“Red means go!” shouted a cyclist near the front of Chicago’s Critical Mass on Friday. He then led a group of at least a hundred cyclists, including me and two police officers, through a red light in the congested Chicago Loop during rush hour. Whenever we went through a red light (or under one of Chicago’s echoey overpasses), cyclists would ring their bells or yell out ululating yelps, making their defiance known.

It felt kind of thrilling and rebellious to just go through a red light like that, but as I became part of the Mass, I wondered if this small infraction came out of real anger or if it was just for fun. Critical Mass is a monthly event during which cyclists in Chicago as well as other cities “take back the streets” by forming a rolling wall on typically car-clogged thoroughfares. It’s a refreshing protest in which cyclists, rather than cars, get to decide the rules of the road.

When I decided to participate in Critical Mass for the first time this month, I wasn’t thinking about politics. However, when I actually arrived, I realized that a lot of the other cyclists saw it as a political event. Before we got going, people handed out flyers for Occupy and other grassroots political movements. The title of the unofficial Critical Mass publication, The Derailleur, also had a vaguely political French anarchist throwback feel to it, although the actual content was just various works of art that included bicycles or bicycle pieces.

I wondered why they might see a bike ride as something political, beyond the politics of the road. And I thought that, in a way, Critical Mass does what a lot of recent political movements are trying to do. That is, force people to pay attention to a group that feels marginalized. Sure, cyclists choose to be cyclists, and they get to stop being cyclists as soon as they get off their bikes, but on the roads it can be frustrating. You get treated like you shouldn’t be on the road at all.

But other than thinking that cars ought to be nicer to cyclists, I didn’t necessarily agree with everything that my fellow Critical Massers were saying. During the ride itself, some people shouted political banter while others rode quietly. At one point a Hummer honked at us and a man with a long blonde ponytail and studded gloves yelled “Do you know what he fills his tanks with? Liquid gold and the blood of dead soldiers!”

Another young man in traditional hipster garb weaved about the wall of cyclists shouting sarcastically, “We’re pseudo-activists! We care about things!”

I thought, “What they’re saying doesn’t really represent me, although people watching us go by might think that the people yelling speak for all of us.” The friend I had with me is probably even less likely to camp out on Wall Street and hold up a sign than I am, although he is also much more at ease on his bike.

It got me thinking that a lot of political movements these days tend to be less about trying to advance a specific agenda than about trying to strike a balance about who is in charge of the political discourse. Some, myself partially included, have criticized the Occupy movement for a lack of clear demands. Such a criticism is important to keep in mind, but it’s also useful to think about what such movements do achieve. Politicians now at least try to pretend that they’re catering to the “99 percent.” Maybe this is a sign of progress.

The “Arab Spring” follows this trend in some ways also. Although every protester in one country might not want the exact same things, they all want to have a role in directing the conversation on national and international levels.

The fight to have a say has been the driving force of many political movements in recent history: independence from colonial rulers, the women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement. But as new kinds of political power have come to dominate, the rules of engagement have changed. Now more than ever, a small group of people with a lot of economic power determine who has the campaign funds to govern in the U.S., and who gets U.S. political backing to govern abroad.

Perhaps this kind of power could be mitigated through changes in policy. But before those changes can even begin to take place, marginalized groups must take their share of control over our attention in any way they can. To get cars to share the road, cyclists may have to occasionally block Michigan ave. For deeper inequalities, the methods are more radical.