so, let's understand what happened with the dapl.

1) obama cancelled it, which was not an honest order but merely intended to clear the camp.
2) the new administration created a distraction around refugee policy to coerce the lifers into a different direction.
3) once the camp was cleared, and the cold of winter had set in, the new administration reversed obama's order to cancel it.
4) various factors (including the distraction around refugee policy, the weather, the fashionable nature of protest in the 21st century (#dapl is so last year) and what could be called 'protest fatigue') prevented re-mobilization from being powerful enough to cause a serious disincentive towards the use of force.
5) the camp was shut down, and the pipeline was finished.

so, what can we learn from this?

i suppose the immediate thing to analyze is what could have been done differently. the obvious point is that the new administration would have had a harder time ramming through the new policy if the camp hadn't cleared on it's own. but, we cannot blame activists for being tricked by obama, can we?

well, we can, actually: i saw this coming, and i'm sure many other people did, too.

so, the immediate lesson is that protest spaces should never be cleared in a transfer of power, especially not one from a more friendly government to a less friendly one. but, did people really not know that? and, why didn't they come back?

i've been over this with other protest movements. the essential root problem is that activists have adopted the language and tactics of viral marketing campaigns. now, i need to be clear: these tactics can be potentially effective if you need large numbers of people for a short amount of time. but, people are trained to understand the substance of viral marketing as inherently limited in temporal scope.

when you assemble people with a viral marketing campaign, you need to expect that the group will be disassembled by the next viral marketing campaign. what you've done is reduce the resistance to a type of fashion, a fad to discard for the next fad.

the next fad is in fighting "islamophobia". and, that's where everybody went.

on the other hand, this realization merely serves to amplify the importance of ensuring that activists do not allow camps to clear until objectives are confirmed. realizing the short attention span of #hashtag protestors is in some ways just a pre-requisite to developing tactics to neutralize that short attention span. but, the deeper lesson needs to be that viral marketing, as useful as it may be in some ways, is not a replacement for movement building - and can in fact act against it.

so,

1) the immediate lesson is not to disperse until you've won.
2) but, the broader lesson is that #hashtag activism is fleeting, and cannot replace deeper movement building. to the contrary, the shorter attention spans of young people (as brought on by viral marketing...) is an obstacle to deal with in deeper movement building.