Some juicy thoughts here!
I think your critique of effective altruism is on point, and the gloss of effective activism as a stance which takes systemic problems seriously but falls short of engaging with the problem of complicity is insightful. (And as well as the burn-out and disillusionment you mention, we could perhaps also point to the signalling problem this position faces - apparent in much of the criticism that has been levelled at XR.)
Grappling with the paralysis created by this problem of complicity in the face of systemic injustice does seem to be a key issue of contemporary politics, and I read your development of emergent activism as a laudable attempt to do just that. It seems to me there's quite a lot of potential pitfalls at this juncture, since so much depends on the details of how systemic injustice operates and how complicity is manufactured.
E.g. in the wake of BLM the emphasis on understanding structural racism as the internalisation of irrational attitudes has licensed a certain set of practices among conscientious white people: diversity training, reading popularised critical race theory and imploring others to do so on social media, etc. All of which has led to the reactive criticism that anti-racism has been been appropriated by the white middle class self-development narrative, a development which consolidates rather than combats structural racism.
In contrast there's an understanding of structural racism as something more like a cybernetic network effect, a product of self-stabilising social feedback loops that are themselves external to individuals, but which manifest in individual behaviours via environmentally cued attitudes which may be rational or irrational. If this is right no amount of individual self-work can help, and the only adequate response is collectively coordinated institutional change.
There's a kind of parallel pattern found in e.g. Charles Eisenstein (someone who could perhaps be located in the emergent activist camp by your criteria). This holds, roughly, that the destructive tendencies of modernity have arisen from the internalisation of bad narratives. This conveys the problem as a basically spiritual one, whose solution lies, once again, in self-development - this time appearing as the work one must do to get beneath one's social conditioning to access one's unmediated, true desires - which, supposedly, couldn't fail to be conducive to a better world.
Against this could be pitched a view which is sceptical of the concept of 'true self' that exists beneath all the conditioning, that argues that desires are always social mediated, even when authentic, and that the image of escaping one's social conditioning to find one's authentic self is none other than the founding myth of neoliberal consumerism. As such the Eisensteinian veiw, while attempting to break the deadlock, actually ends up digging it deeper.
Point of these examples is just to suggest that much rides on the details. As such I think there's risk of underselling the role that thought and rationality has to play. Rather than de-emphasise it, perhaps we should refuse to let it be monopolised by the atomistic utilitarian reason of EA, and advocate for a more dialectical, cybernetic reason that is adequate to thinking through these systems from the inside?
Anyway - thank you very much for this article, it's always good to encounter people attempting to think through this stuff carefully from the perspective of a participant. Perhaps the greatest difficulty is in not allowing the bridge between thought and action to be broken by collapsing into either disillusioned cynicism or, in the other direction, into feckless naïveté.
Sam
