My name is Lawrence Christopher Skufca. I am a civil rights activist and community organizer in the Camden, New Jersey area.
I hold a Juris Doctor from Rutgers School of Law; a B.A. in Political Science from Furman University; and an A.A. in the Social Sciences from Tri-County Technical College.
“The Trap” is a three part documentary series by award-winning producer Adam Curtis which explores whether the economic model that human behavior is motivated by rational self interest has created a culture of suspicion which actually threatens individual liberties and reduces the quality of our lives.
The series chronicles how the introduction of game theory has led political leaders to adopt a simplistic model of human behavior which views social interaction as series of self interested transactions designed to maximize individual outcomes. This paradigm shift has transitioned governments away from their traditional role in promoting the public interest into institutions which act to appease the wants of citizens. At the same time, citizens have begun to identify themselves as simplistic beings whose freedom is associated with the fulfillment of desires. As a result, both politicians and the masses have embraced an egocentric concept of freedom which has caused us to accept an economical model of supply and demand politics which seeks to maintain relevance by meeting short term desires rather than improving our overall social condition.
Curtis proposes a more substantive and fulfilling form of freedom which allows us not only to fill immediate wants and desires, but to transform the overall quality of our living standards. This hope of improving the society we live in, he suggests, has been abandoned by policymakers in favor of a safer, less satisfying form of democracy which robs our lives of their intrinsic value.
Episode 1: F**k You Buddy
Part one examines how Game Theory and the idea that human behavior is driven by rational self interest has molded the political, economic and social behavior of Western Democracies.
Episode one explores John Nash’s hypothesis that human behavior is motivated by rational, self interested decisions to maximize potential outcomes. Using self interest as his first premise, Nash proposes that individual behavior is motivated by rational choices, rather than any sense of duty towards others. Therefore, in any social transaction an individual maximizes their potential benefits by acting in their own self interest. Curtis chronicles how this concept has influenced politicians, economists, anthropologists and even geneticists to embrace a market based supply and demand approach which has transformed the goal of government from seeking the public good to fulfilling public demand.
Episode 2: The Lonely Robot
Part two chronicles how a transition to an economic model of government administration has produced a controlling, dispassionate system of bureaucratic management driven by statistical analysis and desired outcomes. Curtis shows how the call for increased government efficiency and delivery of services, measured by numerical calculations, has resulted in increased institutional rigidity, inefficiency and corruption as administrators have resorted to manipulating statistics to meet performance targets rather than enacting the desired reforms.
Episode 3: We Will Force You To Be Free
Part three focuses on how the introduction of Isaiah Berlin’s concept of positive and negative liberties has influenced the Western concept of social progress. Berlin argues that the negative consequences of social revolutions can be avoided by enforcing negative, rather than positive liberties. Berlin reasons that the exercise of positive liberty always brings oppression because it requires the government to coerce an unwilling populace into embracing the desired social change. Therefore, Berlin suggests that it is safer for democracies to limit the government’s ability to cause harm through the exercise of negative liberty, allowing individuals greater autonomy over their own lives. However, Berlin warns, the idea of negative liberty can never become so absolute and inflexible, that democracy evolves into the very tyranny it seeks to avoid.
Curtis chronicles how Western leaders have ignored Berlin’s warning through an extreme vision of negative liberty which seeks to end global tyranny and maintain the peace through the use of state sponsored violence. At the same time, Western democracies have attempted to maintain domestic tranquility by suppressing passionate dissent and retreating to the safety of rational objectivism. As a result, Curtis argues, we are trapped within a false paradigm which stifles democracy and robs our lives of meaning.
Fair Use Notice
This video may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes only in an effort to advance the understanding of human rights and social justice issues and is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law.
In the 20th century, the United States moved from an economy based on high wages and reliable benefits to a system of low wages and cheap consumer prices, to the detriment of workers. What’s next?
The problem of low pay has dominated headlines this year thanks to striking fast food workers, tone-deaf employers, and a spate of successful campaigns to raise state and local minimum wages.
Behind the news cycle, however, there’s a deeper issue than what Walmart or McDonald’s pay their workers today. Americans are once again wrestling with what they fundamentally want from the social contract—the basic bargain most of us can expect from the economy throughout our lives.
A generation ago, the country’s social contract was premised on higher wages and reliable benefits, provided chiefly by employers. In recent decades, we’ve moved to a system where low wages are supposed to be made bearable by low consumer prices and a hodgepodge of government assistance programs. But as dissatisfaction with this arrangement has grown, it is time to look back at how we got here and imagine what the next stage of the social contract might be.
The story of the modern social contract can be divided into two parts, with the first beginning in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The New Deal era of the 1930s through the 1970s was largely defined by high and rising wages, which were pushed up by strong unions, limited global competition, low energy and commodity prices, and more stringent regulations on businesses. At the same time, the ability to automate and innovate in the dominant manufacturing sector made it possible to offer workers high pay while keeping prices on consumer goods low.
But the social contract didn’t just encompass paychecks. During the mid-century boom, many employers—led by industrial giants like General Motors and General Electric—acted as “welfare capitalists” that were also primarily responsible for providing benefits like a pension to workers and their families. Part of the motivation was cultural: Before the notion of shareholder capitalism took root in the 1980s, companies viewed it as part of their mission to act in the interests of all of their stakeholders, including workers and their communities, rather than in the interests of investors alone. However, companies also favored the arrangement because providing benefits to workers directly gave them some leverage against labor unions. Ultimately, the welfare-capitalist social contract became the norm.
Starting in the 1980s, however, the social contract underwent a profound change. Deregulation of industry, increasing global competition, and the increasing cost and volatility of raw materials all led companies to move away from the New Deal era consensus. In its place grew what we term the “low-wage social contract” that has dominated through the current day.
After the New Deal, a Worse Deal
The low-wage social contract seeks to balance poor private sector pay with cheap consumer goods, low taxes, and government subsidies that boost after-tax incomes. What does this mean in practice? Cheap imports from countries like China are one big part of it, as are policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit that allow Washington to supplement low-income workers’ pay through the tax code.
Proponents of the low-wage social contract on both the left and the right have argued that the combination of inexpensive goods and low taxes should give consumers more spending power than they would have in a high-wage, high-price economy. In a famous paper entitled “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story,” Jason Furman, now Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, argued that the low-wage model actually made low-income consumers better off overall.
For many, though, the bargain has clearly failed. It is true that tax credits and cheap goods have boosted the standard of living for otherwise impoverished workers. Yet, according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account wage subsidies and additional costs like taxes and medical costs, almost 10 percent of the total working population still lives in poverty. This includes roughly 5 million Americans who work full-time, year-round.
A key reason for this is that the low-wage social contract does not do much to help families in the areas they need most. Clothing, food, and other items found at Wal-Mart might be cheap for low-wage workers. But other necessary services—health care, daycare, eldercare, and college—have simultaneously become less affordable and more important as most mothers work outside of the home and the wage premium for college remains high. In 1960, the average family spent about $12,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars on childcare, education, and healthcare over the course of 17 years raising a child. Four decades later, the average family spends almost $63,000 per child. Medical out-of-pocket expenses now push more people below the poverty line than tax credits can lift above it.
