Evangelizing

It seems that we are looking for some sort of way to organize these widespread and connected and institutionalized changes in human consciousness. But somehow, I feel that a large part of effecting change is far more subtle. Do we need to have “a series of structured dialogues…held simultaneously and linked electronically”? (Towards a New Consciousness) Or do we need to change the subjects of the conversations held in living rooms and cul-de-sac driveways? Somehow, we have to create a “buzz.” And maybe this institutionalized approach is the way to do it. Ask marketers. Their goal is to get people to talk about their products. They want to turn regular consumers into ambassadors and advertisements. I feel that this is a highly effective way to generate change.

So, I wonder, how do I become an ambassador for a new consciousness?

Back when I lived in “regular America” with lots of “regular Americans” (a.k.a. the semi-affluent suburbs of Kansas City), I had plenty of opportunities to plant seeds of sustainability, but was often afraid I would also indelicately rip out the deep roots of materialism. I knew it would make people uncomfortable.

I remember how much my ex-boyfriend’s mother loved to talk about how she redecorated her entire house every two or three years. She would talk at great length about new wallpaper and curtains and furniture. Even then, I found it wasteful and ridiculous. She spent a great deal of energy to talking about things to make herself appear rich and vaguely interesting, so I did not want to disappoint what appeared to be a very important goal—impressing those around her. Her like-minded friends would respond with their own stories of recent purchases or plans for redecorating. So I pretended to be impressed and vaguely interested by nodding approvingly.

But should I have taken that opportunity to talk about how I dreamed of buying or inheriting one hardwood kitchen table and using it until the day I died? And how I found that material goods with a long history and lots of stories to be far more enriching of my surroundings than a brand new, yet highly fashionable, coffee table produced in a factory and sold at the sprawling Nebraska Furniture Mart?

She might have considered it rude. She may have thought my response quaint or odd. She may have brushed it off as the weird aspirations of a hippie environmentalist. Yet, judging by the evolving reactions and behavior of my family—bonafide “regular Americans”—to my environmentalist nudges and suggestions, even initial brush-offs or demeaning stereotyping can give way to reconsideration of their ways of thinking and acting.

We should not shy away from “bearing witness” of our ideals. Even if they diverge from accepted cultural norms, our professing them without being judgmental should not be considered rude. So let us go forth and gently spread the gospel.

Capitalism 2.0

Check out Umair Haque and "The Smart Growth Manifesto." He makes great points about the importance of rethinking growth, how we define it, and how we value it. The piece envisions an economy driven by outcomes, connections, people, and creativity.

"Capitalism 2.0 cannot be powered by growth 1.0: that's why the race for smart growth is inevitable. The economic pressure -- the potential for value creation, in a world being ripped apart by value destruction -- is simply too great."

We've been thinking a lot about what Haque calls "Capitalism 2.0," and a number of issues arise:

1. Does Capitalism 2.0 even include capitalism?

2. What does growth mean? Growth of what? Capabilities? Services? Satisfaction?

We are not sure yet, but we are pretty sure that material, energy, and water consumption needs to decrease. Not necessarily because of resource shortage, supply is not the issue, but because the biosphere cannot sustain the waste and pollution produced by our material consumption. Conversely, we are pretty sure that increasing access to services, social goods, and personal satisfaction is desirable.

3. What growth's role in the new economy? How do we promote the above goals without increasing material and energy use?

We are working on how to re-design consumerism and consumption to inspire broader social and environmental change.

Thoughts? Pontifications?

Exponential civilization - and a look at communications approaches

A friend sent me this video by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Bronman. Though the video focuses on the exponential rate of change in information technology I think it is an interesting example of effective web video design that we might want to think about for our communications projects.


Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

Thoughts? Is this too group specific in its message - to people who are already the technologically literate and reflective? I think it might be useful for getting to think about the pace of change. How could a similar approach get people to reflect (in a productive, not just "gee-wiz," way) on the increases in consumerism?

