How Do We Want People to Feel When They're Learning About Our Movements?

Some smart words from Cayden Mak on the battle for hearts and minds. Plus a new AI Bill of Rights, Reid Hoffman's dalliance with Elon Musk, and much more.

I was a virtual attendee at the annual New Media Ventures summit last Wednesday and Thursday, and while I missed being in the room where it happened, I was still impressed by the creativity and energy of the start-ups that were featured. Since it was founded in 2010, NMV has consistently spotted and boosted some of the most useful and important new organizations to sprout at the intersection of progressive politics and technology, like SwingLeft, OpenField, the Algorithmic Justice League, Mobilize, Equality Labs, Movement Labs, Swayable, Run for Something, the Movement Cooperative, and PushBlack (see the whole list here).

This year’s cohort ranged from the expansive, like Liberation Ventures, which is building the power to win comprehensive reparations for Black Americans and is itself investing in an array of allied organizations working on that frontier; Raheem, which is building the infrastructure for an alternative to 911 that would summon community care rather than police to crisis situations; and the Gravel Institute, which aspires to counter the conservative movement juggernaut Prager University by providing progressive popular education online, to the more practical, like Ameelio, which is building a secure platform for low-cost video calls for families with members in prison; or Right to Health Action, which is organizing people impacted by COVID in all 50 states, building a pipeline of activist leaders and getting ready for the 2024 primary season.

As with its more recent cohorts (here’s my report on their 2021 cycle), NMV also is leaning heavily into organizations that center media, narrative and story-telling as a key tool for changing hearts and minds, including Kweli TV, which appears to be well on its way to building a subscriber-supported service for the best in global Black cinema; Some Friends, a podcast platform focusing on BIPOC stories and talent; the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective, and Que Pasa, Midwest?, a bilingual podcast.

Introducing the session focused on media and narrative, Cayden Mak made some really trenchant remarks about the power of story-telling and careful listening for building real communities using digital tools. Mak recently stepped down from leading 18 Million Rising, the digital-first movement-building organization focusing on Asian American and Pacific Islander communities that was a 2015 NMV investee. Before being its executive director, he was also its chief technology officer, new media director and “social media wizard.” So he’s been through the whole stack of what an e-organization can do to build power. Here’s a somewhat shortened version of his introduction, posted with his permission:

The mediascape is undergoing tremendous upheaval. One of the aspects of that upheaval is a fracturing into personalized (what I would also call isolated) media streams that are tailored to each consumer by a pervasive surveillance apparatus. The platforms that provide us this experience are incentivized, via their business models, to keep us scrolling, flipping through content endlessly

I’m a big theory nerd, because i want to understand the deeper meaning of what I experience, and a lot of the theorizing about this that's out there is focused on either the business model -- think of "surveillance capitalism" -- or on the content itself -- think of the meme wars. What I’m interested in is trying to theorize the place where these two things meet. The tricky thing about the mediascape is it's not just what people are posting, or the rules that govern the platforms. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which is why I think we can look to somewhat more holistic ways of understanding what's going on. I've been thinking about understanding the mediascape not as an attention or surveillance economy, but as an affect economy first and foremost.

What do I mean by affect? in the world of media studies, it's about how technology, design, social and economic relations, language, and other ways we inhabit our shared and mediated world make us feel. Players in the media landscape are fighting for our attention, yes, but the way they're doing it is about how they make us *feel*. People will come back to places that make them feel how they aspire to be: often that’s powerful, effective, or members of a desirable in group. This is a playbook that’s worked for a wide variety of interests, including insurrectionaries and conspiracy theorists that have set the internet on fire.

But what if we could bring people back to places that hold them, reflect them, and offer them the experience of abundance and shared effectiveness?

Over the years at 18MR, we've spent tons time digging deep into creating an organizational identity and playbook that spoke to who young Asian Americans are, but also who they'd like to be. We learned through this process that Asian American millennials are progressive and want to stay rooted in their communities. They want to engage in the struggles of others but also long to see their struggles reflected in the issues they read about. They want to feel like they belong to a broader movement for racial justice in this country. They're very online, but also treasure their family, whether by blood or by choice. People keep coming back because we touch something real, but also project forward to something our members deeply desire -- and they see themselves squarely in the center of the story of how we get there together.

I wish I could tell you that we did this with some kind of shiny sentiment analysis tool, but there's no big secret to a lot of this; through developing a clear language, both written and visual, engaging in timely political education and activation, and trying and sometimes failing, we built this over time. We met people where they were at, predominantly online. In short, we are media organizers. Through this work we have consistently pushed the left flank of Asian American organizing across the country, starting well before it was cool and continuing to hold the line in the face of racist violence and COVID-19.

