chloe kaczenski humbert

If you consolidate everything, it’s in one big target that’s more vulnerable and less agile. There’s a reason for the adage “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” or the advice to “diversify your portfolio” or the saying “all politics is local” so on and so forth. This idea that consolidation is going to be the key to anything is absolutely wrong, and it’s obvious if you look at successful endeavours, movements, and communities. We need a lot of people working on what they care about and know about from the bottom up, not one big organization telling people what to care about or what they can’t from the top down. Consolidation may in the short-term benefit certain people, but it’s obvious that it’s not actually a good plan that leads to harms and vulnerabilities. We know that merging corporations means monopolization and the harms that come with it. School consolidation is as bad as my mother and activists who railed against it in the 70s warned it would be. But there’s often a push to merge social movements and organizations and get everyone under one umbrella marching to the same drum. This would inevitably mean adhering to a central authority and compromising some of everyone’s core values to the point where people lose interest, goals will be subverted and watered down to please everyone, and many people will get turned off by groupthink pressure. People who would’ve joined in will be turned off by all that and it will dissipate the purpose of doing anything anyone wanted to do in the first place. It’s also just a fact that people just don’t trust big authority organizations as much as they do grassroots organizing. It’s one of the reasons for example that right-wing big money interests directly and indirectly fund a lot of small-time fringe media personalities and astroturf moms groups and stuff like that to create a majority illusion. There’s a reason why they would do this rather than just paying one big organization to do it all; it just wouldn’t be as effective! I think people are being duped into thinking they’ll be more powerful consolidated, when in fact they will lose power this way, especially since there will be more centralized way for bad actors and people with other intentions to co-opt and do controlled opposition more easily. Coalitions are often temporary and focused for a reason. If you want strength in numbers coordinate, don’t conglomerate. You don’t need to do everything, but we all can do something. That sounds more doable anyway, right?