The Long-Term Cost of Performative Activism: A Framework for Ethical Justice Work

When a tech company posts a black square on social media but continues to sell surveillance tools to authoritarian regimes, the contradiction isn't just hypocritical—it's corrosive. Performative activism, the kind that prioritizes appearing righteous over achieving results, has a long-term cost that many organizations underestimate. For those working at the intersection of encryption, privacy, and social justice, the stakes are especially high. Empty gestures can erode trust with the communities you aim to protect, drain limited resources, and create a culture where optics replace outcomes. This framework offers a way to diagnose performative patterns, build sustainable practices, and measure what actually matters.

1. Where Performative Activism Shows Up in Encryption Work

Performative activism isn't limited to corporate social media posts. In the encryption and privacy space, it takes many forms: a security conference that boasts about diversity but has an all-white speaker lineup; a tool that claims to be "for activists" but is designed without any input from the communities it targets; a policy organization that issues press releases about digital rights but fails to show up for local coalition meetings. These patterns share a common root: the actor prioritizes the appearance of alignment over the messy, slow work of genuine change.

Consider the open-source project that adds a code of conduct after a public scandal but never trains maintainers on how to enforce it. The document sits on a GitHub repo, untouched and unenforced, while contributors from marginalized backgrounds continue to face harassment. The cost is twofold: the project gains a superficial badge of legitimacy, but the underlying culture remains toxic, driving away the very people it claims to include. In encryption, where trust and collaboration are essential for security audits and protocol improvements, this kind of performative gesture can weaken the entire ecosystem.

Another common scenario involves corporate privacy initiatives. A company announces a "privacy-first" redesign, complete with a blog post and a splashy website, but continues to collect telemetry data through default-on settings. The announcement generates positive press, but privacy advocates who dig into the fine print find the same surveillance-as-a-business-model underneath. The gap between rhetoric and reality breeds cynicism, making it harder for legitimate privacy efforts to gain traction. Over time, the public becomes desensitized to privacy claims, and the term "privacy-first" loses meaning.

Policy campaigns are not immune either. An advocacy group launches a petition with thousands of signatures demanding encryption backdoors be banned, but fails to engage with lawmakers in their districts or provide technical expertise to draft alternative legislation. The petition generates a spike in social media engagement, but the legislative process moves forward without their input. The result is a missed opportunity to shape policy in a meaningful way, and the group's credibility with policymakers is damaged for future fights.

For this guide, we define performative activism as any action that signals alignment with a cause but does not produce measurable progress toward the cause's goals. The key word is measurable. If you cannot point to a concrete outcome—a changed policy, a shifted norm, a developed skill, a strengthened relationship—the action may be performative. This is not to say that symbolic actions are always bad; rituals, memorials, and public statements can build solidarity and awareness. The problem arises when symbolism substitutes for substance, especially when resources are scarce and time is limited.

Why Encryption Work Is Especially Vulnerable

Encryption is technically complex, politically charged, and often misunderstood by the general public. This creates a fertile ground for performative gestures: a company can claim to "protect user privacy" by implementing end-to-end encryption in one feature while leaving a dozen other data-collection channels open. The technical nuance allows them to deflect criticism while maintaining the status quo. Activists, too, can fall into the trap of celebrating technical wins—like a new encryption protocol—without ensuring that the protocol is actually usable by the people who need it most.

The long-term cost is a erosion of trust in the entire field. When communities see that privacy tools are designed without their input, or that advocacy campaigns produce more press releases than policy changes, they become disengaged. The encryption movement needs sustained, credible action—not just signals—to build the broad coalitions required to defend digital rights.

2. Foundations Readers Confuse: Solidarity vs. Performance

One of the most common confusions in ethical justice work is the difference between solidarity and performance. Solidarity is a practice of shared risk and mutual accountability. Performance is a display that requires no sacrifice and shifts no power. Understanding this distinction is foundational to building sustainable movements.

Solidarity means showing up when it's inconvenient. It means using your privilege to amplify voices that are silenced, even when doing so costs you something—a promotion, a platform, a relationship. In encryption work, solidarity might look like a well-funded organization providing legal defense funds for a smaller group facing a SLAPP lawsuit, without demanding co-branding or credit. It might look like a security researcher spending months learning about the specific threats faced by a community, rather than parachuting in with a generic tool and leaving.

