Modern Protest Culture is Crippled by Internet-Brain


 By Samuel D. James - Posted at Digital Liturgies:

On being shocked that your university isn't like social media.

Published May 15, 2024

Disrupting institutions to achieve a desired social or political outcome is classic American protest. These processes are rarely pleasant and often ineffective (at least in the long term), but there’s nothing uniquely Millennial or Gen-Z about them. The pro-Palestinian students who have taken over buildings at Columbia University and other places might be disastrously wrong in their overall political goal, but their logic is as old as the Declaration of Independence.

Conservatives need to be more honest about this, instead of pretending that every protest movement that happens on the left is some kind of explosive assault on law and order. The First Amendment is a law which guarantees order will sometimes be lost. It’s true that college students are radicalized on America’s universities, but in one important sense, this fruit of that radicalization is traditional.

In another important sense, however, the protests which the contemporary Left tends to be engaged in these days has become infected by a dysfunctional view of reality. Specifically, it is a view of reality deeply shaped by the digital age and the Internet era’s individualistic, curated, first-person worldview.

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