is revolution still possible??
If we look closely at how power operates today, it becomes harder to locate where resistance should even begin. The structures that shape behavior are no longer only political or economic. They are embedded in how attention is directed, how time is experienced, and how reality is perceived on a daily basis. What once enabled collective action now feels dispersed and unstable. The question is not simply whether change is possible, but whether the very conditions that once made it possible still exist in any recognizable form.
Karl Marx located revolutionary potential in material conditions and class conflict. That framework assumed that people could recognize shared exploitation and act collectively. Today, even when exploitation is visible, collective response rarely stabilizes. The issue is not awareness. It is continuity. Attention is fragmented. Time feels scarce even when it is not. The system does not only extract labor. It extracts focus. This creates a condition where individuals are constantly stimulated but rarely sustained in one direction long enough to organize.
Technofeudalism helps explain ownership and control structures, but it does not fully articulate the lived experience of this condition. The attention economy operates at a deeper level. Platforms are designed to maximize engagement, not coherence. This produces cycles of emotional activation followed by rapid disengagement. Outrage, empathy, fear, and hope are all compressed into short bursts. Over time, this leads to normalization of numbness. People feel everything briefly and nothing deeply. The result is a population that is informed but not mobilized.
We are also observing a series of parallel biological and psychological signals that, taken together, suggest something more than a cultural or behavioral shift. Rising rates of ADHD diagnoses across multiple countries and demographics, increasing clinical and subclinical reports of cognitive fatigue and burnout, and widespread nutritional deficiencies including low B12 levels which are associated with neurological function and sustained cognitive capacity; all of these point toward a broader systemic condition. Whether these phenomena are directly causal in the political sense, or whether they are better understood as symptoms of the same underlying ecology, they align with and reinforce a system that rewards fragmentation, rapid task-switching, and the prioritization of immediate emotional response over deliberate reasoning. The body and the mind adapt, as they always do, to the environment they inhabit. When that environment systematically punishes slowness and rewards reactivity, the adaptive response is a gradual recalibration of cognitive and emotional thresholds. Patience decreases not as a moral failing but as a rational adaptation. Intolerance for ambiguity increases. The capacity to hold uncertainty without immediately discharging it through some reactive behavior, such as scrolling, posting, opining, or consuming, weakens progressively. These are not minor side effects of an otherwise functional system. They are structural features that directly undermine the psychological and relational foundations required for collective action, which has always depended on people's willingness to tolerate uncertainty, defer gratification, trust one another over extended periods, and engage with processes that are slow, complex, and not guaranteed to succeed.
Historical revolutions relied on sustained physical presence, shared temporal experience, and the slow accumulation of shared meaning across communities bound together by geography, labor, and cultural memory. Figures such as Che Guevara or Deniz Gezmiş became symbols not only because of their specific actions but because of the broader environments (social, temporal, and spatial) that allowed those actions to resonate, to accumulate meaning, and to inspire imitation and commitment. In my own cultural context, referencing Deniz Gezmiş is not an abstract intellectual gesture. It connects to a lived and inherited cultural memory in which resistance had a physical, visible, and irreducibly collective form; a memory of bodies in streets, of voices that could not be compressed into a feed or a content format, and of a political consciousness that was built face to face over months and years rather than assembled and disassembled in days. The street, in that historical moment, was a space where time slowed down enough for people to find one another, recognize shared conditions, build trust, and act in concert. The temporal and spatial alignment that this required, specifically the conditions under which sustained solidarity could form, is extraordinarily more difficult to achieve today, not because people are less brave or less aggrieved, but because the very fabric of time and attention within which political consciousness forms has been restructured from the outside.
Street protests still exist, yet their function has shifted. Today, movements are often translated into digital content before they stabilize as physical phenomena, with their meaning contested online through hashtags and images before solidifying on the ground. This visibility is both an asset and a vulnerability. While movements can scale rapidly, they often dissolve just as quickly as public attention moves to the next event. The system does not need to suppress mobilization; it only needs to fragment it, ensuring actions remain episodic rather than cumulative. This creates a loop where actions are repeated without the sustained, escalating pressure that historical movements once achieved.
