Yesterday I found myself watching a video from about the 25th anniversary of the Quebec City demonstration against globalization. The video was watchable in part because George Stroumboulopoulos has spent, himself, nearly 25 years in front of a camera telling a stories directly to an audience. But it’s also because it’s a snapshot of a time just before things changed.

When photos were on film.

When broadcast and cable TV still were the dominant media.

When the World Trade Center towers still stood.

In his video essay, George tells a story about that moment in time that today is hard to imagine. Not just the protests against capitalism, but also how the symbol the protestors rallied around distinct meanings for both sides. One saw it as protection, the other saw it as an insult.

The three-metre high concrete and wire fence also served as a provocation in a way that may have been harder to tell in the moment. Sure it was a barrier, but this generation also knew walls come down, and with it entire systems of oppression. Those on both sides of this fence had seen it happen a dozen years earlier. This barrier’s mere presence arguably helped empower them, even through aggressive and violent efforts to suppress people’s fundamental rights.

Months later, of course, the “temporary” suspension of many of these rights became an accepted norm.

Now an entire generation has grown up in an environment which has enforced a level conformity to such a degree, protests are labelled insurrections, and the protestors are charged as a terrorists. (Just take a look a very similar event and protest in Toronto nine years after the events in Quebec City.)

All this brings me back to today.

While reading an article about a podcast I found myself highlighting more phrases (“anarchist calisthenics“ and “micro-looting“) and sentences while scribbling increasingly longer marginalia. I was frustrated by the arrogance of the article, but didn’t disagree with his annoyance at the flippancy the “shoplifting as protest” theme was discussed and presented.

As the writer, Graeme Wood, winds down the piece, he offers:

Getting clubbed because you refused to use the bathroom designated for your race—that is something your grandchildren will brag that you did. I wonder what is wrong with people who feel like they are on an odyssey against a comparable injustice but who evade responsibility for shoplifting produce.

But then it struck me: It’s the same as it’s always been.

It’s not that the people are wrong, the fault instead lies in the very system they are operating in.

Mass protests feels abstract or token because they have been effectively outlawed, and any progress made by those increasingly rare contemporary efforts has been crushed and dismantled.

Maybe these “mirco-looters” have never encountered true oppression. Maybe they have never experienced the pain of crowd suppression weapons because the system has diffused their plans before they even knew they even wanted to protest.

Maybe they don’t know what it’s like to agree on values, while disagreeing on issues because opinions are weaponized and amplified to generate passive money for people who don’t even care enough to have a perspective.

Maybe now the only way to put your body upon the gears is to find those small ways to actively not participate in the system. To take down the sign in the window. To feel what it’s like to steal an avocado and give it away to the person marching down the street toward the new fence holding us in.

Or maybe people really don’t care and are just doing it kicks and clicks.

But I doubt it.