Activists don't get listened to, they get clipped. They prescribe some set of policies X, Y, and Z; someone in power hears Y and likes it, and ignores the rest.

Activists don't get listened to, they get clipped. They prescribe some set of policies X, Y, and Z; someone in power hears Y and likes it, and ignores the rest. In the case of drug enforcement, the idea was to decriminalize and destigmatize drugs so that persons addicted to them could seek treatment and rehabilitation. Problem is, that also requires public money be spent on rehabilitation programs. It's cheaper for the state to just get people high and let them die. Same thing with "defund the police", which had an implicit "and use the money to fund mental health programs" at the end of it, along with prescriptions to fund deescalation training for whatever cops we still needed. All the Twitter activists heard this, they chanted "defund the police" as if everyone else had too, but that memo didn't reach the desk of any of the mayors who actually tried these programs. To make matters worse, a lot of city police departments took this literally, deliberately, to discredit anti-police activism. So the cops effectively punished the city for speaking out against them. The underlying problem is that communicating these problems in a way that's succinct enough to resist malicious interpretation, without it coming off as a way to dodge the blame for your own problems, is very difficult. You are not entitled to make others think or speak the way you do. Concepts you invent will be reinterpreted however people like unless you drown them in so much French that only your own apparatchiks can understand them[0]. In other words, these are shibboleths - terms that exist solely for an in-group to identify themselves to one another. Here's the thing: this is great for MEGO[1] and terrible activism. When Louis Rossmann wants to point out how companies are retroactively changing the deal, he doesn't say it's wrong to do that, he says the CEOs have a "rapist mentality". When Cory Doctorow wants to talk about how Internet platforms get worse and worse, he talks about "enshittification[2]". These coinages work because they leverage the listener's existing understanding of those concepts. Semantic drift works to their advantage: someone misusing "enshittification" to refer to, say, inflation, rather than the gradual demise of Internet platforms, is continuing the analogy. [0] More generally, habitual insistence on the use of one's idiolect - especially one crafted to motte-and-bailey your unsavory opinions - is a sign of an abusive personality. Yes, that's a dig at RMS. [1] "My Eyes Glaze Over", aka "disguising heinous shit behind boring language" [2] Enshittification is a particularly funny one, because it's exactly the sort of fancy French word you'd expect, but with a nice Anglo-Saxon swear word in it.