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Engineering the Current Thing

If you pay attention online you might have heard of “The Current Thing.”

What’s The Current Thing? The Current Thing is any concept that grabs hold of public attention, sometimes out of nowhere, and which demands an answer: are you for or against?

I also like Marc Andreessen’s explanation.

But where does The Current Thing come from? Does it just happen or is it made? How does it work?

And so, I read through the paper “Availability Cascades and Risk Reputation,” after Andreessen mentioned it as a seminal work on The Current Thing. Here’s how the paper begins: Continue reading “Engineering the Current Thing”

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Prolonged Pandemic Protests

In May 2020, I wrote one of my last pieces focused on COVID: Pandemic Protests. In it I listed a number of ways COVID changed or was likely to change protests around the world:

“In many instances, top-down social distancing orders and bottom-up unwillingness of people to gather in large groups had similar effects. The large protests that we saw so much of in 2019 dwindled not because protesters won their demands or because governments cracked down hard, but because people didn’t go out as much.

“Protesters’ strength came from gathering in numbers. What to do now?”

And for a while in many places around the world, large, crowded protests did decline, or were replaced by social-distance versions.

The most notable of those declines for me, since I had also written about it several times here, was the impact on the existing protest movement in Hong Kong. That movement formerly drew anti-government protests of over one million people to the streets (in a city of 7.5 million). When COVID emerged, the cynical view was that the timing of the pandemic hurt the protesters (or helped the government). Continue reading “Prolonged Pandemic Protests”

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Blank Paper (How to Protest Today)

How do protest techniques adapt to changing laws, international public opinion, and online mobs?

Blank Paper

In an earlier essay on Pandemic Protests I shared an example of a “blank paper” protest from Kazakhstan. Police arrested a man holding a piece of blank paper on charges of “we’ll sort that out later.”

Kazakhstan is not a country associated with free speech. Neither was the former USSR. As the old joke goes (translated from Protest Folklore, by Andrey Moroz):

“A man throws leaflets on Red Square, they grab him and see that he is handing out blank papers. They ask: “Why empty?” – “So everything is clear.”

Continue reading “Blank Paper (How to Protest Today)”

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Fear, Fury, and Forgetting

Change often doesn’t happen smoothly, but rather in fits and starts.

Here’s a look at some mass actions over the past few decades that either caused fear or fury and (for some of them) how they were ultimately forgotten.

Since we’ve seen a year of fear and fury around the world, largely in the form of many types of large sustained protests and the impact of COVID-19, let’s look at some past examples and how change plays out (or doesn’t). What behavior and consequences emerge along the way?

Radon Gas. In the 1980s a report from the EPA and its reporting in media set off a radon gas scare in the US. The gas, naturally occurring in the ground, seeped into home basements and was blamed for cancer deaths. People suddenly became afraid to spend much time in their basements. But the risk was exaggerated in importance.

Radon gas as a cause of cancer is highly tied to smoking. Given that smoking has declined in the US over the last few decades before the recent creation of vaping, is radon really an issue? An EPA report estimates that 21,000 die of lung cancer caused by radon but 86% of them are also smokers.

With more knowledge, the fear dissipated like the gas itself.

Continue reading “Fear, Fury, and Forgetting”

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Pandemic Protests

As with other sudden, widespread changes, there are many second-order effects from coronavirus. I’ve been slowly chronicling them on this blog. Today, let’s look at the impact on protest movements and tactics.

Over the past few months people around the world lost their ability to protest. Or, they lost the type of protest that had worked for them — the mass gatherings to show dissatisfaction and force government response.

In locations including Algeria, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Haiti, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Russia, Spain, Netherlands, Peru, Syria, and the US, protests have declined or have taken a different turn — due to COVID-19. What systems are changing and what is likely to remain changed after a vaccine?

Continue reading “Pandemic Protests”

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The Owl’s Right Eye (Protest Symbols)



Let’s come back, more directly, to a theme in my writing — what happens when something small becomes a tipping point for change. When the seemingly innocuous becomes unpredictable.

If you’ve only casually followed the Hong Kong protests and reaction from the Chinese mainland and overseas Chinese communities, you might wonder about the importance and meaning of the covered eye. Specifically, the right eye.

Hong Kong protesters found one of their many symbols (and there are many) when police shot and injured the right eye of a protesting woman in August. The injured eye is a more powerful symbol than even that of the man police shot on October 1 (Chinese National Day) in the chest (that is, the heart).

But since the now famous protester’s eye injury we’ve seen company ad campaign apologies and even an individual arrest all because of missing eyes.

But the eye I was reminded of was none of these. It was a different eye — also a right eye and in China — that over 40 years ago had results reminiscent to those eyes of today.

Continue reading “The Owl’s Right Eye (Protest Symbols)”

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Selecting the Scalable Snapshot

One of the themes of these posts is that we unintended consequences of a change come from the way it scales.

It is also superficially easier to judge events as at risk of unintended consequences (easier, not more accurate) when there is an image — a snapshot — that represents risk.

So what are causes of difficulty when we make judgments? I’ll go into some examples.

After two back-to-back mass shootings in the US, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted something seemingly logical yet awful (shown later in post). Interestingly, people took offense and attacked him for the apparent logic (he later apologized). His offense: insensitively calling out and comparing the magnitude of different causes of death.

But the problem with Tyson’s tweet wasn’t that at all. Continue reading “Selecting the Scalable Snapshot”

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Why Are There So Many Protests in Hong Kong?

Looking back, we can piece together ways that past choices impact the present. Sometimes choice – impact pairing is direct; other times less so. And while we might identify a set up for future problems, we can’t know how those problems will be expressed. A current example is from Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is in the news again in a sad way. Protesters marched multiple times in opposition to a proposed extradition to China law. In a city of seven million, the turnout was incredible. One protest march had as many as one million and another perhaps two million people. Police fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and beanbag rounds. There is pressure on the Chief Executive to resign. And all this is happening within the greater context of the China – US Trade War.

But if Hong Kong is part of China, why is there even the need for an extradition law?

The situation in Hong Kong is more complicated than that and had many contributing events.

Photographer: Anthony Kwan / Getty Images. The neon sign at left is for a pawnshop.

Here’s a short list. Continue reading “Why Are There So Many Protests in Hong Kong?”