Planting Liberally

Yesterday's blog post about the Progressive Strategy Brain got me thinking about a problem which the authors of Finding Strategy (PDF) have discussed in the past: what would a grand strategy for progressive power look like?

In addition to giving blog posts like this one a really cool-sounding title, grand strategy is a coherent composition of several different strategies which together address all of the different forms of power relationships in society. It's quite a tall order, which would explain why no one has really developed a grand strategy for progressive power. (Full disclosure: As I mentioned yesterday, one of the authors of Finding Strategy is a personal friend.)

I don't pretend to have the answer to this question, but I'd like to piece together some thoughts on what such a strategy might look like. As Finding Strategy argues, strategy consists of six components: goals, assessment, tactics, resources, dynamics, and evaluation. Today, I'd like to focus on the first two components; I'll delve into the other four in follow-up posts. Follow me across the jump for more.

Cultural and political goals, and decomposition of each

The first key to forming a grand strategy is categorizing various forms of power relationships, in order to get a good picture of the terrain. On the whole I think progressives tend to focus on expressly political power relationships, i.e. power relationships engendered directly by the government, and ignore cultural power relationships.

Political goals

Political goals can be neatly decomposed according to the structure of government, for example: winning the presidency; electing a progressive Congress; stocking the judiciary with progressive judges; watching the bureaucracy and persuading it to enact progressive regulations; electing progressive governors and state legislatures; experimenting with progressive reform in the state houses; etc. When thinking about expressly political forms of power, I would also include the internal machinery of the party apparatuses, even though they're extra-constitutional.

Progressives have strategists who focus on all of these goals, although some goals gain a lot more attention than others; in particular, I would argue that we are far more concerned with the presidency, Congress, and the Democratic Party than we are with the judiciary, the bureaucracy (which I would argue is a different beast than the presidency, though clearly affected by it), and state- and municipal-level goals. There are some great strategists working to change that, like the Progressive States Network, but there is still plenty of uneven focus.

Cultural goals

Cultural goals can't be decomposed quite as easily, because there is no "constitution" for our culture (and thank goodness for that.) I think one useful way of looking at cultural goals is to think about the different kinds of ideological institutions which dominate the interaction between culture and politics. These institutions include religion, the workplace, schools, the media, and family and other personal relationships.

Each of these institutions shapes the worldview of its membership or audience in various ways. Consequently, any strategy which attempts to expand progressive power in a comprehensive way must address the problem of spreading the progressive worldview through these institutions. For example, what kind of efforts are needed to spread the progressive worldview through religious institutions?

Of course, this is a very old problem, and various thinkers have already addressed it in a variety of ways already. The union movement is a massive effort to establish progressive power relationships within the workforce. Religious institutions have undergone a series of transformations which stretch back to well before this country was founded, many of them attempts to establish more progressive theologies and more progressive intra-church relationships. And so on.

A savvy grand strategy would address ongoing efforts in each of these institutions and would attempt to bolster or complement them in some way. Thus, at a minimum, a progressive grand strategy should seek to:

• Strengthen and enlarge the union movement
• Enlarge the membership of progressive religious institutions, and address the religious needs of those who are not being served by the religious landscape as it stands today
• Expand the availability of college education, and bolster the prevalence of the progressive worldview on college and high school campuses
• Create a more progressive media landscape, by reducing the barriers to entry for progressive media makers, and moving conservative and centrist media to the left
• Encourage family dynamics and personal relationships which support a progressive worldview, e.g., progressive parenting models

Moreover, a grand strategy should seek out other forms of power relationships and emerging ideological institutions. For example, is it possible that some online social networks are now taking on the role of forging ideology? Is it possible that the astronomical rates of incarceration has made prison a kind of ideological institution? More than that, is it possible that progressives have overlooked longstanding broad-based institutions, like the military, which might have an important role in ideological formation, yet fly below the progressive radar screen? If that's the case, then what should progressives do to ensure that their worldview is established and nurtured by these institutions? (Or, in the case of prison, what should progressives do to minimize the number of people who get incarcerated?)

