It is fascinating to observe the concept of protest, like so many other concepts recently, being hijacked and misappropriated to mask something else entirely. We have a particular conception of the term, what it implies, what it evokes, yet it is frequently being used to describe activities that clash with the implicit features carried by the term. This is a form of semantic warfare, in which words become enmeshed in the fog of war.

To be more precise, one aspect of what I'm describing relates to the mass production of protest, the formation of an inorganic protest "complex". Protest is popularly considered a spontaneous, organic outpouring of popular sentiment, something that reflects the mass will of a people suppressed by some hostile power. Yet increasingly protest is being used by hostile forces in a pre-meditated, engineered, inorganic way while maintaining the appearance and narrative of the "traditional" conception of protest, which it resembles less and less.

This is just one example of the general case of a metric ceasing to be useful once it is recognize as a metric. Once we begin explicitly trying to target some metric, some behavior, some form, we effectively become liars as the form we take no longer speaks to some deeper truth as it was originally meant to.