It’s workplanning season where I work and everyone is struggling to incorporate the organization’s anti-oppression and diversity initiatives into their priorities. On the one hand, I’m very lucky because I’ve got the web in my corner—clearly the biggest force for democracy since the printing press. On the other hand, thinking outside of the server-shaped box is sometimes difficult for the technically minded and there’s clearly a huge difference between the possibilities inherent to the medium and the capabilities of a small web team at a non-profit. What follows is not a list of the projects I’m pursuing over the next 12 months, but the principles that are guiding my brainstorming. Please feel free to suggest some actual projects (or challenge my anti-oppression analysis).

Oppression, as I’m using the term, is ideological domination resulting in exploitation of one social group for the benefit of another. Racism is a form of oppression based on ethnicity, valuing (at least in the United States) people of European descent over African, Native American, etc. Sexism is another based on gender and there are lots more. A common tendency is that these dominant ideologies tend to be both reinforced from a centralized source (mass media) and also internalized by oppressor and oppressed alike—to the point where (for example) a woman might believe that she could never be as good a lawyer as a man because she’s “too emotional”.

Now, some ideas on how the web can help.

Open the vectors. McKenzie Wark’s “A Hacker Manifesto” (have I mentioned I love manifestos?) well describes a Vectoralist Class which maintains its power largely by controlling access to information, not land or wealth. Considering the role that mass media plays in reaffirming oppressive narratives (e.g. all African American youth are in gangs), opening the vectors so that marginalized stories can be told is an immediate disruption. This process involves relinquishing editorial control and finding alternative methods of distribution, for instance community-generated feeds replacing hand-picked content or facilitating non-traditional authorship (i.e. stewarding content from an oppressed community to the mass media). It’s important to examine both the input and output, so the content that’s being produced (and valued) and the ways it’s being disseminated without being manipulated to conform to pre-existing standards.

Interrupt feedback loops. The coder in me might suggest that power and privilege seem (ironically?) to follow a Power Curve. A Power Curve, aka Zipf Law, aka the Pareto Principle is a relationship exhibited in lots of situations, but most often when previous performance affects future performance—called the Yule Process. Popular websites get linked to more often than non-popular websites, making them more popular. Books that sell well appear on lists or are talked about, making them sell better. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. On the web, it was pointed out long ago that there’s still a lot of area under the curve and the web lacks the necessity of focus that makes the it possible to dominate an entire field. Amazon.com isn’t limited by shelf space, it can offer a book that sells very few copies. A local movie theater has to show movies it knows will make money so it can pay rent; YouTube doesn’t. LonelyGirl15 or ZeFrank are stars without ever having begged Paramount to distribute them.

Challenge the story. Digging up dirt seems like what the internet does best. As our failing Fourth Estate sleeps on the job, citizen media and general muckrakers do their job for them. It’s not just journalism-type information that’s getting out into the public because of the internet. The amazing Maplight project (which just won NetSquared’s Innovation Award) connects corporations that give legislators money to how those legislators then vote on legislation supporting those corporations. Following the money and seeing how bought your Senator is has never been easier. Personally, I think this would be one of the biggest (and first) losses if network neutrality failed to be safeguarded.

Man, this was a hard one to write. Everyday posts are a bitch.

Late last week, I watched Kapitaal by Studio Smack (link via TypeForYou) and was enrapt by the degree to which we are subjected to the power of design every day. Yesterday, walking through San Francisco’s Mission District, I had a flashback to Kapitaal and suddenly the answer to the questions I brought up in my last post emerged fully-formed, like Athena, from my head.

The Achilles Heel (lots of Greek metaphors today) of running corporate campaigns like RAN does is that corporations can outspend you. Markets campaigning goes for the jugular, in terms of reputation or branding, but a giant like Exxon or Ford can drop millions into a PR campaign to combat your educational outreach. Anyone who reads Stanifesto regularly has witnessed my ire for PR campaigns that do exactly that.

But these companies don’t do this all by themselves. They hire people to do it. They hire smart, creative people. They hire people who (and I’ve met a lot of them) are either completely full of self-loathing at being shills for gas-guzzlers, cigarettes, and war or are extremely thankful that they get to do something creative with their lives and merely rise to the abstract challenge of selling “n” units of product “x” with a budget of “$”. Design, at its core, is problem-solving. Lately, the problem has been stated in terms of units, products, and dollars… but it doesn’t need to be. We must change the challenge.