This decomposition provides, I think, a good structure for progressive grand strategy. Progressive grand strategy has, on one hand, a goal of winning political victories, in all of their various constitution and extra-constitutional forms; and on the other hand, a goal of spreading the progressive worldview through a variety of cultural ideological institutions.

Assessment

A progressive grand strategy must assess the terrain of power relationships in society in order to transform those relationships. There are a few different pieces to this kind of assessment.

The first is an assessment of the challenges progressives face when they try to spread their worldview through ideological institutions, and the efforts to overcome those challenges. In my description of cultural goals above, I've implicitly identified some of the ongoing efforts. I think a full assessment would have to look at the challenges progressives face in more detail. For example, why is it that conservative religious traditions are not losing adherents as quickly as progressive religious traditions? What are some of the difficulties unions face when they try to recruit new members, or to retain solidarity within their ranks? And so forth. Naturally, many of these assessments have already been undertaken, and perhaps only need to be collated and updated a bit.

The second is an assessment of the challenges progressives face when they try to win political victories. This is hardly untrodden ground for progressives. We spend a lot of time assessing these challenges, and to our credit, we have done a good job of overcoming some of them. There are some pitfalls to beware of, such as our tendency a) to assume that a Democratic victory is a progressive victory (although I do think it's safe to say that almost all progressive victories are Democratic victories) and b) to assess challenges to progressives through the lens of various campaigns, like the 2008 presidential campaign or the 2006 Congressional campaign. Individual candidates can sometimes overcome certain challenges, but that doesn't mean that the structural problems behind those challenges have disappeared. Nevertheless, on the whole I think progressives know quite a lot about what they're up against in the realm of political campaigns. In the past I've tried to compile the assessments I've seen in various progressive publications into one large, master list; see my very old, and perhaps first, post on liberal entrepreneurship (under "So what is liberal entrepreneurship", item 2). That list is probably due for a major update sometime soon, and I'd certainly love to hear about other attempts to synthesize assessments of challenges to progressive political victories along these lines.

The final area of assessment concerns the effects of cultural institutions on our political landscape. For example, what would a major increase in union density do to increase progressive electoral fortunes? How would a gradual demographic trend away from conservative evangelical churches and towards liberal Christian churches or minority religions reshape the framework of our political discourse? And so on. Prorgressives tend to view these questions through the lens of specific campaigns and electoral victories, which means that, except for our efforts in media advocacy, we spend a lot of time worrying about the growth of cultural conservatism, and very little time working to expand cultural progressivism. I believe we need a deeper understanding of cultural progressivism. A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on the cultural dimension of transformational politics, which suggests a simplistic, but I think useful, mathematical formula which expresses the relationship between cultural institutions and politics:

You might think of the ideological landscape designed by cultural institutions as a kind of sum of products. Take the number of members an institution has, multiply by the granularity of its ideological impact, and then multiply again by the emphasis that institution places on ideological transformation. Add that number up for all cultural institutions, and you have the total amount of ideological impact exerted by cultural institutions.

This formulation is entirely too neat, and woefully inadequate to fully capture the nuanced interplay between cultural forces and political life. Any formulation would be. But I think it's a start, and I'd be very interested to hear critiques or alternative formulations.

What's next

In my next post on progressive grand strategy, I'll discuss tactical plans and resources required for progressive cultural transformation and for progressive political victories. That will, I think, give a little more perspective to my nearly obsessive focus on liberal entrepreneurship. I also hope to tie together strands of thought from a variety of disparate realms, including both culturally and politically progressive efforts.

In the meantime, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this emerging outline for progressive grand strategy, and some of the assessments I've compiled above.

Last summer I highlighted a report on the state of progressive strategy called Finding Strategy: A Survey of Contemporary Contributions to Progressive Strategy (PDF). At the time I didn't do much more beyond summarize the report and promise follow-up at a later point, which, I grudgingly admit, I didn't really do.

