George Hahn

Political movements are graded on a similar curve, but the connection between action and outcome is rarely a straight line.

The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott began as a one-day protest.

Despite a 90% participation rate, the single-day action achieved no tangible results.

But after 13 months and a favorable Supreme Court ruling, the boycott successfully forced the integration of Montgomery's bus system.

During that long campaign, however, it would have been easy for onlookers to be cynical.

Over the past decade, I've been a protest cynic, believing most actions viewed through the narrow lens of the moment are performative measures that generate selfies and make participants feel good about being right without having any actual impact.

But Timothy Snyder says my thesis is incorrect.

The main reason you protest is to tell the rest of the people who are watching you that what's going on isn't normal, Snyder told me.

The second reason you protest is that it's the gateway to doing other things.

In other words, what looks like sound and fury signifying nothing is in fact an incubator for building infrastructure and organizing further actions.

Case in point.

After the first day of the Montgomery bus boycott, activists, led by a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., organized a carpooling network with more than 200 cars and 100 pickup locations.

That infrastructure sustained their movement, allowing them to register an estimated $3,000 hit per day to the city's bus service until their demands were met.

That's $35,000 per day adjusted for inflation.

When we launched Resist and Unsubscribe last week, we contributed some infrastructure to a political movement.

Our goal is to demonstrate to consumers that they wield enormous power, as their spending accounts for more than two-thirds of the U.S.

economy.

Your wallet is a weapon.

And in a capitalist society, the most radical act is withholding your money.

Deployed broadly across the economy, however, a consumer boycott is a blunt instrument that maximizes damage while diluting influence.