The Infrastructure Hypothesis, Part II

Leakage and the Work of Brokers

What the Hypothesis Misses

The first movement proposed that our information infrastructure is fractured in ways that prevent crisis analysis from converting to action. But this hypothesis contains a silent assumption: that the incompatibility is total. It isn't.

Sometimes ideas do cross the gap. Sometimes a story in mainstream media does trigger organizing. Sometimes social media engagement does catalyze real-world mobilization. Sometimes small local networks do reach unexpected scale. These are exceptions—but exceptions contain information.

The hypothesis is incomplete without examining where and how leakage happens.

The Role of Brokers (Historical Case)

Consider the civil rights movement's relationship to journalism. The movement succeeded partly because it had brokers—people embedded in both activist networks and media systems. Ella Baker understood organizing. She also understood how to make movements visible to journalists. James Farmer and John Lewis could articulate demands in language that resonated with newspaper editors and with grassroots participants. News organizations had reporters (like Claude Sitton of the New York Times) who maintained long-term relationships with movement figures, not just parachuting in for the spectacle.

These brokers performed specific work:

• They translated movement goals into terms that journalism could carry
• They maintained relationships that made journalists willing to cover unglamorous local organizing
• They understood media rhythms well enough to time actions for coverage
• They had credibility in both worlds, so they weren't dismissed as mere activists or mere reporters

The infrastructure didn't prevent action. Brokers enabled leakage across it.

Now notice what's changed: journalism has contracted. The long-term correspondent embedded in a region has largely disappeared. Local newsrooms have collapsed. Relationships between journalists and organizers have become transactional rather than sustained. The brokering class has withered.

This is historically specific. It's not that infrastructure is inherently incompatible with action. It's that this particular moment's infrastructure has eliminated the intermediary roles that once enabled translation.

How Leakage Still Happens

Despite this loss, action still occasionally escapes the system. Examine how:

1. Exploitation of gaps in monitoring

Organizers understand that media attention is scarce and erratic. They exploit moments when crisis narratives create temporary openings. After a story saturates mainstream coverage, journalists briefly disengage to pursue the next crisis. In that lull, organizers can build without constant scrutiny. The media incompatibility with prescription actually becomes useful—journalists won't document the organizing infrastructure being built, which means fewer opposing forces know about it either.

This is improvisational use of the system's inattention as cover.

2. Distributed networks replacing centralized translation

Where brokers have disappeared, organizers have built parallel infrastructure. Encrypted messaging, Discord servers, Signal groups, and localized Slack workspaces function as translation layers that media never touches. They allow hyper-specific prescription—exactly what mainstream media can't carry—to circulate in networks too distributed for any single outlet to monitor or report on.

The incompatibility of mainstream media with prescription no longer matters because prescription happens outside media systems entirely. Information about specific actions moves through channels that don't require media translation.

This is the leakage working in reverse: instead of action escaping into media visibility, organizing has learned to escape media visibility altogether.

3. Micro-celebrity and platform heterogeneity

A relatively unknown organizer with 50,000 Twitter followers operates in a different information ecology than the mainstream media ecosystem. They can post specific action steps. They can build accountability through their follower community. They've created a micro-system with some of the properties of mainstream media (reach, legitimacy) but without the liability constraints.

These figures—often younger, operating outside traditional institutions—function as informal brokers. They're not embedded in both worlds; they've created a third space that borrows properties from both.

The key is that they operate outside the institutions whose liability concerns prevent prescription. Individual accounts have different risk profiles than corporate media entities.

What Moved and What Didn't

Examine specific moments to test the hypothesis against reality:

Black Lives Matter (2013 onward): The initial spark came from social media (Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi creating #BlackLivesMatter). Mainstream media initially covered it as a protest movement, not as prescription for organizing. But the distributed networks—largely Black social media spaces—carried specific organizing guidance. The leakage happened not because mainstream media changed, but because organizers bypassed it.

What did require mainstream media translation: political legitimacy. Getting mainstream outlets to treat BLM as serious political actors (not just protesters, but a movement with strategic sophistication) required a brokering function. That work fell largely to younger writers and commentators who had credibility in both activist and media spaces.

The 2017-2018 teacher strikes: These happened despite media incompatibility with prescription, not because media provided it. Teachers organized through union networks, encrypted channels, and face-to-face organizing. Mainstream coverage came after the infrastructure was built, not before. Media provided retrospective legitimacy, not prospective instruction.

The prescription existed—but in union meetings and local organizing spaces. Media's role was to make those spaces visible after the fact.

Failed leakage: 2020 police abolition discourse: Here's where the hypothesis shows its strength. "Defund the police" became ubiquitous in mainstream discourse. It was analyzed, debated, legitimized by major outlets. But it remained largely discourse. The prescription—what defunding actually looks like, how to organize for it, what the specific policy changes entail—never made the transition from activist networks to mainstream media in actionable form.

