Portland, OR — A large protest filled the downtown this week, with hundreds of green-shirted protesters shouting incomprehensible slogans and nearby traffic slowing significantly, while drivers tried to piece together, from incongruent signage, what the protest was about.
The crowd was large and clearly motivated. What it was motivated about could not be established from the signs, which ranged from the vague ("ENOUGH") to the contradictory, one reading "YES" while another held directly beside it read "NO," to the purely internal: a careful drawing of a frog, captioned only with a number. At least one checkmark and what appeared to be either an ultrasound image or a weather radar report adorned other placards.
"We applied every available method," said an analyst hired to determine the protest's subject from its signage alone. "Keyword frequency, color theory, font weight. The most common slogan, by a wide margin, was 'THIS IS NOT OKAY.' We were unable to recover what 'this' referred to. But we maintain high confidence that this must mean something."
The difficulty has grown, researchers say, as signs adopt the conventions of the internet. A rising share now consist of QR codes that resolve to further QR codes, colorful Pepe the Frog drawings, and slogans produced by a phone app that optimizes for shareability over meaning. One placard was a screenshot of a different placard.
The Counter-Protest
Complicating the analysis, a counter-protest assembled across the street holding signs that were, by every measurable property, identical. Analysts could not determine which group held which position, or whether either group had noticed it was indistinguishable from the other. The two sides chanted at intervals, occasionally in unison. Both sides had equally loud and equally incomprehensible bullhorns.
Police, asked to characterize the gathering for their report, wrote "a protest" and left the subject line blank. A spokesperson said the department had "stopped trying to write down what they're about somewhere around 2019," and now logs only the headcount and the weather.
Findings
The only datum analysts could establish with confidence was that the participants were upset. Sentiment was rated "high." Direction of sentiment was rated "unavailable." A follow-up study that asked protesters directly returned forty-one distinct answers and one man who said he had come for the drum circle.
Organizers, reached for comment, provided a statement. The statement was itself a sign, which the organizers held up, and which raised several new questions.
At press time, the signs had been collected, flattened, and recycled into fresh signs for a different protest, about which equally little is known.
