I’m not one of those guys who is totally supportive of a cause until its activists block my commute with their protest, although that did happen yesterday. On my way to discuss strategy with a non-profit client, I crossed paths with a bunch of people getting arrested in front of San Francisco City Hall. Despite their witty t-shirts, the scene struck me as especially tragic. Both Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Superior Court of San Francisco (and virtually the whole city of SF) have been solidly against Prop 8 at every opportunity. Perhaps someone involved can explain the action logic to me, since I’m sincerely interested, but the scene smacked to me as a lack of either critical thinking (who are the decision-makers and how will they be influenced?) or leadership (is anyone leveraging the predictable groundswell toward an organized campaign?).

Here are three ideas I think would’ve been more effective.

No one goes home single

If you’ve already decided that nothing short of being arrested will do, make it mean something more than just “we’re willing to get arrested for our beliefs.” That’s wonderful—and absolutely necessary to underscore the vitality of this fight—but stops just short of authentic civil disobedience. Instead of having the lockdown party at SF City Hall, move it to Sacramento. Attach demands to the lockdown, like, “We’re not leaving without someone marrying us.”

Borrowing a historical (and therefore cliché) example: Rosa didn’t block traffic, she refused to give up her seat. Her action forced people to choose between a bad law and human decency. The analog here would be to swarm the Clerk’s office and demand equal treatment. Don’t get out of line, don’t take a number, don’t move until they agree to marry you. Then, if they forcibly remove you, you’ll be arrested for doing the exact same thing as straight couples in the same line, not the illegal-for-everyone sitting in an intersection.

Fake it ’til you make it

The Supreme Court ruling provides a strange and exploitable loophole. If you were a same-sex couple married during the period where same-sex marriage was legal, your marriage still stands. There’s an estimated 18 thousand couples who fall into that category. Who’s to say you’re not one of them? Since there’s no way to tell without demanding documentation (and being a dick) that you and your honey aren’t legally married but merely everything-but-legally married… Just be married!

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the principle of the thing matters and it’s incredibly hurtful to know that the state is—let’s not mince words here—against you. The long-term goal of this strategy would be to leverage the logistical nightmare of the state having to constantly prove that every marriage was or wasn’t within a certain window, making enforcement of Prop 8 impossible. Considering that everyone in the executive branch from the Mayor to the Governor to the President is against Prop 8, it’s unlikely that Federal Marshals will bust down anyone’s door and make you return those ramekins you registered for.

Appropriate Valentine’s Day

This is the “Nuclear Option” for same-sex marriage.

The historical Saint Valentine was a Roman priest martyred for marrying Christians during the reign of Claudius Gothicus, who had deemed it illegal to do so. He was discovered, imprisoned, and ultimately beheaded because he defied the state and brought couples together out of love. Our modern Valentine’s Day celebrates this concept of romantic love, but conveniently forgets the defiance aspect of the tale. It’s time to bring it back.

Forget the rainbow. The new iconography of same-sex marriage should be the pretty pink heart, Cupid and his bow-and-arrow, smooching lovebirds, and every symbol, idiom, or typeface that advertising guys now employ to sell greeting cards reinforcing hetero-normative relationships under the guise of showing how much you love someone. Nice idea, it’s ours now.

I’m mad, like everyone else. Obviously, I fully acknowledge that the decision hasn’t hit me in the same visceral way as it’s hit others, but I’m hardly an innocent bystander. While my fianceé and I don’t bring them up because we don’t want to politicize our relationship, let’s just say that we’ve made non-trivial decisions based on the injustice we see around us. Prop 8 was a defeat for us, just like the rest of humanity.

So let’s beat this.

I’ve attended South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) for several years but this year was special since it was my first (last?) as a speaker. My session was intended to be about non-profits using their website to accomplish their mission, but we never seemed to make it there. Since SXSW decided to format it as a discussion, I was relying on content to come from the audience members—who were unfortunately relying on me. The idea of letting people down is not something I’m either terribly familiar or terribly comfortable with, so now I’m sharing what I would’ve said if my session had been just me with a microphone (two turntables optional).

Edge of the Web

Every new medium emerges from the husk of the old, inheriting a number of soon-to-be anachronistic metaphors. The early web brought with it the book’s concept of pages, whose final vestiges as a mode of organizing content have been all but erased by the Web-as-Platform concept. The web as a place where you read is no longer true, if it ever was. The web is where you do.

Should the last point not be self-evident, go now and count how many of your bookmarks are about reading vs buying, selling, searching, inspiring, or communicating. I’ll wait.

