We don't wave signs here
Towards direct action doctrine for the '22 midterms
Midterms are coming. Time to start tooling up.
We're in Phase IV of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s activism strategy: we've done the research (so much research), we've negotiated with the powers-that-be in good faith and found their responses wanting, and we've engaged in a pretty good amount of introspection and contemplation upon the level of surety we have around things.
We are now arrived at direct action: forcing a public crisis to engender public will to create institutional change. In the context of a series of domestic and political psychological wars, direct action is asymmetric, because we are in a fight with, and alongside, billion-dollar political-media entities that dwarf us in access to capital and and social-media amplification; and it is tactical, because we have to be laser-focused on attaining outcomes, to almost the complete exclusion of everything else.
It's a basic rule of startups: if I have a business that requires, for its survival, that I focus on just making really good widgets, and I'm trying to build my widgets and also expand my market into China and hire a widget technology CTO and locate widget investors and run a widget marketing campaign and start, like, a WidgetCoin cryptocurrency... one or more of those things is not going to work. Stewart Butterfield, the Slack dude, says it as a (somewhat annoyingly homiletic) simple catchphrase: we don't sell saddles here.
We are activists. By "we" I mean the people that support me, the people that checked in on me during this month off Facebook, the people in Alabama that I went to war with in '17, or the people in New York in '18, or the fact-checkers and disinformation experts and extremism specialists I went to war with in '20; the people whom the lawyers and political experts I've spoken to sort of just, like, write off as a bunch of "activists", which is not a compliment in their world.
And we are, I think, a very different kind of activist. It is an annoying consequence of being in news articles and quoted as an expert in things that you have to delete anything potentially read as controversial or overtly hyper-partisan, so most of the doctrine and guidelines I wrote in '18 has been deleted at this point, but... if you've known me for longer than a few years, you know what I've been writing about Russia, and about defensive doctrine against an otherwise unanswerable information-war attack; and you'll know what I mean by "war mode".
I don't care how I fit into anyone's clout-building plans right now. I don't care what you think an activist is. All I care about is getting an outcome.
We don't wave signs here.
We make viral memes targeting specific audiences with atelier-built, workshopped messaging, based on peer-reviewed research, intended to raise voter turnout, and we distribute them through a kind of micro-earned-media process. We closely coordinate with local activists and complement or amplify their messaging as we deem strategically relevant.
We go straight after the voters in the spaces they inhabit, ideally in the languages they speak and the communities they live in. Think of it as guerilla relational organizing.
And because we want to be completely 100% aboveboard with even appearing like we're making an in-kind contribution that would need to appear on an FEC disclosure, we don't coordinate with candidates.
The content schedule is about to start up; I don't see any reason why I shouldn't start now, so, let's say, every day, I'll make at least four items of content that I'll track feedback and popularity on (memes, video, posts, etc.) relative to the midterm elections.
I'll need to start up an atelier group, given the audience and distribution that I'm after (I'm thinking Facebook ads and Twitter organic reach to get after the audiences I have in mind). Producing a steady stream of work on a content schedule isn't an issue for me, or for any group of creatives really; it's going to be producing consistently high-quality work in sufficient volume to play the virality numbers game. That's going to require feedback and a clear workflow process, more than it requires additional creative assets.
So.
Direct action campaigns targeting populaces require at least two parameters:
Payload, or "what are you saying?" starts to be a question now that we're moving past audience-building part of the cycle.
Targeting, which is simply "who are you saying it to". In practice this is more like "who cares what you are saying".
Targeting is going to be a question by itself; I have in mind something like a national generic-ballot campaign with experimental ad runs (like $50, $100 at a time) ramping up towards a combined organic-reach (like, going viral for free) campaign mixed with ads in the T-30 period.
Payload is at least a relatively easy-to-answer question this cycle. Polling and direct feedback is saying, generic ballot negative narratives against Republicans along three lines, more likely along just two.
Extremism is an easy guess for a critical gap to fill in Democratic "narrative coverage"; I don't think there's a good discourse of extremism for liberals, and this has to do with the state of extremism studies as much as it has to do with the Republican strategy of rather brazenly trying to legitimize their extremist views as mainstream (like "Christian nationalism").
As long as (white, male, cishet) people continue to treat counterfactual Republican viewpoints like they're an actual perspective worth heeding, and not a survival issue - which are the stakes for immigrants, women, non-white people, people of color, LGBTQIA folks, just about everyone else, really - then they're missing the point.
I wouldn't presume to diagnose the issue - there's other white-people-ologists I'm sure, like Harriot, or Mystal, who could do the job more clearly and trenchantly than I could - but in the world I observe as an Asian dude, It's poor manners, or not "going along to get along", in white circles, I sense, to keep racial justice centered in the conversation. Like, we don't want to contemplate your survival because it makes the conversation into one where we're personally impugning other cishet white male people and being uncivil.
Oh f**king well. It's election season. Take a backseat, skip. This isn't about you.
I suspect we're going to have to workshop a fairly significant amount of this content to come out with something that's going to "give" people something (like, they'll actually want to retweet or Facebook-share it and spread it, instead of just reading it and nodding or whatever) and also send a message that motivates people to get out to the polls.
I think it's going to be appeals to identity along negative-partisanship lines, around rejection of Republican extremism; but this is going to have to emerge in atelier critique.
Abortion, and reproductive rights and sexual equality generally, in 2022, is the other elephant in the room.
Here, the sanest and smartest thing to do is actually take a backseat to another organization that's doing the work out here. Guerrilla activity like organizing inter-state abortion trips or arranging for Plan B are valid and extremely worthy, but not really what I'm after; I think I need someone on a national organization comms staff to approve or shoot down messaging ideas and provide some flexible messaging doctrine I can work with.
Probably in the first week or so, a smart idea is actually going to be reaching out to someone at a national reproductive-rights organization and running some messaging points by them.
Lord knows what's going to happen with, like, news articles or whatever, from the other work I've done on extremism for Facebook, or the sanctions work; one of two pathways I have for getting sanctions done right now is somewhat occupied with other content. But that's gotta fall by the wayside somewhat, for a spell, at least.
Election season is on, and that means warmode in the LadyTown that I know of.
I'm down with that.