Fake spring.

The Mid-Atlantic had a moment this week.

Sixty-two degrees on a Tuesday. People bursting with joy in the most beautiful way — jackets abandoned, outdoor tables packed, group chats lighting up like something had been unlocked. I was watching from Los Angeles, where it's always something approximating spring, so I don't always get the full force of it. But I felt it through the timeline. I felt it through the text messages. I felt it in the particular quality of joy that only people who have been cold for too long can produce.

Fake spring.

And then (of course!) the forecast dropped back to the 30s.

There is a reason the phrase "Arab Spring" entered the lexicon the way it did.

Beginning in late 2010, something moved through the region, a current of popular uprising that felt, for a season, like it was about to change everything. Tunisia. Egypt. Libya. Yemen. Bahrain. People in Tahrir Square. Young organizers who had spent years quietly building networks suddenly, thanks to social media, visible to the whole world. A window cracked open, and the air coming through it was electric.

You know what happened next.

In most of those countries, the window closed. Sometimes violently. The conditions that had produced authoritarian rule — concentrated power, captured institutions, gutted civil society, economic precarity weaponized into compliance — those conditions didn't disappear because the streets filled up. The uprisings made the demand visible. They did not, in most places, build the infrastructure to hold it.

I keep returning to the gap between those two things.

The eruption of hope. And the durability of change.

We are not bad at generating moments. We are extraordinarily bad at generating conditions.

Democracy work runs on this same cycle. An election, a verdict, a movement, a breakthrough happens and suddenly everyone can see the system clearly. People feel the urgency and they want in. Donations spike. Sign-ups surge. It is fake spring and it feels completely real, because in those moments, it is real.

And then the temperature drops.

The Arab Spring didn't fail because people weren't brave or hungry enough for change. It struggled in many places because decades of dismantled civil society meant there wasn't enough: independent institutions, democratic muscle memory, distributed power, to hold what the uprising opened up. You cannot harvest what you haven't planted. You cannot hold what you haven't built.

This is what I think about with the organizations I support. The ones that get called upon in every crisis moment but are under-resourced between them. The ones doing the daily, unglamorous work of keeping democratic habits alive when the cameras aren't rolling.

"Fund us like you want us to win" is a call to action often repeated across global feminist activist communities. In this moment, the stakes feel more elemental than winning. This is about living.

The infrastructure that can hold a spring — legal, cultural, organizational, financial — has to be built in the cold. You do the work before the moment demands it. You build when it's not yet visible why it matters. The communities I've spent the last decade in partnership with have been doing exactly this, and the question I keep sitting with is whether we'll show up for them with the same energy we show up for moments.

The mean doesn't have to revert.

That's not a law of nature. Reverting back to the mean is the consequence of choices. Structures don't maintain themselves — they're actively reproduced, or they're actively dismantled, or they slowly calcify from neglect. The question is only which one we're doing and whether we're doing it on purpose.

The warmth comes when it comes. The question is whether we're ready to hold it.

I'm watching people in the Mid-Atlantic recalibrate for the cold that came back. But the good news about spring — real spring — is that it comes whether we deserve it or not. The work is in being ready for it. The work is in building, right now, the conditions that can hold the warmth when the window finally opens.

That's the only question I'm asking this week.

What are you building that will hold?

Read

The Bad Guys are Winning, Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic (a 2021 piece but incredible context for what we are navigating today)

"All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries."

Recall

Last week's edition: The cost of missing off-ramps

Upcoming

RxT: Data Centers and Democracy: How Policymakers are Pushing Back
Wednesday, Apr 8: Register here

Note: Virginia delegate John McAuliff will be one of the policymakers joining the forum.

Sabrina Hersi Issa is a human rights technologist committed to leveraging innovation as a tool to unlock opportunity and dignity for all. She does this through her work in technology, media, and philanthropy. This is her personal newsletter.