Chris Abraham

One of the strangest parts of modern protest culture is that everyone shows up carrying a tracking device on their wrist and another one in their pocket. Not because they’re being careless. Because that’s just what a phone and a watch are now.

We already know how this plays out, because the military learned it the hard way. Strava heat maps once revealed secret bases overseas, not through espionage but through jogging. Soldiers went on their morning runs, their watches logged GPS tracks, and suddenly “empty” deserts lit up like Christmas trees. Nobody was spying on anyone. The pattern itself was the leak.

Crowds work the same way. One Apple Watch is just a heartbeat. Ten thousand Apple Watches moving down the same street at the same time is a signal. Phones, carriers, Apple, Google, ad networks, and analytics systems all see density, motion, and clustering in near real time. They don’t need to know who you are to know something is happening.

There are systems that trigger on this. Not sci-fi, just logistics. Too many devices in one area, moving together, staying together, dispersing suddenly. That’s how traffic apps detect jams. It’s also how authorities, companies, and emergency systems detect large gatherings. A protest has a different fingerprint than a parade, a commute, or a concert. The machines can tell.

This is why military gear works the way it does. I own a Garmin Instinct 2 Tactical. It has a kill switch for radios and tracking because in the real world, emitting location data gets people killed. That doesn’t make me Jason Bourne. It just means the risk is real enough that engineers design around it.

Of course, it’s almost funny, because I still carry a phone. Most people do. But the principle matters. If you’re going to “fight the power,” you are doing it while broadcasting your coordinates to dozens of networks. This isn’t paranoia. It’s math.

Every protest today creates two crowds. One in the street, and one in the data. And the data crowd never stops being watched.

Somewhere in every modern protest there is a man whose face looks like it has been gently erased by ten thousand steps. He is not angry, exactly. He is… aerated. His pores are open. His calves are telling a long, detailed story. He has walked for justice and possibly also for a personal best.

We used to measure protest in slogans, in signs, in whether the cops looked nervous. Now we measure it in miles.

The other night I watched a river of activists flow down the avenue, cardboard signs bobbing like nervous lilies. Their chants rose and fell, their feet slapped the asphalt, and all I could think was, wow, somebody just closed a ring. Somewhere, a smartwatch vibrated with the quiet, religious thrill of achievement.

This is the age of Strava.

If you are not yet part of this amber-glowing hive of endurance worship, Strava is a social network for people who believe that movement must be recorded or it was merely theoretical. It is Facebook for quads. Instagram for hamstrings. A place where you can upload your run, your ride, your walk to get oat milk, and receive small digital pats on the head called kudos from people who also have sore hips.

Strava does not care why you moved. It only cares that you moved, and preferably in a clean, continuous line.

This makes it perfect for modern activism. A march is, after all, just a very political long walk. A protest is a parade that refuses to clap. And every parade, even an angry one, is a chance to rack up some delicious, righteous mileage.

I like to imagine the secret life of the crowd. The signs say Stop This, Justice Now, End That. But the watches say 2.3 miles, 412 calories, moderate heart rate, new personal record on Constitution Avenue. One activist is yelling into a megaphone while quietly hoping the route takes a little detour past the park, just to get a round number.

There is something almost beautiful about it. The marriage of moral urgency and Fitbit piety. The idea that you can fight the system and also beat your neighbor Dave from Silver Spring in weekly distance. We used to talk about “showing up.” Now we talk about “logging it.”

Because if it’s not on Strava, did you really resist? Or did you just sort of… stroll? I picture the future historian. Not poring over manifestos or news footage, but scrolling through heat maps. Here, in red, is the great march of 2026. Here, a smaller but very efficient rally, notable for its tight pacing and low elevation gain. Here, an outlier who walked fourteen miles for a cause and then, tragically, forgot to hit “record.”

The tragedy is real. To walk for justice and leave no data behind is to become a ghost. There is a certain democratic poetry in all this. Strava doesn’t care who you are. It doesn’t care what you believe. It just wants your steps. A billionaire and a broke college kid are equal in the eyes of the GPS. You are all just blinking dots on a map, sweating toward something.

In a world where everything is argued, counted, and disputed, it is oddly comforting that at least your feet are telling the truth.

So yes, I admire them. The marchers with their flattened sneakers and their digitally immortalized routes. The activists who fight power and chase their step goals at the same time. They are not just moving history. They are moving at 3.1 miles per hour, with a heart rate that suggests decent cardio health.

And somewhere tonight, as the chants fade and the streets empty, a hundred phones will glow in the dark. A hundred little victory screens will appear.

Activity saved.

Kudos earned.

Revolution logged.

Whenever a friend tells me they’re going to a protest, I ask if their will is up to date and if they’ve said their goodbyes. People think I’m joking. I’m not.

