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.

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.