The low-wage social contract has also contributed to a lack of aggregate demand. Because workers are also consumers, and because low-income households spend more of their money than do wealthier households, the low wage system limits the power of workers to help the economy grow by purchasing goods and services.
The Next Social Contract
That’s how we got here—but what might lie ahead?
While the “low wage” social contract may not be much of a bargain for many workers, there’s no pretending we can go back to the New Deal-era system of old. The combination of conditions that allowed for high wages, high profits, and low prices no longer exists in a service-based economy with more unstable employment and in which the declining number of manufacturing jobs are more subject to global competition. And while the welfare capitalist model did benefit many in the middle class, it often excluded African-American workers and was reliant on a family model based on a sole male breadwinner. The next social contract needs to adapt to these new economic conditions and further the huge strides we have made toward equality for women and minorities in the workforce.
What, then, would a better social contract look like?
First, we could accept the basic shape of the low-wage economy while softening its edges by asking government to do even more. With higher taxes on the wealthy, Washington could use the tax code to provide poor and middle-class families more generous means-tested subsidies to pay for childcare, education, and healthcare. Since the Clinton era, much of the Democratic Party has embraced this version of the social contract. It is essentially the model behind Obamacare.
The downside, besides the challenge of raising taxes, is that subsidies don’t guarantee affordability. They can even encourage industries to raise their prices; see, for example, the proliferation of cheap student loans, which have not made college much more affordable. What’s more, means-tested programs for the poor often lack the political support needed to keep them strong.
Another possibility, which would please many progressives, would be to nudge the economy toward a social democratic model such as that of Scandinavia. This social contract would entail high wages, a high cost of living, and a universal welfare state paid for with high, relatively flat taxes.
But transplanting the Nordic model as a whole to the U.S. would be difficult in the face of fierce resistance to higher levels of spending. It would also be hard to import a system of benefits paid for by broad and flat taxes, like payroll taxes and consumption taxes, on a country like the U.S. with much greater inequality.
In our own work at the New America Foundation, we have outlined a third idea we call the “middle-income social contract.” It assumes that many service industries won’t be able to offer their workers middle-income salaries, which means that, in addition to raising wages somewhat, the government will have to take a more active role in making essential services like education, child care and health care more affordable. The best way to do this is to provide these programs directly, such as through universal Pre-K, single-payer health insurance, or subsidies to the states for taking care of the elderly. Policymakers can begin to build a middle-income social contract by raising the federal minimum wage closer to a true living wage and expanding public early education, both of which are widely popular proposals.
The current low-wage social contract between American workers, employers, and the government has been a raw deal for most Americans. Just as the New Deal contract shifted to the low wage model, we need to shift once again to a system more suited to the current economy and needs of workers and citizens. The options for the next social contract are many—we just have to choose the right one.
THE MESSAGE ARRIVES on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.” ¶ ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted man in the world. For almost nine months, I have been trying to set up an interview with him—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs? In May I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013. But the finer details of the rendezvous remain shrouded in mystery. I landed in Moscow without knowing precisely where or when Snowden and I would actually meet. Now, at last, the details are set.
I am staying at the Hotel Metropol, a whimsical sand-colored monument to pre-revolutionary art nouveau. Built during the time of Czar Nicholas II, it later became the Second House of the Soviets after the Bolsheviks took over in 1917. In the restaurant, Lenin would harangue his followers in a greatcoat and Kirza high boots. Now his image adorns a large plaque on the exterior of the hotel, appropriately facing away from the symbols of the new Russia on the next block—Bentley and Ferrari dealerships and luxury jewelers like Harry Winston and Chopard.
I’ve had several occasions to stay at the Metropol during my three decades as an investigative journalist. I stayed here 20 years ago when I interviewed Victor Cherkashin, the senior KGB officer who oversaw American spies such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. And I stayed here again in 1995, during the Russian war in Chechnya, when I met with Yuri Modin, the Soviet agent who ran Britain’s notorious Cambridge Five spy ring. When Snowden fled to Russia after stealing the largest cache of secrets in American history, some in Washington accused him of being another link in this chain of Russian agents. But as far as I can tell, it is a charge with no valid evidence.
I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries.
But in all my work, I’ve never run across anyone quite like Snowden. He is a uniquely postmodern breed of whistle-blower. Physically, very few people have seen him since he disappeared into Moscow’s airport complex last June. But he has nevertheless maintained a presence on the world stage—not only as a man without a country but as a man without a body. When being interviewed at the South by Southwest conference or receiving humanitarian awards, his disembodied image smiles down from jumbotron screens. For an interview at the TED conference in March, he went a step further—a small screen bearing a live image of his face was placed on two leg-like poles attached vertically to remotely controlled wheels, giving him the ability to “walk” around the event, talk to people, and even pose for selfies with them. The spectacle suggests a sort of Big Brother in reverse: Orwell’s Winston Smith, the low-ranking party functionary, suddenly dominating telescreens throughout Oceania with messages promoting encryption and denouncing encroachments on privacy.
Of course, Snowden is still very cautious about arranging face-to-face meetings, and I am reminded why when, preparing for our interview, I read a recent Washington Post report. The story, by Greg Miller, recounts daily meetings with senior officials from the FBI, CIA, and State Department, all desperately trying to come up with ways to capture Snowden. One official told Miller: “We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: ‘You’re in our airspace. Land.’ ” He wasn’t. And since he disappeared into Russia, the US seems to have lost all trace of him.
I do my best to avoid being followed as I head to the designated hotel for the interview, one that is a bit out of the way and attracts few Western visitors. I take a seat in the lobby facing the front door and open the book I was instructed to bring. Just past one, Snowden walks by, dressed in dark jeans and a brown sport coat and carrying a large black backpack over his right shoulder. He doesn’t see me until I stand up and walk beside him. “Where were you?” he asks. “I missed you.” I point to my seat. “And you were with the CIA?” I tease. He laughs.
Snowden is about to say something as we enter the elevator, but at the last moment a woman jumps in so we silently listen to the bossa nova classic “Desafinado” as we ride to an upper floor. When we emerge, he points out a window that overlooks the modern Moscow skyline, glimmering skyscrapers that now overshadow the seven baroque and gothic towers the locals call Stalinskie Vysotki, or “Stalin’s high-rises.” He has been in Russia for more than a year now. He shops at a local grocery store where no one recognizes him, and he has picked up some of the language. He has learned to live modestly in an expensive city that is cleaner than New York and more sophisticated than Washington. In August, Snowden’s temporary asylum was set to expire. (On August 7, the government announced that he’d been granted a permit allowing him to stay three more years.)