"Make No Little Plans" - Some advice from urban planner and architect Daniel Burnham

This year is the 100th anniversary of the Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago, perhaps the zenith of the City Beautiful period of American City Planning - an era characterized by optimism for the perfection of the city and the betterment of every individual. Burnham was renowned in his day as an urban planner and architect architect of numerous early skyscrapers and planner of the Chicago world's fair of in 1893. Though not realized in his lifetime, Burnham's plan of Chicago has continued to influence the development of the city over the last century, particularly the development of a coninous public park along the lake-shore. In rememberance of grand visions of social betterment, let us marinate ourselves in his famous dictum, "Make no little plans."

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big."

Enjoy the snow out there today.

Nowtopia - Chris Carlsson

An interesting interview that is highly relevant to our discussions. How do we create the world you want to live in? This guy has some answers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_pfDjnbWuQ

Complexity Economics and some fundamental questions

How do we increase the well-being of society? What is long term growth and how can it be attained? What is "wealth" anyway? These questions form one of the central threads running through Eric Beinhocker's aptly named The Origin of Wealth.

Wealth is typically measured in terms such as Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and GDP/capita. It arises from increasing productivity per hour; where production means adding value from one state to another - for example: shaping metal into an auto body or delivery tomatoes from field to supermarket. So wealth is our ability to buy things that we want and on a national scale the total amount of things that we want. The value of each product classically depends both on its rarity (constraints in supply) and human needs or wants (demand). But as Robert Kennedy spoke:

"Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife. And the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

How can we develop a better measure of the well-being of a people? The UN's 'Human Development Index' and Bhutan's 'Index of Gross National Happiness' are examples of attempts to balance traditional material wealth with personal fulfillment, community strength, and political efficacy in measures of national success. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics) A potentially critical failing of these models is that they continue to include traditional measures of "wealth" that are then modified by other social factors which in principle adjust for the negative consequences of that wealth generation.

In The Origin of Wealth, business consultant and writer Eric Beinhocker attacks the fundamental assumptions of traditional economics and argues for a new approach he labels "complexity economics" that seeks to understand the evolving dynamic systems of irrational agents that is our real economy. One of the criteria that he lays out in his attack on classical economics is that any new theory must agree up and down with existing theory, including physics, chemistry, and biology.

The equilibrium models employed by economics not only violate the emergent principles of complex systems but are used to justify normative prescriptions for economies that run counter to established principles of physics, chemistry, and biology (particularly the concept of limitless growth propounded by technological optimists given constraints on energy extraction, climate change and biodiversity loss to name but a few). In particular, as 'Sir Arthur Eddington once famously remarked "If your theory is found to be against the second law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope."' Much more could be said on this topic but I want to focus on the specific bit that leads to a new definition of wealth with new potential for measurement.

Beinhocker argues that rather than being a metaphor in economics, entropy is actual entropy, an idea first suggested by economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. An economy obviously consists of a great many ordered products. In almost all situations, when we say "value added" we really mean increased order - typically achieved by the consumption of a greater amount of energy in the form of food (labor) or fossil fuels. However, value isn't just the result of increasing order but also the result of human valuation: the fitness of an object or service at satisfying human needs or wants.

From this context, Beinhocker suggests a new definition of wealth creation consisting of three criteria, which he calls Georgescu-Roegen criteria:
1. Non-reversability
2. Increasing order, and
3. A fitness function (dependent on the human, material, and social context)
So, for example, an Armani suit might be worth much more than a wool parka on Wall Street, but in the Alaskan wilderness the reverse is true.

But does this definition help with Robert Kennedy's call for a better way of measuring if we are "proud to be Americans?"

I believe it does, if used in concert with measures of well-being, health, and efficacy. Such a definition of wealth would require a different measure of value creation that would better account for the consequences of drawing down natural capital or dissipative pollution that is hard to clean up or recycle, for example.

