Jay Emmerich’s Reviews > By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism > Status Update

Brings up that all the case studies we've looked at in this book all exist on a spectrum of social identity, where one group wants to remove any connection, and the other end has people constructing their own based on a shared content world. It's interesting to some degree.

Again, this is just repeating the flaws of each to bring together a more cohesive, and arguably, more productive style of organization. It's got good points.

We get to the last chapter (despite the fact that everything says 100 pages left) and it asks the question: What counts as being political? Which is interesting. It breaks down some of the problems every group up to this point have faced and how they could overcome it, or how some hybrid of the organization structures could be the best. We'll see how much longer it takes for me to finish this.

Talking about a shift between "dutiful citizenship" (performing an act because you should) and "actualizing citizenship" (performing to reach an attainable goal) is a really interesting thing we touch on here. There's been a widespread shift away from doing things because your supposed to, and I think that's indicative of multiple things going on in the world. This was written pre-covid and it shows.

The libertarian idea (at least, this text posits it as libertarian) of de-emphasizing traditional politics due to it being too big and too old fashioned is interesting, but I question if we ever have enough people who enter into the system wanting to make change at the same time, as if it's a handful dispersed over years, I fear that they will never amount to much, given the slow process the system is shown to work.

Here I am, over halfway through the book and realizing that they have been talking about two different kinds of politics, participatory and institutionalized, and the distinction between the two. Participatory is local elections, institutionalized is like congress. It's interesting to note that distinction because the two are vastly different, and thinking that they are the same is probably part of the problem.

It is interesting how they describe libertarianism, as (I think I've mentioned previously) it's been used as a dirty word. The mentions of Ayn Rand and other theory based creatives reminded me where some of that connection has come from. But, like the person is quoted in saying, she's not the saint of Libertarianism. There's more to it then that.

Giving more context than I'm used to related to the term "libertarianism," this chapter is interesting to me because I haven't really dug into it at all. I'm used to it being a bad word more or less.

Another chapter done. This new one, about the growing libertarian movement, feels like it's off to a good start. I am actually excited to keep reading.