A Network of Networks

How Our Movement Must Scale to Prevail

By Bryan Winter

When the British ships began their anticipated attack on the city of Boston, the lanterns were lit and he raced off on horseback in the dead of night starting in Boston, then on to Charlestown, Medford, Arlington, and Lexington before being captured on the way to his final stop, Concord.

At each step of the route he quickly roused the local militia to prepare before bolting off to his next destination. He rode across miles of forests on horseback, driving himself and the horse to exhaustion. At each stop along the way he knew a baker, a butcher, or a candlestick maker. Each of those he knew had a bond of deep trust such they could be relied upon to deliver his message reliably and with sufficient urgency.

Paul Revere used his friendships and relationships built up from his many years of service to his community to rally and mobilize the American people in defense of a set of principles that hadn’t even been fully defined. The revolution was built on ideals, but its bones were made of deep relationships and networks.

A second rider was sent that day, a man by the name of William Dawes. Dawes was respected but not nearly as well known, and the militias he raised were not nearly in the number or quality as those along Revere’s route.

There wasn’t a problem with the other militias, they had all trained to the same standard. The issue was Dawes was relatively unknown among the people he was trying to communicate with, and the urgency wasn’t fully understood or transmitted through the informal networks of relationships that militias depend upon to be effective.

Paul Revere was a node in a network that was close to other nodes in local networks. This network of networks was made over decades of service to his community, customers, employees, and friends. History remembers the ride, but it was his proclivity for relationship building that made him so effective at muster.

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Building Muscle in the Movement

We talk a lot about courage and unity as the foundations of robust and effective resistance to totalitarianism in this movement. We talk about tactics, about how to have hard conversations with your neighbors and loved ones. We write about how to save resources or provide aid to others who may require them. We talk about crafting a message, about how to protect your identity, and how to care for yourself to protect your sanity and good cheer—important when it feels like the world you once knew and took for granted starts to break down. But there is a final component to the puzzle of a muscular and durable movement.

Paul Revere, at the time of the American Revolution, was already a household name. He was a silversmith of great renown and his wares were sought out throughout the Commonwealth. He later branched into dentistry and large scale metalworking. He was very wealthy for his time. He had friends everywhere. He walked with ease among merchants, artisans, and dock workers with an easy laugh, but a piercing intensity. He attended town councils, he supported local charities, he was a volunteer firefighter, and he trained with the local militia. He had friends everywhere.

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Original Art by emj. Titled “Connections”

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On June 14th, between 5 and 11 million people (depending upon whose numbers you accept) stepped out into the field and declared with a single voice that there are No Kings in America.

From the coast of Florida to the Hawaiian Islands, people in every major city in America—from Boston, Denver, Austin, Phoenix, and Philadelphia gathered in numbers almost too many to count. The suburbs and other cities hosted their own rallies as well, completely independently and without any centralized authority. Small towns with populations of a couple thousand filled their squares with a couple hundred very angry and committed citizens. Over 2200 protests gathered on a single day.

Using free speech as its sword, and the American Flag as its shield, the No Kings Movement roared with unapologetic fury. The fascists want to flood the zone and we must answer that with our own flood—everything, everywhere, all at once.

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Phase 1: Moving Mountains En Masse

In the first phase of this movement we were in a stage of mobilization. That means mustering as much as possible around common symbols and principles.

We work together to drive the largest number of people in the streets at a regular interval, along with periods of relaxation and rest. We are flexing a mobilization muscle with periods of recovery to allow for consolidation, digestion of lessons learned, and networking. We help the people develop habits of opposition and engagement that are physically and financially sustainable across the broader movement.

Even defining principles is an achievement, because the opposition is fractured along dozens of philosophical perspectives; getting all these tribes of humanity to harmonize around a single message is important for developing movement power.

This was important, not because of a specific political outcome but because the No Kings movement needed to demonstrate that there was potential energy in the system for a resistance movement at all. People need to be reminded that they are not alone in an era of institutional collapse, and that sense of solidarity makes them more likely to act.

We also cannot do this alone. A single individual has limited power, but en masse, people can move mountains. This is a game of power and we achieve power with numbers.

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Finding Your Home

The liberty we have taken for granted for so long is under threat and everyone can sense it, but the question of what can be done about it is not entirely clear to many of us. This demonstration, while important, is not enough to sustain durable habits of resistance.

Like Paul Revere, we should be now developing and growing a whisper network between organizing actors. Small, aggressive, and nimble protest groups have started applying political pressure to capitulators and testing tactics that the broader movement can learn from. Legal organizers are building networks of mutual support for migrants and targeted organizations, while larger organizations focus on communications, strategy, training, and the raising of legal defense or operational funds.

A steady cadence of larger days of action serve to keep all the organizations fresh with newly engaged volunteers and keep media attention on the issues we want to be raised. Every standout in a small town creates opportunities for new relationships that allow us to best allocate the limited talent and capital we have available.

Strategies of opposition are being developed, debated, and planned. A thousand experiments in mobilization tactics, media, outreach, and political campaigning are being developed independently and then shared among movement actors. Donors who share our concerns for the state of democracy are beginning to talk amongst themselves. They are carefully considering where they might be able to provide support, and upon which actors to bet political and financial capital.

In this phase of the movement’s development, the large masses of humanity that have assembled in the millions across the country are now trying to find a home in one or more activist groups, like 50501 Veterans and Mass 50501. We are building durable friendships and informal networks of information and resource sharing, and finding ways to not duplicate effort by allowing organizers of varied skills and life experiences to specialize.

While individuals slowly specialize, those early to the movement can train, educate, and plug-in newly joined members in an effort to offload some of their work and protect themselves from burnout. Leaders will change as life circumstances for individuals change, and as people figure out how they can best help. Roles within the movement will change as people learn what they are capable of. In my own case, I’m a software engineer by trade but I’m learning to write, recruit, and network. This is now my trade, and with it an entirely new identity that I need to get used to.

This is, without a hint of irony, the place where those individuals in the movement with sales, customer service, and public speaking skills can do much. They can do this by representing an organization and speaking to other organizations, individuals in the street, and the media and soapbox. Any places where people gather are prime targets.

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Build Relationships and Rely on Them

This movement must scale, and that means we need to be out there in the thousands and eventually the millions. We can build a movement-wide nervous system that connects various activist organs to each other and to non-activist organizers and community groups like churches, civic clubs, hobbyist organizations, or eventually networks of businesses. We will need to raise a nonviolent civilian army to truly hold this administration to account.

We cannot build a centralized command structure because we do not have the time. There are so many moving parts to this movement that it is not possible to entirely synchronize actions and pacing across the thousands of organizing organs across the country.

We can, however, backfill an organizationally fractured—but ideologically unified—movement by giving everyone a seat at the table through informal and formal partnerships. There will be actors within this movement that spend the rest of their organizing efforts targeting a single capitulating business—or there may be some that simply spend days making dank memes to amuse the public and win converts.

All of this has value, because no one can do this alone; the task ahead of us is just too large, and the stakes too high to allow the egoism of an individual to warp our ethics. Build relationships, and then get in the habit of relying upon them.

Movements are not built with just action—they are built with trust.

Bryan Winter is a member of 50501 Veterans and an Ambassador for Mass 50501. He can be reached via Bluesky (@savingtherepublic.bsky.social‬) and Facebook.