These days, even though it feels like our movements are being out-memed by our enemies, we cannot concede the field. The flourishing of conspiracy theory and reactionary ideology is an expression of an ongoing battle for our collective imagination. One way we can engage in the fight for our collective imagination is offering escape hatches, in many modes and media, from the bleak affective landscape of the reactionary conspiracist's present and future. People-powered media production oriented toward a different vibe online and elsewhere tills the soil for justice to grow.

Regardless of whether we’re podcasters or product managers, visual communicators or traditional journalists, how do we want our people to feel when they're learning about our movements? How do *they* want to feel? What will keep them coming back to learn, transform, and take collective action? Regardless of the specific medium or media this group of startups is working in, I can see a clear throughline considering how the media that our folks create, consume, remix, share, and relate to makes us feel: like we belong, that there's a place for us now and in the future we're creating, and that another world is on its way.

It's tempting to leave it there, but just compare what Mak is describing as a strategic digital organizer to what a legion of fundraising consultants working for the likes of Nancy Pelosi and most of the rest of the Democratic Party and its candidates are pumping daily into millions of in-boxes. I know those emails are profitable (hell, Marcus Flowers, the candidate running a completely quixotic campaign against MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, has raised $10.7 million, which I rant about a bit in my latest Medium post), but at what point do the people in the bowels of those fundraising machines decide to stop poisoning the atmosphere?

Tech and Politics

—Huge kudos to danah boyd, who just announced that she will be stepping down from Data & Society’s board next spring, ten years after founding the organization, and godspeed to Charlton McIlwain, who is stepping up as board chair and Janet Haven, its fearless and intrepid executive director. They have all built a major new institution for a field that barely existed a decade ago, and just in time for all the critical challenges we face around the social and cultural impact of data-centric technologies.

—Related: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has just released its non-binding “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” synthesizing a ton of public input, and it’s pretty darn good. (Though deep in the fine print you can find this big carve-out: “The implementation of these policies to national security and defense activities can be informed by the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights where feasible.” Ahem.)

—Also related: Back on September 22nd, Shoshana Zuboff gave a great opening keynote at the Unfinished Live 2022 conference, which you can now watch here, but what was most interesting to me about her speech was what she didn’t say about how to solve the problem of surveillance capitalism: not a word of support for Web3 or blockchain or any of the related projects being heavily promoted by the event.

—I guess I don’t really understand LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s politics very well. On the one hand, he is the main donor behind Welcome PAC, which is funding Democratic Party outreach to “future former Republicans” and other swing voters who reject the Orange Cheeto, like this effort in Ohio to support Tim Ryan’s US Senate bid. (He also has put a lot of money into the Mainstream Democrats PAC, attacking progressive challengers to moderate Dems.) On the other hand, the newly released trove of text messages to and from mega-billionaire Elon Musk related to his $44 billion offer for Twitter show that Hoffman wanted in with his old friend Elon, suggesting that he could put $2 billion toward the deal. I’m not sure why anyone would want to help Musk take over Twitter, given his stated interest in reinstating Trump’s giant megaphone on the site along with other signs the Tesla mogul is politically unhinged. Earlier this month, Hoffman told Axios that he was skeptical of Musk’s offer, but that was before these texts came out. (And now Musk is reportedly renewing his original offer to buy the company; does that mean Hoffman is in?)

—Though progressive Democratic challengers faired far worse in the 2022 Congressional primaries than in the last two cycles, a new analysis by Amelia Malpas in the Washington Post shows that their ongoing efforts have influenced the policy positions and priorities of incumbents, causing them to significantly increase their cosponsorship of bills introduced by the Squad.

—Women between the ages of 18-29 rank abortion at the top of issues that are important to them personally, followed by inflation and climate change, according to a poll conducted in mid-August by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life. It’s also the topic they are following most closely in the news.

Odds and Ends

—Michael Grunwald has written the one thing you should read if you want to ponder what Hurricane Ian is telling us about the future of Florida.

—Here’s a worrisome trend: American news consumption has been dropping since 2020. The percentage of American adults who say they often get news from a digital device dropped from 60% then to 49% in 2022, the Pew Research Center reports. People getting news often from TV dropped from 40% to 31%, and news consumption from radio and print also dropped. What’s replacing it?

—Here’s a new database tracking corporate donations to anti-LGBTQ+ lawmakers, courtesy of Accountable for Equality Action.

—Say hello to the SNCC Legacy Project’s amazing new digital archive of the civil rights movement. It features videos, music, stories, reports, bios, photos, interviews, panels, and other materials of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was the cutting-edge organization of the movement, plus the voices of today’s young activists.

Department of Self-Promotion

—Lara Putnam and I are featured in the latest episode of Democracy Works, a podcast hosted by Jenna Spinelle and produced by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, talking about our recent New York Times essay about Democratic and progressive organizing.

End Times

—I don’t know if Katie Darling has a shot at winning her bid for Congress against incumbent Rep. Steve Scalise, but I’ve never seen a campaign ad as personal and powerful as this one from her.