Holding Actions

Holding actions are the first of the three dimensions Macy identified for the Great Turning. In her environmental organizing context, they included protests, legal challenges, direct resistance to deforestation or pollution. In the AI context, they include the regulatory frameworks — the EU AI Act, American executive orders, emerging governance structures in Singapore and Brazil and Japan — that constrain the most dangerous deployments. They include labor protections that slow the speed at which workers are displaced without support. They include AI safety research that identifies failure modes of systems deployed at scale before those modes cause irreversible damage. Holding actions buy time. They do not, by themselves, create the alternative. A regulation that prevents harm is valuable but does not produce the deployment that would have been beneficial.