One thing we increasingly do on the web is self-organize. On every social network from Facebook to Flickr, we form groups. Most of the time, these groups are purely recreational alliances of common interest. Every once in a while, they are political. Consider some recent examples:

1. The Facebook Bill of Rights & Responsibilities group that achieved greater democracy in the site’s management
2. Concerned citizens flocking to support a designer whose work was stolen by a stock art company
3. Last weekend’s #AmazonFail uprising that investigated why gay, lesbian, and feminist books vanished overnight from best-seller lists

These three particular victories are interesting because they all have two things in common. First, none of their efforts are centered around or guided by an outside organization, non-profit or otherwise. Second, they were all—what’s a nice way of saying this?—wrong.

1. Facebook’s back-pedal traded a vital discussion (Do I “own” my comments on your Wall? Should I have access to them even if you delete your profile?) for Democracy Theatre.
2. The designer, it turns out, may have been plagiarizing others’ work himself.
3. Even Clay Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody” author and post-organizationalist, admits that #AmazonFail was about misguided emotion and not justice.

The lesson that I take from this ad hoc activism is that the general population is neither apathetic nor disorganized. The multitude is brimming with passion about even “niche” issues like intellectual property law or transgender rights (which have received far less media coverage than global warming) and have the means to come together to make demands of top decision-makers. But, given their respective failures, these campaigns also illuminate the need for non-profits to assume a new role in online activism: providing a strategic avenue for collective action.

No more educate-motivate one-two punch? Their most primary roles wrested from them, where does this leave non-profits websites that raise awareness and compel action (two things they no longer need) only to then bill you for it with a donation request?

Your mission, online

It seems appropriate to confess at this point that I feel blessed to work with non-profits on exactly these issues. This post is written not out of frustration with them but a desire to vastly improve their lot.

If a committed and easily mobilized online audience seems like a burden, it’s clearly because we’re looking at the situation incorrectly.

It might be as simple as structure. If your website is handled by Communications, it’s going to be a place to read and not a place to do. If it’s handled by Development, donor conversion is probably your #1 metric. Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, once noted there was a trough of online stagnancy in middle-sized non-profits. The larger have independent web teams, the smaller has a “web team” who also happens to be the Executive Director. At this top level, directly in service to your mission, is precisely where a tool so powerful as “the Internet” belongs.

Is it as simple as looking at your mission and saying, “How can we use the Internet to achieve this?” Almost, but before you go running off to reinvent your whole website, my experience has found two crucial principles that should guide you: sincerity and granularity.

Consider the top 3 actions on WeCanSolveIt.org: sign a petition, tell friends, donate.

Robin Beck, an online organizer and co-worker emeritus of mine (uncharacteristically optimistic here), claims that we’re so used to dodging the Internet’s scams and spams that to really provoke online activism requires a higher order of sincerity. Non-profits are offering big boxes of “make the world a better place” or at least “feel good about yourself”. If we take the lid off and discover instead a “fundraising ploy” or “list-building exercise”, we’re not going to buy another box.

On its most basic level, this means that the action you’re requesting has to directly solve the problem you say it will. Adam Green of MoveOn and Change Congress publicly dropped some science on a recent email action alert he received in a blog post entitled, “Profiles in Bad Online Organizing, Part I”.

I’m not saying the DSCC has no role to play in getting Coleman to step down. I’m just saying they should play an honest and effective role.

But beyond that, it means asking for something that you couldn’t do without your supporters. You have a task that seems impossible, but you’ve figured out how to break down into smaller pieces so—if everyone does their part—it’s a snap. Which brings us to granularity…

A full academic discussion of granularity is available in “Wealth of Networks” if you can wade through it.

The root of granularity is “grain” and sand provides a great metaphor for understanding it. A sand castle is made of very small granular contributions. A single grain or a heaping bucket all contribute to the achievement of building the sand castle. Donations are granular, as supporters can give any amount they choose. Signing a petition is not, as you can only sign it once—lacking the heaping bucket. A video contest is also not, as it takes a high initial investment—lacking the single grain.

Online, this translates into the scope of transactions that your website is capable of handling. Wikis are notoriously successful at granularity. I could write an entire article on “Wookiees” or, if some reason I lacked the time or motivation to do so, I could merely correct someone else’s spelling of “Wookie”. This range of involvement allows for increased participation (and increased accuracy, but that’s a different article).

Enough theory. Let’s see these in action.

A case study

In my final year as Senior Webmaster for Rainforest Action Network, we pulled off an online campaign using exactly these principles. The organization’s mission is:

Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.

The impossible goal was to catalog enough products that contained palm oil or its derivatives to map the supply chain back to the primary forces of deforestation in tropical rainforests. The team consisted of a palm oil campaigner (Brihannala Morgan), an online organizer (Robin Beck, see above), a web designer/developer (me), and three awesome interns.

Step 1 was to ask supporters to go to their local supermarket and find products that contained palm oil, palmitate, etc. For this step, the team created an instructive yet entertaining video on YouTube. We further incentivized the mission by awarding the top “Supermarket Sleuths”.

