A leaderless mass protest is fundamentally illegible to any single observer.

Evidence

Who was telling the truth here? No one, and all of us. We were taking a fundamentally illegible eruption of contention and trying to make it legible. This was a horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless, mass protest. Concretely speaking, there were as many reasons for participating in the revolt as there were participants. Probably more. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 415

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the media-bias claims in ch12 and to the broader theme of horizontal movements and their inherent structural features in ch8 and ch13. — connects to: Mass protests are fundamentally illegible and media coverage inevitably distorts them — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 415
• QUESTION: Is illegibility intrinsic to leaderless movements rather than an artifact of media framing? This bears on whether the media ‘distorted’ or simply named the movement.
• SEED: A piece on horizontal movements’ structural illegibility as a feature that makes them democratically rich but politically unreadable.