Entering the room he has booked for our interview, he throws his backpack on the bed alongside his baseball cap and a pair of dark sunglasses. He looks thin, almost gaunt, with a narrow face and a faint shadow of a goatee, as if he had just started growing it yesterday. He has on his trademark Burberry eyeglasses, semi-rimless with rectangular lenses. His pale blue shirt seems to be at least a size too big, his wide belt is pulled tight, and he is wearing a pair of black square-toed Calvin Klein loafers. Overall, he has the look of an earnest first-year grad student.
Snowden is careful about what’s known in the intelligence world as operational security. As we sit down, he removes the battery from his cell phone. I left my iPhone back at my hotel. Snowden’s handlers repeatedly warned me that, even switched off, a cell phone can easily be turned into an NSA microphone. Knowledge of the agency’s tricks is one of the ways that Snowden has managed to stay free. Another is by avoiding areas frequented by Americans and other Westerners. Nevertheless, when he’s out in public at, say, a computer store, Russians occasionally recognize him. “Shh,” Snowden tells them, smiling, putting a finger to his lips.
DESPITE BEING THE subject of a worldwide manhunt, Snowden seems relaxed and upbeat as we drink Cokes and tear away at a giant room-service pepperoni pizza. His 31st birthday is a few days away. Snowden still holds out hope that he will someday be allowed to return to the US. “I told the government I’d volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose,” he says. “I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can’t allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I’m not going to be part of that.”
Meanwhile, Snowden will continue to haunt the US, the unpredictable impact of his actions resonating at home and around the world. The documents themselves, however, are out of his control. Snowden no longer has access to them; he says he didn’t bring them with him to Russia. Copies are now in the hands of several news organizations, including: First Look Media, set up by journalist Glenn Greenwald and American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, the two original recipients of the documents; The Guardian newspaper, which also received copies before the British government pressured it into transferring physical custody (but not ownership) to The New York Times; and Barton Gellman, a writer for The Washington Post. It’s highly unlikely that the current custodians will ever return the documents to the NSA.
Edward Snowden explains in his own words why he decided to reveal secret details of the domestic surveillance being conducted by US intelligence services. PLATON
That has left US officials in something like a state of impotent expectation, waiting for the next round of revelations, the next diplomatic upheaval, a fresh dose of humiliation. Snowden tells me it doesn’t have to be like this. He says that he actually intended the government to have a good idea about what exactly he stole. Before he made off with the documents, he tried to leave a trail of digital bread crumbs so investigators could determine which documents he copied and took and which he just “touched.” That way, he hoped, the agency would see that his motive was whistle-blowing and not spying for a foreign government. It would also give the government time to prepare for leaks in the future, allowing it to change code words, revise operational plans, and take other steps to mitigate damage. But he believes the NSA’s audit missed those clues and simply reported the total number of documents he touched—1.7 million. (Snowden says he actually took far fewer.) “I figured they would have a hard time,” he says. “I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”
Asked to comment on Snowden’s claims, NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines would say only, “If Mr. Snowden wants to discuss his activities, that conversation should be held with the US Department of Justice. He needs to return to the United States to face the charges against him.”
Snowden speculates that the government fears that the documents contain material that’s deeply damaging—secrets the custodians have yet to find. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy shit.’ And they think it’s still out there.”
Yet it is very likely that no one knows precisely what is in the mammoth haul of documents—not the NSA, not the custodians, not even Snowden himself. He would not say exactly how he gathered them, but others in the intelligence community have speculated that he simply used a web crawler, a program that can search for and copy all documents containing particular keywords or combinations of keywords. This could account for many of the documents that simply list highly technical and nearly unintelligible signal parameters and other statistics.
And there’s another prospect that further complicates matters: Some of the revelations attributed to Snowden may not in fact have come from him but from another leaker spilling secrets under Snowden’s name. Snowden himself adamantly refuses to address this possibility on the record. But independent of my visit to Snowden, I was given unrestricted access to his cache of documents in various locations. And going through this archive using a sophisticated digital search tool, I could not find some of the documents that have made their way into public view, leading me to conclude that there must be a second leaker somewhere. I’m not alone in reaching that conclusion. Both Greenwald and security expert Bruce Schneier—who have had extensive access to the cache—have publicly stated that they believe another whistle-blower is releasing secret documents to the media.
In fact, on the first day of my Moscow interview with Snowden, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel comes out with a long story about the NSA’s operations in Germany and its cooperation with the German intelligence agency, BND. Among the documents the magazine releases is a top-secret “Memorandum of Agreement” between the NSA and the BND from 2002. “It is not from Snowden’s material,” the magazine notes.
Some have even raised doubts about whether the infamous revelation that the NSA was tapping German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, long attributed to Snowden, came from his trough. At the time of that revelation, Der Spiegel simply attributed the information to Snowden and other unnamed sources. If other leakers exist within the NSA, it would be more than another nightmare for the agency—it would underscore its inability to control its own information and might indicate that Snowden’s rogue protest of government overreach has inspired others within the intelligence community. “They still haven’t fixed their problems,” Snowden says. “They still have negligent auditing, they still have things going for a walk, and they have no idea where they’re coming from and they have no idea where they’re going. And if that’s the case, how can we as the public trust the NSA with all of our information, with all of our private records, the permanent record of our lives?”
The Der Spiegel articles were written by, among others, Poitras, the filmmaker who was one of the first journalists Snowden contacted. Her high visibility and expertise in encryption may have attracted other NSA whistle-blowers, and Snowden’s cache of documents could have provided the ideal cover. Following my meetings with Snowden, I email Poitras and ask her point-blank whether there are other NSA sources out there. She answers through her attorney: “We are sorry but Laura is not going to answer your question.”
THE SAME DAY I share pizza with Snowden in a Moscow hotel room, the US House of Representatives moves to put the brakes on the NSA. By a lopsided 293-to-123 tally, members vote to halt the agency’s practice of conducting warrantless searches of a vast database that contains millions of Americans’ emails and phone calls. “There’s no question Americans have become increasingly alarmed with the breadth of unwarranted government surveillance programs used to store and search their private data,” the Democratic and Republican sponsors announce in a joint statement. “By adopting this amendment, Congress can take a sure step toward shutting the back door on mass surveillance.”
It’s one of many proposed reforms that never would have happened had it not been for Snowden. Back in Moscow, Snowden recalls boarding a plane for Hong Kong, on his way to reveal himself as the leaker of a spectacular cache of secrets and wondering whether his risk would be worth it. “I thought it was likely that society collectively would just shrug and move on,” he says. Instead, the NSA’s surveillance has become one of the most pressing issues in the national conversation. President Obama has personally addressed the issue, Congress has taken up the issue, and the Supreme Court has hinted that it may take up the issue of warrantless wiretapping. Public opinion has also shifted in favor of curtailing mass surveillance. “It depends a lot on the polling question,” he says, “but if you ask simply about things like my decision to reveal Prism”—the program that allows government agencies to extract user data from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo—“55 percent of Americans agree. Which is extraordinary given the fact that for a year the government has been saying I’m some kind of supervillain.”
