The Movement is the Medium

In my recent post, Mapping the Left-Media Ecosystem Conversation, I pulled together some links to recent analysis on how the political left, particularly in the United States, needs to build a media ecosystem that can counter what the right has constructed over the last few decades. That post was a curated set of highlights, offered with minimal commentary.

This post is my first attempt at synthesis, distilling lessons and recommendations surface again and again across these resources.

It's about media infrastructure: the systems that support circulation, enable sense-making, and allow alignment to emerge across differences. What follows maps infrastructure patterns that need to be built in order to dismantle far-right and fascist narrative dominance.

While the Left Created Media, the Right Built Infrastructure

To understand what the left is up against, we need to stop asking why right-wing content travels farther or sticks longer. The answer isn’t that their messaging is better or that their voices are louder (though both are often true). It’s that the right has spent decades building systems to distribute, repeat, reinforce, and align their narrative logics.

This infrastructure doesn't depend on any one media outlet or podcast superstar. And it stretches far beyond Fox News or Breitbart. It’s the mesh beneath them: the coordinated timing, the signal boosting across platforms, the common phrases that appear across channels that get echoed into legitimacy. Their infrastructure is the way their stories are repeated, remixed, and reinforced until they become ambient truth.

Social media companies have empowered the right to strategically cultivate parasocial bonds between content creators and the public, at scale. Their ideology is embedded in formats people actually want to scroll through: humor, commentary, sports, lifestyle, shitposting, and as Gen Z calls it, brainrot. Experiments were funded by right wing backers until they found what worked, an evolutionary process with more failures than successes that funders and commentators on the left most often ignored as evidence of right-wing wastefulness.

The lesson to derive isn't for the left to copy their content or media formats. It’s to understand that the narratives that win are the ones that circulate. And the narratives that circulate are the ones built to move.

So the question progressives and others on the left need to ask is: how do we build movement in media?

Strategic Shifts in the Media Landscape

The following are not trends. They’re structural realignments in how narrative power flows and what it takes to hold that power. If we want a media ecosystem capable of building political momentum to counter right-wing narratives and replace them with progressive narratives, we need to reorient toward these shifts in strategy.

Narrative Trust Lives in Individuals Requiring Infrastructure

People carry the message—systems must carry the messengers.

Trust no longer flows through institutions by default. It moves through relationships, and it's shaped by voice, presence, and consistency. Audiences follow people. What gets seen, believed, and acted on is increasingly determined by the credibility of individuals rather than institutions.

But individuals aren't infrastructure. They can attract attention, but they can’t route it. They can hold trust, but not circulate power at scale. Left on their own, creators will burn out or get siloed. Left on their own they end up carrying the weight of credibility without the support to distribute it. Worst case scenario, they get too big and become gate-keepers to power.

To build durable media power, we need systems that recognize and reinforce individual trust. That means scaffolding for mutual amplification, distributed visibility, and care for creators and their support systems. Because while people carry the message, infrastructure carries the movement.

Feeds Reflect Media Coordination

What reaches the public is shaped by timing, trust, and collective intent.

We publish into news and activity feeds governed by rhythm, relationships, and "relevance". What shows up, when, and for whom depends on timing and coordination, not editorial sequence. When properly resourced, visibility is a logistical outcome, not a matter of luck.

Right-wing media has learned to coordinate the feed. It aligns story timing, shares language, and reinforces narratives across channels in a decentralized manner. The result is presence: stories that show up everywhere at once, from voices that appear independent but move in formation.

The left, by contrast, too often publishes in isolation. A powerful piece appears then vanishes into the void. To break this cycle, we need to treat visibility as an outcome of coordination, not luck or exhaustively unsustainable persistence. This is what it takes to make a story real in feed-shaped discourse.

The Movement Is the Medium

Circulation isn’t adjacent to organizing—it's how movements cohere.

Narrative work isn’t separate from organizing. It IS organizing. The way a story moves: who carries it, when it’s repeated, where it resurfaces, this is what shapes what people believe is possible, urgent, or real. Circulation creates coherence.

The left doesn't suffer from a content shortage nor a shortage in talented voices with aligned values. It suffers from a flow problem. Stories emerge with clarity but fail to spread, fail to sync, fail to stick. We lack infrastructure that allows ideas to move in alignment.

The right has spent billions of dollars over decades fumbling towards creating this infrastructure. Their stories now travel across and between networks by design, gaining meaning through movement.

Movements that circulate narrative and meaning are the ones that build power. This is why resourcing media infrastructure needs to be a priority on the left.

Media Solidarity Emerges Through Interconnection

Alignment across difference is what makes narrative resilience possible.

No single outlet or voice can hold narrative power alone. The future of left media can't be singular or depend upon cornerstone institutions. It will be interdependent: a web of projects, people, and platforms that reinforce each other without requiring uniformity or explicit agreement.

Rather than speaking in one voice, the right moves in strategic chorus. Its media actors operate with relational redundancy: overlapping signals, coordinated emphasis, shared sense of timing. Despite what one might think, this doesn't reflect homogeneity. Let's call it tactical resonance. (Full transparency, an LLM came up with that one. I thought it was too cool sounding not to include.)

The left tends to operate in silos. To shift that, we need shared scaffolds: trusted relationships, common framing tools, informal signal networks. Connection needs to be strong enough to hold contradictions for stories to live long and spread. All of this serves to increase the resilience of our narrative networks.

