I can understand the seduction in the reasoning – telling disempowered, demoralized people that they just need to do these few things feels a lot like helping! And for the audience it might even be a relief to find something like agency, to have a direction to move and a sense that somebody hears you. But it’s not real help and it’s not real agency and individual action won’t change systemic problems. Excusing failures of power this way is a kind of participatory gaslighting.

— Mike Hoye, Thrashing, blarg, 2025