That may be an overstatement, but not by much. Nearly a year after Snowden’s first leaks broke, NSA director Keith Alexander claimed that Snowden was “now being manipulated by Russian intelligence” and accused him of causing “irreversible and significant damage.” More recently, Secretary of State John Kerry said that “Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor, and he has betrayed his country.” But in June, the government seemed to be backing away from its most apocalyptic rhetoric. In an interview with The New York Times, the new head of the NSA, Michael Rogers, said he was “trying to be very specific and very measured in my characterizations”: “You have not heard me as the director say, ‘Oh my God, the sky is falling.’”
Snowden keeps close tabs on his evolving public profile, but he has been resistant to talking about himself. In part, this is because of his natural shyness and his reluctance about “dragging family into it and getting a biography.” He says he worries that sharing personal details will make him look narcissistic and arrogant. But mostly he’s concerned that he may inadvertently detract from the cause he has risked his life to promote. “I’m an engineer, not a politician,” he says. “I don’t want the stage. I’m terrified of giving these talking heads some distraction, some excuse to jeopardize, smear, and delegitimize a very important movement.”
But when Snowden finally agrees to discuss his personal life, the portrait that emerges is not one of a wild-eyed firebrand but of a solemn, sincere idealist who—step by step over a period of years—grew disillusioned with his country and government.
Born on June 21, 1983, Snowden grew up in the Maryland suburbs, not far from the NSA’s headquarters. His father, Lon, rose through the enlisted ranks of the Coast Guard to warrant officer, a difficult path. His mother, Wendy, worked for the US District Court in Baltimore, while his older sister, Jessica, became a lawyer at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington. “Everybody in my family has worked for the federal government in one way or another,” Snowden says. “I expected to pursue the same path.” His father told me, “We always considered Ed the smartest one in the family.” It didn’t surprise him when his son scored above 145 on two separate IQ tests.
Rather than spending hours watching television or playing sports as a kid, Snowden fell in love with books, especially Greek mythology. “I remember just going into those books, and I would disappear with them for hours,” he says. Snowden says reading about myths played an important role growing up, providing him with a framework for confronting challenges, including moral dilemmas. “I think that’s when I started thinking about how we identify problems, and that the measure of an individual is how they address and confront those problems,” he says.
Soon after Snowden revealed himself as a leaker, there was enormous media focus on the fact that he quit school after the 10th grade, with the implication that he was simply an uneducated slacker. But rather than delinquency, it was a bout of mononucleosis that caused him to miss school for almost nine months. Instead of falling back a grade, Snowden enrolled in community college. He’d loved computers since he was a child, but now that passion deepened. He started working for a classmate who ran his own tech business. Coincidentally, the company was run from a house at Fort Meade, where the NSA’s headquarters are located.
Snowden was on his way to the office when the 9/11 attacks took place. “I was driving in to work and I heard the first plane hit on the radio,” he says. Like a lot of civic-minded Americans, Snowden was profoundly affected by the attacks. In the spring of 2004, as the ground war in Iraq was heating up with the first battle of Fallujah, he volunteered for the Army special forces. “I was very open to the government’s explanation—almost propaganda—when it came to things like Iraq, aluminum tubes, and vials of anthrax,” he says. “I still very strongly believed that the government wouldn’t lie to us, that our government had noble intent, and that the war in Iraq was going to be what they said it was, which was a limited, targeted effort to free the oppressed. I wanted to do my part.”
Snowden says that he was particularly attracted to the special forces because it offered the chance to learn languages. After performing well on an aptitude test, he was admitted. But the physical requirements were more challenging. He broke both of his legs in a training accident. A few months later he was discharged.
OUT OF THE Army, Snowden landed a job as a security guard at a top-secret facility that required him to get a high-level security clearance. He passed a polygraph exam and the stringent background check and, almost without realizing it, he found himself on his way to a career in the clandestine world of intelligence. After attending a job fair focused on intelligence agencies, he was offered a position at the CIA, where he was assigned to the global communications division, the organization that deals with computer issues, at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It was an extension of the network and engineering work he’d been doing since he was 16. “All of the covert sites—cover sites and so forth—they all network into the CIA headquarters,” he says. “It was me and one other guy who worked the late shifts.” But Snowden quickly discovered one of the CIA’s biggest secrets: Despite its image as a bleeding-edge organization, its technology was woefully out-of-date. The agency was not at all what it appeared to be from the outside.
As the junior man on the top computer team, Snowden distinguished himself enough to be sent to the CIA’s secret school for technology specialists. He lived there, in a hotel, for some six months, studying and training full-time. After the training was complete, in March 2007, Snowden headed for Geneva, Switzerland, where the CIA was seeking information about the banking industry. He was assigned to the US Mission to the United Nations. He was given a diplomatic passport, a four-bedroom apartment near the lake, and a nice cover assignment.
It was in Geneva that Snowden would see firsthand some of the moral compromises CIA agents made in the field. Because spies were promoted based on the number of human sources they recruited, they tripped over each other trying to sign up anyone they could, regardless of their value. Operatives would get targets drunk enough to land in jail and then bail them out—putting the target in their debt. “They do really risky things to recruit them that have really negative, profound impacts on the person and would have profound impacts on our national reputation if we got caught,” he says. “But we do it simply because we can.”
While in Geneva, Snowden says, he met many spies who were deeply opposed to the war in Iraq and US policies in the Middle East. “The CIA case officers were all going, what the hell are we doing?” Because of his job maintaining computer systems and network operations, he had more access than ever to information about the conduct of the war. What he learned troubled him deeply. “This was the Bush period, when the war on terror had gotten really dark,” he says. “We were torturing people; we had warrantless wiretapping.”
He began to consider becoming a whistle-blower, but with Obama about to be elected, he held off. “I think even Obama’s critics were impressed and optimistic about the values that he represented,” he says. “He said that we’re not going to sacrifice our rights. We’re not going to change who we are just to catch some small percentage more terrorists.” But Snowden grew disappointed as, in his view, Obama didn’t follow through on his lofty rhetoric. “Not only did they not fulfill those promises, but they entirely repudiated them,” he says. “They went in the other direction. What does that mean for a society, for a democracy, when the people that you elect on the basis of promises can basically suborn the will of the electorate?”
It took a couple of years for this new level of disillusionment to set in. By that time—2010—Snowden had shifted from the CIA to the NSA, accepting a job as a technical expert in Japan with Dell, a major contractor for the agency. Since 9/11 and the enormous influx of intelligence money, much of the NSA’s work had been outsourced to defense contractors, including Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton. For Snowden, the Japan posting was especially attractive: He had wanted to visit the country since he was a teen. Snowden worked at the NSA offices at Yokota Air Base, outside Tokyo, where he instructed top officials and military officers on how to defend their networks from Chinese hackers.