Joe Pytka has won countless Emmys for his creative and technically flawless commercials. A few years ago, he directed three spots for Chevron’s “Will You Join Us?” campaign. The campaign itself is merely to spread FUD about energy issues. A design community that recognizes any contribution to that campaign with an award, whether beautiful or not, is a community that is delirious. A magazine printed on 100% virgin paper cannot be great. A website inaccessible to non-sighted visitors cannot be great. The criteria for great design must be adjusted to reflect our modern values.

I’m not saying anything new. If you’ve ever read a copy of Adbusters you know that design is sick and needs medicine. If you’ve read Emigre’s “First Things First 2000” essay, or even the original from 1964, you know that these things have been discussed. Fists have been raised. So what’s any different now?

Now we can imagine a corporate campaign against design firms. We should name names instead of drop names. Which firms are perpetuating oppression and poverty, promoting greed and consumption, and rewarding want? Which designers are providing the skilled labor for the white-washing, green-washing, or any other CMYK combination of washing for Corporate America? Which designs, full of the spiritual investments by creative people, end up as just tools in the toolchest of maintaining corporate power? Find them. Expose them.

Markets campaigns work. Designers are sympathetic but need some tough love. With great creativity comes great responsibility.

Envision a world where the creative class realizes their power in shifting culture and stands accountable for doing it in healthy ways. Imagine advertising firms refusing to represent products untruthfully. Picture marketing becoming a new ally, not an enemy, to a sustainable world. Watch it spread across other creative lines: musicians refusing to license their songs to unethical commercials, writers forsaking puff pieces for real investigative journalism.

You and me free of the constant fear that people are trying to trick us into buying shit we don’t need, free to live our life in personally meaningful ways… that’s the world I want to live in. That’s the world I want to help design. Who’s with me?

I just finished reading “How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul” by Adrian Shaughnessy. It was very heavy on the how-to-being part and a little less so on the without-losing part. While I’d recommend the book highly to anyone looking for more about running a studio, forming and developing client relationships, and forging their own path through the design world, it left me wondering where else we can go as designers to take an active role in forming a bright new world.

Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth (I do love my manifestos) has been hanging next to my desk for years now, and I was very pleased to see that his studio has joined forces with Institute Without Boundaries to form MASSIVE CHANGE. It endeavors to do exactly what I described above, move smart, creative people out from behind their drafting tables and in front of the social steering wheel.

They share this vision with (and were recently interviewed by) Worldchanging. I had a chance to hear Alex Steffan speak at South by Southwest Interactive this year and his presentation honestly brought me to tears. The simple idea of fostering giant culture shift via applied imagination struck me as not only plausible but immensely fun! In web design, I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of writing semantically meaningful, standards compliant code; creating a sustainable future is the same challenge raised to the power of the human race.

I just purchased the Worldchanging book (coincidentally designed by the same guy who wrote the foreword to “How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul”) and the MASSIVE CHANGE book. I’ll let you know when they’ve cured me of this ridiculous obsession with saving the planet.

Finally, I’ve decided that Kevin Cornell’s “Design Vigilantism” would be the perfect way to begin my life of extra-curricular world-saving via graphic and web design. Victims that need avenging may be suggested in the comments.

“My Final Prediction”, Bruce Sterling’s last column with Wired, ends:

As a futurist, I’ve often licked my chops over rather grim possibilities. But my lasting fondness for the dark side is a personal taste, not an analysis. I’m frequently surprised, and when I consider the biggest surprises, I’m heartened that they were mostly positive. The Internet, for instance, crawled out of a dank atomic fallout shelter to become the Mardi Gras parade of my generation. It was not a bolt of destructive lightning; it was the sun breaking through the clouds.

Please, Bruce, you’re not a Futurist. And your “fondness for the dark side” is like my “fondness” for The White Stripes. I would like to like them, but I don’t actually like them. As soon as no one’s looking, I switch back to AFX and Autechre.

Futurists are violent, callous, and remorseless. An art project in college had me memorizing the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, and I can still recall the good bits:

Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! Oh, factory gutter! I savored a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!

We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired, for they are nourished by fire, hatred, and speed! Does this surprise you? It is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!

Futurists would love the world we’ve created today. Essentially, their manifesto has manifested. Even television commercials have wholly adopted Futurist values. Faster transactions with your credit card! Higher horsepower for your SUV! More blades on your safety razor! Louder crunch in your snack food!

Nope. I’ve heard Sterling speak before and I was not left wanting to destroy museums or build my own rocket pack. He had the closing remarks at last year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference. After an hour of decrying the state of the world, failed governments and devastated ecosystems, he described the beautiful world that was possible and, in a tearful rendition of Carl Sandburg’s “The People, Yes!” drove the point home. I couldn’t continue without quoting the poem myself.

