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Comment by jimkleiber | Hacker News Reader

> A universal problem with "leaderless movements" is that they quickly devolve to the lowest common denominator level. Anyone can put out their slate and call themselves an "activist"...

I appreciate this part a lot. It helps me realize that movements also have brands they need to manage and have similar struggles to companies that are trying to manage brands at various levels of centralization—e.g., the challenge of maintaining brand alignment among distributed franchisees.

> A "leaderless movement" has all of the biomass of a huge national organization, but none of the immune system and command/control to counter such organized exploiters.

I wonder how well leaderless movements can create things. It seems as organizations and movements become less coordinated, less structured in how to resolve internal conflicts and align, that they would be more suited to attacking things or ideas, rather than building them.

Any thoughts on this?

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This is definitely a known problem, and one which lots of people have spent lots of time thinking about.

As you say, social change movements face many of the same struggles as companies, including maintaining brand alignment and quality control across a network of distributed actors. For this reason, social change movements often adopt (and adapt) the same management tools and techniques that large companies have developed for their operations.

But there is a bunch of literature about managing these challenges specifically for social change movements. One reasonably concise and approachable example is: https://www.citizenshandbook.org/network-campaigns.pdf

>It seems as organizations and movements become less coordinated, less structured in how to resolve internal conflicts and align, that they would be more suited to attacking things or ideas, rather than building them.

I'm not sure this is true. Leaderless movements can be well coordinated and structured (it's just hard). And poorly coordinated and structured movements aren't really suited to doing anything well, even just attacking things and ideas.

For this reason, social change movements often adopt (and adapt) the same management tools and techniques that large companies have developed for their operations.

Going by the praise he had for his organization and the people helping him, MLK had something like this.

And poorly coordinated and structured movements aren't really suited to doing anything well, even just attacking things and ideas.

When exploited by organized outside forces, they do one thing really well: Create disorder, chaos, and disdain.

I believe it was Thomas Carlysle who said something like, "Revolutions are started by idealists, prosecuted by fanatics, and co-opted by scoundrels."

Tim Pool recently quipped in one of his videos that some copies of the Antifa handbook have explicit instructions to "pretend to be BLM" for cover.

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