But Snowden’s disenchantment would only grow. It was bad enough when spies were getting bankers drunk to recruit them; now he was learning about targeted killings and mass surveillance, all piped into monitors at the NSA facilities around the world. Snowden would watch as military and CIA drones silently turned people into body parts. And he would also begin to appreciate the enormous scope of the NSA’s surveillance capabilities, an ability to map the movement of everyone in a city by monitoring their MAC address, a unique identifier emitted by every cell phone, computer, and other electronic device.
Even as his faith in the mission of US intelligence services continued to crumble, his upward climb as a trusted technical expert proceeded. In 2011 he returned to Maryland, where he spent about a year as Dell’s lead technologist working with the CIA’s account. “I would sit down with the CIO of the CIA, the CTO of the CIA, the chiefs of all the technical branches,” he says. “They would tell me their hardest technology problems, and it was my job to come up with a way to fix them.”
But in March 2012, Snowden moved again for Dell, this time to a massive bunker in Hawaii where he became the lead technologist for the information-sharing office, focusing on technical issues. Inside the “tunnel,” a dank, chilly, 250,000-square-foot pit that was once a torpedo storage facility, Snowden’s concerns over the NSA’s capabilities and lack of oversight grew with each passing day. Among the discoveries that most shocked him was learning that the agency was regularly passing raw private communications—content as well as metadata—to Israeli intelligence. Usually information like this would be “minimized,” a process where names and personally identifiable data are removed. But in this case, the NSA did virtually nothing to protect even the communications of people in the US. This included the emails and phone calls of millions of Arab and Palestinian Americans whose relatives in Israel-occupied Palestine could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” Snowden says. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.” (The operation was reported last year by The Guardian, which cited the Snowden documents as its source.)
Another troubling discovery was a document from NSA director Keith Alexander that showed the NSA was spying on the pornography-viewing habits of political radicals. The memo suggested that the agency could use these “personal vulnerabilities” to destroy the reputations of government critics who were not in fact accused of plotting terrorism. The document then went on to list six people as future potential targets. (Greenwald published a redacted version of the document last year on the Huffington Post.)
Snowden was astonished by the memo. “It’s much like how the FBI tried to use Martin Luther King’s infidelity to talk him into killing himself,” he says. “We said those kinds of things were inappropriate back in the ’60s. Why are we doing that now? Why are we getting involved in this again?”
In the mid-1970s, Senator Frank Church, similarly shocked by decades of illegal spying by the US intelligence services, first exposed the agencies’ operations to the public. That opened the door to long-overdue reforms, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Snowden sees parallels between then and now. “Frank Church analogized it as being on the brink of the abyss,” he says. “He was concerned that once we went in we would never come out. And the concern we have today is that we’re on the brink of that abyss again.” He realized, just like Church had before him, that the only way to cure the abuses of the government was to expose them. But Snowden didn’t have a Senate committee at his disposal or the power of congressional subpoena. He’d have to carry out his mission covertly, just as he’d been trained.
THE SUN SETS late here in June, and outside the hotel window long shadows are beginning to envelop the city. But Snowden doesn’t seem to mind that the interview is stretching into the evening hours. He is living on New York time, the better to communicate with his stateside supporters and stay on top of the American news cycle. Often, that means hearing in almost real time the harsh assessments of his critics. Indeed, it’s not only government apparatchiks that take issue with what Snowden did next—moving from disaffected operative to whistle-blowing dissident. Even in the technology industry, where he has many supporters, some accuse him of playing too fast and loose with dangerous information. Netscape founder and prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has told CNBC, “If you looked up in the encyclopedia ‘traitor,’ there’s a picture of Edward Snowden.” Bill Gates delivered a similarly cutting assessment in a Rolling Stone interview. “I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn’t characterize him as a hero,” he said. “You won’t find much admiration from me.”
Snowden with General Michael Hayden at a gala in 2011. Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, defended US surveillance policies in the wake of Snowden’s revelations.
Snowden adjusts his glasses; one of the nose pads is missing, making them slip occasionally. He seems lost in thought, looking back to the moment of decision, the point of no return. The time when, thumb drive in hand, aware of the enormous potential consequences, he secretly went to work. “If the government will not represent our interests,” he says, his face serious, his words slow, “then the public will champion its own interests. And whistle-blowing provides a traditional means to do so.”
The NSA had apparently never predicted that someone like Snowden might go rogue. In any case, Snowden says he had no problem accessing, downloading, and extracting all the confidential information he liked. Except for the very highest level of classified documents, details about virtually all of the NSA’s surveillance programs were accessible to anyone, employee or contractor, private or general, who had top-secret NSA clearance and access to an NSA computer.
But Snowden’s access while in Hawaii went well beyond even this. “I was the top technologist for the information-sharing office in Hawaii,” he says. “I had access to everything.”
Well, almost everything. There was one key area that remained out of his reach: the NSA’s aggressive cyberwarfare activity around the world. To get access to that last cache of secrets, Snowden landed a job as an infrastructure analyst with another giant NSA contractor, Booz Allen. The role gave him rare dual-hat authority covering both domestic and foreign intercept capabilities—allowing him to trace domestic cyberattacks back to their country of origin. In his new job, Snowden became immersed in the highly secret world of planting malware into systems around the world and stealing gigabytes of foreign secrets. At the same time, he was also able to confirm, he says, that vast amounts of US communications “were being intercepted and stored without a warrant, without any requirement for criminal suspicion, probable cause, or individual designation.” He gathered that evidence and secreted it safely away.
By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock. One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)
Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an “oh shit” moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.
Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAO’s operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.”
MUCH OF SNOWDEN’S focus while working for Booz Allen was analyzing potential cyberattacks from China. His targets included institutions normally considered outside the military’s purview. He thought the work was overstepping the intelligence agency’s mandate. “It’s no secret that we hack China very aggressively,” he says. “But we’ve crossed lines. We’re hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets. And that’s a real concern.”
The last straw for Snowden was a secret program he discovered while getting up to speed on the capabilities of the NSA’s enormous and highly secret data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah. Potentially capable of holding upwards of a yottabyte of data, some 500 quintillion pages of text, the 1 million-square-foot building is known within the NSA as the Mission Data Repository. (According to Snowden, the original name was Massive Data Repository, but it was changed after some staffers thought it sounded too creepy—and accurate.) Billions of phone calls, faxes, emails, computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world flow through the MDR every hour. Some flow right through, some are kept briefly, and some are held forever.
The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology.
Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That’s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”
In addition to the possibility of accidentally starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy because, in order for the system to work, the NSA first would have to secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the US. “The argument is that the only way we can identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we’re analyzing all traffic flows,” he says. “And if we’re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.” (A spokesperson for the NSA declined to comment on MonsterMind, the malware in Syria, or on the specifics of other aspects of this article.)
Given the NSA’s new data storage mausoleum in Bluffdale, its potential to start an accidental war, and the charge to conduct surveillance on all incoming communications, Snowden believed he had no choice but to take his thumb drives and tell the world what he knew. The only question was when.