Performance, by contrast, is designed to be seen. It often involves low-cost, high-visibility actions that generate social capital for the performer. The classic example is the social media post that condemns injustice but does nothing to change the structures that produce it. In the encryption space, performance can be subtler: a company that publishes a transparency report but fights against legislation that would mandate transparency; a conference that highlights a single speaker from an underrepresented group but maintains an invitation-only selection process that excludes that group's members.

The cost of confusing the two is that resources flow toward performance rather than substance. A team might spend weeks crafting a diversity statement while ignoring the hiring practices that produce a homogenous workforce. A nonprofit might launch a flashy campaign about encryption backdoors while neglecting to fund the grassroots organizations that actually lobby against them. Over time, the performative actions become the norm, and the substantive work is marginalized.

How to Tell the Difference

We use a simple test: ask who bears the risk. In a solidarity action, the person or organization with more power takes on risk—financial, reputational, or physical—to support those with less power. In a performative action, the risk is borne by the marginalized group, who may be exposed to backlash or surveillance without receiving meaningful support. For example, a company that encourages employees to post about a cause but does not protect them from retaliation is asking the employees to bear the risk while the company reaps the reputational benefit.

Another test: ask whether the action changes the distribution of power. Solidarity actions aim to shift power to those who have been excluded. Performative actions maintain the existing power structure while allowing the performer to feel virtuous. In encryption, this might mean the difference between a company that donates to an organization fighting surveillance and a company that lobbies against surveillance legislation while making a public donation to a privacy nonprofit. The donation is visible; the lobbying is hidden. The power structure remains unchanged.

3. Patterns That Usually Work: Building Sustainable Ethical Justice

Not all activism is performative, and there are well-established patterns that produce lasting change. These patterns share several characteristics: they are resource-intensive, relationship-based, and accountable to the communities they claim to serve. Below we outline three approaches that consistently yield results in encryption and privacy work.

Pattern 1: Deep Partnership with Affected Communities

Instead of designing tools or campaigns for a community, work with the community from the outset. This means investing time in building relationships, listening to needs, and co-creating solutions. For example, a team developing an encrypted messaging app might spend months conducting user research with journalists in high-risk environments, iterating on the design based on their feedback, and training local trainers to support adoption. The result is a tool that actually meets the users' needs, rather than a tool that the developers assume they need.

This approach is slow and expensive. It requires humility and a willingness to be wrong. But the long-term payoff is immense: the tool is more likely to be adopted, the community is more likely to trust and defend it, and the relationship provides a feedback loop for continuous improvement. In contrast, a performative approach might involve releasing a tool with a press release and a list of "features for activists" that were never tested with actual activists.

Pattern 2: Transparent, Measurable Commitments

Rather than vague promises of "supporting privacy," make specific, time-bound commitments with clear metrics. For example, a company might commit to reducing its data collection by 30% within 12 months, with quarterly public reports on progress. An advocacy group might commit to training 100 community organizers in encryption basics by the end of the year, with a follow-up survey to measure skill retention. These commitments create accountability and allow outsiders to evaluate whether the action is substantive.

The key is to choose metrics that are directly tied to the desired outcome, not just activity metrics. "Number of blog posts about privacy" is an activity metric; "number of users who changed their privacy settings after reading a post" is an outcome metric. Performative activism often relies on activity metrics because they are easy to inflate. Substantive work tracks outcomes, even when they are harder to measure.

Pattern 3: Institutionalizing Accountability

Individual good intentions are fragile. To sustain ethical justice work, organizations need structures that embed accountability into their operations. This might include an ethics review board with community representatives, a public grievance mechanism, or a policy that ties executive compensation to diversity and privacy metrics. In the encryption space, this could mean requiring that all new products undergo a privacy impact assessment by an independent panel before launch, or that a percentage of revenue is set aside for community-led security audits.

Institutionalization ensures that the work continues even when the founders move on or the public attention fades. It also makes it harder to backslide into performative gestures because the structures themselves create friction: if you have to explain to a board why you launched a feature without community input, you are less likely to do it.

4. Anti-Patterns and Why Teams Revert to Performance

Even well-intentioned teams can fall into performative patterns, especially under pressure. Understanding the common anti-patterns helps teams recognize and correct them before they become entrenched.

