Melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma, and mourning. These are emotions we face when we experience political defeat. In Burn Out, Hannah Proctor explains how in the struggle for a better world, defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. Proctor asked: how do the people on the front line keep going? By drawing on historical resources she brilliantly illustrates how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope, so we can too. The political is not only personal, it’s interpersonal, which is highlighted through our digital media use nowadays, where our sense of self often clashes with our online representation of that and those of others. As I am currently researching the emotional tensions and conflict within social movements in the context of platform capitalism, and Proctor has greatly inspired me, I was curious what her thoughts on this would be.

CA: What I would love to talk to you about is how do digital media shape the emotional experience of political defeat.

HP: I wouldn’t say I made a conscious decision to avoid discussing digital media in my book—it’s just that most of my case studies are historical. That said, it’s an interesting question, and a few people have asked me about it before. Social dynamics definitely play out in digital spaces, and there are clear connections between how people interact online and in person. In many ways, the emotional experiences that arise can be amplified online, sometimes leading to confusion or conflict that might not occur face-to-face.

There’s also a kind of paranoia that comes with digital spaces. For example, there’s this feeling that if you’re not constantly making public statements about a political cause, people might assume you don’t care. At the same time, the expectation to always have an opinion or share everything can be exhausting. This dynamic often leads to moralizing, where people judge others for not engaging enough. But just as often, people feel drained by the constant demand to stay connected.

I actually wrote about this recently in my newsletter, particularly around the concept of capacity. That idea didn’t come to me so much from social media itself but from organizing spaces—WhatsApp and Signal groups, for instance. These groups are a major way people communicate and organize, but they also come with their own set of emotional complexities. Some people are more vocal, while others remain silent, and these dynamics can create tension.

What interested me about the term capacity is that it became a common way for people to express limits—often without being clear about what those limits were. In the groups I was part of, people would say they didn’t have the capacity to do something, but that could mean anything from “I’m not interested” to “I’m dealing with something serious.” Over time, the ambiguity of that phrase started to frustrate me.

And, of course, the language we use in these digital spaces doesn’t always translate directly to in-person interactions. It’s interesting that I didn’t consciously decide not to focus on this in my book, but looking back, it’s definitely a relevant aspect of the discussion.

CA: I think it’s interesting you mentioned paranoia because that could have been another chapter in your book.

HP: ​​There’s this sense of obligation to stay informed about everything—for example, what’s happening in Palestine. It can feel like a privilege to be able to turn off your phone and disengage. But at the same time, maybe it’s important to step back occasionally.

I often think about paranoia in relation to social media—it fosters mistrust and suspicion. That’s the emotion I most associate with it. I didn’t end up writing a chapter about paranoia in my book, but I wonder if I should have.

Even though the historical case studies I focused on mostly predate social media, there were still mediated forms of communication that shaped social dynamics. If you look at the 1960s and 70s, a lot of arguments weren’t happening in person; they were playing out in the pages of small journals, including on the letters pages. In those cases, people were engaging with comrades in this somewhat detached way, writing in a formal or combative tone they probably wouldn’t have used face-to-face.

So while digital communication has introduced new dynamics, some aspects of these interactions—especially the way people argue and engage with each other from a distance—aren’t entirely new.

CA: You write about how historically people within social movements sometimes stop seeing themselves as individuals because they think the collective and the cause is more important. Especially with what we’re talking about now in the context of media and the moral judgment and paranoia that comes with it, it seems as if even if you decide that you are solely in service of the collective and disregard your own needs in the process, you’re still being judged as an individual. There’s this tension here.

HP: Yeah, that’s true. But I suppose it depends on the platform. In some Signal groups, for example, people often use pseudonyms, so there’s this sense of depersonalization—you’re not always sure who’s who. That creates one kind of dynamic. On social media, though, it’s the opposite. It’s much more about personal branding, where people cultivate an identity and project themselves in a particular way.

That raises the question: who is all this for? Are people engaging to further a collective cause, or is it more about appearing like a good person (although I must say I’m wary of using terms like ‘virtue signalling’ as arguments about that are often made in such bad faith)? That tension is something I explore in my book—specifically, the conflict between the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and the reality of still being an individual with personal wants, needs, and desires. Political struggles often promote this idea of subsuming oneself into a collective, but in practice, there’s always some degree of tension between the collective and the individual. Collectives are messy and fraught and internally contradictory too – it’s never just a homogeneous smooth thing.

