Way back in 2004 when I was getting a PhD studying social movements, I wrote the below in response to sneering at anti-war protests as incoherent and unfocused. I’m re-posting it because sneering at protest is apparently cool again,¹ according to this guy at The American Prospect who doesn’t have scintilla of evidence to his claim that recent No Kings protests are a) run by old people instead of by youths as the 60s showed to be Right and True, and b) ineffective because young people have too many diverse grievances for protest to do any good, anyway.

Look there are actual recent literatures on this and decades of data and study which somebody with a national magazine platform could engage in. I’ve been away for a while but I think these observations in response to “why aren’t the kids protesting right” still hold up okay. TL;DR is something like, large protests have always been highly heterogeneous in participant makeup and grievance, protest effectiveness varies in a bunch of complex ways, and it’s at minimum a proposition that needs actual evidence to say that today’s protests are missing whatever magic contemporary writers romantically ascribe to the protests of the 1960s. If anything, I think I’d now simply be less kind to the obvious bad faith views I was responding to, as I see most of the internet is doing to this dumb TAP post.²

Covering yesterday’s massive demonstrations in New York, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Jesse Taylor all worry, to different degrees, about what Ezra calls “the ideological incoherence of protests.” They all suggest that what contemporary protests lack is the unified vision of the civil rights and Vietnam eras.

I’ve commented on protest here before, in particular on the anti-war protests of spring 2003, and on the subject of counting crowd size. On the relevance of protest and some changes in it over time, I think that the first of those posts might still have some interesting material.

But, to think about this idea of the good old days of ideological coherence, I went to the tape–well, to the file cabinet in the corner of my office, really–where five years of 60s and early 70s protest data is stored, and I looked up the largest protests of the era, those most comparable to yesterday’s demonstration.

The single largest event of the period was a Washington, D.C., antiwar rally of November 15, 1969, attended by an estimated 250,000 people. A quick read of the coverage of that weekend–like yesterday’s march, it really was a series of events, not a single event–demonstrates that participants were there to take part for many reasons, although they all ended up under the anti-war banner: Students protested the draft; religious activists ranging from Catholic to Quaker participated; radical leftists were there, as were elderly women and parents with their children, as were small groups seeking violent confrontations; also present were African American organizers and advocates for the poor, protesting the war’s diversion of funds from domestic programs. This is still an oversimplified list of participants; it’s clear that while the war was the most tangible target of the protests, many grievances actually brought protesters out. Like this weekend’s march, officially organized by United for Peace and Justice, that series of events had a nominal set of organizers, but plenty of other groups also participated. In a sister protest across the country, where another 100,000 people demonstrated, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Gay Liberation Front were among notable organizations represented.

Similarly, earlier that year close to 100,000 people participated in a late-April anti-war march in New York City, in which anti-war and anti-racist claims were mixed. On the same day in Chicago and San Fransisco, another ten thousand protesters in each city marched against the war, poverty, and racism.

So, a pretty cursory look at protest data suggests that what we think of today as a unified antiwar protest was actually highly heterogeneous, both in terms of who participates as well as why they participate. The answer to Jesse’s question, “What would have happened if Selma was joined by the Socialist Worker’s Party, or anti-globalization people (or their relative counterparts from the 60s)?” is that in many cases that’s just what happened.

What might this mean for making sense of yesterday’s march? A couple of suggestions. First, the concern over a diluted ideology resulting in a lack of efficacy may not be warranted–which is not to say that there may be plenty of other reasons to worry about efficacy–because, like civil rights and anti-war protests of past eras, yesterday’s march did have a target, boiled down in all of its forms to the policies of the Bush administration. Second, I think that Ezra’s absolutely right when he says that, regardless of activist makeup, media portrayal is still important, and negative coverage can still scatter some of a protest’s power. Too much focus on the differences among activists, the expressive use of protest, or the carnival atmosphere of some protest will play down the unifying reason for protesters to come together; but, I would argue that this is less a function of changes in protest than in changes in how news is made.

After briefly operating again, authentication to the Peloton API has been re-restricted. There are apparently some workarounds, but building a bunch of OAuth mechanics on top of a non-public API is a lot of work on something too fragile for me to rely on. That means that RideShare is inoperable for the foreseeable future, and that’s a big bummer!

Much, but not all of the ride data continues to be available through Apple Health, so I can continue to use a lot of what I did to summarize the year’s exercise data last year. Here’s a quick comparison of workout intensity in 2025 and 2024.

I’ve updated my annual last.fm summary stats app for 2025. I’m really happy with this year’s changes: The app should be faster for most users and it offers a simpler couple of visuals, displaying a shareable card for your top “new to you” artists as well as for your top overall artists of the year. It’s fun to update this year over year. If you’re a last.fm user, I hope you’ll try it out!

deardestiny.shinyapps.io/tuner

My little data vis all for my Peloton rides broke a couple of weeks ago, but clever developers found a way to continue using the API, so it’s back, for now. I wish Peloton would publish an official auth flow; they would see an explosion of support and interest from small and big developers, I think.

My week in riding the bike: I was under the weather after a few long, in-person work days last week. Improving early this week, I started up slow but built to feeling really good for this morning’s dawnbreaker HIIT and Hills thumper.

I made some updates to my RideShare app (which produces nice, shareable images of Peloton rides) that I’m really happy with: More flexible output image sizing and the ability to select from the image types that the Peloton API provides for more interesting visuals. I wrote this up over at the data blog.

Phase one after a really hard spin:

Lo, I am a being of pure heat, deeply calm and still after furious expression of will and strength.

Phase two: why does my house have all these staaaairrrs and why don’t we have any baaaggeells

Trying to be a tiny bit more intentional about capturing and annotating things, I’m experimenting with a link/dev/snippet log – new, (again) over at the datablog. One entry so far; let’s see where I take it.

Over at the datablog, I wrote up some details on producing my 2024 workout summary from Peloton and Apple Health data. This was a fun little project to tinker through over my holiday break.

Last Peloton ride of 2024 went quite a bit harder than I was expecting. I’ll go out sweating hard because I can, and I’ll try to start 2025 the same way.