Step 2 was to ask our online activists to enter the UPC numbers (the form is down now) of products they found. For this we connected to a third-party database to help verify that products were real. Since activists could also mark certain products as not containing palm oil, it was mostly self-regulating.

Step 3 was to ask those same online activists (I use the term “online” loosely here, since they’ve spent most of their time in grocery stores) to return, warning stickers in hand, to mark those products containing palm oil. RAN headquarters followed this up with a letter to companies whose products were getting stickered.

Was it sincere and granular? Cataloging every product that contains palm oil was certainly not something that three staff and three interns, all located in San Francisco, could pull off. It was also sincere in its intention to find the major players in rainforest destruction. The project was granular, too. An individual could find, submit, and/or sticker just one product and still add value or could spend a whole weekend (and we had activists that submitted hundreds). If you just wanted to correct false positives, that was also an option.

Was it successful? Wildly. On the first day of Step 3, the phones were ringing off the hook with companies whose products contained palm oil. A few days and they were disclosing their supply chains. A few weeks and the major producers were calling to schedule meetings.

I don’t want to downplay the amount of energy that the team dedicated to this project but, in absolute terms, it was a small investment. Everything from the online form to the backend database could’ve received a lot more attention—although the stickers were sweet—but they still managed to do the job with only a few weeks of staff time and a few hundred dollars (mostly the stickers). Not bad ROI for getting a meeting with a major player in the palm oil business.

Next steps for your organization

If you’ve read this far and want to shift your website to a mission-driven strategy, here are your next steps:

1. Put together a team. Find folks with a past history of pushing the technology envelope (anyone who secretly signed you up for Twitter or has been caught on Yahoo Pipes will suffice). Balance these with folks who have a handle on the strategic goals of the organization. Bonus points if these are the same folks. Three is ideal.
2. Give the team some space. If they’re successful, these people are about to pull off a task that your organization currently deems impossible. Give them some time to figure out how. Tell them not to come into the office for a week and instead generate 100 ways to accomplish your organization’s mission online. The first few dozen ideas will be boring, but then things will pick up.
3. Ground it in reality. Wow, the team came up with seriously wacky stuff, some of it ignoring current realities. Cut anything that you can’t start small and then slowly build up, along with ideas that aren’t both sincere and granular. From the remaining list, ask the team which idea they’re most excited about and do it first.
4. Provide success indicators and time limits. Measure the impact. At what point will the team get more resources and at what point will you pull the plug or say, “That didn’t work, try something else?” Make the measurements matter to the mission.
5. Start small. Don’t try to do everything out of the gate. Do the most important thing. Then the next. Then the next. All the while, keep an eye on those indicators.
6. Celebrate. It can get lonely on the edge. If you’re really doing something innovative, make sure you take the time to pat yourself on the back. Valuing your team’s motivation, rain or shine, is going to be the key for long-term success. Because…
7. Repeat. The first project may catch or it may not. Even if it does, repeat this process. Figure out how often you can afford to take a chance on something new (every quarter? twice a year? annually?) and re-assemble your team when it’s time.

If this seems exciting but a little bit daunting, then we should talk. Diligent was started with organizations exactly like yours in mind and with a mission “to harness the dynamic and democratic power of the Internet for social change.”

That’s mine, what’s yours?

Here are a few metaphors that I hear thrown around in activist circles that, as Inigo Montoya might say, “do not mean what we think they mean.”

Low-hanging fruit

The first is not unique to activism, business uses it left and right as well. In case you happen to have never been in a meeting when someone uses it, the phrase “low-hanging fruit” is meant to convey benefits that can be attained with minimal action. So, if I want to get 500 signatures to put in a bike lane, the low-hanging fruit might be bike messengers. I could probably quickly acquire a few hundred signatures with not a whole lot of effort.

The problem is, that’s not how you pick fruit. Fruit is normally picked starting with the “high-hangers” for two important reasons. First, pickers start at the top and fill their basket as they go down, otherwise they’d be climbing with ever-heavier loads. Second, the fruit lower on the tree is partially shaded by the higher branches and often last to ripen.

So, for the bike lane example, the “low-hanging fruit” would be folks whose names would make it more difficult to get others to sign and who probably aren’t high value names to begin with. Elementary school kids, maybe.

Silver bullets

Silver bullets often come up when we’re looking for a simple solution to a complex problem. An example might be installing solar panels in remote African villages. This fairly simple solution manages to address issues ranging from social (providing power without making the community reliant on fuel) to environmental (cleaner than coal or nuclear) to political (no foreign-owned powerplants requiring a government-owned grid).

