Review Is the Product: The Scarcity Shift Changing How Movements Share Wisdom

Social movements are experiencing a fundamental inversion. For decades, the bottleneck was information production. For most of my career, our campaigns and NGOs were desperate for more research capacity, writing skills, policy reviews, resources to process public information, and institutional knowledge. Access to those precious resources determined which voices could participate meaningfully in policy debates.

Today, AI has collapsed these barriers. A community group or a lone wolf activist can now generate a sophisticated policy analysis, a detailed regulatory comment, or a comprehensive facility risk assessment in hours rather than weeks.

But this democratization of content creation has revealed a deeper scarcity: legitimacy. When anyone can produce polished analysis, the critical question becomes not “who can write this?” but “who should sign off on this?” What does it mean to us? The power has shifted from the producers of information to the validators of it.

This shift represents more than operational efficiency. We are at a moment of structural transformation in how social movements organize knowledge, distribute authority, and build collective power.

Beyond Fact-Checking: Situated Judgment as Core Value

Traditional models of expertise verification focus on factual accuracy. Is this data correct? Are these citations valid?

But movements require something far more complex. We need situated judgment. Like the newsroom editors of old, this involves understanding not just what is true, but what is strategically relevant, culturally appropriate, and aligned within specific contexts.

Across our work with the Halt the Harm Network, a national community of frontline leaders, researchers, advocates, and organizers focused on resisting oil, gas, and petrochemical pollution, we see these questions play out regularly. Whether it is in Appalachia or the Louisiana Gulf Coast, communities are up against enormous industrial expansion.

AI can rapidly compile environmental impact data, regulatory precedents, and demographic information. But determining which risks to emphasize, which legal strategies align with community values, and which messaging resonates with local culture requires human reviewers embedded in that context. That is where the network comes in.

The value lies not in the compilation, but in the curation. It is the strategic choices about what matters most.

The Networked Review Model

What emerges is a new form of distributed expertise: networked review systems where local knowledge holders collaborate with domain specialists to validate, refine, and authorize generated content.

This creates a network-based “legitimacy layer” that depends on organizing three dimensions of authority:

• Local Authority: Local reviewers who understand community dynamics, cultural sensitivities, and strategic priorities within specific places and populations.
• Technical Authority: Niche subject matter experts who can verify accuracy, identify blind spots, and ensure regulatory or scientific rigor.
• Coalition and Campaign Authority: Movement leaders who can align outputs with broader campaigns, coalition relationships, and long-term strategic goals.

The innovation lies in creating systematic ways to combine these forms of authority efficiently and transparently.

Implications for Movement Structure and Strategy

From Hierarchical Expertise to Networked Distributed Validation

Traditional advocacy organizations were built around the scarce expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, and researchers whose specialized knowledge justified centralized organizational structures. When drafting and research was expensive, gatekeeping made sense.

But when AI handles initial drafts, the organizational logic inverts.

Value now concentrates around review networks that can rapidly validate, contextualize, and authorize content across diverse local needs. This points to movement structures that are less hierarchical and more networked. Systems where authority flows through relationships, reputation, track record, and community trust, not just credentials or brands.

The Long-Tail Opportunity

Perhaps most significantly, this shift unlocks what we might call the “long tail of movement needs”. Small, specific, time-sensitive requests that were previously uneconomical to serve.

A rural community facing a zoning hearing, an immigrant rights group needing rapid response materials, or a labor union requiring technical analysis for contract negotiations could all access sophisticated support when the marginal cost of production approaches zero and review systems can efficiently validate outputs.

If (and that is a big if) we organize properly, we can democratize access to higher-quality advocacy resources and flatten geographic and resource disparities that have historically advantaged large, well-funded institutions in major metro areas.

This shift also creates new quality assurance challenges. When content generation is automated, how do movements maintain standards while scaling rapidly?