However, the Progressive Strategy Studies Project (PSSP) has recently released a new companion tool for the report, so I thought I'd revisit this discussion. The tool is called the Progressive Strategy Brain, and it's explained in an introductory blog post at the Progressive Strategy Blog. The brain is a visualization tool which allows users to navigate a library of about 4,100 articles or entries related to progressive strategy. The screen is split in two vertically, with the top half depicting an interconnected web of concepts centered on a single, active concept, and the bottom half providing text and description of that concept. You can click on any concept in the top half to make it active. While some entries have very sparse text and merely exist to depict a relationship between other concepts, others include a full report's worth of HTML. The tool is still evolving, and PSSP hopes to update it every week. The software which runs the whole show is called The Brain. (Full disclosure: Wolfgang Brauner, one of the authors of the original report, and of the Progressive Strategy Brain, is a personal friend.)

Clicking around inside the Progressive Strategy Brain is quite fun, as you can navigate between all sorts of interesting topics, individuals, organizations, and even abstract ideas. There are a few interesting jumping off points, though, such as Finding Strategy (2006) strategists (a list of strategists listed in the original report), Progressive Challenges (challenges which face the prorgressive movement), Progressive Strategy Types, and Progressive Strategy Literature.

I think this is a fascinating tool. PSSP has managed to make a lot of very interesting content available in a very accessible and interesting format. I do have a few quibbles. There are some places where I'm not entirely sure how the relationships between concepts are created. The taxonomist in me would also love a way to impose a little more structure or categorization on top of the web. And I hope that as time goes on, the organization opens up the Brain to outside contributors (although I imagine the constraints of the software might make that difficult.) But on the whole, I think this is a great effort which calls attention to, and helps us organize our thoughts on, our conception of strategy for the progressive movement.

What I'd love to see in the evolution of the progressive strategy brain, and in the larger discourse on progressive strategy generally, is increased attention to non-political goals. Put another way, I'd like to see progressive strategists broaden their horizons, to pursue goals that include transformation of non-political, cultural institutions. After all, transformational politics includes both cultural transformation and political transformation. We need strategies for cultural transformation, and particularly transformation of the ideological institutions which usually regulate the interaction of our culture and our politics - religion, the workplace, schools, personal relationships, and the media. Progressives don't talk much about transforming those institutions (except insofar as doing so can produce electoral results), and that shortage of strategic discussion shows in the PSB's entry on progressive ideological infrastructure.

Eventually, I'd like to see progressives develop a series of strategies for transforming these institutions and creating a more progressive culture. I'd like to think that I've nibbled at the edge of this problem in the past, with a variety of series on creating progressive TV and strengthening the labor movement, and I hope to continue in that vein. I'd love to see others take up the reins and develop strategies for progressive change within other ideological institutions. That kind of strategic development is the first step in the development of a grand strategy of progressive power, which would tie together progressive cultural and political transformation.

I'm tempted to draw up an outline of what such a strategy might look like, especially given the great work which has gone into PSB. In fact, I might take a crack at that a bit later on. For now, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on the Progressive Strategy Brain, and the state of progressive strategy generally.

Peter Levine has an interesting post about the levers of democracy, published last week.  It's a very interesting angle on the problem of changing our political system, and it is closel related to my discussion of transformational politics earlier.  There are a few things I could nitpick over, like his omission of religion and the workplace as levers of change (unless you count unions), a bit too much abstraction in the line about "nonprofits", an inability to account for the importance of family and friends in shaping political change (and the effect of such family-altering movements as the feminist movement or the evangelical movement), and a technical inaccuracy about the growth of unions (they are not shrinking any more.)  But it's a good list, and very interesting.

Someone should really take a look at this list and flesh it out with good examples and more serious consideration of how to employ all of these various levers in concert.  I'd love to see something like that.

(H/t Mike Connery, though for some reason I can't find the actual blog post.) 

This is mostly a bookmarking post, I suppose, but I've just found a couple of interesting resources for innovators:

• The Knight News Challenge offers grants to support innovative ideas in journalism (h/t Amy Grahan)
• Innocentive is a marketplace for innovative solutions for problems posed by governments, businesses, or non-profits (h/t Freakonomics)

It occurs to me that a) I should probably put together an innovation resource center, and b) Delicious won't cut it for this purpose.  Hopefully I'll put the time together to actually do that some day.

