Protests, Feedback, and Signal Theory

Today I have a question: "How will we know when to stop protesting?"

I ask this as someone who believes racism is pervasive in the African-American experience and that these protests were entirely warranted. I ask this because I believe it would be tragic if the message of the protests was attenuated because they "just petered out."

At the same time, what I see in the news makes it seem as if both the protesters and the police are set to engage in cycle after cycle of escalation with no means of de-escalation. Further, this is happening in the context of large crowds, which by themselves are prone to spasm of violence and vandalism, and where it seems clear there are at least some cases of external provocateurs hostile to the movement actively seeking to start the violence and discredit the movement.

I am not asking this from a moral point of view. I am asking it from a signal theory point of view. This is in some sense a simple feedback system. Think of it like a stereo amplifier -- the output is amplified by the output transistors, but it is modulated by negative feedback that prevents the system from being driven to its highest energy output. Feeding back the signal into the system without attenuation leads to a situation where all the signal is lost: the energy is entirely consumed by the feedback and the music is gone.

Without identifiable leaders who can dial down the protests, without a set end date, without open channels of communication, it is hard for me to see how we can reduce the time and energy spent in protest so we have more time and energy to spend fixing the things that need to be fixed. Maybe sustained low level protests are part of the plan too -- I recognize there is a history of paying lip service to an issue and then moving on. But if we can _only_ escalate, we will end up in a place where there is no capability to reform, and that will hurt us all.

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Aside: If you think the signal theory analogy does not apply, please tell me why. I'm generally a hopeful sort, but when I look at the past weeks' events from this perspective, it starts to be hard to maintain that hope.