It's Working: Flooding The Zone

Episode description

Joshua sat down Monday to pick this week’s episode, opened 3 tabs, and closed all 3 without picking anything. In his defense there were about 40. 🗂️

In 1984 a psychologist named Karl Weick published a paper explaining why people who care enormously about enormous problems reliably do nothing about them. Short version: make a problem big enough and the human brain quietly logs off. He was writing about social policy for an academic journal nobody outside psychology reads. 34 years later Steve Bannon described that exact effect to a reporter, cheerfully, as a governing strategy. He put it more colorfully. We use his actual words in the episode.

So this one has no docket number and no 412-page document. It’s the two of us asking whether being this tired is a personal failing or a policy outcome, and then, because we are apparently incapable of leaving it there, going and finding out what the research says.

It says a lot, actually. 39 injunctions landed on this administration by May of last year. The Congressional Research Service looked at 34 of them and found 41.2 percent still standing as of June. The birthright citizenship order died 6-3 at a Supreme Court nobody expected to kill it. 💀 Also the Fourth Circuit turned the anti-DEI provisions loose, trans Americans still can’t get an accurate passport, and the mail voting order has been blocked, unblocked, and blocked again since August. Both of those columns are real, which is inconvenient for everyone selling you a tidy version of this.

Then there’s Paul Gorski, who interviewed 22 people about why they left movements they’d given years to. The thing that pushed them out wasn’t the cops and it wasn’t losing. It was their own side, and a rule nobody ever says out loud: if you didn’t burn out, you were never really committed.

Sit with that one. We did.

Also in here: the statistic every activist you know has quoted at you, taken apart using the published objections of the researcher who found it. A 40-year-old paper that describes flood-the-zone 3 decades before anyone flooded anything. Will on why pacing is not cowardice. And a prediction, with a date attached, so you can come back and tell us we were wrong. We might be.

Yes, we are aware this is a podcast telling you to consume less. We thought about that. Then we made it anyway.

Everything below is real. Go check it. The whole point of the episode is that you shouldn’t take anybody’s word for anything right now, including ours.

SOURCES

Weick, K. (1984) “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” American Psychologist: https://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Small-Wins_Redefining-the-Scale-of-Social-Problems.pdf

Metag & Gurr (2023). Overload lowers your sense that paying attention does anything, and that’s what makes you stop: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10776990221127380

Gorski & Chen, “Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists.” The culture of martyrdom finding is in here: http://www.edchange.org/publications/Activist-Burnout-Chen-Gorski.pdf

Chenoweth & Stephan, 323 campaigns, 1900 to 2006: https://commonslibrary.org/chenoweth-3-5percent-rule/

Chenoweth’s own cautions on the 3.5% rule. Read this before you quote it at anyone again: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/questions-answers-and-some-cautionary-updates-regarding-35-rule

Injunction counts and what is still blocked: https://legis1.com/news/nationwide-injunctions-trump-1-courts-still-block

The mail voting order, August 24 and August 28: https://www.votebeat.org/national/2026/08/24/supreme-court-lifts-stay-trump-executive-order-on-elections-mail-ballot-restrictions/ https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/28/judge-again-blocks-trump-mail-ballot-executive-order.html

We sat down to pick this week's episode, opened 3 tabs, closed all 3,
picked nothing. There were about 40 to choose from.

That's not a him problem. That's the product. 🗂️

New episode on flood-the-zone, why we're all fried, and 40 years of
research nobody reads.

🔗 fof.foundation/@overlappodcast

#TheOverlap

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