Anti-Pattern 1: The Press Release Pivot

When a crisis hits—a data breach, a public scandal, a critical article—the instinct is to respond quickly with a statement. But a statement without action is a performative gesture. The anti-pattern is to issue a press release promising change without specifying what will change, who will be accountable, and by when. Teams revert to this because it is fast and reduces immediate pressure, but it often backfires when the promised changes fail to materialize, leading to a loss of trust that is worse than the original crisis.

Anti-Pattern 2: The Diversity Theater

Diversity theater includes actions like adding a single person from an underrepresented group to a board or panel without addressing the systemic barriers that exclude others. It also includes requiring diversity statements from job applicants without changing the hiring criteria that favor dominant groups. Teams revert to this because it is easier to change optics than to change power structures. But the long-term cost is that the tokenized individuals bear the burden of representing their group, and the underlying exclusion persists.

Anti-Pattern 3: The Tool Fetish

In encryption work, there is a tendency to believe that the right technology will solve social problems. A team might build a secure communication tool and assume that it will automatically protect activists, without considering that the activists may not have the digital literacy to use it, or that the tool's metadata could still be used to identify them. This anti-pattern substitutes technical solutionism for the harder work of training, support, and community building. Teams revert to it because building a tool is concrete and measurable, while building trust is abstract and slow.

Why Teams Revert

The pressure to show results quickly is the most common driver. Funders want metrics, boards want progress, and the public wants visible action. Performative gestures produce visible results fast, while substantive work takes time and often fails publicly before it succeeds. Teams also revert because of a lack of expertise: they may not know how to do the deep partnership work, or they may not have the relationships required. Finally, there is the comfort of the familiar: it is easier to do what has always been done, even if it is ineffective, than to try a new approach that carries risk.

5. Maintenance, Drift, and Long-Term Costs

Even when teams start with good intentions, the work of ethical justice requires ongoing maintenance. Without it, drift toward performative patterns is almost inevitable. The long-term costs of this drift are significant and often invisible until it is too late.

The Cost of Trust Erosion

When a community sees an organization make a performative gesture, trust erodes. The next time that organization asks for support—for a petition, a donation, or a partnership—the community is less likely to respond. Trust is built slowly and destroyed quickly. In encryption work, where trust is the foundation of secure collaboration, erosion can have cascading effects. A privacy tool that is perceived as performative may lose its user base, making it less secure (because security depends on network effects) and less effective.

The Cost of Resource Misallocation

Performative activism consumes resources that could be used for substantive work. Time spent crafting a diversity statement is time not spent improving hiring practices. Money spent on a PR campaign is money not spent on legal defense funds. For small organizations with limited budgets, every performative gesture represents a real opportunity cost. Over several years, the cumulative effect can be devastating: the organization becomes skilled at optics but ineffective at outcomes.

The Cost of Burnout

People who join an organization because they believe in its mission become disillusioned when they see performative behavior. They may leave, reducing institutional knowledge and continuity. Those who stay may become cynical, doing the minimum required to maintain appearances. The result is a culture of low engagement and high turnover, where the most committed advocates are the first to leave. In encryption, where expertise is scarce and retention is critical, this cost is especially high.

Drift Detection: A Simple Checklist

To catch drift early, we recommend a quarterly review using these questions:

• Can we name three concrete outcomes from our work in the past quarter that directly benefited the communities we aim to serve?
• Do the people we claim to support have a formal role in our decision-making?
• Have we publicly acknowledged a mistake or a failure in the past quarter?
• Are our metrics focused on outcomes or activities?
• Would our work continue if we stopped all public communications for a month?

If the answer to any of these is no, it is a signal that drift may be occurring. The next step is to realign resources toward substantive action.

6. When Not to Use This Framework

No framework is universal. There are situations where the focus on long-term impact and avoiding performative gestures may not be the right priority. Recognizing these exceptions is itself a form of ethical judgment.

Crisis Response: Speed Over Process

In an acute crisis—a sudden surveillance law, a security vulnerability affecting vulnerable users, a natural disaster—the need for immediate action may override the careful relationship-building we advocate. In a crisis, a rapid public statement or a quick tool release may be necessary to protect people, even if it is not perfectly co-designed. The key is to treat the crisis response as a temporary measure and to follow up with substantive engagement once the immediate danger passes. The framework should not be used to paralyze action in an emergency.

