All Paths Require Activism
How do we leverage the full capacity of activism by broadening our understanding of what it’s capable of... just as humanity had to broaden its understanding of what petroleum was capable of?
Last week I spoke at the Sustainable Finance Summit in Montreal, Canada (watch the video here). Here is a condensed version of my remarks:
An Anecdote
I’ve been an activist my entire life — 30 years of activism. Fifteen years ago I was working for a magazine called Adbusters, where we came up with the idea for Occupy Wall Street, which quickly spread into something that touched so many lives.
But about five years ago I had a kind of core event in my life: I started getting recruited to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos. To get there, I had to go through a series of vetting meetings — I met with people at the organization who asked me lots and lots of questions to get a sense of who I was. Do we really want to bring the Occupy Wall Street guy to the World Economic Forum? What would he do if we brought him there? Those meetings finally culminated in a meeting with the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab. I basically said to him: why am I here? Do you believe in revolution? Why are you trying to bring me to the World Economic Forum?
And he posed a binary that has been capturing my thinking for five years. He said: I believe that a change of systems is impossible, but that systems change is possible. He distinguished the two — systems change being improving things as they are, and a change of systems being changing everything about it, which he said is impossible.
For five years I’ve been struggling with that. What’s come out of it is a realization that the binary is actually false — because it’s not about picking which side you’re on, which is very polarizing. It’s about realizing that both sides require activism. Regardless of whether you think it’s systems change or a change of systems, both require people in the streets to drive that social change. Which is ultimately, I think, what he was honestly trying to say — and why he did ultimately invite me to speak at the World Economic Forum. Activism is somehow crucially important to all the work we want to do, because it provides a necessary element of social-change energy.
A Paradox
In the early days, when humans discovered petroleum, at first it was only used to make lamp oil. They would take the gasoline, which was a byproduct, and just throw it away. For the first 25 years after humans discovered they could drill wells and extract petroleum, gasoline was simply thrown away — until someone finally developed the engine, and all of a sudden gasoline became vitally important.
That’s how I think about activism right now. We have this force that we cultivate for certain moments, and then it dissipates — and we throw away the essential element, which is the ability to mobilize millions of people and get them to accomplish great things. So that’s the paradox for me: how do we leverage the full capacity of activism by broadening our understanding of what it’s capable of — just as humanity had to broaden its understanding of what petroleum was capable of?
On Coordination
There’s an interesting relationship between activism and money, because both are a layer of social coordination. Money has this amazing ability to coordinate our societies — Adam Smith’s invisible hand and all that. And activism is also fascinated with the question of how you coordinate large numbers of people.
When I think about what I’m looking for in the future, I’m reminded of an event from the 1980s in America that I’ve been studying a lot recently: Hands Across America. People across the country built a human chain spanning the entire United States and held hands for 15 minutes. Each person in the chain paid a nominal donation — about 10 or 15 dollars — that went to feeding hungry people and ending homelessness.
What’s interesting is that, first, it took all of the social-coordination capacity available at the time — IBM had to donate machines, there was phone banking; it maxed out the technical capacity of that era. And second, ironically, it was sponsored by Coca-Cola, and it went through the Reagan White House. It was an event that went from the bottom to the top of society, with everyone coordinating for those 15 minutes.
For me, that represents a version of the future of activism: the ability to pull off massively coordinated actions. In 1986 they could only do something very simple — hold hands for 15 minutes. But today, in the era of the internet, when everyone has a phone in their pocket, we should be able to do things that are massively more sophisticated. And those actions could be broadly, socially benevolent and not political in a certain sense. They could be sponsored by banks, by corporations, by activist organizations — and they could accomplish something really beautiful in a very short period of time. So that’s what I’m dreaming about: this kind of massive coordination.
Lessons Learned
Looking back, Occupy Wall Street was such a beautiful experience for the brief time it happened, and then it dissipated — and you always wonder, could it have turned out differently? Could we have done something differently?
It’s tricky, because when you create a social movement, what you’re essentially doing is giving people a set of rules for a collective game they’re going to play. This gets back to the coordination challenge. With Occupy we had a very limited number of rules, which is why it worked: go to the financial district, gather in an assembly, hold consensus-based discussions about the future of democracy, come up with a single demand. That’s what people did. But when that stopped working, there was no fourth rule — no “then go home, regroup, and come back.” It just wasn’t in the rules. So when the encampments were evicted and everyone was forced to go home, there was no way to play the game again, and it ended.
