Ramka , Resistance and Resilience: Lessons from 1980s Polish Dissent for Contemporary Networked Cultures of Protest

This article revisits the argument, made popular by scholars such as Zeynep Tufekci and Vincent Bevins, that the networked form and horizontalism were the reasons for the underperformance of the protest movements of the 2010s. Networked protest cultures were not born with the internet. When we examine Polish samizdat, in the overall context of the Solidarity movement, as a historical instance of social media activism, we discover that, for a protest movement, de-centred and non-hierarchical forms of organization, and the leaderless and prefigurative philosophies of political action were important if not necessary conditions for achieving resilience and impact, even at the expense of some inertia in the long run.