On March 13, 2013, sitting at his desk in the “tunnel” surrounded by computer screens, Snowden read a news story that convinced him that the time had come to act. It was an account of director of national intelligence James Clapper telling a Senate committee that the NSA does “not wittingly” collect information on millions of Americans. “I think I was reading it in the paper the next day, talking to coworkers, saying, can you believe this shit?”
Snowden and his colleagues had discussed the routine deception around the breadth of the NSA’s spying many times, so it wasn’t surprising to him when they had little reaction to Clapper’s testimony. “It was more of just acceptance,” he says, calling it “the banality of evil”—a reference to Hannah Arendt’s study of bureaucrats in Nazi Germany.
“It’s like the boiling frog,” Snowden tells me. “You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty, a little bit of deceptiveness, a little bit of disservice to the public interest, and you can brush it off, you can come to justify it. But if you do that, it creates a slippery slope that just increases over time, and by the time you’ve been in 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, you’ve seen it all and it doesn’t shock you. And so you see it as normal. And that’s the problem, that’s what the Clapper event was all about. He saw deceiving the American people as what he does, as his job, as something completely ordinary. And he was right that he wouldn’t be punished for it, because he was revealed as having lied under oath and he didn’t even get a slap on the wrist for it. It says a lot about the system and a lot about our leaders.” Snowden decided it was time to hop out of the water before he too was boiled alive.
At the same time, he knew there would be dire consequences. “It’s really hard to take that step—not only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that I’m willing to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground.”
But he felt that he had no choice. Two months later he boarded a flight to Hong Kong with a pocket full of thumb drives.
THE AFTERNOON OF our third meeting, about two weeks after our first, Snowden comes to my hotel room. I have changed locations and am now staying at the Hotel National, across the street from the Kremlin and Red Square. An icon like the Metropol, much of Russia’s history passed through its front doors at one time or another. Lenin once lived in Room 107, and the ghost of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared chief of the old Soviet secret police who also lived here, still haunts the hallways.
But rather than the Russian secret police, it’s his old employers, the CIA and the NSA, that Snowden most fears. “If somebody’s really watching me, they’ve got a team of guys whose job is just to hack me,” he says. “I don’t think they’ve geolocated me, but they almost certainly monitor who I’m talking to online. Even if they don’t know what you’re saying, because it’s encrypted, they can still get a lot from who you’re talking to and when you’re talking to them.”
More than anything, Snowden fears a blunder that will destroy all the progress toward reforms for which he has sacrificed so much. “I’m not self-destructive. I don’t want to self-immolate and erase myself from the pages of history. But if we don’t take chances, we can’t win,” he says. And so he takes great pains to stay one step ahead of his presumed pursuers—he switches computers and email accounts constantly. Nevertheless, he knows he’s liable to be compromised eventually: “I’m going to slip up and they’re going to hack me. It’s going to happen.”
Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to open a large trove of NSA secrets that Snowden had passed to him. So he sent his longtime partner, David Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from Poitras, who fixed the archive. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian booked a transfer through London. Tipped off, probably as a result of surveillance by GCHQ, the British counterpart of the NSA, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive containing 60 gigabits of data—about 58,000 pages of documents—was seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Miranda’s with the password for one of the files, and they were able to decrypt about 75 pages, according to British court documents. *
Another concern for Snowden is what he calls NSA fatigue—the public becoming numb to disclosures of mass surveillance, just as it becomes inured to news of battle deaths during a war. “One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic,” he says, mordantly quoting Stalin. “Just as the violation of Angela Merkel’s rights is a massive scandal and the violation of 80 million Germans is a nonstory.”
Nor is he optimistic that the next election will bring any meaningful reform. In the end, Snowden thinks we should put our faith in technology—not politicians. “We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.” The answer, he says, is robust encryption. “By basically adopting changes like making encryption a universal standard—where all communications are encrypted by default—we can end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.”
Until then, Snowden says, the revelations will keep coming. “We haven’t seen the end,” he says. Indeed, a couple of weeks after our meeting, The Washington Post reported that the NSA’s surveillance program had captured much more data on innocent Americans than on its intended foreign targets. There are still hundreds of thousands of pages of secret documents out there—to say nothing of the other whistle-blowers he may have already inspired. But Snowden says that information contained in any future leaks is almost beside the point. “The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
*CORRECTION APPENDED [10:55am/August, 22 2014]: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Miranda retrieved GCHQ documents from Poitras; it also incorrectly stated that Greenwald has not gained access to the complete GCHQ documents.
This article will question what role private and public actors assume in the current structure of data collection and what potential rights are violated. To tease out the relationship between the private and government sectors, this article, for sake of argument, accepts as fact that surveillance is a core government function and that data is a public resource collected by private organizations. While those assumptions may be challenged by different definitions of what constitutes a public function, public resource, or mode of collection, this article does not take on those challenges. It also does not ask the normative question of whether data collection should cease or the descriptive inquiry of whether data collection could even be halted if the public wanted it to be.
Rather, this article simply examines the structure surrounding data collection in terms of privatization, and asks whether certain legal doctrines may be triggered, including the Fourth Amendment. To do so, this article will first set out a definition of a privatization and use the military as an example. In Section II, the article will then engage in a short history of the Internet to show how electronic data collection was a core government function later “privatized” by Silicon Valley corporations. Section III will then explain how this dynamic between private and public oversight raises Fourth Amendment concerns. Finally, the Conclusion will then set out suggestions for the future, including a potential justification for new privacy rights.
Recommended Citation
Victoria D. Baranetsky, Social Media and the Internet: A Story of Privatization, 35 Pace L. Rev. 304 (2014)
The source behind the Guardian’s NSA files talks to Glenn Greenwald about his motives for the biggest intelligence leak in a generation. Read the Guardian’s full NSA files coverage HERE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-n…
Many Americans believe that human trafficking is limited to foreign countries.But here in America, the sex trade is thriving. The average age for entrance into the sex industry is 12-14 years old and the vast majority of females who are coerced into sex trafficking have limited options for escaping the lifestyle. In this episode of National Geographic’s Inside: Secret America, investigative journalists Mariana van Zeller and Darren Foster go undercover and explore the world of sex trafficking in the United States. They gain an insider’s perspective from victims, outreach workers and law enforcement officials who are on the front lines fighting to stop this American tragedy.
They begin their journey with two volunteer outreach workers in Charlotte, N.C. who assist victims of sex trafficking. The team gains firsthand experience in the level of psychological intimidation a pimp can have over a trafficking victim while attempting to counsel a distraught victim. Outreach workers report that75% of trafficking victims are forced into sexual servitude by a pimp or handler. More surprisingly, not all pimps fit the stereotype of the flamboyantly attired street hustler. Some appear to be successful business professionals.
Taina Bien-Aimé is the Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). CATW is the first and oldest international non-profit organization dedicated to ending trafficking in women and girls and related forms of commercial sexual exploitation as practices of gender-based violence.
