Post-Parkland gun-control activism succeeded because of house meetings, not social media.

Evidence

Even the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, who grew up more “connected” than I did, recognized the importance of in-person meeting when they began campaigning for gun control in 2018. In #NeverAgain, David Hogg writes that “[a]nger will get you started but it won’t keep you going.” Although he was outspoken in the days after the tragedy, he predicts that by himself, he would have burned out after a few days or weeks. “The real beginning,” Hogg says, “came two days later at Cameron Kasky’s house.” Kasky, another student, had begun holding meetings at his house, and Hogg was invited by Emma González, a mutual friend. Writing that the students were “obsessive from day one” and often slept over at Kasky’s house, Hogg describes a scene that evokes the emergent tactics of political activisms past: “[I]f [we] thought of something that seemed like it could work, [we] just did it. Some people did a lot of interviews; some people were really good at Twitter; other people focused on organizing and coordinating.” … Like the meetings that the Montgomery bus boycott organizers held behind various closed doors, it was here that the students worked together to outline their demands and make decisions about how to speak to the public at large. While they pulled strings on Twitter and in the media, it was the house—and the group dynamic that it brought into being—that provided the space of appearance. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 602

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the reader’s question about whether Odell’s proposed solutions are exercises in privilege — here she grounds coordinated resistance in mundane domestic spaces, a concrete counter-argument to the withdrawal misreading.