Why Now? (Situational Analysis)
| What is the potential of this generations’ technological aptitude and pluralistic attitudes? |
Please see also: Anti-Oppression Principles;Our Assumptions/Theory of Change
SmartMeme’s guiding theory of change is based on an understanding that the present moment is a unique time in the history of our planet, and calls upon each of us to think bigger and act smarter as we consider the future of life on Earth. Ours is a moment of escalating, intersecting social and ecological crisis, when dramatic change is inevitable. The open questions still revolve around the nature of the changes: Will the collective response be proactive or reactive? Who will get the benefits, and who will feel the worst impacts? And ultimately – Will we will move closer or further from a society rooted in principles of social justice, real democracy and ecological sanity?
Intersecting Crisis
The generations alive today face both the challenge and opportunity. There are many hopeful trends, countless success stories, and the inspiring history of people powered change. But centuries of unchecked industrial expansion and economic growth—fueled by conquest and militarism—have created a global operating system that has brought the planet’s ecological life support systems to the edge of collapse. Tune in to any serious scientific or long-term policy discussion and you can’t avoid the symptoms – a massive extinction crisis, the looming threats of global warming, the depletion of key resources such as topsoil, fresh water, and cheap oil. Even human bodies are polluted with toxic chemical compounds. The United States’ occupation of Iraq is costing trillions of dollars and countless, precious lives. Systemic poverty still shapes the destiny of most people on the planet. These problems emerge on top of the historic problems of runaway militarism, unchecked corporate power, economic inequality and the systems of racism, sexism, heterosexism and oppression that have haunted the human family for generations. There is much that needs changing.These problems are the result of institutions, and these institutions are built on a silent consensus of shared assumptions: Humans can dominate and out-smart nature. Women are worth less. Racism and war are part of human nature. The US is entitled to occupy other countries…etc.
Harmful institutions must transform to meet the demands of our moment and the values of our generation. In order to change, the underlying assumptions that excuse or validate their behavior must shift…The stories must change.
Changing the Dominant Culture
To deal with these overlapping crises, we must understand the histories and institutions that underlie the contemporary economic and political manifestations, as well as how these histories and institutions shape our culture and ways of collectively making meaning.SmartMeme understands culture as a matrix of shared mental maps that define collective meaning. These maps are also a collection of stories that help us understand who we are. Thus, inevitably, popular culture is an ever-evolving contested space of struggle where competing voices, experiences and perspectives fight to answer the questions: Whose map determines what is meaningful? Whose stories are “true”?
As certain ideas, practices, and worldviews become normalized over time they form a dominant culture that represents mass “conventional wisdom.” Inevitably the dominant cultural map disproportionately represents powerful institutional interests and institutions, and the stories that validate their political agendas.
Stories, Memes & Social Change
Grassroots movements have traditionally targeted the root causes: the unjust institutions and systems of power. SmartMeme is strengthening this strategy by targeting another essential component: the narratives of power.Storytelling has always been at the very foundation of organizing. Narrative is how we dream, share, connect, and create. Human beings process information and make meaning through stories – and we can view culture itself as a schema of shared stories.
At the heart, stories are simple – there is a conflict that must be resolved, characters we can relate with, images that capture our imaginations, and foreshadowing that helps us imagine the outcomes. We all use these elements to communicate every day as we relate the happenings of our lives to a loved one, or discuss the news headlines with a neighbor.
Humans communicate our stories through rituals, customs, words, symbols, and ideas – and these are “memes” (rhymes with dreams). Memes are units of cultural information that evolve through culture and continue to replicate, spreading virally from person-to-person, generation-to-generation, with a life of their own. The term meme, (derived from the Greek, “to imitate”) was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 as an analogy to the word “gene.” The spread of memes shapes the evolution of culture.
The concept of a meme helps change agents focus on how ideas can spread and how we can shift the dominant culture. Challenging oppressive memes while creating and popularizing new memes has always been a key component of social change efforts: From rallying cries like “no taxation without representation,” to powerful unifying symbols like the raised fist, to disproving the “separate but equal” meme, to naming issues and movements like environment, corporate globalization, or media justice, social change struggles are constantly creating and contesting memes. In our present era of increasing corporate control of the media and the wide spread use of manipulative “perception management” techniques by powerful interests, those of us working for justice and change need to understand how designer memes can be used and abused.
Building A Culture of Strategy
The non-profit organization has become the primary vehicle for social change in the United States, and while 1.7 million non-profits are putting their “fingers in the dike,” the tide is rising fast.The U.S. nonprofit sector (as a whole) too often operates as fragmented array of disconnected and compartmentalized issues and agencies, seeing itself as isolated from the global community and from issues outside of its narrow field. Nonprofits often lack the skills and capacity to coordinate and compete in a message-saturated mediascape with the powerful interests who shape policy discussions.
Despite enormous expenditures of energy, social change campaigns struggle to spread their (often very good) ideas outside of their existing networks. Social movements and organizations in the US need better strategies to communicate with mass audiences in today’s media saturated environment in order to mobilize popular support.
In order to really change the dominant culture, social change efforts must both build on incremental victories, and create holistic change narratives that can capture the popular political imagination. Effective storytelling that is spread with well-crafted memes can help to amplify vision and build movement – as well as win short term concessions. SmartMeme’s approach is to balance short and long term strategy, thinking, and storytelling.
There is an urgent need to improve conditions in the nearest-possible term. There is also an urgent need for more holistic stories, wider frames, and alliance building models that connect constituencies inter-generationally at the intersections of the crucial issues of our moment.
The smartMeme Strategy & Training Project was founded to respond to the movement building and messaging demands of the globalized, information age, and build networks of people committed to holistic visions of change. SmartMeme is about doing social change in a holistic way – shifting from issues to values, supplementing organization building with movement building, and exploring creative new strategies that can help address the scale of the mounting crisis. SmartMeme explores how the power of narrative can support organizing, movement building, and social transformation.
How can we get to the roots of the problems we are facing: ecological devastation, rampant poverty, war and militarism, and, what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called, “spiritual death?” What is the potential of this generations’ technological aptitude and pluralistic attitudes? How do we seed a cultural and political shift big enough to alter the global economy’s present course and build a truly just world?
This discussion led us to found smartMeme to explore the potential of systemic change through the looking glass of narrative. We invite you to join the conversation as part of our community.