This is a slightly different point, but something else I’ve thought about—especially in relation to my book’s title—is how certain concepts related to mental health or self-care circulate online. There’s a kind of simplification that happens. For example, ideas around radical self-care get detached from their original contexts—quotes from radical thinkers are taken out of context and spread widely, taking on a life of their own. That’s a slightly different phenomenon from what we were discussing earlier, since it’s more about abstract ideas than direct interpersonal interactions. But it’s still a key part of online culture that I’ve been thinking about.

CA: If we’re talking about self-sacrifice, such as revolutionary suicide, in the context of digital media, how far should that go? Should we be terminally online and be in 50 Signal groups and be overstimulated (or digitally burnt out) because that’s part of ‘the job’ and is being off-grid a privilege? I see activists being frustrated for people not engaging online ‘because it’s the bare minimum’, yet the other side of that is people assuming you are not doing anything because it is not visible online. Thoughts?

HP: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s always going to be competing perspectives on these things. Some people argue that you shouldn’t be using certain platforms at all—because of Meta, or privacy concerns, or corporate influence—while others take different positions. There’s always this idea of the purest stance, but there’s never just one vision of what that is; there are always competing versions of it.

Personally, I don’t think anyone should feel compelled to post furiously out of guilt or just to prove something to others. That doesn’t seem like a meaningful motivation. If a political movement is primarily driven by guilt, it’s probably not going to be very sustainable. That’s not to say people shouldn’t engage—but I think if someone genuinely believes they’re doing meaningful work, they shouldn’t feel pressured to constantly perform it for others.

At the same time, there’s a flip side to this: it can become too easy to excuse yourself from doing anything at all. That’s the tricky balance we were talking about earlier—there has to be a middle ground. It’s equally problematic to say, Well, I don’t have to engage at all.

I’ve been thinking about how moralizing can actually be quite incapacitating. Calling people out for “doing activism wrong” might be understandable—it’s frustrating when people don’t engage in the way you think they should—but I don’t think it’s an effective strategy for mobilizing movements. Instead of motivating action, it often just creates more resentment and disengagement, which can be paralyzing in itself. The challenge is figuring out ways to make activism feel more sustaining rather than driven by guilt or fear. But of course, that’s easier said than done.

It’s interesting because I don’t have chapters in my book specifically on paranoia or guilt, but those are the emotions I most associate with social media. If I were to write about it now, I think those would be central themes.

CA: Yeah, social media is designed for us to morally judge each other instead of to care for each other, so paranoia and guilt would be at the top for sure. You write that it pretty much all comes down to the tension between urgency and patience; if we don’t act now it’s going to be too late but then again these things take time. I see this so much in media dynamics as well, where research shows that digital media is good for quickly and mobilizing people, but for long-term strategies and systemic change, it’s a bit harder to use those technologies. And on another level it seems more important to say the morally correct thing as soon as possible than to take a moment and form a critical argument.

HP: Yeah, I think the tension between urgency and patience isn’t something that can ever be fully resolved. Sometimes, immediate action is necessary, but long-term change also requires sustained organization.

I don’t know if you’ve read Vincent Bevins’ book If We Burn, which examines the mass protest movements of the 2010s. It reminded me of what you were saying because it explores how social media played a crucial role in mobilizing huge numbers of people onto the streets. But in many cases, these movements struggled to achieve their long-term goals because they lacked the deeper institutional structures needed to enact change.

Bevins makes a fairly traditional argument about the importance of organization, pointing out that in places where movements had stronger trade unions or other long-standing institutions, they were often more effective. While his focus isn’t on emotional dynamics, I think it’s still relevant to this conversation. It’s one thing to generate mass mobilization in the short term, but the real challenge is answering the question: And then what?

That’s where patience comes in. Spontaneous uprisings can be powerful, but without lasting structures in place, their impact is often fleeting. The difficult part isn’t just getting people to show up—it’s figuring out how to channel that energy into something that can actually endure.

CA: I think this is where emotions become especially important. It’s relatively easy to channel outrage into action—people take to the streets because they’re angry. But the real challenge is sustaining that momentum over time.

HP: It’s also tough when strategies aren’t working, and that can be really demoralizing. The urgency hasn’t changed, but it becomes emotionally draining when it feels like things aren’t making progress. In the book, I talk about an essay by psychiatrist Robert Coles, who interviewed activists from the civil rights movement. The essay is called Social Struggle and Weariness. He encountered many burnt-out activists who were exhausted because they had repeatedly been arrested and participated in the same actions over and over, but nothing seemed to change. At what point do you start asking, “Why should I keep doing this?” That kind of weariness is a real emotional challenge.

It’s also impossible to separate emotional issues from strategic ones. A lot of these struggles are complicated by things like state repression, so it’s not just about bad organizing or poor strategies. It’s complex.