Last weekend I posted about the idea of buzzing against McCain as a tactic to augment the McCain Googlebomb project start by Chris Bowers. The idea is to schedule regular "bursts" of anti-McCain memes throughout the social networking-o-sphere, in order to create negative "buzz" around John McCain. My diagnosis is that many people think they know McCain well, based on hazy impressions left by positive media coverage. The hops is that a steady stream of negative messages coming from friends and relatives will help clear up those hazy impressions, and encourage voters to deal with McCain as he is - a conservative politician who will be just as disastrous as George Bush was as president.

To make this idea a bit more concrete, what I'm suggesting is that at some regular interval (let's say twice a month, for argument's sake), progressives pick a day to "flood" the blogs and social networks with anti-McCain messages. The particular steps I'm thinking of include:

• Bloggers writing posts which spread the meme
• Social networkers digging, stumbling, Facebook-posting, and otherwise recommending those posts
• MySpace, Facebook, and other social network members posting notes, bulletins, or blog posts which reinforce the meme
• Facebook members creating and joining groups which reinforce the meme
• YouTube members posting and recommending videos which reinforce the meme; bloggers and others embedding those videos on their blogs or profiles

... and I'm open to other suggestions. There are more elaborate things we could try, too, such as designing an anti-McCain badge which displays the meme of the day in some kind of catchy way, or designing a contest website to choose the favorite anti-McCain video of the week, or something like that.

I'd also like to think up ideas for anti-McCain memes. There's plenty to go on here, but here are some initial ideas:

• McCain has a very conservative voting record
• McCain is breaking campaign finance laws
• McCain is a Bush lapdog
• McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years
• McCain is a lapdog of the Religious Right
• McCain kissed up to Jerry Falwell to win the nomination
• McCain is rehashing forty-year-old ideas that don't work
• McCain is tied to lobbyists

And there are plenty more we could add to the list.  The important point is that each meme should be thoroughly documented and proven with relevant facts, articles, etc.  Those details can be dropped in the blog posts, YouTube videos, Facebook group overview text areas, etc.  That will take some effort, which means, first, that we'll need a fairly big crew to pull this off well, and second, that we'll need a bit of time between each burst - that's why I think two weeks is about right.

If you've got other ideas for buzzing against McCain, I'd love to hear them!  Fire away in the comments...

On Thursday Digby wrote a fascinating post at Campaign for America's Future on the difference between transactional and transformational politics. The post pointed out the difference between "transactional" politics (what can I get in the political marketplace?) and "transformational" politics (how can I change the marketplace?). Digby argues that elected officials should be doing two jobs at once - getting the best reforms they can in the current environment, while working to change that environment so that it is more favorable to progressives.

I think it's important that we recognize the difference between these two forms of politics, and also that we push our elected officials to strive for political transformations even as they try to get the best "deal" on each political "transaction" they make. Indeed, that is perhaps the central purpose of the progressive blogosphere.

However, I think we should also think more broadly about political transformation and the other forces, besides the machinations of Democratic politicians, which might create political transformation. In particular, we need to be aware of the cultural institutions which frequently shape our political environment, and we need to push those institutions to create political transformation as well. Follow me across the flip for more details on how, in my opinion, cultural institutions shape our political environment, and what (in somewhat high-level terms) needs to be done about those institutions to create the kind of progressive political transformation we seek.

There are a number of cultural institutions which shape the broad strokes of our political ideology. These include the media (including both news media and entertainment media), educational institutions, the workplace and labor unions, religious institutions, and our familial and other personal relationships. In the past, I've referred to these kinds of institutions as "ideological conversion machines", and that term has its origins in some theories advanced over the past couple of years by Chris Bowers, and originally by Louis Althusser, who coined the term ideological state apparatus. Regardless, all of these institutions shape our ideology in a number of different ways, ranging from overtly political messages (sermons about feeding the poor, say), to more subtle values-based messages (like a steady stream of workshops on diversity at college, say), to experiential learning (like learning the importance of solidarity by participating in a strike), and so forth.

Interaction with these sorts of institutions shapes a person's political ideology. Some institutions tend to make their members more liberal (many labor unions, for instance), while some institutions tend to make their members more conservative (like many evangelical churches.) In fact, this relationship is also somewhat circular, as many people gravitate towards the institutions which tend to reinforce their own ideologies.

