Impossible until it's not

Political power is a malleable thing, Mactaggart had learned, an elaborate calculation of artifice and argument, votes and money. People and institutions — in politics, in Silicon Valley — can seem all-powerful right up to the moment they are not. And sometimes, Mactaggart discovered, a thing that can’t possibly happen suddenly becomes a thing that cannot be stopped.

The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley — and Won, by Nicholas Confessore, New York Times Magazine, 14 August 2018. The article details Alastair Mactaggart's work to develop a California ballot initiative to protect consumers' online privacy.