Sometimes, when things aren’t going well, interpersonal relationships can become harder too. In those moments, social media—though somewhat detached—can become an outlet for expressing emotions. I remember during the Arab Spring, social media was hailed as a revolutionary force, and people really believed it could bring about change. Looking back, that argument seems almost absurd now, or at least not one that anyone would still make.

Now, it feels like it’s too late to step away from these platforms—we’ve all joined in, and now it feels like, “Oh no, what have we done?”

CA: There was still this sense of hope in the 90s and in the early days of the internet. People were like, “Wow, look what the internet can do! This is amazing and so hopeful.” But now, there’s so much research showing the opposite, like how platform capitalism is really problematic. When profit and greed are the main goals of these platforms, it’s not going to be good for us or for justice.

It’s just very difficult, because we know these platforms don’t work anymore. You talk about the melancholy of the left, right? We’re stuck in the past, still celebrating the way things were, instead of looking at the material realities of the present and dealing with what’s actually happening. And I think it’s the same with our media infrastructures. A lot of people are still posting stories on Instagram every day. But then, there are also a lot of people who, like you said, wonder why we’re still on these platforms. But again, we’re so stuck in them because many people still use them, and you need the numbers to reach more people. So, I guess my question, which I don’t have an answer to, is: how do we break out of this melancholy but also dependency on these platforms, and look at their reality? What do we do? Because it seems so hard to imagine a world without them.

HP: It’s interesting because you mention the ‘90s, and I also remember a point, a bit later, in the mid-2000s, where it wasn’t inevitable that everyone just joined Facebook or Gmail. I remember people with more of a ‘90s anarchist politics being very against it, and at the time, it seemed like such an outlandish, eccentric, marginal, cranky kind of position – a bit like saying “I’m going to go live off the grid”. It was treated as slightly ridiculous, but in a way, those people had a point. Probably, that’s what people should’ve done, because at the time, it wasn’t too late to take that route. But back then, I think that argument seemed quite anachronistic. It seemed to belong to this ‘90s, No Logo era or something.

And yeah, it’s funny because I definitely knew people who had that position, but they were in such a minority, and it also became a bit untenable at some point—things like not having a smartphone or not being on certain platforms became harder to sustain. But I do think about that, because, yeah, maybe they had a point.

One thing I’ve noticed while talking to people about the book is that many of them have shared their experiences of living in exile, and how, in certain contexts, the only way they could be involved in activism was online. Online activism does enable some things. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have done a lot of activist work from afar, and have been very engaged in different movements at a distance.

I guess that’s something my book touches on as well, especially with people living in exile. It’s a reality of the world today, and it really struck me that, for a lot of people, their way of being politically engaged isn’t by going to in-person meetings because they couldn’t do that. So actually, there are ways in which online activism in some contexts enables engagement.

CA: I liked the way you discuss hope – it being a difficult word because it doesn’t really encapsulate the struggles that we go through, but that the struggle does change people in positive ways too, which is hopeful in itself. You cite some science fiction where the utopian revolution is not pictured as the endpoint but as a beginning point of healing together. The almost cliché comment is that we need to take care of each other while the revolution is not here (yet). And I was thinking… is there hope? How could media infrastructures contribute to hope and getting through this liminal moment in time?

HP: That’s interesting. I was thinking about hope not just as a feeling, but as a practice—something you do rather than just something you experience. You can act hopefully even when you feel despair, and in fact, it’s probably impossible not to feel despair sometimes. But feeling despair doesn’t mean you have to give up. That’s what I was trying to get at.

I recently saw someone online sharing a quote from a text by Ray Brassier that appeared in a book called Bad Feelings that was edited by people involved in the 2010/11 student and anti-austerity movements in the UK. He writes:

Hope is reactionary: it cocoons actuality in the gossamer of the tolerable, dulling the thirst for change.

Despair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge of the intolerable against the whetstone of actuality, sparking the will to change.

Whoever tolerates the present will never risk everything to change it.

I found this a helpful way of distinguishing between hope and despair without aligning the latter with resignation.

I think it’s important not to fall into an overly deterministic view of technology. This is the world we live in, and these are the tools available to us – and, yes, unfortunately they are the master’s tools. Digital platforms both facilitate and complicate communication; in some ways, they make things harder, but in other ways, they improve them.

I also think there’s a danger in framing everything through the lens of how our lives are mediated by screens, how our attention is being sapped, and so on. There’s truth to that, of course, but sometimes it feels like that explanation becomes the whole story, when in reality, life continues beyond those narratives. People still move through the world, interact, and engage in ways that aren’t entirely defined by technology.

