Creative activism

A fair few years ago, various friends got annoyed when Iceland announced it was resuming commercial whaling, with the usual suspects being particularly quiet on the issue.

The creative friend, who used to work for Das Spiegel, pulled together some designs along the lines of ‘Only in Iceland can you eat a tourist attraction’, the practical friend with access to an office printer, turned the designs into A5 stickers, and closer to home the mischievous friend, mobilised some people, organised teams, and spread stickers across Icelandic tourist posters on the Underground.

2 weeks later an Icelandic MP stood up in parliament, to denounce whaling as bringing the country into disrepute, as evidenced by the wave of sabotaged posters he’d seen on his recent trip to London.

The example is not that subvertising works, or that a small group of passionate people can have an effect disproportionate to their numbers, the theme here is the alliance between creative types, perhaps ‘creativists’, and mischievous types, clearly ‘activists’.

There is a wealth of examples of creative brains playing with both campaign themes, advertising spaces, and in many cases simply aiming for a mind fuck. From adbusters, to Banksy, to the space hijackers. From the Billboard Liberation Front, to the Church of the Sub Genius and the Discordians, from the Reverend Billy to the Yes Men, there’s a lot of fun to be had here.

So the issue in mind, is how to connect creative types to the folk who are happy to risk arrest turning those creative ideas into subvertising, guerrilla or uncommissioned urban art. There are lots of design students, aspiring artists and bored graphic designers languishing at ad agencies, who I reckon would be up for doing the creative side. But is the existing activist movement, grassroots and otherwise, up for doing the dirty work – literally in the case of stencils and spray paints.

Perhaps an investigation into the communities that exist, the graffiti artists, the design forums, and the activists – well I know most the latter. Maybe a new tool, or better yet an organi online community, with some logistical support. Finally an idea or issue, to inspire, to generate a tidal wave of creative ideas something akin to deepwater horizon to mobilise both the creative and activist communities to jam the corporate mass media culture of advertising and marketing.

I have the skeleton of a project plan here, now I just need to find some cash, and some web developer time.

Email ends in themselves

Decision makers, especially political ones, respond to public pressure. Sending a lot of emails to an MP has an effect, even if they moan about it. Visiting them in person has a much greater effect, but few have the confidence to arrange that meeting, oh and MPs moan about that too. Taking direct action to stop the decision maker making the wrong decision has an even greater effect, but tends to get you arrested, which means that even if you have that confidence, you can’t do it every week. There’s lots of other activism in between.

Next week folk will be debating mobilisation strategies, and perhaps supporter journeys, for the upcoming campaign, and my question is will that debate be focused on email activism as an end in itself. Is the purpose of the campaign to generate a huge amounts of emails to the target, and to use those email participants to recruit more people to email the target, and then to reiterate ad nauseum, and to repeat with different emails to different targets until the internet melts.

An entire industry has grown up around email advocacy, using the tools of the marketer and one wonders why. My prejudice is that it’s a reflection of the over professionalization of the campaigning caste. That somehow by adopting corporate tools, key performance indices, critical path analysis and endless tracking we will effect positive change.

The problem is that this leads us to only do the things that can be tracked. You can split test an emails subject line, to see what maximises the open rate. You can test how likely people are to respond on a Friday afternoon, vs. a Monday morning. You can plot the frequency of emails, to achieve a saturation effect, than is proportional to your unsubscribe rate, but what you can’t do, is to do so with passion, imagination and the insane ambition that we can achieve change.

My prejudice is that sending lots of emails, is simply an excuse to find people who care that can be inspired into doing something more than just sending emails. The thinking is not unique, there are lots of ladders of engagement out there, but we don’t seem to resource putting this into practice.

How does one value offline activism, or deeper online activism, against the clear numbers game of Avaaz and 38 degrees. What is the value of blockading the Department of Transport – the charges have just been dropped – or having 100 conversations with others in your local community?



Email actions lead ultimately to fundraising leads, but as a tool to effect change they become less effective with every one you send. As decision makers become overwhelmed with standard emails, how long before they say enough is too much. One has to assume that donors think the same.

And if we maximise our ROIs measured about the KPIs set by the same digital consultants the targets are using, then it simply becomes the money game that we will surely loose. We are after all vastly outnumbered by the corporates.

So as a tool email gives me the reach to find people to do offline activism, or new things yet

Skeletons in the political closet

It’s cold outside, and for the sake of distraction I seem to be ploughing my way through the West Wing, and romantic tales of political skulduggery.

On Friday Chris Huhne resigned as Energy secretary, under the suspicion that he may have committed a crime 9 years ago. Yesterday 101 Tory MPs revolt against government policy on renewable energy, and the cause of dirty power surges ahead.

Now I’m not much of one for conspiracy theories, if for no reason than I think such things are difficult to keep secret, but I do believe in the establishment. A disorganised network of the great and good, who went to school and university with each other, who play golf, share lodges, port, cigars and the after dinner scheme.

I also believe in both political realities and the advantages of a journalist sitting on a good story, until it becomes worth something. Nine years is a long time for the police to consider whether a crime has been committed, especially when an MP is involved, albeit 9 years ago he was more of irrelevance to the political process.

So someone has been sitting on the story, and the case for 9 years, and now is the time they’ve decided to roll it out. Innocent or guilty, his reputation is tarnished, and the green agenda has suffered. The question is who? And why? And in the coincidence to the Tory MP rebellion is their a hidden hand of the big energy utilities, the nuclear industry? The fossil fuel lobby? Or simply that network of old chums looking out for one another.

I can’t really conceive why anyone would oppose a clean energy future, but that conspiracy exists. Someone, with money and power, orchestrated the hack on the University of East Anglia, and planned a media strategy around those emails in the lead up to Copenhagen. So if one conspiracy exists, perhaps there is some sanity to thinking the events of the last 48hrs, are the work of the same vested interests.

To conclude I’d hesitate to call Huhne a martyr of the energy revolution, but with a list of 101 MPs to play with, and a new list of marginal to consider, we know where the reactionary bourgeoisie might be found.