However, the term comes to us from old European legends about werewolves. Werewolves, immune to normal bullets, can only be killed by silver ones. Far from being simple solutions, silver bullets are actually more difficult to make than regular ones and substantially less bang-for-the-buck, as silver is both softer and more expensive than lead. In short, you’d probably want to avoid using a silver bullet unless you’re facing something like a werewolf that can’t be defeated through conventional means (which addressing energy needs in developing nations just may be).

Radical

Perhaps the most understood metaphor, yet one that activists employ to the point of self-identity, is the notion of “radicalism”. Literally “radical” refers to the root of something, most often a plant. Activists who identify as “radical” maintain that they are getting to the root of the problem—with the implicit or explicit suggestion that all other strategies will fail to produce true change. Accusations of not being radical enough equate to not being serious about one’s beliefs.

Again, reality begs to differ.

Instructions for removing an unwanted tree all begin with cutting the tree down first. Once you’ve removed a tree’s leaves and its ability to photosynthesize its food, it’s much easier to deal with the leftover roots. The stump can continue to generate new growth, but diligence will ensure that it never amounts to a new tree, leaving the stump to eventually die. Removing stumps is so difficult that the most common methods include drilling poison-filled holes and setting them on fire.

Knowing the truth behind this metaphor encourages a remarkably different angle for activism than “radical”, namely removing the ability of destructive systems to feed and perpetuate themselves before attempting to address the “root” of the problem. Maybe everyone working on corporate power should switch to campaigning against advertising. Afterall, it would be difficult for companies to lobby Washington if no one bought their products.

No one knows the answer better than organizations that try to navigate the dark and often deadly middle ground between “selling out” and “dropping out”. They receive criticism (both sincere and feigned) from concerned parties on either side of them in the activist spectrum.

For a good example one need not look further than Act Now Productions. Founded by environmentalism’s Wunderkind turned L’Enfant Terrible, Adam Werbach, Act Now has come under… let’s just say “scrutiny” for working with everyone’s favorite discount superstore, Wal-Mart. Since the partnership began, talk of Act Now is met with (depending on company) eye-rolling distaste or backhanded compliments. As to whether they were hypocrites or irrelevant, I’ve always wondered.

An article in this month’s Fast Company tried to set the record straight. They acknowledge that Act Now has its critics, from smaller radical organizations to Werbach’s previous employer Sierra Club, but mostly stick to puff piece territory, covering the controversy of working with Wal-Mart in far greater detail than the work itself. It ends with the uplifting quote from Werbach on his ability to change a trans-national corporation, “I’m going to try. I’m trying.”

Much more troubling is the single line slipped in slyly, “Wal-Mart would not allow Fast Company to interview employees”. I was not the only one to notice it, as San Francisco alternative weekly paper SF Weekly ran an article the following week tearing apart the Fast Company piece.

[A]fter reading the Fast Company piece, and doing a little more reading and talking to people, I’m afraid Werbach’s detractors are right. His current role as Wal-Mart’s greenwasher-in-residence is almost certainly doing more harm than good.

SF Weekly author Matt Smith calls up Wal-Mart employees and asks them about the measures mentioned in the Fast Company piece. Not many have even heard of any, those that have say they’re being perverted by middle management into ways to make employees’ lives harder. The goal of greening Wal-Mart is being translated into moralistic, high ground arguments on why associates need to lose weight or stop smoking.

Upset with the pictured painted by the extremes of the two articles, and the vast room in between, I gave up and went to go talk with some folks from Act Now. They were hosting Sze Ping from Greenpeace China and it was a great opportunity to call them out on the two articles and get at the truth.

Everyone I talked to had read both and were eager to share their perspective. For the most part, they thought both were crap (my paraphrasing, they were very polite). They acknowledged that the Fast Company piece was fluffy, saying that it skipped both the really good and the really bad things that Wal-Mart is doing. “They have to be diplomatic,” someone offered. Similarly, the SF Weekly article garnered sighs. “We only started the program in April and Wal-Mart has over a million employees, I’m sure it’s not hard to find some who haven’t heard of it.” Even so, they’re thankful that someone’s keeping an eye on them. “It’s understandable. It’s about accountability.”

Sze Ping shared some of the clever ways that Greenpeace China gets around the rigid state censorship. “We can’t praise, but we can’t criticize. And we certainly can’t stay silent.” Instead, they’ve partnered with Coca-cola to co-brand energy-efficient technology throughout the upcoming 2008 Olympics in Beijing. In the U.S., this would be a sin, the ultimate sell-out. In China energy-efficiency is a more radical path to sustainability than dropping a banner in Tiananmen Square. “But you would get a free plane ticket to somewhere,” Ping laughs.