I wouldn’t say that digital technology is a source of hope, but I also wouldn’t place all the blame on it for the challenges we face. The real question is: what would a more liberated future look like? Obviously, you wouldn’t want a vision of the future that involves smashing all technology and returning to some pre-digital state. So instead, the question becomes: what would these systems look like if they weren’t driven by profit? How could they function in a way that serves people rather than corporations? What would digital communication look like in a world without figures like Elon Musk in control of everything?

I’m not sure that’s a particularly hopeful vision—but it’s something to think about.

CA: I also wanted to mention that the way you have described your experience with depression, is the closest to my own experience as I have ever seen it be put into words. It was really validating for me to read, so thank you. And indeed, you write that the most scary thing about it, is that you felt neutral about feeling bad. That was my experience too, where you just accept this reality. And as you say, it’s precisely that stuckness and not having the energy to even realize that things could be improved.

HP: Which is precisely the problem.

CA: Exactly. There’s so much research about social media and screens and depression and loneliness. Depression is such a timeless experience, yet our media makes it also quite specific.

HP: I think some of the negative emotions associated with social media can be amplified when you’re already in a self-recriminating state. It can intensify those feelings in ways that aren’t always immediately conscious, which makes it even harder to recognize or counteract.

It’s interesting because, in the chapter on depression in my book, I hadn’t originally planned to write about myself. I wrote a long section, kept rearranging it, but it never quite worked. In the end, I realized I had to include my own experience—because none of the existing accounts I was reading fully captured what I was trying to articulate.

For me, the core contradiction is this: a lot of left-wing arguments about mental health suggest that external forces shape how we feel—the world is making you feel this way. But when you’re depressed, that kind of reasoning doesn’t necessarily help. Even if it’s true, it doesn’t change the feeling itself. Depression isn’t something you can be reasoned out of. So in a way, the question of whether it’s “true” or “not true” almost becomes irrelevant—it doesn’t actually solve anything and it certainly doesn’t make it easier to engage in activities to change those causal conditions.

I also wanted to capture a certain flatness—a sense that these experiences aren’t always dramatic or abyssal. Sometimes, they’re just mundane, part of the everyday texture of life. Social media and phones are so embedded in our daily routines that they don’t always feel like something separate or extreme. That neutrality—the way these things just are—was something I wanted to explore.

CA: My final question is about the sense of self in relation to the chaos of fragmentation, which you briefly mention when you’re discussing exhaustion. This is such a crucial experience of being online and organizing right now. We meet people face to face, talk to them in a Signal chatgroup, then we talk about that signal chat group in another smaller Signal chatgroup, then we screenshot something and then we share that to someone else we know in a private message, then someone else shares that screenshot publicly in another group chat without the context, you try to mobilize people on your Instagram story, then someone comments something on your post, etc. etc. Everything is very chaotic and I do think it changes the way we look at ourselves.

HP: Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s interesting how your perspective shifts depending on your level of involvement. When you’re not actively participating and are just observing from the outside—seeing what people post online—you form a certain impression of what’s happening. But then, if you get involved again, you often realize there’s a huge mismatch between that public image and the reality on the ground.

One thing that often gets lost in this is the complex emotional relationships within a group. For people directly involved in organizing, the real drama is often interpersonal—things that aren’t visible to outsiders. Or there’s often a huge imbalance in terms of who is actually doing a lot of the day to day ‘spade work’ versus who is nominally involved but fairly inactive. As someone only seeing the public-facing side of a movement, you’re completely oblivious to these internal dynamics. That’s why there’s such a disconnect: on the one hand, social media presents fragmented glimpses of what’s happening, but on the other, those glimpses can be incredibly misleading. From the outside, things might look like they’re going well, while the people on the inside might feel like everything is a disaster.

This also ties into the need for better structures and systems to handle issues before they escalate into crises. Ideally, there would be mechanisms in place to address tensions in a way that feels reparative rather than destructive. But in reality, many of these ventures are under-resourced, and everyone is already stretched to their limits. When people are just trying to keep things afloat, internal concerns often get deprioritized for very understandable reasons.

The problem is that these internal fractures aren’t just side issues—they can be so destructive that they derail movements entirely. History shows how often this has happened. When movements collapse due to unresolved tensions, it’s not just an abstract loss—it’s a real, material setback for the people who would have benefited from those efforts.

I think this also connects to the broader issue of the lack of long-term institutions on the left. Without more established structures, there’s less continuity, less institutional memory. It can feel like movements are constantly having to start from scratch. That’s part of why I was so interested in looking at these questions historically—because understanding the past might help us avoid repeating the same patterns.

CA: Yeah, we don’t have to start from scratch. And that’s a hopeful thing! Thank you so much for this conversation.