Why? Because specificity about power redistribution carries real liability. A newspaper can analyze the concept. It can't prescribe the infrastructure for implementing it without taking a political side. So the idea circulated while the organizing remained localized and fragmented.

This shows the limits of leakage: ideas can cross systems, but prescriptions about power rarely do.

The Invisible Work of Translation

What these cases suggest is that leakage requires active, often invisible labor: people who understand both organizing and media, who maintain relationships across systems, who can sense when a moment has opened up for translation.

This work has no name in our infrastructure. It's not journalism. It's not organizing. It's the interstitial practice that used to happen informally but now requires deliberate cultivation.

Some of it happens through:

• Independent journalists with deep roots in activist communities
• Organizers who study journalism and understand media constraints
• Academics embedded in movements (the rarer ones)
• Editors at smaller outlets willing to take on liability that major media won't
• Foundation-funded projects designed explicitly to bridge the gap

But there's no systematic infrastructure supporting this brokering work. It survives through individual commitment and occasional institutional support, not through structural design.

What the Exceptions Reveal

If prescription sometimes escapes incompatibility, the hypothesis needs refinement. It's not that the infrastructure prevents action. It's that:

1. The infrastructure requires intermediaries to enable translation, and those intermediaries are increasingly scarce. Journalism used to provide this function partially. Now it doesn't have the capacity or appetite for it.
2. Organizers have learned to work around media systems rather than through them. Leakage happens increasingly through channels that bypass mainstream media entirely. This is practical but costly—it means action remains invisible to broader constituencies who still consume mainstream media.
3. Some ideas can cross the gap; others can't. Emotional narrative and identity-based analysis move easily. Prescription about power redistribution doesn't. The infrastructure filters more on content than on form.
4. The incompatibility is not fixed; it's maintained by specific choices. Media outlets could carry prescription if they were willing to absorb liability. Organizers could seek media coverage if they prioritized visibility over autonomy. The incompatibility persists because the incentive structures make these trades feel unacceptable.

The Paradox Deepens

Here's where the analysis gets uncomfortable: the very improvements that would make prescription possible—willingness to take political sides, acceptance of liability, direct coordination with movements—are exactly what would destroy journalism's institutional credibility.

A newspaper that explicitly allied with organizing would become a partisan instrument. It would lose the claim to independence that makes it trustworthy to readers who disagree with the movement. The incompatibility isn't irrational from media's perspective; it's protective of something valuable: the appearance of neutrality.

But that appearance comes at the cost of action. The trade-off is real and irresolvable within current institutional structures.

Where Improvisation Works

Yet action does happen. Not through perfect infrastructure, but through:

• Strategic use of media's limits as cover: Organizers exploit the fact that media attention is episodic and erratic. They build in the gaps.
• Creation of parallel systems: Distributed networks that don't require media translation. They're smaller-scale and less visible, but they're actual infrastructure for prescription.
• Cultivation of brokers outside institutions: People who maintain relationships across systems not because their job requires it, but because they're committed to translation work. This is precarious and under-resourced, but it happens.
• Exploitation of platform heterogeneity: Operating in the micro-celebrity and alternative media space where liability constraints are different or non-existent.
• Acceptance of fragmentation: Rather than fighting for mainstream media coverage, movements increasingly accept that organizing will remain locally rooted and connected through distributed networks invisible to broader publics.

Each of these involves accepting constraints rather than overcoming them. None produces the ideal of crisis analysis reaching mass audiences and triggering coordinated action. But they do produce action—uneven, localized, often invisible to people consuming mainstream media, but real.

The Question This Raises

If the infrastructure genuinely prevented action, nothing would happen. But things do happen. The question isn't "why doesn't the system produce action?" It's "what is the relationship between invisible, distributed, broker-dependent action and the visible, mass-media crisis narratives?"

Maybe they're not actually meant to be connected. Maybe crisis narratives serve a different function—not mobilization but legitimacy. They make the invisible action feel politically possible by establishing that crisis is real and resistance is not fringe.

Or maybe the real infrastructure problem is this: we've lost the translation layer that once made isolated action visible without destroying its autonomy. Brokers could move between worlds. Now organizers must choose: visibility or autonomy. Rarely both.

If that's the actual problem, the solution isn't better crisis narratives or more social media engagement. It's rebuilding the interstitial roles—the journalism, the bridge-builders, the translators—that made multiple systems legible to each other.

That work is unglamorous. It pays poorly. It requires sustained commitment across time. It's also the precise work that current incentive structures have made nearly impossible.

Which brings us back to the paradox: we need brokers to connect systems, but the systems themselves have made the broker's role unsustainable. You can't rebuild what the infrastructure actively de-incentivizes.

Unless, of course, people do it anyway—which they do, invisibly, often without resources or recognition. The fact that action persists despite the incompatibility suggests that the infrastructure is not destiny. It's just what we've decided to build and maintain.

Which means it could be otherwise.