Ultimately, Act Now agrees that Wal-Mart, like China, is dark territory. It embodies the difficult decisions that activists have to make. Just as we can’t solve climate change without addressing the industrial explosion in China, we can’t transform corporate America without someone working on Wal-Mart. Both involve rolling up some sleeves and getting dirty, compromising ideology for progress. Hypocrisy and irrelevance both become tools in the social change toolkit to find the position in the spectrum where your pressure has an effect on more than your own ego.

Many awareness campaigns begin with the very sincere but unfortunately naïve sentiment, “If only people knew the truth…” Armed with little more than that, they spend millions of dollars on celebrity-endorsed commercials, speaking tours, and marketing campaigns that does little more than leave people disempowe(RED).

That’s the sad end to the second half of the sentence that people never finish. “If only people knew the truth, they’d be even more scared than they already are and feel even more powerless than they already do.”

I’m not speaking from a high horse. Consider the tragedy going on, as we speak, in Darfur. I’m aware that it’s going on, I even have friends intimately involved in the struggle. Throw it into a blender along with the perpetual occupation of Iraq, our Constitution being shredded by an outlaw Executive Branch, corporations scrambling to make money from climate change instead of fight it… hit purée and try to drink that concoction. Anyone who claims to be truly aware of what’s going on it our world and not clinically depressed is lying. So I turn away and try to concentrate on the things I have some control over. Let me be clear, awareness-raising efforts on the Darfur issue have made me less inspired to take action.

To eat my own medicine, let me end the ranting about how activism is screwing the proverbial pooch by encouraging blissful ignorance over action and start offering some solutions. Similar to “the only thing we have to fear“, solutions are the solution. However, most of the solutions that organizations offer are signing my name to a declaration, spreading the word, and giving money. Of these, giving money is the only action that actually affects an outcome. Sure, spreading the word might indirectly—but only by encouraging more people to give money.

The solutions that get me really excited are the ones that openly share campaign strategy with me. MoveOn.org‘s emails typically, even when asking for money, lay out a clear plan for how I help. Maybe they want to hire more on-the-ground organizers for an upcoming primary, maybe they want lots of lawyers to email Alberto Gonzalez, either way I can see their strategy and—by taking part—I see how my actions are part of something larger that needs me.

The core of this is that those people enlightened to the point where they feel responsibility for the world and want to take action won’t feel satisfied with activism that strips them of that responsibility. Which is a good thing, because “absolution activism” is a false solution anyway.

Back to the signs that have gone up in my neighborhood. They are a clear example of taking the “If only people knew the truth…” to an illogical extreme. Being a big city with nice weather, San Francisco has more than it’s share of homeless out on the streets. My neighborhood is not the worst in the city in that regard, but the only that I’ve noticed to try to address the problem by putting up infographics about what is and is not acceptable behavior.

There’s a lot more to say on this topic and, like many of my posts, this one has seemed to get away from me without my feeling like I’ve reached any sort of clarity. I expect this will not be my last word on the current disempowering nature of activism. Comments are welcome from those who both seek inspiration and to inspire.

Stan is currently in the desert of Nevada and “robo-blogging” while he’s gone. He wrote this last week and set it to publish today.

SHAC is a bit of a legend in activist circles. They believe that animals should be afforded the same rights and liberties that humans are and make the argument in terribly compelling ways. But beyond that, they use extremely effective but very controversial means to make their issue heard. It might mean visiting the personal residences of scientists that perform cruel animal testing and shouting at them with megaphones all day and night. It might mean protesting the New York Stock Exchange with such vehemence as to cause Huntingdon Life Sciences to be de-listed on NYSE. It might mean taping two pieces of black paper end-to-end in a circle and faxing it to Huntingdon Life Sciences, just to use up all of their fax paper and toner.

Ironically, it was this last act that they were finally busted for. Facing a heap of charges from destruction of private property (toner!) to conspiracy, the SHAC 7 were all convicted on felony charges. When asked why they did all of this to save a few animals, they said “I’m sure people through-out history were asked the same question—all this for a Black? Or all this for a Jew? Yes, all this for an animal.”

I went with several other activists to see “Your Mommy Kills Animals” (named for a brochure distributed by PETA) to learn more about SHAC. What we got was an exposé on how animal rights groups all hate eachother and destroy property a lot. However, it was just subtle enough to masquerade as a critical look into what strategies work and which don’t.

The first clue that there might be something awry were these two talking heads that the documentarians kept interspersing right before or after potentially compelling arguments from the very eloquent SHAC 7. They seemed to subtly undercut the logic of the protagonists. The first was David Martosko, of the Center for Consumer Freedom, and the second Iain Murray, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. These are Right Wing think-tanks that basically get paid to spew bullshit for video cameras. CEI, as I may have mentioned before, are the brains behind those fabulous “Carbon Dioxide: They call it pollution, we call it life!” commercials.