That question exists because protests rely on a fragile assumption: that everyone else involved will behave rationally and with restraint. That armed authorities will always exercise perfect judgment. That no one will panic, overreact, misread a moment, or escalate. That no unrelated actor will see a crowd as an opportunity.

Even if you personally do everything right—don’t engage, don’t escalate, don’t shout, just stand there holding a sign—you’re still stepping into an environment you don’t control. Protests concentrate risk. They attract tension, attention, and unpredictability. You don’t have to be the instigator to be the casualty.

History is full of moments where people assumed the line wouldn’t be crossed—until it was. Kent State wasn’t supposed to happen. Neither were countless other moments where bystanders paid the price for other people’s fear or bad decisions.

So yes, I ask my friends about their wills and their goodbyes. Not because I think they’re reckless—but because I think they’re human, and they’re walking into a situation where the outcome depends on everyone else being perfect.

I understand why people are saying “that’s not fair,” and I don’t dismiss that reaction at all. A person is dead, and that matters.

What I’m trying to do isn’t argue what should have happened, but explain how these situations are often interpreted in real time.

Federal agents who are visibly armed aren’t doing so symbolically. It signals that the environment is already considered high risk. In this case, they were outnumbered, blocked in, exposed, and vulnerable.

That shifts the mindset away from something like a routine traffic stop and toward a convoy or column mindset, where unexpected movement or defiance is filtered through a threat lens.

In those moments, responses aren’t calibrated around hindsight, proportionality debates, or future paperwork. They’re driven by immediate control and compliance. Historically, perceived defiance tends to escalate force rather than invite negotiation.

Saying that doesn’t mean the outcome was right or justified. It means this is how enforcement power often functions, and that reality can be tragic while still being real.

I’m sensitive to this because I’ve personally seen how quickly that threat lens snaps into place. Years ago, when I was a bike courier in DC, I accidentally merged into a motorcade.

Within seconds, weapons were trained on me and I was told, very plainly, that if I didn’t disengage immediately, I could be shot. Nothing had happened yet. But the posture alone made the stakes unmistakably clear.

In DC especially, people tend to understand just how mortal it can be to unintentionally interfere with federal agents who believe they’re in the middle of protecting an operation.

With this much propaganda everywhere, it’s honestly hard to tell which propaganda is closest to reality.

Some of the people we constantly hear from really may be plants, or at least carefully curated voices. Anyone who watches international media long enough knows that a lot of “random” interviewees are selected, coached, or elevated because they say the right things for the narrative being pushed. That’s not paranoia. That’s how modern media works. But the deeper issue is class.

The Venezuelans we’re told to “listen to” are usually elite exiles: English-speaking, media-savvy, often wealthy, often living comfortably abroad. Their resentment is real, but it’s the resentment of people whose ceiling was crushed, not necessarily people who were living near the floor.

When people support systems like socialism or communism, it’s often not because they want luxury or upside. It’s because they want a floor: a floor on how poor they can get, a floor on how vulnerable they are, a floor on how unpredictable life becomes. Removing Maduro may raise the ceiling, but it also risks dropping the floor, and history suggests the first people to benefit from that are usually the already rich.

You see the same dynamic with Cuba. That society holds together because many people long ago accepted ubiquitous education and healthcare over consumer abundance. Literacy and medicine over a capitalist rat race. On a tropical island, a lot of people prefer stability, predictability, and some basic joy in daily life over chasing wealth with no guarantees.

None of this denies suffering. It questions whose suffering gets amplified.

So when someone says “listen to Venezuelans,” the real question isn’t whether Venezuelans are speaking. It’s which Venezuelans, filtered through which incentives, and for whose benefit.

Here’s the symmetry people don’t like to acknowledge.

Many liberals argued that even if Joe Biden were cognitively diminished, senile, or largely absent for stretches of his presidency, it didn’t meaningfully matter. Why? Because the presidency is not a solo act. It’s an institutional machine. A competent, experienced staff can still set policy, execute strategy, manage crises, and move legislation. The White House, they said, still functioned.

That argument is internally consistent. But it doesn’t stop being true when the name on the door changes.

If Donald Trump is a buffoon, a clown, impulsive, or morally unmoored, yet surrounded by a disciplined, ideologically motivated, and strategically effective team, then the same logic applies. Outcomes don’t vanish because you dislike the figurehead. Power doesn’t evaporate because you mock the man at the podium.

In both cases, the real question isn’t the president’s personality or neurological status. It’s the ecosystem: the advisors, the operators, the incentives, the institutional leverage, and the willingness to use it.

Reducing presidencies to “senile grandpa” or “orange clown” isn’t analysis. It’s coping. If you were willing to argue that Biden’s administration functioned despite Biden, you don’t get to pretend Trump’s administration can’t function despite Trump.

Either institutions and teams matter, or they don’t. You don’t get to switch the rule based on who you hate.