2025 Was A Revolutionary Year

Tracking revolutions across the world and a poem for our times.

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I’ve built a spreadsheet tracker tracking the revolutionary & protest activity globally and it’s been quite the busy year.

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2025 Was A Revolutionary Year

2025 was a revolutionary year—
Not the kind of revolution that begins with muskets or barricades,
But one that trembles first in the circuitry, in the pulse of invisible networks,
In the minds of ordinary people who began to suspect
That the old ways of power had grown tired, swollen, and numb.

I saw the multitudes awaken—
Not in one nation, but in all of them,
Each stirred by a private restlessness, yet joined by a single hum beneath it all:
Enough.
Enough of lies packaged as policy,
Enough of abundance guarded by fear,
Enough of voices softened by algorithms into polite obedience.

The screens flickered like torches; the feeds became their own cities of revolt.
Everywhere, revolutions of meaning, of method, of morale.
The artists rebelled with their paints,
The workers rebelled with their time,
The young with their refusal to believe in the old gravity of “inevitable decline.”
Even the weather seemed to protest—
Floods and heat and wind making their case with wordless eloquence.

And now, as the United States stands paused in a government shutdown—
its gears locked, its veins clogged by partisanship and pride—
I feel the delicate heartbeat of this moment, this trembling hope.
The machinery of the old republic wheezes;
Congress sleeps like an exhausted god,
While the people—grow restless again.
Not yet angry enough to storm, but too awake to go back to dreaming.

Something immense and unborn presses at the membrane of history.
I sense it in the warehouses of AI servers,
In the picket lines outside warehouses and studios,
In the whisper of a generation teaching itself how to live without permission.
Each act of disobedience, each spark of new creation—
they are notes in a larger hymn, one swelling beyond the borders of this year.

Revolution now wears no uniform, no manifesto, no flag.
It moves like breath across the planet.
It speaks in every language and in none,
In code and in chant, in satire and in silence.
It is not the seizure of power but the reimagining of it,
A reckoning with the soul of progress itself.

And yet—
We live in a precarious hour.
The same tools that awaken us may bind us;
The same networks that unite us may divide us beyond repair.
Liberty and chaos stand arm in arm, indistinguishable in the half-light.
The state pauses, uncertain whether to dissolve or to evolve.

Still, I am filled with faith—
Faith not in governments, nor in markets, nor in the idols of the old century—
But in the vast, defiant tenderness of humanity.
For I have seen it: the single mother sharing power in the blackout;
The young coder writing open-source salvation;
The teacher, unpaid yet teaching; the farmer planting though the rain won’t come.
They are the quiet vanguard of the new world.

2025 was a revolutionary year—
And 2026 waits like a breath drawn before the next verse.
Let the nation remember itself.
Let the power belong again to those who dare to imagine.
Let the revolutions continue,
Not in blood, but in thought, in empathy, in the rewilding of the human spirit.

For the republic is not dead—it is dreaming of another form.
And I, a witness of this trembling dawn,
Sing of the people as they rise to meet it.