by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
We, as a nation, find ourselves at a crossroads.
One path leads to dystopia. The president will continue to run roughshod over the Constitution and democratic norms that we have come to love and enjoy. The other path leads to a return to normalcy. The question is, of course, which one do we want to take.
It is pretty apparent that there is a real risk that Donald Trump, like a caged rat, is going to lash out in a big way in the coming days as things grow more dire. As such, we as citizens need to be prepared to take to the streets in a big way. A massive, historic manner that would put enough pressure on the Vichy Congress to finally force their hand on the Trump matter.
This will not be easy. It will not happen overnight. It will only work if weekend after weekend for months there are massive national protests. Right now, if you wanted to do that you’d probably use some combination of Facebook or Twitter.
I propose that only by designing a social media platform from the ground up that is designed to facilitate organizing protests will any series of massive national protests will take place. There are a whole host of issues associated with such a herculean task and you would have to give a lot of thought to the UX / UI of the site to figure out how to address the many problems that such a concerted national protest effort would have.
I would suggest you start a site as an app that would organize protests in a few major cities, then gradually built out the service so people in even small cities would be able to use the service to plot how to protest. Now, the beauty of this concept is once it’s built, it would be easy to convert the service into a real challenger to Twitter — or even Facebook — once it completed its original purpose.
The issue is, there is a growing amount of energy in The Resistance online, but not a lot of protests in real life. The service would be designed to connect potential leaders with local protests as well as make it intuitive to ensure that protests were legal in the eyes of the law. Only by keeping massive protests legal could you allow them to continue for the weeks and months needed.
Now, one issue is that if you build it, it’s possible no one would actually want to protest. But if history has show us anything about Donald Trump, it’s everything he touches dies. And he is going to do something really horrible, something so bad that there will be a tipping point and people will want to at last, hit the streets. So that’s why I’m proposing this platform now, so it’s ready and waiting when people want to take back their nation from the would-be tinpot dictator who now threatens the Republic.