Communication Class – Memetic Engineering 101

Wednesday evening was the first “proper” meeting of our Re-Imagining Capitalism seminar, during which we tackled the sticky topic of communication strategy from the comfort of the Dean’s stylish, new meeting room in Kroon Hall .

Most of the preparatory materials assigned for the class had a strategic rather than academic bent. Our goal here, which we stated at the outset of the 3-hour discussion, was to really explore the details of what makes communication effective. How can communication strategies be leveraged not only to transmit ideas, but also to incite action? If we truly believe that our economic system is in need of reform and we’d like to communicate that message, then we need to know:

1. How to structure the message content
2. What medium or method of delivery to use
3. How to penetrate ideological barriers
4. How to reach the broadest or most appropriate audience

Putting strictly economics-related questions aside, we focused on how to engineer effective, targeted, and hopefully “viral” communication regardless of its content. We watched a few YouTube clips to get us warmed up for the discussion, and to give us some concrete material for testing out the hypotheses presented in our readings:


“The Crying Indian”
Launched by Keep America Beautiful on Earth Day, 1971



An insidious video, since the “Indian” isn’t even Native American, and the video was a targeted guilt-trip funded by litter-producing industries. But an enduring classic nonetheless – extremely successful in propagating its anti-littering message. Dean Speth said he recalled the ad’s original appearance, and that though anyone would likely see it as hokey now, it managed to be convincingly touching back then.



“Coal”
by freeloveforum



Hilarious. But though it’s extremely effective at entertaining and galvanizing a target audience of us sustainability-oriented folk, this isn’t a video that’s likely to reach far beyond our circle. It perverts an existing conservative public service announcement “frame”, and turns it into a biting commentary. But to find it funny, you have to be able to draw a parallel to existing “Clean Coal” messaging… and more fundamentally, understand why coal is “bad” to begin with.


“Yes We Can”
Barack Obama Music Video
by will.i.am, February 2008



A tribute to the unprecedented cyber-grassroots effectiveness of the Obama Campaign – perhaps there’s something to mimic there… This video, again, does a great job of mobilizing and inspiring an existing base of supporters. It appeals to progressives, who already buy into the assumptions that a multi-cultural world of equal opportunity is a great idea, but not necessarily to our gun-toting brethren in the boondocks. Oops, was that an offensive way to put it?


“Body Bags”
TV Ad produced by TheTruth.com



The Truth was widely viewed as an effective anti-smoking campaign. Whether it had large-scale impact on the apparent decline in smoking, the individual “Truth” campaign ads were usually at least somewhat shocking – one of the key features of “sticky” messaging, as we learned from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick.



Here’s an overview of some of the major points raised in our ensuing discussion – as I saw them – my classmates can feel free to comment and elaborate:

We probably devoted the most time to discussing the issue of “framing” which is wonderfully laid out in George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant . He points out that any form of communication is embedded in a frame of reference. Conservatives and progressives have their own mental frames that inform how they use language. For example, using the phrase “tax relief” automatically implies that taxes are some kind of painful affliction. Therefore, when progressives adopt that phrase, they’re automatically falling into the conservative frame, thereby shooting themselves in the foot, so to speak. We also discussed the implications of Lakoff’s proposal that conservatives and progressives operate with worldviews that parallel two distinct family models: the strict patriarchal family and the nurturing family.

Here are a few spin-off points that were made during our discussion of Lakoff and the importance of “framing” communication:

- Some frames appear to be “stronger” than others – particularly in terms of the inverses they imply. For example, if you’re not “Pro-Life” that must mean you’re… “Pro-Death”? Not too appealing.

- The importance of developing a common rhetorical framework – a linguistic ideology of sorts that we could use to start positively encoding the messages we ultimately craft. “Moving toward the Real Wealth economy” was a phrase most of us really liked (courtesy of George). The opposite of “Real Wealth,” which would be “Fake Wealth.” seems to accurately describe the piles of loot that have suddenly vanished into thin air along with the collapse of the financial sector. That’s obviously not the kind of wealth anyone wants. This could be an effective use of inverse framing.