Narratives Take Hold Through Echo Networks

Reinforcement across voices is what turns ideas into shared sense-making.

Narratives rarely land the first time. Every marketer knows this. They take hold when echoed: when a story reappears across contexts, from different voices, at the right moments.

The right has long understood this. Their infrastructure is designed for reinforcement. Key messages are repeated across formats, channels, and messengers. Virility isn't the goal: It's normalization. Setting the basis of shared perceived reality.

Social media rewards novelty and spontaneity. But it's coherence rather than originality that builds power. This requires more than repetition. What’s needed are interconnected echo chambers that amplify signals that accumulate, cross-pollinate, and re-emerge repeatedly in new forms. Ideas gain power when they’re carried by many, in rhythm, over long periods of time.

From Diagnosis to Design

If echo networks are how narratives harden into “common sense,” the next step is to build the infrastructure that keeps aligned narratives moving — not for a day or a week, but for as long as it takes to shift public reality. The capacities below are interdependent structural supports: strengthen one and the others can carry more weight, weaken one and the whole frame strains under pressure.

1 · Signal Syncing

Narratives reach further and last longer when they appear in multiple places at the same time. Coordinated timing aligns releases, adapts language, and amplifies in rhythm so stories stay present in public conversation.

On the right, coordination ranges from casual heads-up messages to long-term rollout plans seeded across many channels. The left can match or exceed that by building shared narrative calendars, lightweight coordination networks, and connective tools that work across geographies and sectors. Intentional timing turns scattered sparks into visible movement.

2 · Creator Support Systems

Narrative ecosystems depend on the people who carry them, and those people are often targeted. Harassment, doxxing, lawsuits, economic pressure, burnout. When they go offline, they take with them the reach, credibility, and relationships they’ve built.

The right protects its most influential messengers with coordinated legal defense, research support, and security teams. The left too often stops at moral encouragement or small-scale mutual aid. What’s needed is ecosystem-wide logistical, legal, and safety infrastructure that no single outlet could maintain alone: pooled legal retainers, rapid-response safety networks, shared research capacity, and operational backup when someone comes under attack. Without this, we lose trusted voices at the exact moments we need them most.

3 · Distribution and Discovery

Narratives can’t shift public understanding if they vanish after the first share. Corporate platforms — tuned for advertising and data capture — reward novelty, bury older work, and make sustained circulation difficult without paying for it.

A resilient ecosystem builds its own distribution layer. That means channels and agreements for stories to move across platforms, shared indexing so they remain findable, and public archives that can be tapped months or years later. It also means investing in the deeper stack: open protocols like ActivityPub and AT Protocol that enable us to replace things like Gmail or Facebook with tools we actually own, governance that keeps them from being captured, and new layers that integrate discovery, curation, and adaptation directly into the next generation of tools that social movements use. This goes beyond routing around corporate social media and content creation platforms. It’s designing replacements that match movement priorities from the ground up.

4 · Risk-Friendly Capital

The formats that dominate today’s right-wing media were built through decades of trial and error, and funded at a scale that made failure survivable. Those misses were R&D.

The left’s funding culture, tragically focused on short-term wins, reputation safety, and easy-to-measure deliverables, keeps experimentation small and safe. Meeting the challenge means raising and moving capital at an entirely different scale, then committing a real slice of it to high-risk projects: unfamiliar messengers, cross-platform experiments, new formats, and infrastructure large enough to support every other capacity here. Without financial conditions that allow risk, we’ll stay trapped in platforms built for the conditions the far right thrives within.

5 · Cross-Network Amplification

Narratives take hold when they’re echoed over time by many trusted voices. That reach comes from networks that can carry, adapt, and reintroduce a story across communities, platforms, and contexts. Not just once, but again and again.

Effective amplification is built on habit and reciprocity: moving each other’s narratives forward as a normal part of the work. At scale, this requires its own infrastructure: shared licensing so material can travel, pooled media libraries and searchable clip banks for rapid reuse, and training that treats amplification as a craft. For individuals and small teams, it means embedding reciprocal promotion into daily workflows so the same idea can land in different ways, from different voices, until it becomes part of shared reality.

These capacities are the load-bearing parts of any movement media ecosystem strong enough to set the terms of public reality. Weakness in one stresses all the others. Building them is as much a political project as it is a media or technical one, because the goal is to create the conditions for narrative power that can outlast campaigns, counter disinformation, and shift how people understand the world and what's possible within it.

This post is part of a sequence exploring the shape of the leftist media landscape and mapping how the pieces connect so I can situate myself within it and decide how I can best serve. For the next post in this sequence (which I swear will be much shorter), I’ll break down how I think movement technologists such as myself fit into this framework of media ecosystem capacities, and ways in which our skills fit into the larger puzzle. Because things have gotten pretty real out there and there's a lot of work to do.

If you’re working on any part of what I'm describing, or curious about where your own efforts might fit into this larger tapestry, reach out! We can figure some things out together.

You can DM + Follow me on Signal, Bluesky, and Mastodon—and don't forget to subscribe below to get these posts in newsletter form and stay in orbit!

-Lyre Calliope

PS: I want to thank Ben Werdmuller for inspiring some of the inquiries leading to this writing. A number of his blog posts have been seeding my thinking for the past couple weeks and I would be remiss if I didn't shout it out. He also is using Ghost to publish so you can visit his blog directly, then subscribe to it via his RSS Feed, email newsletter, or the social web @ben@werd.io.