distinguishing between internal and external efficacy. If you’ve got the knowledge you need to participate in civic life, you’ve got internal high efficacy. But you may be thwarted by a political system that doesn’t value or respond to your participation.

mySociety, a British organization dedicated to improving civic systems, launched a site, FixMyStreet, allowing citizens to report potholes and other issues so their local city council members could follow up and address them.

The key ingredient in contemporary social change is efficacy: the sense that you, personally, can have an impact on the world.

But once you’ve concluded that government can’t be trusted to do the right thing, you’re less likely to rely on voting as a useful form of civic expression.

revolutions began in part with a “break in consciousness” brought about by thought leaders: artists, writers, and journalists. These men and women of letters “help[ed] to create that general awareness of dissatisfaction, that solidified public opinion, which . . . creates effective demand for revolutionary change.”47

Our contemporary political and media environment is designed to activate fear.

A 2011 study by the neuroscientist Ryota Kanai at University College London found that young adults who identify as conservative have structurally different brains from those who identify as liberals: they have a larger right amygdala, a part of the brain associated with emotion processing, especially anxiety and fear responses.

David Brooks has suggested that Trump is the wrong answer to the right question. That question, Brooks believes, is how Americans should deal with upheavals and social shifts like globalization.69 More broadly, the question is how people should react when faced with institutions that appear to be both ill-equipped to cope with contemporary

The problem of slacktivism is a problem of efficacy. Whether you’re engaged in thick or thin action, or are focused on voice or instrumental outcomes, it’s possible to have a lousy theory of change or, worse, no theory of change.