The effect of this conspiracy pileup is that you, the little guy, can never change things. If you are living in a world where nebulous forces control everything, forces you can never quite see or understand, then what possible chance do you have of turning anything around?

But dismaying and demotivating people is only one approach. Even more clever is to climb inside the narratives of protest movements and render them meaningless.

In 2014, in Ukraine, after a revolution ousted a pro-Russian president in Kyiv, Russian-sponsored forces staged their own protests in the east of the country, mimicking the rallies in Kyiv down to small details like using tires to build barricades. These counterprotests were called “the Russian Spring,” co-opting the language of the 1968 Czechoslovak uprising against the Kremlin, and so when Moscow then launched its covert war in Ukraine, it worked as a piece of negative storytelling: pro-democracy protests, the Kremlin seemed to be saying, lead not to prosperity but to instability, blood and death. Russian media regularly reinforce this link, with videos that mix what they claim to be American-engineered protests in Europe and the Middle East with scenes of carnage in Ukraine and Syria. The message is that protests and chaos are intrinsically linked.

In a more subtle way, the Kremlin’s digital campaigns in the United States in particular eat at the trust one feels in protest narratives. By taking on the personas of American civil-liberties campaigns—Black Lives Matter, for instance—and using them to manipulate voters in favor of Donald Trump, the end result is that one starts doing a double take at everything one encounters online. Was that American civil-rights poster actually produced in St. Petersburg? Is anything what it says it is? The very notion of genuine protest starts to be eroded. Getting caught is part of the point, making it easier for the Kremlin to argue that all protests everywhere are just covert foreign-influence operations, that there is no such thing as truly bottom-up, people-powered protest.

Still, protesters risk their safety in Hong Kong, Tbilisi, and Moscow. So instead of looking for old, failed grand narratives, perhaps we need to listen closer to the protesters themselves to see how democracy is truly contested today.

“Be water, my friend” is a catchphrase of the Hong Kong demonstrations. Protesters avoid giving the authorities an obvious target: Don’t gather in one place, where you can be encircled; don’t have clear leaders, who can be arrested; ebb and flow the demonstrations to keep officials confused. Protesters are taking on some of the liquid logic of their rulers to make themselves a harder target. In this approach, seemingly less important events and symbols can become suddenly imbued with meaning. In Hong Kong, an extradition law has become symbolic of a struggle for rights; in Tbilisi, the visit of a minor Russian lawmaker to the Parliament has led to consistent protests; in Moscow, elections to the city council, which many don’t even notice, have become a synecdoche for the constrictions of Putinism. Once regimes have caught up with these symbols and language, new ones can be located, and coalitions form around them.