Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s loss in recent elections was startling for a number of reasons. First, during his 14-year reign, Vučić had come to rule the country with an iron hand. Second was the scale: The opposition Student List candidates won 52.65% of the vote, while Vučić’s United Serbia party took only 39.2%.

But even more important, which you couldn’t see from all the big crowds and headlines, is what my friend the Serbian activist Srdja Popović calls the student’s “analog strategy.” Named Student in Every Village, it eschewed high-tech targeting databases and AI-generated graphics for old-fashioned door-to-door campaigning. 

This is part of a larger phenomenon that leaders need to recognize and act upon. As trust in institutions has diminished, traditional channels, such as carefully crafted press releases, slick promotions, and announcements from behind a podium are increasingly ineffective. Today, organizations need to build more visceral, on-the-ground networks to gain traction.  

In the early 2000s and 2010s, a series of popular revolutions brought down powerful authoritarian regimes. First came the color revolutions, which overthrew the remnants of communist dictatorships in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Then the uprisings of the Arab Spring sprang up across the Middle East, bringing similar pressure on hard-line despots.

, or Mandela). It seemed as if the streets just spontaneously filled with self-organizing networks of protesters, empowered by technology, to demand change. The brittle 20th-century-style regimes hardly knew what hit them.

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