It turns out the producer of “Your Mommy Kills Animals”, Curt Johnson, has also produced “Michael Moore Hates America” back in 2004 and his next film is called “Devil’s Weed”, described as “a documentary that examines the loss of civil liberties associated with the public smoking ban in Minneapolis, Minnesota.” Co-producing is Maura Flynn of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Yes, a loss of civil liberties… We all recall Amendment 7: “Congress shall make no law preventing you from smoking in bars.” I wonder if we lost that with the Patriot Act?

There were other moments that made me doubt the film’s sincerity, like the poor music choices (I’m sorry, busting out Rage Against the Machine for a movie supposedly made in the last few years?) and the repeated use of the most violent and confrontational footage they had. It all came unraveled when I was talking to two animal rights activist friends who had wanted to go see it and asked me about some parts of the movement that I soon realized were obviously glaring omissions in the documentary. Clearly, its point was not to plant the seeds of knowledge in those looking to learn more about animal rights, but to sow the seeds on dissent within the movement itself. To the animal welfare people, it showed a crazy and out-of-control animal rights faction. To the animal rights people, it showed a hypocritical and ineffectual animal welfare industry. The Sea Shepherds hate SHAC for being young punks, SHAC hates PETA for selling-out, everyone hates ALF because they threaten people’s lives.

This is not the case, while I’m sure that everyone gravitates to organizations most in line with their own politics, most of the organizations I know more than casually understand the “spectrum theory” of activism. More radical groups need less radical groups to act respectable in order to negotiate, less radical groups need more radical groups to provide pressure to bring power-holders to the table. The animal rights movement is the same way. Even if “Your Mommy Kills Animals” tries to deceive you into thinking they’re at each other’s throats, if you go to the SHAC site and check out their links page, the very first one is to PETA.

This is the first of a few posts I’m robo-blogging from Burning Man. I wrote it last week and set it to go off today.

Yesterday’s Yes Men antics re-awakened conversations around my office about doing more microphone stealing and “identity correction“. We’re no strangers to the method (at the time of this post, a search for “yesmen oil” on YouTube shows a past action as the second link) but my teeth still clench when I hear Aikido Activism misused. Hint: it doesn’t mean “use their strength against them”.

The phrase Aikido Activism, as far as I can tell, originates from an essay of the same name by Reed Burkhart, though the idea has been floating around for a while now (and even used by the bad guys). He describes it as:

a new form of activism combining corporate reform, financial markets strategies, entrepreneurship, et al.

In short, leveraging the power that corporations wield in today’s society by turning bad companies into good ones. That’s pretty close to the mission statement of my place of employment, but a greater understanding of aikido itself might illuminate exactly how such a thing is done.

I was part of a dojo for just over a year, reaching the rank of 5th kyu—which sounds impressive until you realize that a guy off the street starts at 6th kyu. Like the most effective activism, aikido is entirely non-violent. The goal is to neutralize an attack while having compassion for the attacker. It’s perhaps better described via explanation of the first three techniques I was taught and what I would consider their Aikido Activism analogs.

Iriminage. Meaning “turning throw”, iriminage is also called the 20 Year Technique (i.e., it takes two decades to learn it). The first step is to get out of the way of the attack. If you stand still, you get hit and violence wins. Get out of the way and your attacker may follow. If so, you have a chance to step behind. In order to press the attack, the attacker must turn to face you. You turn in place and quickly raise your center of gravity and your arm with it. The attacker, trying to avoid getting hit but also in motion, bends backward. If you step through the attacker completely loses balance and falls over.

Ikkyo. I think technically this means “first lesson” but, for reasons already mentioned, it’s best to get iriminage in the oven before moving on. The first step is to get out of the way of the attack—honestly, this is the first step in every aikido technique but the first urge in so many people is to go on the offensive and make it a contest of strength. Don’t do that. With ikkyo, you let the attack happen but not connect. Then you grab the attack as it zooms past, preferably by the wrist. Since the attack was trying to hit you, there’s power behind it (this is probably where the “use their strength against them” myth comes from). As you turn, put your other hand on the attacker’s shoulder and you create an axis around their hips that they will rotate on, in order to stay attached to their fist. Suddenly, you’ve got them pinned. It can surprise you the first time you get it right.

Kokyudosa. We would end all of our training sessions with kokyudosa. You sit on your knees, facing your partner. You lay your hands on your knees, palms up, and your partner grabs your wrists. You have to throw them from this position. Beginners twist and turn and writhe, teachers watching and probably trying not to laugh. Eventually you discover that if you settle into your own weight and project your hands beyond your partner—trying to grab a ball 100 yards behind them—the dynamic shifts instantly and they go flying. Like magic.

Doing these techniques at a protest, on riot cops, would land you in jail fast. Even though they’re “non-violent”, police officers like to be in charge and pinning them wounds egos if not bodies. Instead, consider them metaphorically.

