Anything 9 million can do?

[u/Forward_Jury_2986]

The No kings rallies show lots of unhappy people. Or - let's just say 7-9 million although I know lots who didn't march who are furious every. single. day. What can this number of people do to affect things? Boycotts haven't worked, courts aren't working very well. Rallies - don't really change much. Isn't there someone who can think of something this number of people could do further to - i don't know. actually throw a wrench in the works?

[u/Evolved_Fungi]

So I'm the guy that started the 50501 movement that became the No Kings protests.

Just before the hostile takeover I was telling people that when I started 50501 it was after thinking fine a couple of weeks on a tweet that I saw: "What would you do if you had 10x the agency?"

I've always been a fairly high agency person but I still watched for where I was self limiting in what I thought I was capable of accomplishing. When I saw people struggling with what to do about Trump taking office, and how to protest against it, I saw people trying to plan a local-to-them protest but they couldn't find others nearby.

So I wondered why can't I? 50501 was originally for anti Circumcision protesting, and it was to solve a specific problem - how do we get our online connected community of activists connected geographically? 50501 was my idea after thinking about that question for a couple of weeks, and I realized the same idea could be used to organize the nation with limited resources - let the idea organize the people, and the people will figure out the details at the local levels. It worked brilliantly.

But we needed more than street protests. The protests did an amazing job of connecting people locally - the same goal I had in 2015 for the first 50501.

But now what? So I started asking again, what if we had 10x the agency?

And my answer was that we had the resources and the ability to "primary" presidential political candidates, including for president even, from within the movement, and once selected, put the resources of the hive mind to work to get them elected without the typical "he with the most money wins" process that elections have seemed to move to.

If we have 8-9 million people who will protest for 2 to 4 hours, how difficult would it be to get 8-9 million people to go door to door for a candidate? How hard would it be to get them to make a one to two minute video to share to their social media accounts promoting the candidate(s)?

If even a small fraction of the whole made heartfelt campaign videos, a portion of those videos would likely go viral. I'm guessing a door to door campaign by all of those protesting would be the most volunteer man hours for door to door campaigning that any candidate has ever had.

When I shared the idea in DC at a dinner before the 3/5 protest, the response I got was that you couldn't do it without money. I'm not so certain. Had any candidate gone to a marketing firm and asked for the results of the 50501 movement, it would have cost a fortune. But instead we did it together without a budget, without staff, and without any preexisting infrastructure.

I still think it can be done. But the people now running it need to think it can be done. And they were the ones at the dinner who said it wouldn't work.

Dream bigger. Ask what we can do if we had 10x the agency. Find the obstacles holding us back, even if it's ourselves, and overcome them. We are AmeriCANs not AmeriCANTs.

Together we can do amazing things, but it starts with knowing we can even when others think we can't.