The ideological forces at work in any given cultural institution can also be variably granular. That is to say, while some cultural institutions will push their members towards a generally liberal worldview and impart in their members progressive values, others will push their members to take sides and become active in a particular issue or electoral campaign. While it's hard to paint such a large and abstract a group of institutions with a single brush, I think it's fair to say that most cultural institutions have an ideological impact which is less fine-grained but more long-lasting than the impact exerted by politicians, pundits, and others whose job it is to actively participate in political discourse.

Moreover, ideological forces across cultural institutions are not uniformly emphatic. Thus we might imagine two different union locals, both theoretically tied together by the ideology of solidarity, but one considerably more strident in fighting workplace policies and therefore, perhaps more likely to make the notion of solidarity real to its members. Or we might imagine two different colleges, both on paper as supporting diversity, but one considerably more aggressive in recruiting and accepting a diverse student body, pushing its students to socialize across racial and ethnic lines, etc.

In fact, you might think of the ideological landscape designed by cultural institutions as a kind of sum of products. Take the number of members an institution has, multiply by the granularity of its ideological impact, and then multiply again by the emphasis that institution places on ideological transformation. Add that number up for all cultural institutions, and you have the total amount of ideological impact exerted by cultural institutions.

Of course, our political environment is far too complex and nuanced to be expressed by such a clean and crisp mathematical equation. Real life gets messy. Cultural leaders claim to hold certain values, only to undermine them through their actions. Or cultural leaders hold views which don't cleanly fit into any neatly-defined political ideological category (for example, a vast number of clergy.) More than that, many institutions have an internal tension between the "official" ideology of their leaders, and that of their members, and these tensions create countervailing ideological forces. And so on.

But I think this conceptual mathematical formula is valuable to us, because it points us towards pressure points where we can imagine changing the cultural forces which create our political ideological environment. In particular, it suggests that we can do any of the following things to create a more progressive political environment:

• Bring more people into progressive cultural institutions, like the labor movement, liberal religious groups, etc.
• Make progressive cultural institutions more engaged in fine-grained political fights over concrete issues
• Make ideological transformation and higher priority for more progressive cultural institutions

Actually, that's only haf the equation.  The flip side of promoting progressivism is demoting conservatism, by doing some or all of the following:

• "Steal" members from conservative cultural institutions
• Encourage conservative cultural institutions not to engage in fine-grain political debate
• Reduce the emphasis on ideological transformation within conservative cultural institutions

I don't particularly like this second half of the equation, since it can get pretty ugly.  To see what this looks like in practice, consider the conservative movement's long-term effort to bust unions, or consider that nasty little group, the Institue for Religion and Democracy, which works to destabilize mainline Protestant denomination and to "pick off" congregations from denominational bodies.  It's remarkably odious stuff.  There are ways to demote conservatism that are not quite as ugly though - for example, encouraging evangelicals to focus less on political action, or encouraging them to break ties with the Republican party.

Regardless, the larger point is that there's a cultural dimension to political transformation, and that therefore, political transformation requires cultural transformation, including at least some of the steps I've outlined above.  This is not the kind of thing that politicians should be doing, nor do I think they'd do it particularly well. (Although Jimmy Carter has been busily proving me wrong with his pan-Baptist reform group.) Rather, it is the kind of thing which ordinary people, grassroots cultural activists and leaders, must be involved in. I also think (and this has been a central assertion of my blogging and, recently, my paid professional work) that it's the kind of thing entrepreneurs and activist businesspeople can and should take part in, by using market forces to create cultural change.  I also think there is an important role for the blogosphere to play in this project, by cultivating and nurturing ideas for cultural growth and by critiquing cultural institutions and pushing them to be more progressive.

This kind of cultural transformational work is massive, complex, difficult, and not the stuff of overnight revolutions. Conservatives discovered that it took decades to weaken the hand of center-left mainline Protestant denominations and labor unions, to build up an orchestrated massive media machine, and to win the trust of a growing group of religious conservatives. We will no doubt find that organizing religious liberals, rebuilding the labor movement, and increasing the impact of our own nascent media machine will take a very long time. Fortunately, some of this work is already being done; colleges are creating a new generation of very progressive Millenials, labor unions have undertaken a massive program of political mobilization that is very successful, and religious liberals are starting to organize themselves (more on that later.) But we have really just begun, and there's plenty left to do.