Iriminage is about finding the moment where the cycle of destruction depends on you, and seizing the opportunity to end it. A boycott, for instance, is consumers realizing that corporations require people to buy their stuff in order to exist. For publicly traded companies, shareholder activism is a similar tactic. Once the corporation is listening, you can raise the expectations of social responsibility like you would your arm, to the point where they will either have to meet them or fall over backwards.

Ikkyo is about pitting the attacker’s desire for destruction against their desire for self-preservation. Sending the two in different directions means they can’t have both and they will almost always choose the latter. You can see this when activists raise the reputational risk around a project without explicitly targeting a corporation. Since the public is quick to damn corporate greed in the abstract but loath to criticize specific ones, this has the effect of giving corporations a choice of continuing an irresponsible behavior or keeping their name clean.

Kokyodosa is about projection. When we, as activists, are focused on the fight and not the future we wriggle and squirm and come up empty. When we formulate a vision for the world we want ten, twenty-five, or fifty years from now we can act with calm and confidence in the moment, which in turn gives us strength beyond our own expectations.

Of course, these are just simple examples and the Yes Men are black belts. They employ all sorts of advanced aikido techniques, like leading (gaining audiences’ trust before springing the trap) and stealing balance (turning normally stolid executives flustered and defensive). Since I’ve recently started to get calls at my office for someone who is not me, inviting me to have dinner with President Bush and serve on Business Advisory Councils, I think I need to enroll at their dojo and finally make it to 4th kyu.

Ended up as as pretty long post. Credit to Oscar Ratti for the art from Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere, the best illustrations of aikido in motion I’ve ever seen.

The basic situation is this: For-profit companies go away if they don’t make money (their stated goal). Non-profit organizations can labor on indefinitely even if they don’t make progress on fulfilling their mission statement (their stated goal).

There are lots of directions to go from here. First, a little clarification. While you’ll frequently see for-profit companies running a loss (i.e. supported by venture capital until they become profitable) those companies do eventually disappear if the market doesn’t support them. Consider Pets.com for an example (described by Wikipedia as “a leading icon of the dot-com bubble”). Contrast this with the (at the time) scathing rebuke of non-profit successes from “Death of Environmentalism“.

Over the last 15 years environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combating global warming. We have strikingly little to show for it.

Fifteen years of not running a profit is relatively unheard of in the for-profit world. After a few quarters, their shareholders are up-in-arms demanding more responsible management. This often means tightening business focus (often accompanied with closing plants and laying off workers), which gets to a fundamental difference between nons and fors. Closing offices and laying off non-profit workers does not help them achieve their mission, in fact it makes it harder. The equivalent in the non-profit world is to “liquidate” their mission, by making it less aggressive and thus easier to achieve. Ta-da, we’re “profitable” again!

The question of “How can non-profits be more like for-profits?” comes up all the time (and the various pros and cons are well-summarized by this article over at N-TEN). Honestly, some afflictions attributed solely to non-profits (like “Founders Syndrome“) can be seen in the for-profit world, as well.

What doesn’t get asked as often is, “How can for-profits be more like non-profits?” Namely, what if the mission of a company shifted from “Make money by producing Product X.” to “Make the best Product X possible.”? I’m not claiming that this isn’t the goal of 90% of the employees of any company, but it’s still not the stated goal. There are obviously financial considerations that make this an unapologetically idealistic and not realistic suggestion, but it’s a worthy thought exercise. How would business practices change?

The specific discussion last night (and I should mention that the representatives for the for-profit-but-not-evil company and non-profit-but-often-frustrating organization tended to agree on a lot) mostly circled around how non-profits keep growing without a way to hold ineffective ones accountable. I would say that, like for-profits, non-profits are providing a product/service/utility that, if the public values, will get funded by donations. It might not be a thing you can hold in your hands (like a Coke can), it may just be a feeling that you’re part of the solution—which many people value even more. This is the beauty behind social entrepreneurship.

I’ve mentioned before that I worry that truly revolutionary communication is fast becoming impossible. I’m not one of those “there are no creative works left for our generation!” kinds of artists; instead I’d trace the problem to a new totalitarian semiosis. Let’s define those words quickly.

to·tal·i·tar·i·an, adj.

of or relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state

sem·i·o·tics, n.

the study of signs and symbols, how meaning is constructed and understood

Let’s dive a bit deeper, shall we? By totalitarian, I am not referring to any government that controls its people by force, as is commonly understood by the word. We don’t live in that kind of culture. Police are not beating down my door, I’m allowed to vote and even have a blog to express my views, for the most part people don’t disappear to some secret prison.

