From Resistance to Organization

Criticism alone does not shift power. We can protest, boycott, demonstrate, or withdraw. That can be right. But the harder question is how many individual acts of resistance become something that can exert lasting influence on decisions.

For almost every structural problem, one question eventually appears: What can I do? And even among highly engaged people, that question quickly leads to personal rules or the decision not to use certain systems. These are real political decisions. But they do not yet solve the problem that people alone usually have very little power over companies, owners, and institutions.

A(I)mbivalence is interested in the step that is surprisingly often skipped in many debates: How does shared discomfort become collective agency? Why can many people be angry at the same time and yet remain politically weak? And what distinguishes a moment of mobilization from structures that still hold when the hashtag is gone and the demonstration is over?

Luise Freese speaks about what this question means in the context of AI: in the workplace, in unions, in political movements, and anywhere people are not just reacting to technological change but trying to shape the conditions under which it is introduced.

The central shift is simple: from “What can I even do?” to “What can we do together to make change stick?”