The Great Inversion: What Happens When the Activists Become the Conservatives
By Mayumi Rollings
In the span of twenty-one days, I traversed three distinct ideological continents: the radical feminist solidarity of Women Deliver in Melbourne, the silicon-slick disruption of Web Summit in Vancouver, and the impact storytelling ecosystem of Media That Matters. I went looking for the future of social change - as someone who works at the intersection of AI, storytelling, and advocacy - but I found something more unsettling: a cultural role-reversal where the systems builders are showing more flexibility than the activists. And where the people with the most to gain from powerful new tools are most at risk of being left behind by them.
Radical Resistance or Rigid Traditionalism?
At Women Deliver, the main objective was to dismantle systems of oppression. Over 6,000 people converged from 189 countries to coalesce, collaborate, and provide input into the newly minted Melbourne Declaration, which advocates for protecting human rights, empowering strong feminist movements, and aligning global support to guarantee that dignity and justice are universally protected rights. The conference described itself as a radical space for movement-building designed to resist anti-rights movements. The goals it aims to address are urgent and real: bodily autonomy, climate justice, and decolonization - to name a few.
And the wariness of technology present in that space is not irrational - it is both valid and justified. Surveillance has been weaponized against the very communities these movements protect. Data extraction has historically served extraction of another kind. The suspicion is earned, and the history beneath it is long.
And yet a paradox exists. The Feminist Playbook explicitly calls for dismantling capitalism and “Global Minority power” - a framework born from decades of watching market logic hollow out social movements from the inside. That history is real. But a framework designed to protect against co-optation can, if held too rigidly, become its own kind of enclosure - one that locks out tools capable of amplifying the very voices it was built to defend.
There seems to be a growing awareness, even within these spaces, that the power of new tools could be leveraged to propel their interests forward in this age of AI. But awareness alone doesn’t bridge the gap. In practice, the learning curve feels so steep, and the ideological risk so fraught, that the effort to try remains too daunting for many. Knowledge stays in other hands. Power follows.
The New North Star: Aggressive Disruption
Meanwhile, at Web Summit, the atmosphere was one of relentless forward motion. With a mission to create meaningful connections between the CEOs and founders reshaping the world, the event focused on AI as the new “North Star.” Under headings like “Always shipping, never safe” and “Designing intelligence, disrupting society,” the tech elite framed themselves as the architects of a world-changing future.
While this environment is often criticized as a “tech bro” culture, there was an undeniable intellectual agility in the room. The conversation was about scaling, regulation, and the rapid evolution of work. Job creation. Infrastructure design. These are people obsessively curious about how to bend the future to their will - and that curiosity, whatever its motives, is formidable.
But that agility has a shadow. The majority are unwittingly building upon the foundations of an economic system on the verge of collapse, one whose very data was biased and fallible from the start. It is a consolidation of power at a rate that many find both alarming and difficult to ignore - a new conservatism wearing the costume of disruption.
Both rooms, as it turned out, contained a version of the same trap: one mistook motion for progress; the other mistook resistance for safety. The activists in Melbourne who treated powerful new tools as inherently anti-rights appeared - ironically - more conservative and traditionalist than the innovators they aimed to challenge. And the innovators in Vancouver, for all their stated disruption, were quietly building walls.
The Impact Anxiety: Fear of the Tool
This tension reached its most personal pitch at Media That Matters. Here, among filmmakers and storytellers - my own people, or so I thought - I hoped to find the bridge. Instead, I found the fault line at its sharpest.
The anxiety in that room wasn’t new to me. I’d felt versions of it before - the instinct to protect something sacred from the language of metrics, the fear that learning to speak the funder’s dialect means slowly becoming the funder, and thus succumbing to the system that through its very nature becomes oppressive to original voices and stories. Those fears are not irrational. The history of social movements being hollowed out by the very infrastructures that claimed to support them is long and well-documented.
But I also sat with a quieter discomfort. In conversations about how storytelling impact gets measured and valued, I noticed a recurring pattern: the moment a new tool entered the room, the conversation often collapsed into a binary. This or that. Good or bad. Integrity or compromise. And in that collapse, something got lost - the harder, more generative question of whether these tools could be learned, redirected, or reclaimed.
I recognized that reflex. I’ve felt it in myself. But I’ve also learned, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, that the way through is rarely as clean as this or that. It is almost always more intricate than that. And the cost of refusing to engage with that intricacy - of leaving powerful tools entirely in other hands - is one the people in that room could least afford to pay.
The Cost of Inflexibility
The “aha” moment of this three-experience journey is that progressivism has changed its address. The tech builders, once the disruptors pushing at the edges of power, have moved toward a conservative consolidation of it. Meanwhile, the activists, in their legitimate fear of new digital architectures, have retreated into a posture that prioritizes resistance over mastery - and in doing so, risk ceding the most powerful levers of the 21st century to the very systems they hope to dismantle.
The most radical act of resistance today might not be a protest. It might be a nuanced, aggressive curiosity about the very tools currently being used to leave activists behind. To understand a tool is not to endorse it. To learn its language is not to become it. And to ask “how does this work?” is not a betrayal - it is, perhaps, the beginning of reclaiming it.
There Is Hope in the Questions Asked in Private
And yet.
Amid the loudest voices in the room - the ones performing certainty from the stage, the ones whose identities were bound to a particular answer - there were others. They found me afterward, in hallway corners and DM threads, with a different kind of question. Not “is AI good or evil?” but “how does this actually work?” and “how can I use this to serve my community?”
These are the people who understand, even if they can’t say it publicly yet, that the way through is confusing, unmapped, and potentially dangerous - but full of possibilities not yet imagined. They are not ready to perform a position. They are ready to learn.
My purpose was never to convert. It was to provide enough context that each person could make an informed choice on their own journey - not this or that, but something more nuanced, more honest, and more their own. And in those quiet, curious conversations, I found something the mainstage couldn’t hold: the beginning of a more honest reckoning.
That’s who gets left behind when we refuse to engage: not the ideologues on either side, but the curious ones in the middle - the people who wanted to ask but didn’t feel safe to. The ones who could change everything, if we gave them room to wonder.