Still, ideas concerning what a life might be like where I didn’t pay rent or concerning a life-long romantic partnership that was not a state-sanctioned marriage are difficult to express if only because we lack both the literal vocabulary but also the emotional vocabulary to allow such feelings to transfer between one another. For this reason, I make a distinction between semiotics and semantics, as I’m primarily interested in the emotional resonance of a phrase and not its discrete meaning. Looking up “Hippie” will probably not accurately convey what is meant by calling someone one. Maybe I’m still rehashing The Spectacle.

Last week I chatted with Patrick Reinsborough of smartMeme concerning my thoughts on activating the creative class (more on that some other time). He brought up his surprise and fascination with Capitalism’s ability to account for the Commons, which he had previously thought an incorruptibly non-Capitalist idea. Indeed, even anti-Capitalist ideas have a place in Capitalism. In fact, as Capitalism grows more oppressive and undesirable, demand for anti-Capitalist or revolutionary ideas grows, creating a price point for dissent. All is accounted for. Patrick describes such a world and offers some solutions in his seminal “Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination“.

Yesterday, I walked into a comics store and walked out with “Channel Zero“. The introduction from Warren Ellis claims:

We’re in cultural lockstep, taking holidays in other people’s misery, asking for our stinking badges, dead heads nodding over phosphordot fixes.

The actual comic follows Jennie 2.5, a media activist who gradually becomes a media terrorist, who gradually becomes just a face on a t-shirt like Che Guevara (sidenote: a friend tried to get “ClicheGuevara” as an AIM name, but it was taken). Though the book was written in 1997 and imagines a world of overt censorship—this was in the middle of Giuliani’s rampage against art—it gets everything else right. It’s not apathy that undercuts the modern revolution, it’s that revolution reaffirms the status quo. Subversion has been subverted.

Nor is the truth being suppressed. Bush gets caught violating the Constitution left and right. How many scandals can he weather? Honestly, he can probably keep going until the food runs out. The American that needs to revolt in order for revolution to occur, the mass consumers of mass media that provides the social mass that lowers the momentum of social change to zero, doesn’t have it that bad. But when they do, will they realize it?

Perhaps brigades of Black Bloc standing against riot cops are doing more than inviting violence. Perhaps they’re taking and holding the territory necessary in case the rest of us need to join them. Considering that Giuliani is the current Republican front-runner, we may both get another chance re-enact Channel Zero.

Working in the communications department of an environmental non-profit, a film about the disinformation campaigns staged by energy companies about global warming probably wasn’t going to contain a truckload of surprises for me. In fact, I cover such things all the time on this blog. It did surprise me how the filmmakers managed to make a potentially bleak subject pretty funny (they describe it as a “toxic comedy”) while leaving the issue its deserved respect.

Before the showing, writer/director Daniel Gold addressed the crowd. The film had began years ago and, after months and months of researching for a film about whether or not global warming was real, it became absolutely clear to everyone that what was really needed was a film about why there’s still any doubt—they name it the “global warming gap”, or the difference between what scientists know to be true and what the public thinks. Journalist Ross Gelbspan puts it plainly in the film, “they’ve stolen our reality.”

Ross is but one of many heroes and villains interviewed in the film, I couldn’t help but think of him as the star. Years ago, he co-wrote an article about climate change and disease; skeptics immediately attacked it. His first reaction, as a journalist, was to research their side of the argument. Thinking the jury was still out in the scientific community, he backed off and even felt guilty. Later he discovered that these skeptics were all funded by the coal industry. He gets pissed and becomes determined to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. A decade later and Ross has retired because it’s too damn depressing. He shrugs to the camera, admitting that article after article has made no dent and that—his daughter sitting not three feet from him on the couch—we’re probably fucked. Another few years later and we see him pulled out of retirement by Katrina and traveling all over the nation speaking with high schools, colleges, the next generation. His is an irrepressible heroism.

The “next generation” is full of cameos of people I know. While climate crusader Bill McKibben inspires a crowd, we see Billy Parish listening intently. Billy has done his fair share of inspiring others as founder of the Climate Campaign and co-founder of Energy Action, the nation’s largest youth climate coalition. Another next-genner can be seen as the dastardly Competitive Enterprise Institute counter-protests a climate action shouting, “Greenpeace kills! Greenpeace kills!” Campaigner Dan Firger smiles at the camera, “uhm, we’re not even Greenpeace.”

I had mentioned before that I was worried that Nordhaus and Shellenberger, co-authors of “The Death of Environmentalism” didn’t come off as heroes. I’ve only met Nordhaus in person but followed the whole debate from a few years ago quite closely (just google “death of environmentalism“). The film gets them just right: smart as hell, a tad reckless, and more than a tad completely full of themselves.

Unfortunately, mine was the last screening at SFIFF, but you can learn more, get involved, and pre-order the DVD on the official website. It’s got more laughs than Inconvenient Truth, that’s for sure.