"where is the "true activism"?"

I think that's a complex question.

The simple reason: I think most of the people with real grievances are too busy trying to make ends meet. Meanwhile people with financially underwritten agendas and/or trustafarian types who don't have to work have plenty of time to dominate the conversation.

But there are deeper issues too. At one time those so-called "trustafarian" types did campaign for workers' rights, higher wages, etc. Now they mostly campaign for trendy eco issues and other ideological issues that have little relationship to reality and no relationship to the plight of the poor. I don't know if that's intentionally constructed or a product of some sort of breakdown in social communication, but that seems to be the way it is.

The cynic in me says this: in reality these people hate the poor. The poor are dirty, uneducated, and worst of all often harbor conservative/religious social values. Moreover empowering the poor and raising their standard of living is in conflict with environmental goals of reducing resource consumption. Who wants to use more energy and land and what-not just to take care of a bunch of rednecks and brown people? That's why activism today is basically a LARP where overprivileged mostly-white children of baby boomers try to re-live their parents' glory days and where trustafarians with dreads try to show off their street cred to get laid with cute hippie chicks. That's why they pick trendy issues that don't help or in a few cases might actually hurt the poor (e.g. limiting new construction).

I think there's a bit of truth in the cynical view unfortunately.

What's the solution? For starters, I really think people should ignore "activists" that have no skin in the game. Ask yourself if they really know what they're talking about. Are they actually affected by the issue? If not, they may well be thrusting themselves into an issue for reasons that have more to do with fashion statements and scenesterism than genuine concern or well-informed efforts to improve anything.

Take GMO foods for example, an issue I've repeatedly used as an example of a trendy LARP-protestor hobby horse. I do take protestors of GMO foods seriously when they're farmers that have been wrongfully sued for patent infringement by biotech companies, and I group that under the whole problem of patent law abuse and patent trolling that also affects the software industry. So there are people who protest GMO foods that ought to be taken seriously. But the yuppie larvae who are convinced they're going to kill us all because some quack web site says so? Fuck them. They're just clogging our informational arteries with irrelevant fear-mongering bullshit and detracting from the real issue at hand.

So let's say we do that. Ignore the LARPers, but listen to the victims of IP law abuse. That leads us somewhere the LARPers never do, namely somewhere productive and empowering, since it means that those farmers can and should make common cause with those who campaign against software patents. Now we have something that has real political meaning, a real coalition to actually get something meaningful done that can help real people.