Building Initial Awareness

Sometimes, the first step in a campaign is simply to raise awareness about an issue that is unknown to the public. In that case, symbolic actions—a protest, a social media campaign, a public letter—can be valuable even if they do not produce immediate policy change. The danger is when awareness-raising becomes the end goal rather than a stepping stone. The framework should be used to ensure that awareness translates into action, not to dismiss the initial awareness-building phase.

When You Have No Power

For individuals or groups with very little institutional power, performative gestures may be the only option available. A student group that cannot influence university policy may still find value in a public protest that builds solidarity and signals their stance to peers. In this context, the gesture is not performative in the same sense because it does not substitute for substantive action—there may be no substantive action available. The framework is most useful for those with power—companies, large nonprofits, influential individuals—who have the resources to do real work but choose optics instead.

Cultural and Contextual Sensitivity

The line between solidarity and performance can vary across cultures. In some contexts, public statements of support are expected and meaningful; in others, they are seen as empty. The framework should be applied with an understanding of local norms and expectations. What looks performative in one community may be a genuine expression of solidarity in another. The key is to listen to the community you are trying to support and let their feedback guide your actions.

7. Open Questions and FAQ

This framework raises as many questions as it answers. Below we address some of the most common ones that arise in encryption and privacy work.

How do we measure long-term impact without falling into metric fixation?

Metrics are tools, not ends. The goal is to track outcomes that matter to the community, not to create a dashboard that looks good. We recommend using a mix of quantitative metrics (e.g., number of policy changes influenced, adoption rates of tools) and qualitative ones (e.g., community feedback, case studies). Regularly revisit your metrics with community input to ensure they are still relevant. If a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

What if our organization is small and lacks resources for deep partnership work?

Start small. Even a single conversation with a community leader can provide more insight than a dozen surveys. Use open-source tools and existing networks to reduce costs. Be transparent about your limitations: say "we are learning and we want to do better" rather than pretending to have expertise you don't. Small, honest steps build trust more effectively than grand, performative gestures.

How do we handle funders who want quick, visible results?

Educate funders about the long-term nature of ethical justice work. Share case studies of performative failures to illustrate the cost of short-term thinking. Propose a mix of metrics that includes both short-term outputs (e.g., number of people trained) and long-term outcomes (e.g., changes in policy or behavior). If a funder insists on performative metrics, consider whether the funding is worth the cost to your credibility.

Is it ever okay to use performative tactics strategically?

Yes, if they are part of a larger strategy and you are honest about their limitations. For example, a public statement can be useful to signal a stance and mobilize supporters, as long as it is followed by concrete action. The danger is when the performance becomes an end in itself. Use the framework to check yourself: after the gesture, have you allocated resources to the follow-up? If not, it is likely performative.

What role does social media play in performative activism?

Social media amplifies performative gestures because they are designed to be shareable. But it can also be a tool for accountability: posts can document commitments, create public pressure, and build coalitions. The problem is when social media replaces offline action. A good rule is to ask: "If this post were never seen, would the work still happen?" If the answer is no, the post is likely performative.

8. Summary and Next Experiments

Performative activism is a trap that even the most well-meaning teams can fall into. The cost is not just wasted resources but eroded trust, burned-out advocates, and delayed progress. The framework we have outlined—distinguishing solidarity from performance, investing in deep partnerships, making measurable commitments, and institutionalizing accountability—offers a path toward sustainable ethical justice work.

But a framework is only as good as its application. We encourage you to start with one small experiment this quarter:

• Choose one project or campaign and apply the drift detection checklist from Section 5. Share the results with your team and identify one area for improvement.
• Reach out to a community you aim to serve and ask a single question: "What is the most useful thing we could do to support your work?" Then do it, without adding your own branding or agenda.
• Review your organization's metrics and replace one activity metric with an outcome metric. Track it for six months and report the results publicly.

These experiments are not about perfection. They are about building a practice of reflection and accountability. Over time, small shifts in how you allocate your time, money, and attention can transform your work from performative to substantive. The communities you serve—and the causes you believe in—deserve nothing less.