This loop is particularly visible in the domain of NGO activism and institutionalized civil society, where the failure is often as much a result of strategic choice as it is of structural constraint. Many organizations have not only converged on similar campaign formats and metrics of success, such as petition signatures or donor reports, but they have also become fundamentally dependent on the sponsors and donors whose interests rarely align with radical change. By prioritizing a "saving the day" mentality, these entities often trade long-term transformation for immediate, marketable results that satisfy their financial backers. This creates a predictable cycle that the system absorbs with ease. In many cases, NGOs are not merely victims of a delimited design space; they are active participants who play the game to ensure their own institutional survival. It is an uncomfortable reality that some within these organizations are fully aware of this cycle and even enjoy the stability and status it provides. As long as the personal or institutional benefits for a few remain a higher priority than the benefit of the mass audience, activism will continue to function as a self-perpetuating loop. It acts as a pressure-release valve, offering the appearance of accountability without the substance of structural change, precisely because the organizations themselves have become an integral part of the system they ostensibly challenge.
At the same time, a generalised condition of uncertainty has become the ambient atmosphere of contemporary life, reshaping political behaviour in deep and underappreciated ways. Economic instability, accelerating technological change, political volatility, ecological anxiety, and the erosion of the long-term institutional frameworks that once provided a degree of predictability to personal and collective life; all of these create a persistent background level of existential anxiety that shapes individual and collective risk tolerance. People who are genuinely uncertain about their economic futures, their housing security, and their children's prospects are structurally less willing to take the kinds of risks that political transformation has historically required, risks that, in earlier historical moments, were taken by people who had, in many cases, even less to lose. Despair increases, but it does not translate into coordinated action because despair without a credible collective horizon tends to collapse inward rather than outward. Rather than generating the kind of shared determination that historical revolutionary movements drew upon, contemporary despair more often produces withdrawal, individualized coping strategies, cynicism about collective action, and a diffuse sense of powerlessness that is all the more demoralizing for being so widely shared. The system does not need to eliminate hope entirely in order to neutralize it politically. It only needs to diffuse hope across too many directions simultaneously, ensuring that energy for change is perpetually dispersed rather than concentrated.
This generalized state of fragmentation also has profound effects on political tolerance and the capacity for productive engagement with complexity. Continuous exposure to high-stimulation environments progressively reduces the threshold for discomfort with slowness, ambiguity, and process. People who have been neurologically and behaviorally conditioned by years of engagement with platforms optimized for rapid emotional response become genuinely less capable of tolerating the pace and texture of genuine political deliberation, which is inherently slow, uncertain, often frustrating, and rarely immediately rewarding. Political and social change, when it is durable rather than merely performative, unfolds over years and decades through processes that are opaque, nonlinear, and resistant to the kind of narrative clarity that social media rewards. This creates a deep structural paradox: the intensity of desire for change increases, fueled by the very emotional activation that the attention economy produces, while the capacity to engage patiently and collectively with the actual processes through which change occurs is simultaneously being eroded by the same system. The energy exists, but it cannot be sustained or directed long enough to do the structural work that transformation requires.
The normalization of numbness further complicates this dynamic. Emotional fatigue leads to disengagement. Individuals learn to protect themselves by reducing emotional investment. While this is an understandable adaptation, it weakens the affective bonds that sustain collective action. Without shared emotional intensity, movements struggle to maintain momentum. What remains is a pattern of brief mobilization followed by rapid dissipation.
Recent movements show that adaptation is possible but difficult. Youth led mobilizations in Nepal demonstrate that combining physical presence with strategic digital coordination can still produce outcomes. These cases are important not because they replicate past revolutions, but because they experiment with new forms under current constraints. They suggest that the system is not absolute. It is adaptive, and therefore can be challenged by equally adaptive strategies. From a grounded perspective, observing these patterns leads to a critical insight. The limitation is not only external. It is internalized through habits of attention, perception, and response. If people cannot sustain focus, tolerate uncertainty, and build trust over time, then even the most favorable external conditions will not lead to transformation. Revolution fails before it begins, at the level of cognition and coordination.
This brings us to a more uncomfortable question. Are we moving toward a condition where free will is increasingly externally limited, whether by design or by historical continuity? Or are we choosing to construct an illusion of hope in order to maintain psychological stability? The answer may not be binary. What matters is how we respond to this course.
If classical revolution is constrained, then the task is not to repeat its forms but to rethink its foundations. To not accept this pessimistic thought we must utilize collective intellectual activism and research to come up with a model that might work.
References
Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks.
Tüfekçi, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest.
Bruineberg, J. (2022). Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy.
Heitmayer, M. (2023). The second wave of attention economics.
Sulmaz, D. (2025). How Gen Z’s digital rage is reshaping Nepal’s tomorrow.
Madison, N., & Klang, M. (2016). Digital activism, slacktivism, and the critiques of futility.