Yesterday Chris Bowers got the ball rolling with the Googlebomb John McCain project. I admire Chris's work a great deal, and in particular I think his innovative Google-bomb campaigns have been absolutely phenomneal. But I think beating John McCain will require a lot more than just a Google-bomb.

Google-bombs work best in a low information election. For background, the point of a Google bomb is to cause a negative but neutrally sourced news article about a candidate to appear high in Google search engine rankings when web users search for the candidate's name. So Chris's Google-bomb for 2006 House Republican candidates worked really well because voters quite often didn't know much about those candidates. In the weeks before the election, voters sought out information about those candidates by typing their names into Google, and came up with the negative stories that bloggers helped push high into the search engine results.

The problem with John McCain is that he's extremely well-known, in a shallow way, by a lot of voters. The general perception is that he's a maverick clean-ethics Republican, and is therefore more moderate than the rest of his party. There is also a quiet perception that he's very hard to beat, and that "most" voters like him. This meta-opinion about the election is perhaps just as damaging to our activists as the fuzzy notion of McCain as a whole, because it dampens the effect of our enthusiasm gap.

While I think Google-bombing will do some good, I think a really effective solution will have to go further. I think it will have to incorporate a grassroots messaging campaign which a) informs progressive activists that McCain isn't really a maverick, clean-ethics, moderate Republican, and b) informs progressive activists that beating McCain is not going to be difficult. This campaign has to be virally spread, pushed from friend-to-friend via blog posts, Facebook notes, YouTube embeds, and all sorts of other peer-to-peer venues.

My recommendation is that progressive bloggers establish a regular routine of "buzzing against McCain". Similar to Atrios and DailyKos's monthly Kerry fundraising days in 2004, these will be days when we exhort progressive activists to flood the social networks with some small, simple, anti-McCain meme, like "McCain is unelectable", "McCain is a lobbyist lap-dog", "McCain wants another 100 years in Iraq", and the like. Ideally, I'd also like to see some kind of distributed badge infrastructure which allows bloggers to display the meme of the week (or month, or whatever) prominently on there blogs, right alongside a photo of "the hug". OpenLeft has been doing some great spade work on establishing an anti-McCain narrative in recent weeks, and I think some of that work will come in very handy as we try to come up with anti-McCain memes to be spread virally. But we'll have to go beyond the Google-bomb to win this election.

(Full disclosure: my company did a bit of technical/design work for Chris and Open Left last year.)

There's been a lot of buzz lately about Facebook "censorship" of free speech.  The Blackadder One case I wrote about a couple weeks ago was just an early warning sign of more trouble to come.  Recently Jon Pincus has been posting a series of diaries at Tales from the Net and Liminal States about his encounter with problems very similar to those Derek Blackadder ran into when he tried to organize workers on Facebook.   Pincus's posts include a very good trail of documentation of the problems he's encountering, which make this series one of the more interesting resources on Facebook censorship I've seen.  (As an aside: thoroughly and clearly documenting the problems you have with software is one of the best ways you can help your software or service provider diagnose and fix the problem.  But that's a rant for another day.)

As it turns out, Blackadder and Pincus are running up against Facebook's rather crude anti-spam filters, which, in certain cases, flag a discussion board post as spam if the post includes a link to a web page outside of Facebook.  While one can certainly sympathize with Facebook's desire to block spam on its services, it's easy to see how this kind of crude filtering technology (which is well behind the cutting edge of spam filtering software, by the way) can cause problems for those trying to organize Facebook users for legitimate purposes.  It does appear that Facebook isn't trying to block or suppress speech per se, since spam-filtered posts are often ensconced in a trail of other, non-filtered posts with very free-ranging discussion.  Still, the result of Facebook's crude filters is, as Pincus says, a chilling effect on political speech.

Now Pincus is extrapolating his experience into something which is hopefully more useful to the wider Facebook community - a guide for responding when Facebook censors your political speech, based at Wired's how-to wiki.  If you're having trouble with spam-filtering on Facebook, check out this resource, and if you have more to add, go ahead and do so.