Prior to this position, Taina was the Executive Director of Women’s City Club of New York (WCC), a multi-issue advocacy organization that helps shape public policy in New York. She was a founding Board member of Equality Now, an international human rights organization that works for the protection of the rights of women and girls and later served as its Executive Director (2000-2011). She was Director of Business Affairs/Film Acquisitions at Home Box Office (1996-2000) and practiced international corporate law at the Wall St. law firm, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton (1992-1996).
Taina holds a J.D. from NYU School of Law and a Licence in Political Science from the University of Geneva/Graduate School of International Studies in Switzerland.
By Saru Jayaraman, Director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United
Activism in America and around the globe draws on the strategies and tactics of many cultures and philosophies. But to the extent that a certain model has dominated in the American left, it’s the progeny of Saul Alinsky and the trade unionist movement — an organizing practice best described as forming groups of workers to collectively protest and challenge the otherwise-unchecked power of bosses.
Historically, the workers who organized were mostly working class, white and in big factory-floor-type industries. Of course, to a working class white guy — not just Alinsky but most of the political figures who have shaped the institutional left — organizing other working class white guys is the easiest default. There’s nothing wrong with organizing working class white people. There is, however, something quite wrong if those are the only communities we’re organizing. A broad-based and far-reaching progressive movement must have broad strategies and reach into every community in America.
Ironically, while low-wage workers, people of color and immigrant workers are often considered “unorganizable,” it was these workers clamoring to be organized that sparked the creation of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United. Over the last twelve years we at ROC have built a national restaurant workers’ organization with more than 10,000 members in 26 cities, 100 employer partners and several thousand consumer members. While we’ve won back millions of dollars in stolen tips and wages for workers, opened several worker-owned restaurants, trained thousands of low-wage workers in livable-wage job skills, published two dozen reports on the industry and won some policy changes, our biggest accomplishment has been to develop the leadership of women and men from all backgrounds – white, black, Latino, Asian, Arab, immigrant and non-immigrant – to lead this movement themselves.
The communities most often neglected as “unorganizable” are the critical canaries in the coal mine of American society. When women, people of color and immigrant workers aren’t paid a living wage, it drives down incomes and the economy for everyone. When low-wage restaurant workers don’t have access to paid sick days, they come to work and spread germs and everyone who eats out pays the price. If we are not focusing our organizing efforts on poor people, communities of color, immigrants and women, then not only are we failing to build a broad and powerful left but we are also failing to include the perspectives of those most affected by the injustices we seek to fix.
*EDITOR’S NOTE: The strategy advice for activists outlined below should be limited to the context of persuading potential supporters to assist in the positive change you are advocating and should not be viewed as an effective strategy for persuading a knowingly exploitative individual or entity. An individual or entity which is already financially and ideologically invested in their policy decision is less likely to be persuaded to change harmful behaviors through relationship building. Unfortunately, under these adverse conditions, the tactics outlined below will more likely result in feigned cooperation and covert retaliation than in productive dialogue. – L. Christopher Skufca
By Hilary Rettig
What Activism Is—or Should Be
Activism is the act of influencing a person or group of people with the goal of eliciting a desired behavioral change. That change might be that the person votes for your candidate or ballot initiative; joins, donates to or participates more fully in your organization; or adopts a new habit such as energy conservation or vegetarianism.
The word behavioral is crucial because it is behavioral change, not simply a change of heart or mind, that leads to a more progressive society. Some activists don’t get this; they think they’ve done their job if they can get their audience to agree with them. As meaningful as agreement is, however, and as good as it feels to both you and your audience, it does not in itself change the status quo: only behavioral change does. Getting your audience to change their behavior is harder than simply getting them to agree with you, but a dedicated activist will work diligently toward that goal, knowing that it will benefit not just the planet and society but, as I discuss below, the individual himself or herself.
Two other activities that aim to influence people with the goal of changing their behavior are marketing and sales. These are anathema to many activists, who consider them inherently exploitative, and the essence, really, of all that’s wrong with capitalism. There’s some truth to this viewpoint, but it is also somewhat of an oversimplification, since marketing and sales can, in fact, be used non-exploitatively and to positive ends. In business classes, and in this section of The Lifelong Activist, I teach what is called “consultative sales,” where you’re not manipulating the customer, but working alongside of him to arrive at a solution to a serious need he has. That need might be “I need a computer,” “I need a birthday gift for my girlfriend,” or “I need a government that represents the interests of everyone, and not just the top one percent.” The salesperson’s/activist’s job, in consultative sales, is not to manipulate the customer but to guide him toward an informed choice, and the outcome is not zero-sum, but win-win: the customer gets what he needs, and the salesperson/activist gets what she needs, be it cash, a vote or a petition signature.
The bottom line is that activism is, or should be, marketing and sales. Meaning, that you should use the same marketing and sales techniques that corporations use to sell products to sell your activist cause, and progressivism in general. You should, moreover, use these techniques wholeheartedly and without shame or embarrassment, for two main reasons:
1. Modern marketing and sales are, literally, the most powerful persuasive techniques ever devised.
They are responsible for the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the globe willingly eat at McDonald’s, listen to Madonna or U2, wear Nikes and use Microsoft Windows.
These techniques are too powerful to ignore and, in fact, it is folly to do so—folly, and a disservice to those on whose behalf we say we’re working. This is especially true given that our opposition generally embraces marketing and sales wholeheartedly, and uses them to powerful effect.1
In her book Bridging the Class Divide and Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing (see Bibliography), activist Linda Stout says:
It is important for [activist] organizations to have a marketing plan. Marketing is usually thought of in terms of selling products. But I think of marketing as figuring out how to talk about your work and get the message of what you are doing across to particular groups of people. When you are organizing, you are literally marketing a message.
All successful activists do, in fact, use marketing and sales, even if they don’t recognize or identify their activities as such. Fundraising and volunteer-recruitment are quite obviously marketing and sales endeavors, but so is any activity where you seek to persuade others. That’s why, throughout this section of The Lifelong Activist, I am able to quote business experts and activist experts side-by-side, giving essentially the same advice.
2. What corporate marketing and sales harms, progressive marketing and sales heals.
Many progressives believe that ubiquitous corporate marketing has largely replaced authentic expressions of identity, culture and community, resulting in a citizenry that is alienated from self and others. Corporations create that alienation, then profit when they sell people on the (false) idea that buying things will heal the alienated, hurting soul.
That’s not what you are doing when you market and sell progressivism, however. What you’re doing is offering a cure for that alienation.
Convince someone to support a progressive cause and you help heal society.
Convince someone to become an activist, with all the self-determination and self-expression and community that that role encompasses, and you help heal him.
