Activism as a showcase.
In recent years, activism has become an undeclared profession. It has its own stages, its own vocabulary, its own business models. It is no longer measured only in filled squares or successful campaigns, but in followers, engagement rates, and conference tickets that cost as much as a month’s rent.
The paradox is clear: activism, which should liberate us from the logic of capital, ends up imitating its rules. Competition replaces solidarity, ego outweighs results, performance takes the place of politics. It’s a transversal process:
• in feminism, where the fight against patriarchy intertwines with the race for a book deal;
• in environmentalism, where climate urgency is measured in intercontinental flights;
• in disability and chronic illness advocacy, where testimony risks becoming a showcase for medical products rather than a tool for building alliances.
The dynamic is always the same: don’t lose the spotlight. Sharing others’ initiatives means risking one’s own centrality. Better to preserve symbolic capital than to put it into circulation. This creates communities that define themselves as such only as long as they remain closed in on themselves, generous in words but stingy in action.
Yet activism, by definition, is grassroots politics. It cannot be reduced to a brand or to a résumé. It is not the runway of those who best perform the role of activist, but the collective practice of those who know how to decenter themselves. It means recognizing differences as strength, not as threat. It means understanding the connections between struggles such as climate, cities, health, gender, disability, instead of turning them into isolated compartments.
The problem is not just individual coherence. It concerns the very structure of activism in the platform era. Social media rewards polarization, self-promotion, competition, the opposite of what should fuel a political movement. As a result, activism ends up speaking the very language that empties it out, the language of likes, visibility, and algorithms.
The risk is that militancy turns into entertainment. That feminism becomes shelf-ready storytelling, environmentalism a travel agenda, disability a sponsored format. This is not just inconsistency, it is the normalization of a mechanism that reduces politics to personal branding.
But if activism is to mean anything, it must go back to doing what capital cannot do: building bonds instead of markets, alliances instead of hierarchies, spaces of freedom instead of personal showcases. Because in the face of climate, social, and health crises, there is no more time for individual performances.
