I have been thinking about how we concerned with community change need a new approach that matches our current circumstances. I teach an Introduction to Community Change course. It’s a Humanities course, and I use a great book, Twitter and Teargas, by Zeynep Tefekci, as a core text, along with other readings and some films, such as Pride, Bringing Down a Dictator, and Brother/Outsider. While Tufekci’s text is still the best one I have found to bring together thinking around social movements and thinking around the internet and its effects–Tufekci calls this “networked protest”–we need an updated text, or really a whole new approach. (Meantime, Zynep, could you update your book, because some of us really want to keep assigning it for classes?)

Example: Right now, many parts of the MAGA coalition are crashing and burning because of the moronic or ideological policies of the Trump administration: prices for everyday stuff remain spiked, jobs are quietly flatlined, our neighbors are being kidnapped, housing and food insecurity is rampant, the U.S. keeps intervening–to say the least–in foreign affairs, and most of all this week: a massive cover up of the Epstein child sex trafficking ring. Yet the American Left is not jumping on this opportunity. Admittedly, the Blue Wave just happened last week, but the rest of this stuff is no surprise.

Tufekci centrally argues that movements post-internet (the turning point is Arab Spring or thereabouts) organize massively and quickly, or sometimes very particularly and spectacularly (see the story of @Tahrirsupplies for example) but lack the infrastructure and resilience to respond nimbly when circumstances change, while movements that had to be organized on 3×5 cards simply HAD to have those characteristics in order to survive.

Ok, but we need to respond to those circumstances, rather than bemoan them. (Here I am bemoaning.) What I see on the ground:

• the strengths of networking movements–across the globe (see Free Palestine), quickly and massively (see No Kings), with input that might capitalize on AI (if we gotta–I mean, they do it) such as aggregating data, pictures, video, etc.
• influencer-politicians–I don’t know what to make of this but it is clearly a thing.
• folks remembering that we/they are human, and we need time and resources and a value on resetting, grounding, grieving, celebrating…eating, sleeping.
• global capitalism being uncovered as a big ol’ swindle, from all sides of the political spectrum
• we are seeing now the hopefully-end-stages of decades of culture warring from the Right, and I don’t mean that simplistically, as in hating on _____ (fill in the blank). I mean the Right fighting the War of Position, as Gramsci calls it. They built a whole “common sense” that actually points some of the adherents directly toward socialism or at least a full-on critique of neoliberalism. (I actually heard this very argument on my local morning news zoo show on conservative A.M. talk radio station, which I hate-spy-listen to many mornings on the way to work.)

When I wrote Wynter’s Queer Revolution: Community Organizing and the Future of the Humanities (coming soon–Spring 2026 from Routledge!), it was because I wasn’t sure what my role was in all this given that I am a faculty member at a public college. But I think what is important is that we think long-term about developing capacities and dispositions toward our own war of position, which means that education does matter. We are starting to do this, and I mean it loosely, that such broad efforts are being taken up by the adhocracy, as Tufekci terms it, not by Antifa Central Command.

What am I missing, and what do you think? Would love to start some comments.