I hope that this resource will lay the groundwork for later resources which help online activists fight draconian online corporate policies in a variety of contexts, like Google account shutdowns and the plethora of Beacon-like Facebook abuses likely to come in the future.  Eventually, I'd like to see a resource that provides top-notch practical and legal advice to social networking consumers, and perhaps serves as a hub for organization, in much the same way that Chilling Effects serves bloggers who are harassed by corporate cease-and-desist letters.  Extrapolating out a bit, such resources could be the starting point for a well-organized online consumer movement which I wrote about yesterday.

For now, though, if you are running into Facebook's spam filters, or if you are having similar problems at other social networking sites, check out the Pincus guide, and add on to it if you have more to contribute. 

Last weekend's blog post on the eBay sellers boycott generated some very interesting comments, and I want to follow up with some more thoughts on organizing online workers.

As background, I've been arguing for a few months now that labor unions should do more to organize online workers. The argument goes that folks whose primary income is derived from activities as diverse as blogging, eBay auctioneering, Second Life merchandising, and so forth, compose a new industry segment which is already quite large and will grow in the future. Furthermore, despite the fact that these individuals are hard to organize due to the nature of online work, their livelihood is essentially at the mercy of a small group of executives at web companies like eBay and Linden Labs. Therefore, they comprise a group who have important collective needs, and who would benefit tremendously from workplace organizing.

While I still think most of this argument holds up, I'm less and less certain that a traditional labor union is the best vehicle for organizing online workers, for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is that online workers are not actually employees of the companies whose services they are working with; they are consumers of those services. Thus, the eBay sellers "strike" is not a strike at all, but a boycott. The more I think about this round peg/square hole problem, the more I believe that the solution is to just build a round hole. In other words, alongside a thriving labor movement, we need a powerful and well-organized consumer movement. Follow me across the flip for more, and tune in tomorrow for some practical follow-up.

The problem of organizing online workers is, in a sense, just a special case of the problem of organizing consumers generally. Consumers are notoriously hard to organize, since in many cases, they don't know one another. Whereas workers at a factory or an office see each other every day and have multiple chances to get to know one another, consumers of a single business generally don't, and indeed, many prefer it that way. Consequently, the consumer movement tends to be far less organized than the labor movement. Consumer groups tend to form in an ad hoc way around a specific issue, make some noise about that issue, and perhaps win a couple of victories before flaming out. While occasionally consumer groups become institutionalized, even regularly lobbying government around a key set of pet wonky issues and scoring a few important victories, they rarely make much noise on the electoral scene or gather significant and long-lasting commitments from their "base", as labor unions regularly do.

In fact, the differences in organizational power between the labor and consumer movements can be traced back to the legal rights afforded the one but not the other. Whereas workers have the right, under the National Labor Relations Act, to organize and force their employer to negotiate a contract with them collectively, consumers have no legal right to force the businesses they patronize to bargain with them collectively.

Nevertheless, consumer culture is becoming an increasingly important part of daily life. The extreme form of this trend, perhaps, is found among online workers, who derive their livelihood by consuming online services. But there are no shortage of consumers who, while they don't make a living as consumers, nevertheless derive a substantial part of their identity from being Starbucks snobs, Harley drivers, and everything in between. Dozens of books have been written about consumer culture and brand identity, including Juliet Schor's The Overspent American and Naomi Klein's No Logo.

I think the growing prominence of the Internet in daily life, and particularly the dominance of a few huge brands, like Google, Facebook and eBay, in many peoples' online experience, calls for the development of a more active and energized consumer movement. The Internet has created a long tail of consuming relationships into our lives. In a single day, I could conceivably spend a great deal of my online time at Google, Yahoo, and Bloglines, a moderate amount of time on Facebook, much less time at Powells, and an infinitesimal amount of time at places like the local coffee shop's website. As we add up the patterns over time and across a wide swath of web users, we end up with what's bound to be a very, very long tail of online consuming relationships. From the individual's point of view, we end up creating more accounts, and checking off more license agreements, than we can possibly remember.