I don’t know if we could have done that differently, or if it was just the maximum capacity of what social movements were capable of back then. But if I could bring a technology from today and give it to myself back then, I’d give people access to AI. One of the things I’m working on a lot is activist AI — AI that can run locally on your phone, without using the internet. If the movement had had a more sophisticated way of changing the rules mid-game, that’s what I would have changed.
Outcry and Occupy
Could Outcry have sustained Occupy? Not in its exact current iteration, but the technology shows the potential, yes. What I built with Outcry — which you can download from the App Store — works completely offline on your device. You can’t shut it off; it doesn’t use the internet at all. So I do think you could build an AI where people say, “They shut down the squares — what should I do now?” or “I’m actually more interested in this aspect of the movement; how could I develop it?” There’s potential there for more collective intelligence in the movement.
Giving people the “keys”
We’ve talked about creating the fuel of activism, and building some kind of engine for activism. What we’re really asking now is, how do you give the keys to the people? How do you unlock this?
There’s a real connection between finance and activism — there’s something about money that’s a social-coordination quest for power. And there are two things going on here. One is that people already have the power; it’s latent in them. That’s why social movements appear and disappear throughout history — you can go back to ancient Egypt and find papyri describing social movements from that time. So it’s a recurring, latent part of people, and one aspect is waking them up to that power.
But there’s also the historical element, which is something we don’t control. Occupy Wall Street wasn’t just created by people; it was created by a historical moment — partly the Arab Spring, partly what was happening in Spain at the time, partly things about economics and the stock market that we might not fully understand. And one thing Occupy didn’t have is a durable institution left over from it. There’s no Occupy organization or foundation that remains. Whereas what Stéphan (Fondaction) has is something labour activists created 30 years ago that still exists — and that’s still available in case there’s a historical moment when it’s needed.
So there’s this dual thing: waking people up to the power they have, and building infrastructure that exists for those periods when everything seems impossible. I’m coming from America, where even really simple things are now being erased — gender-neutral bathrooms, for example, under Trump. People are so scared they’re removing them. So in America, what’s needed right now is how to last through the Trump era and wait for the next moment. That’s how I imagine giving the keys of power back to the people.
On collaboration
One of the interesting parts of my journey since Occupy Wall Street is that I’ve been invited into many different spaces, and some of them genuinely confused me about why I was there. This isn’t one of those — I get why I’m here. But I’ve gone places thinking, why am I here? And it always comes back to this: change is something we all want. Regardless of where you work or how you’re positioned, you want change — even if it’s just increasing how many people know about your brand. People interested in that latch onto the fact that 50% of Americans had heard about Occupy Wall Street within one month, on a budget under $1,000. For brands, that’s fascinating — how did you get half the country to hear about something in a month? For others it’s a different element: how did you get people to actually go into the streets?
So in terms of collaboration, what fascinates me right now is the idea that the actual problems we need to solve are non-political — they’re not polarizing. And we need to be careful not to polarize them, because as soon as we name them they tend to get polarized. That’s the game played with politics: “I could polarize that.” So it’s difficult to keep them from being polarized. But if we find those challenges and build collaborative social movements that aren’t about left versus right, but about building the capacity to do big things quickly — that’s fascinating. That’s where I’d want to go.
What success looks like
Success, for me, is in service to this idea that we can take on massive global coordination challenges. Here’s a specific example — and as soon as I say it, it’ll get politicized: I really like the idea of planting a trillion trees. It’s another idea launched by the World Economic Forum, and there are plenty of critiques of it. But what I like isn’t the trees — it’s the idea of trying to achieve that. If humanity were able to plant a trillion trees in a week, all over the world, then regardless of the environmental outcome, the mere fact that we’d done it would set another high bar for what’s possible — like holding hands across America, like Occupy Wall Street.
So success, for me, is seeing something in the next couple of years where people say: this isn’t political, this is just a test of our human capacity to pull off an amazing global coordination challenge. Let’s do it. That’s what I want.
One word describing my state of mind
Contemplative.
If you want this conversation on your stage, or this kind of thinking inside your campaign, write to me.