This month we’re reading Take Back the Fight by Nora Loreto, which is a look at Feminism in Canada and how neoliberalism has crushed movements in the quest for individuality. My reading year from 2025 left me deeply worried as I see autocracy winning in democracies, and corporations eating our lunch while they get subsidized and lay people off.
This left me wondering, what can I do to help affect change. Given the world I’ve grown up in I naturally jumped to the individual actions I could take. I could get a few thousand people in a book club to read about how to organize in a digital age. I could pick my reading for the rest of the year to maximize my individual action.
But Loreto has disabused me of how much change my singular actions disconnected from a group can have. According to Loreto, neoliberalism champions the impact that an individual can have1, highlighting the few times an individual does anything so that we don’t join larger groups to organize our efforts and make any real impact. We’ve been tricked into thinking that a social media post2 is as powerful as getting out in the street and disrupting the lives of politicians.
The thing is that it’s easy to talk about the activism needed, or the changes required to make a better world from behind my screens. It requires little of my time compared to finding my way downtown, or to Vancouver 9 hours away, to protest in person about something I want changed in the world. I get good feelings when I write, and get some social validation with comments telling me how smart I am for my observations, but don’t put much skin in the game.
This is exactly what politicians and businesses want, angry social media posts, blog posts that tear them a new arsehole, that have no action attached to them. Blog posts can be countered with a press release and huge marketing teams. People in the streets protesting are harder to sweep under the rug, though government and business try by vilifying protesters as dissidents3 as a way to discredit them.
Next time you want to promote a post online because you like its social implications remember, that’s the easy thing to do. Sure do it, but then look up a matching local organization and show up to one of their meetings to learn from those that are out there on the front lines. Then show up at a protest, bug your local politician about the topic.