The cringe-ification of protest

Organizing the last big protest of the 20th century was a major undertaking. The contingents set to be involved in disrupting the World Trade Organization’s Third Ministerial Conference — labor unions, politicians, students, environmentalists, Indigenous groups, human-rights watchdogs, Catholic clergy — were not all natural allies, and a year of intensive planning preceded the November 1999 action known thereafter as the Battle in Seattle. The demonstration achieved its first goal quickly, tying up Seattle’s downtown and making it impossible for WTO delegates to get into the conference. The police got outnumbered and then overwhelmed. Ultimately, the conference’s opening ceremony was canceled. The first day of protest stretched into four more. Inside and outside the conference were confrontations and reckonings that still reverberate today.  

The internet was still taking shape in 1999, and social media as we know it now didn’t exist. If it had, there’s no question that people watching the coverage on TV would have been arguing about choices and tactics, and debating what the protesters could have and should have done. There would have been people dismayed that protesters failed to prevent property damage, and people who were rooting for Molotov cocktails to fly. Monday-morning protest quarterbacks would insist that the anarchists who began smashing windows were chaos agents planted by the city or possibly the Feds. Everyone would have opinions about the environmentalists who turned out in sea-turtle costumes.

Because the WTO protests did occur before the advent of social media, they’re almost never mentioned in the aftermath of events like last weekend’s nationwide No Kings protests, when inevitable hot takes like “Ugh, why are people even bothering with this bulls**t” light up Twitter, Bluesky, and beyond. Nor are other modern movements that have moved needles and forced hands: the fierce focus of the ACT-UP protests that gave a recalcitrant government no chance to look away from the AIDS crisis, the Occupy encampments that galvanized a new generation of politicians determined to confront the status quo. Instead, what’s increasingly invoked is a single word: cringe.

A protester in a Trump mask during the No Kings demonstration in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, 2025. (LAUREN PUENTE/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

If you’ve spent time on the internet in the past decade or two, you’re at least glancingly familiar with cringe. It’s both noun (ugh, she just posted cringe) and adjective (why is this show so cringe?), and from what I have gleaned it is a discerning but unfixed set of aesthetics, simultaneously unspoken yet broadly agreed-upon, that echoes Potter Stewart’s summation of obscenity: I know it when I see it. Monitoring cringe has been a reliable preoccupation of online media that scour YouTube and TikTok in order to bring us the latest on what behaviors, styles, hobbies and social habits are thought to be cringe. Side parts? Probably. No-show socks? Definitely. A 2023 Buzzfeed listicle titled “38 super cringeworthy things we unfortunately have started to accept as normal” includes such disparate behaviors as filming yourself crying for social media, “boasting” about your relationship with a spouse, TikTok dances, not picking up your dog’s poop on walks, misogyny, eating in front of cameras, being too into a fandom and “being annoyed by another person’s joy.” 

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Cringe, in other words, is a subjective metric. It’s also one that currently belongs to young people. Right off the bat, one thing that is unavoidably cringe about protests is that people who aren’t young are uniformly uncool. Old people aren’t just uncool; they also alienate young people because their mere existence is a terrible reminder that young people might someday also be old and uncool. When pragmatism and coalition-building are shoved to the side and aesthetics take center stage, the spotlight is harsh. You might be a seasoned protest veteran fluent in mutual aid and leftist history, but to young people, you are simply a middle-aged normie being way too dramatic about encroaching fascism. Maybe you worked with Food Not Bombs and made a clip-art anarchist zine back when you lived in a punk house, but a moderately popular Bluesky user has never heard any of those words before and is filing you under “wine moms 4 Kamala.”

People turn out for the “No Kings” rally to protest ICE, Trump and his policies in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, 2025. (SAHAB ZARIBAF/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)Then there’s the question of whether protests are cringe because they rarely succeed, and the attendant question of why people continue to think that the existence of a protest is a promise that the protest will make everyone happy and solve all the problems and make it so no one ever needs to attend another protest. Feminist media critic Jenn Pozner theorizes that young people who learned everything they know about politics via the internet saw Donald Trump re-elected and concluded that protest can’t possibly work, because if it did, how did this happen a second time? What they’ve learned, Pozner says, contrasts with a pre-cringe era “when social media was earnest” and people watched Occupy and the Arab Spring unfold on Twitter.

“You would think [social media] would accelerate and catalyze community, but it can, and often does, accelerate and catalyze atomization and a sort of detached cynicism,” says Kevin Gannon, director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence (CAFE) at Queens University of Charlotte and the author of “Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto.”  “Social media makes it possible to cultivate an air of ironic detachment.” 

Both ironic detachment and detached cynicism, in turn, are incompatible with the gestures toward hope that are inherent in protest. Hope requires people to make themselves vulnerable to the prospect of disappointment, and vulnerable to those who can see the act of hoping. Twice as much vulnerability makes indifference — or a posture of it, at least — the safer choice. As Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba write in their book “Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care,” “[L]ike any indifference-rejecting phenomenon, [hope] demands effort in order to thrive.” Effort is caring in action. Effort is also an outcome of earnestness; most of us learn very early in life that we don’t get to dictate how earnest we’re allowed to be about the things we value — that parents, peers, teachers and even strangers will let us know when we’ve crossed the line. 

And then there’s knowing when to let some of the earnestness go and care a little less — not because of cynicism, but because you actually want to push forward, and that requires working with others. “Both the right and the left have really diverse arrays of either coalitions or potential coalition members,” says Gannon. “But it seems to be much more of a hurdle for those of us on the left than it is on the right. To really think deeply about what kind of society we want is a complex endeavor, and it gets into a lot of really important questions. And I think there’s a flattening [of that] on the right that’s like, ‘Nope, f**k it, we’re in the streets to support Trump.’ Nuance is great, but it gets in the way when you’re talking about broad-scale, nationwide movement building.”

Protest involves a lot all at once, and the people now declaring protests to be cringe come by that opinion honestly and understandably. They’ve spent years watching the people who claim to represent them repeatedly prioritize civility and decorum over actually trying to stop all the horrors we all clearly see. They’ve had to watch people with the power to at least keep things from getting much worse decide instead to play the game the way they’ve always played it and ignore that their latest opponents have upended the board, flipped the table, and set fire to the whole room. Can we expect them to give hope and effort the benefit of the doubt now? 

Protest movements have always been collisions of personalities and styles, which means that they have always been someone’s idea of cringe. But there’s a reclamation on the horizon. We’re seeing cringe re-framed in TikToks and embodied by Protest Labubus. Embrace it or let it go. And then stay free and stay the course.