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
…
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”

No, Bruce. Sorry to say it, but you’re a humanist. Maybe, on some days, a transhumanist—but mostly just a humanist. I know it sucks to be a happy, optimistic writer sometimes (what do you do for angst?) but you’ve given us a beautiful vision of an ecological sustainable future, so don’t fight your nature. No pun intended.

Sorry this post looks like a Clips Show. I’m getting sick and needed some extra sleep.

The term “Conspicuous Consumption” was coined in 1899 to describe (with no small amount of disdain) the buying patterns of the Nouveau Riche. They suddenly had lots of money and wanted to let everyone know. Huge cars, lavish mansions, fur coats, sparklin’ dookie, etc.

Who’s sexier: George Cloonery or Al Gore?

The same thing seems to be happening with the trend-setting creative class in the present day. These Nouveau Righteous have developed a conscience and, by god, they’re going to let people know. Fashion magazines this summer were abuzz with the new “Eco-Chic” trend (as opposed to Eco-Chick, which is always in season). Everyone was checking labels to make sure they were toting certified organic, sustainably cultivated, fair-trade clutch bags that really reflected their worldly values on the way to the plastic surgeon for lipo, in their Hummer.

Evangeline Lilly thinks you should wear more hemp.

Making known one’s ethical affiliations is nothing new. Bumper-stickers proclaiming preferences for love-making over war-making could have grandkids by now and the colored-ribbon frenzy of the 90s has merely evolved into the colored-bracelet frenzy of the 00s (no, not that one). Still, there’s something about the ultra-ubiquitous white iPod as symbol for cultural capital that suggested to me that this (RED)^TM coalition was more about capitalism than activism. Afterall, fancy iPods and Bono go hand-in-hand.

The (RED)^TM campaign (yes, they’ve trademarked the term “(RED)”) has a wonderful manifesto that explains their intention with the branding strategy. My favorite bit is reproduced below:

(RED) is not a charity. It is simply a business model. You buy (RED) stuff. We get the money, buy the pills and distribute them. … If they don’t get the pills, they die. We don’t want them to die, we want to give them the pills…

Does that read like a protection racket to anybody else? “Hey kid, buy this iPod or Africans die. I could help ‘em out y’know, all you gotta do is buy this iPod. C’mon, you wouldn’t want anything bad should happen.” This is strange to me, because the (RED)^TM products seem to be priced exactly the same as their non-African saving contemporaries, what kind of “business model” is that?

The new face of activism?

In the end, I don’t think this campaign is truly about leveraging the power of consumption to help resolve the world’s tragedies, it’s leveraging the world’s tragedies—and the incredible transformative power of activism—to further fuel consumption. Otherwise, we could skip the iPods and just send $10 to The Global Fund ourselves and save $189 plus tax. The truth is that many corporate business plans rely on Third World poverty to keep costs down and if we really want to address global inequities, it’s probably not best accomplished by pouring money into the very institutions that have perpetuated them.

Are there documents as vital and world-changing out there today? Probably, but I would be surprised if they are immediately recognizable as such. Afterall, it was 13 years between the 95 Theses and the founding of the Lutheran Church (though Marty was condemned after only 4).

My favorite of the original 95 Theses, posted in the crisp October of 1517, would have to be good old #86:

86. Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?

And since we’re on the subject of Theseses, I might as well mention my other two favorite collections (always in flocks of 95).

The Cluetrain Manifesto (have I mentioned that I love manifestos?), was written back in 1999 and did much to foretell both the fall of the Dot Coms (clueless money-making schemes) and the subsequent rise of Web 2.0 (still largely clueless money-making schemes, but who have at least figured out the power of community). My highlight from these Theses?

57. Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

I’ve heard Craig Newmark describe exactly that strategy as why his list works so well.

Finally, I recently discovered the 95 Theses of Geek Activism, posted just a few days ago. It’s slightly different from these other two in that it’s, pardon the clergy-related pun, preaching to the choir. Still, whereas the others are meant to stir up conflict in hopes that a good resolution will come of it, these Theses actually provide some good advice on how to make change. The most confrontational:

73. We do not lock the door to our bedrooms or bathrooms because we have something to hide. We do not secure our networks, conversations, emails and files because we have something to hide.

This statement made me really think about why I do lock my bedroom door and how the media commonly casts privacy and security as mutually exclusive enemies—which is a lot more provocative and engaging than what I was thinking about before that. Something like, “Wow. Martin Luther looks a lot like Vincent D’Onofrio.”