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.

Just last week, AT&T was in the news for two major stories, revealing them as… I think the legal term is “dicks”.

On Tuesday, classified documents were released confirming that they did indeed help the NSA with their warrantless wire-tapping activities. They didn’t just look the other way while the NSA did all the work but coordinated with them, re-routing traffic and purchasing equipment to make surveillance easier. The first of these “spy rooms” was constructed in San Francisco, about four blocks from my office. To be clear, this is not stepping out of the way to let justice be served—the wiretaps are illegal—it’s more like approaching a mugging in progress and offering the mugger a bigger gun.

Then on Wednesday, AT&T announced plans to “filter content” over the internet. They’ve outlined a plan where their servers will monitor the data packets sent through them and delete any that are found to by infringing on copyrights. They feel that somehow, by contributing to the infrastructure, they own what it carries. Imagine your water company deciding when you’re allowed to have water or your power company deciding when you’re allowed to have power. For even less of a stretch, imagine your telephone company (quite possibly AT&T) deciding which phone calls you can make or receive. Consider further that something like “copyrighted content” is not uniformly illegal, as legality depends on usage, and you’ve got a real bull-in-a-china-shop situation (fitting because filtering internet content is a criticism often aimed at the Chinese government).

Put these two together and you see an AT&T that uses their power irresponsibly and, quite possibly, illegally. Not an ideal partner for Apple, whose been trying to keep their image clean. Yet when the iPhone comes out on June 29th, the only way to get it is along with a Cingular/AT&T plan. What’s a nerd to do? Here are a few possible solutions.

Steve’s “blog” has recently had some fairly landmark posts on it about Apple’s perspective on DRM and their environmental policies, both of which have been in response to popular activist campaigns (the Free Software Foundation and Greenpeace, respectively). Perhaps they’d be willing to listen to reason on why telecommunications companies constantly monitoring our communications is not an ideal feature for “our digital life“.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) continues to fight the bully telecoms in multiple arenas. Oh that’s right, AT&T is also starkly against Network Neutrality and even funds astroturf groups to represent a non-existent public outcry in their favor. Almost forgot that. So the second possible solution is to set up a monthly donation to EFF equal to or exceeding your monthly donation (i.e. bill) to AT&T.

The last option is to wait for the iPhone to become available on Verizon (only marginally better on the Net Neutrality front) or another service. This could happen after the exclusive partnership with AT&T is over (see, even Apple gets locked into lame 2-year contracts) or by someone unlocking the iPhone so it can be used with other carriers.

My current plan is to wait on the iPhone. Mostly this is because I’ve learned my lesson on buying 1st generation new product lines from Apple, having purchased one of the first G4s back in 2000 and one of the first MacbookPros last year. Both are phenomenal machines, with just a few kinks that have since been worked out. But, unless I wait the full 5 years, this doesn’t address the political aspects of avoiding AT&T. Also to consider: does it make a damn difference? I’ve been boycotting Sony for almost ten years now and I don’t think anyone but my mom even knows. Ultimately, I think it’s a “can you look at yourself in the mirror-like shiny Apple logo?” issue. And that’s a question we need to ask ourselves over more than just the phone we use.