The answer lies in systematic review infrastructure: local structured rubrics for offering services and reviews, transparent research and storytelling, and Zoom-based accountability mechanisms. These tools make the validation process itself more inclusive and rigorous than traditional expert-driven approaches.

Someday, we may even see community “review ledgers” that track who approved what decisions, when, and under what circumstances, a form of distributed institutional memory that movements currently lack.

Invest in Review Capacity

Movement organizations need to fundamentally rethink resource allocation. Instead of hiring large teams solely to produce content, they should focus on developing robust review capacity, training local leaders in validation processes, building relationships with trusted experts, and designing systems for rapid, quality-controlled turnaround.

In the Halt the Harm Network, we are already investing in Fellows and facilitation processes to support this shift. Our Fellows serve as both subject-matter experts and review coordinators, organizing insights, responding to requests, and helping guide quality assurance across the network.

Introducing the Services Lab

We have also begun to prototype what we call the Services Lab, a new approach designed to match trusted, network-embedded reviewers with targeted advocacy needs. While still in development, it offers a practical example of how we are operationalizing this new focus on validation and facilitation rather than just production.

We’re finding that what network members need is structure and support to package their expertise in accessible, trusted formats. The Services Lab is building that infrastructure.

Ultimately, the Services Lab is about reducing friction: between knowledge holders and those seeking help, between local insight and broad strategy, and between informal conversations and structured, shareable network value. We are not building a marketplace or a consultancy. We are building connective tissue, and doing it in a way that reinforces trust, clarity, and purpose in advocacy networks.

The Value Lives in the Relationships

In an environment where anyone can generate convincing content, trust becomes paramount. Socializing both the experts and the expertise is essential to ensuring quality and accountability.

And perhaps counterintuitively, this AI-mediated model makes human relationships more important, not less. When technical production is automated, success depends entirely on the quality of reviewer networks. The trust relationships, shared commitments, and collaborative practices are what enable rapid, reliable use of what gets produced.

Thriving in this context means being able to quickly assemble trusted reviewer networks across a wide range of needs.

Risks and Limitations

The Authority Question

Who gets to be a reviewer, and how is that authority established and maintained? There is a risk that new gatekeeping mechanisms simply replicate existing inequalities. We need to pay systematic attention to reviewer diversity, community accountability, and transparent influence processes.

Speed vs. Deliberation

Communities may need to resist the pressure for immediate responses and preserve space for genuine collective reflection, even when AI makes faster turnaround technically possible. The social dimension takes time to cook even though the content dimension may no longer require it.

Dependency Risks

Heavy reliance on AI for initial drafts creates vulnerabilities: technical (system failures, bias amplification) and strategic (loss of internal capacity for independent analysis). Movements need fallback strategies and periodic expert input to maintain autonomy.

Putting It Into Practice

The shift from information scarcity to authority scarcity represents a profound opportunity for our social movements.

We organize people well. Techbros do not. And corporations will likely cut their people loose for AI savings.

By building sophisticated review systems and facilitation models, movements can democratize access to high-quality advocacy tools while maintaining the community accountability and strategic coherence that distinguish effective organizing from mere content production.

But realizing this opportunity requires intentional network development. Movement leaders must invest time and attention in new forms of expertise (process design, quality assurance, network coordination), new kinds of relationships (distributed but accountable reviewer networks), and new standards of transparency (provenance tracking, decision documentation).

The movements that successfully navigate this transition will be those that adapt to a fundamental truth: in an age of artificial intelligence, the distinctly human capacities for situated judgment, community accountability, and strategic wisdom become more valuable, not less.

The challenge is building network connections and forms that harness AI’s capabilities while amplifying, not replacing, these irreducibly human elements.

The future always belongs to movements that adapt and leverage shifts in culture and technology while extending community relationships, expanding rights, and holding true to the democratic values that give social change efforts their legitimacy and power. AI does not change that at all.

Learn more about our work with the Halt the Harm Network and subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated as we pilot programs that reflect this evolving framework.