- It was also noted that the conservative movement has spent millions of dollars funding the development of unified rhetoric and framing, whereas the progressive movement still uses rhetoric that’s splintered along the lines of various individual causes – environment, human rights, etc. This is something to remedy, and something that we should keep in mind.

- The idea of neutral frameworks or common ground. Is the use of pointedly neutral frameworks a good way to reach broad groups? It seems that respect for capitalism/free market economics is a potential neutral framework in the United States. A call to service – couched in terms of moral responsibility – is another fairly neutral framework.

- A point that came up several times in our discussion is the importance of the audience we’re hoping to target. Since our end-goal is to engineer broad social change in the organizational structure of our economy, we obviously need to reach a wide group of people. However is this best done all at once by targeting “the masses”? Or is it best to craft several tailored messages and disseminate them to different target groups? Perhaps it’s best to first mobilize a base of like-minded thinkers – i.e. focus on unifying progressives towards a common goal.

- Someone observed that we would all likely feel discomfort at communicating using the conservative rhetoric. Would using alternative frameworks just to push our point, regardless of how valid, be deceptive and manipulative? That’s another question.


Quite related to Lakoff’s were the points made in Jonathan Haidt’s talk on moral psychology, which we also watched in preparation for the class. Haidt describes a potential socio-biological reason why progressives and conservatives differ so significantly. For a complete overview, watch the talk – it’s under 20 minutes long and pretty illuminating.

These fundamental barriers that we face in communicating with large groups of people then intersect with more the basic problems of human attention span and memory. Chip and Dan Heath, in what is sure to become a marketing industry classic, picked up on terminology coined by Malcom Gladwell in The Tipping Point and came up with the six characteristics of a “sticky” message. Meaning, a message that is easily understood, remembered, and further transmitted. The six features that win out over our natural attention deficits are:

* Simple — find the core of any idea
* Unexpected — grab people's attention by surprising them
* Concrete — make sure an idea can be grasped and remembered later
* Credible — give an idea believability
* Emotion — help people see the importance of an idea
* Stories — empower people to use an idea through narrative


We didn’t discuss these points too extensively, because they seem pretty un-contentious. But we did make note of a couple of interesting examples that came up in both the Gladwell and Heath excerpts, and made a note to “file away” their advice for later use – once we’re actually doing some communicating.

Finally, we took a quick look at an excerpt from Michael Strangelove’s The Empire of Mind to briefly touch on our potential medium of communication. It seems that the Internet is today’s forum for reaching masses par excellence. We discussed whether it’s the appropriate medium for us, loosely concluding that it probably is. We also observed that the internet is a “scale-free” network, which means that if you hit the right nodes of traffic, you have instant access to millions. This kind of communicative power is unprecedented in history, but the sheer volume of online chatter can drown out any messages of “actual importance.” That’s why identifying the right nodes could be crucial. We briefly discussed writing an internet tracking program to determine where key nodes for our group might be found.


In conclusion: we are hoping to go about the communication of our ideas as strategically as possible, and we’re not ashamed to admit it. If it’s not exactly a revolution that we’re hoping to start, then at least something close to it. Let’s see how successful our attempts ultimately prove.



The readings for this class:


* Gladwell, Malcom. The Tipping Point. Chapter 3 – “The Stickiness Factor” (~50 pages)

* Haidt, Jonathan: The real difference between liberals and conservatives. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

* Hazen, Don. Don’t Think of an Elephant! Framing 101: How to Take Back Public Discourse pp. 3 – 34

* Heath, Chip and Heath, Dan. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die: “Introduction: What Sticks?” (21 pages)

* Strangelove, Michael. The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement Chapter 7 : “Utopic Capitalism, Global Resistance, and the New Public Sphere.” pp. 199 – 217



Another couple of video gems:

John McCain Parody:
John.he.is

Competitive Enterprise Institute
“We Call it Life”
This video is for real – not a parody.