> This is actually very similar to Bluesky discourse last week, where US protest organizers sent out emails asking people to RSVP and all the activist posters got upset and started lecturing everyone that if you want to go to a protest you must first turn off all your electronics and second make sure nobody else knows you were ever there, or else the police will come get you.
The clash there is between people who think they are living in a rule-of-law liberal democratic regime that treats them as respected citizens with free speech rights and are protesting to register disagreement with some policies, and people who think they are living in a fascist state that has declared, and intends to treat, them as domestic terrorists and are protesting to rally opposition.
Naturally, these different premises about the context and intent of protest lead to different conclusions on how best to approach it.
> and people who think they are living in a fascist state that has declared, and intends to treat, them as domestic terrorists and are protesting to rally opposition.
You're describing the US South in the 60s. The civil rights protestors did not respond by becoming black block anarchists, they responded by doing civil disobedience and getting their faces on TV.
If you're an upper middle class internet user you're actually more respectable than the security forces and can defeat them by showing up. What are they going to do, get NTBed again?
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-23/proteste...
> You're describing the US South in the 60s.
No, I'm describing one particular split among peotrst groups that exists today (similar splits may have existed in the 1960s civil rights movements, but differences in the technical, political, and social context beyond the point of disagreement being discussed make them of limited utility as analogs, even to the extent that they were otherwise similar.)
> The civil rights protestors did not respond by becoming black block anarchists
The average modern protestor who follows the precautions-against-mass-surveillance-and-retaliation is also not a black bloc anarchist.
> If you're an upper middle class internet user
The average protestor is not upper middle class, even if your implicit contention that political respectability is entirely driven by class, that the upper middle class is uniformly more respected than the agents of state enforcement, and, most critically, that the decisive point here is respectability were correct.