More than that, the Internet gives us tools to organize ourselves as consumers in ways which were unimaginable a few years ago. These tools run the gamut from the consumer's blog, which allows consumers of a single brand to find each other, and to the corporate MySpace or Facebook page, which allows consumers to talk back, publicly, to the company whose products they rely on. Conceivably, we could even include the tools of open source software development in this list - after all, these tools allow software consumers to fight back against the policies of closed-source corporate software developers by directly competing with them.

On the whole, what we have are the ingredients for a more energetic and systematic consumer movement. I think we now have an historic opportunity for consumers to band together in order to sway corporate policy on a regular basis. Indeed, events like the eBay sellers boycott and the Facebook Mini-Feed and Beacon revolts could be seen as the early harbingers of a new consumers movement, or as a natural continuation of the open source revolt of the 1990's.

This kind of consumer movement will require the creation and development of a series of well-organized consumer membership associations, capable of representing consumers of companies ranging from Nike to eBay. Such associations would make it their business to maintain a regularly-updated list of consumers of a given brand or product; to build community amongst their members; to notify their members of corporate policy changes; to organize boycotts, to informally negotiate with cooperative corporate executives, and so forth. The funds for these associations would probably be derived from dues, meaning both that the associations would have to produce some kind of tangible benefit for their members, and also that these associations would necessarily represent only the most enthusiastic consumers of a given brand or product.

I think the development of this kind of consumer movement would be extremely beneficial to the labor movement, in the long run. On the one hand, the labor movement could provide organizers and others with experience when the time to boycott or take other actions comes along. On the other, the consumer movement can assist the labor movement in applying pressure to companies with bad labor practices. In fact, in some cases the consumer movement can do one better than that. Since some consumer groups (like a hypothetical eBay Sellers Association) will necessarily include businesses in their membership, those groups can make union-neutral corporate policy a prerequisite of membership, and thereby pave the way for more organizing victories. Of course, this kind of relationship is bound to have moments of tension - for example, in cases where consumers don't sympathize with striking workers, and don't choose to respect picket lines.

While I don't think it makes sense for labor unions to be actively involved in creating consumer membership associations from whole cloth - it's just too far afield of their core mission - I think it's absolutely incumbent on the progressive movement as a whole to be involved in germinating and nurturing an active consumer movement which acts in solidarity with the labor movement. Such an alliance, if properly organized and engaged, could be a powerful counter-balance against the creeping encroachment of corporate policy in our daily lives.

I'm not, incidentally, totally sure of the legal merit behind these ideas, and I'd welcome feedback from legal experts who know a bit more about things like anti-trust law and interstate commerce regulations. More than that, I'd be interested to hear what other folks think about the idea of organizing consumers into institutionalized membership groups capable of building community and lobbying corporate executives when necessary. What do you think?

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the day that my wife started her blog, Looking for Faith.  The purpose of the blog is "to explore spiritual questions and issues from a Unitarian Universalist perspective".  Shelby went to divinity school to pursue ministry as a Unitarian Universalist, so this was a continuation of a very long history of interest in this topic.

I'm very proud of all that she accomplished in that time.  She's written a lot of interesting posts, ranging from a "how-to" guide for visiting a Unitarian Universalist church, to a post on the biblical story of Ruth and Naomi (which is one of her favorite stories - I remember discussing this with her years ago, before she ever went to divinity school), to a book review of Here if you need me.  Along the way, she's collected quite a bit of notoriety from other UU's, and has a good-size following of blog subscribers and commenters, who often augment her posts with thoughtful and interesting remarks.  Moreover, she's become an expert on technical issues ranging from search engine marketing to Wordpress theme design.

To top it all off, yesterday she announced a birthday present for her blog: she will be writing a weekly blog post and a quarterly column at UU World, the magazine of record for Unitarian Universalists.  The column is called The Interdependent Web, which is sort of a pun on one of the key principles of Unitarian Universalism.  Moreover, for a couple of weeks she's been writing a weekly religion and politics roundup for Street Prophets.

Every day I thank my lucky stars to be married to such an intelligent, talented, thoughtful person.  Especially today (which happens to be the seven year anniversary of our first date), I can't say loudly enough that I'm proud of all that she's accomplished and happy to be her number one cheerleader.