How to Save the World
Sometimes, the healing referred to in point #2 extends beyond “emotional” and “community” healing to actual physical healing. That was certainly the case with one of the most successful activist movements of recent decades, the AIDS treatment movement. In the early and mid 1980s, AIDS remained a terrifying mystery. Because it preyed mainly on gays and drug users, it was considered by many a “disreputable” disease; and it wasn’t until mid-1987—nearly the end of his second presidential term—that Ronald Reagan finally gave a public address on the epidemic. Jerry Falwell and others even claimed that AIDS was God’s retribution for the supposedly sinful homosexual lifestyle.
Needless to say, there was little societal impetus to fund a cure—until a vocal and determined activist community started demanding one. Many of these activists worked in fields related to marketing: for instance, the group of six activists that created the famous “Silence=Death” pink triangle included a book designer and two art directors.2
The achievements of these activists were stunning. First, they succeeded in largely removing the stigma from AIDS and making it a topic of general conversation. That in itself made life much more bearable for many AIDS sufferers. The activists also managed to educate Americans—and, later, much of the rest of the world—on the need for, and mechanics of, AIDS prevention and safe sex. Finally, these activists managed to focus the attention of the medical establishment on AIDS, and to garner substantial funding for research into the disease and its treatment, resulting in the development of azidothymidine (AZT) and other palliative drugs.
While it’s true that AIDS remains a vast problem, especially in Africa, there is no denying the spectacular achievement of these “first-generation” AIDS activists whose work saved millions of lives. They serve as an inspiration to all progressive activists.
So, for your sake, the sake of those around you, and the sake of the planet, please market and sell your progressive ideals boldly and effectively.
The rest of this section of The Lifelong Activist tells you how. First, in Chapters 2 through 23, I discuss some fundamental principles you need to know to market effectively. Then, in Chapters 24 through 36, I discuss sales.
Of course, marketing and sales are highly complex endeavors, about which entire libraries have been written, so what follows is necessarily just an overview. See the Bibliography for suggestions for follow-up reading.
The Primary Requisite of Effective Activism
Are people selfish for focusing on their own needs instead of the community as a whole or the larger principle? Maybe or maybe not, but that’s not the point. The point is, that is the way most people—including most activists, by the way—behave. They need a reason to buy, and that reason isn’t the intrinsic worth of your viewpoint, it’s that they have a need that they perceive your viewpoint can fill.
At the same time, if you do your job properly, people will often surprise you by moving their focus quickly from their own immediate need to the more general principle at stake.
Accept the validity of Bitter Truth #2 and start presenting your causes, candidates and viewpoints in such a way that your audiences can immediately and effortlessly perceive them as meeting their needs. They shouldn’t have to do much thinking or guesswork to make the connection. The primary requisite for doing that—and for effective activism in general—is that you hold a sincere liking and respect for your listener that allows you to see things from her viewpoint (see Chapter 16), and to build a positive relationship with her. In the presence of such a relationship, your listener will feel safe and respected and is therefore likely to be tolerant of your attempts to persuade her; in the absence of one, she will likely (rightfully) be suspicious of you, your motives and your ideas. Again, contrast Patricia McHugh’s success at reaching out to people during the New York City memorial vigil, with Jane Doe’s and the other activists’ failures.
The best salespeople and activists are successful largely because they build those kinds of positive relationships almost effortlessly, and with a wide range of people. They are “people people” who love diversity, not just of race, class, religion, age or gender-orientation, but of mind. They enjoy talking to people—or, more to the point, listening to them—hearing their stories and opinions, and figuring out what makes them tick. They find human nature and human behavior endlessly fascinating.
To be sure, there are many salespeople who are insincere flatterers. I believe the percentage of them is much lower than most people think, however, especially among the top ranks. “Faking it” doesn’t work all that well, and it’s just too hard for most people to pull off, especially over the long term.
One word for the attitude I recommend you cultivate is “tolerance,” and yet tolerance doesn’t quite go far enough. If your goal is to influence people, you can’t just tolerate them, you have to really like and appreciate them. This is true even in cases where you disagree with some of the person’s viewpoints or actions. You gain nothing, absolutely nothing, by blaming or shaming such people, or by lecturing them. As Dale Carnegie said way back in 1936, in his classic book How to Win Friends & Influence People (see Bibliography):
You can tell people they are wrong by a look or an intonation or a gesture just as eloquently as you can in words—and if you tell them they are wrong, do you make them want to agree with you? Never! For you have struck a direct blow at their intelligence, judgment, pride and self-respect. That will make them want to strike back. But it will never make them want to change their minds. You may then hurl at them all the logic of a Plato or an Immanuel Kant, but you will not alter their opinions, for you have hurt their feelings.
Carnegie, whose book every activist should read, and then reread repeatedly throughout his or her career, recommends using a “Socratic” method of gently questioning the customer’s ideas and assumptions in order to gradually win him or her over to your viewpoint. And—guess what?—Alinsky also recommends using Socratic questioning. From Rules for Radicals:
Actually, Socrates was an organizer. The function of an organizer is to raise questions that agitate, that break through the accepted pattern. Socrates, with his goal of “know thyself,” was raising the internal questions within the individual that are so essential for the revolution which is external to the individual.
This, of course, brings us all the way back to the discussion, at the very beginning of The Lifelong Activist, of Gloria Steinem’s personal evolution from self-abnegation and self-denial to being able to live Socrates’ “examined life.” Revolution From Within, which is what she called her autobiography, and now you understand that you don’t just start a revolution from within yourself, but also from within your audience. You can’t impose a revolution on anyone—or any society—from the outside, and to attempt to do so is not just folly, but morally reprehensible. (See Chapter 15 for more on this point.) But you can ask the questions that will help your listener achieve her own revolution from within.
Later in his book, Alinsky suggests as proper activist technique a gentle form of interview called “guided questioning”:
Much of the time, though, the organizer will have a pretty good idea of what the community should be doing, and he will want to suggest, maneuver, and persuade the community toward that action. He will not ever seem to tell the community what to do; instead he will use loaded questions. . . . And so the guided questioning goes on without anyone losing face or being left out of the decision.
Is this manipulation? Certainly, just as a teacher manipulates, and no less, even a Socrates.
At the heart of the sales process is a similar form of interview, or “needs assessment,” in which you gently question your customer to ascertain his needs and lead him in the direction you wish. The process may be manipulative, as Alinsky unapologetically points out, but it is not inherently exploitative. Done from the standpoint of a sincere interest in, liking for and respect for the individual—not to mention for society and the planet—it is actually kind and caring.
Bitter Truth #1
The success of your venture depends much less on the quality of whatever it is you have to offer than on the quality of the marketing and sales you use to promote it.
I refer to this as a Bitter Truth—the first of three Bitter Truths discussed in The Lifelong Activist—because, in my experience, no one likes to hear this.
• My programming students would prefer to hear that it’s the quality of their code that will determine their success.
• My cooking students would prefer to hear that it’s the quality of their cuisine that will determine their success.
• My art students would prefer to hear that it’s the quality of their painting, writing, sculpture or music that will determine their success.
• And my activism students would prefer to hear that it’s the quality of their cause that will determine their success.
But it’s true. As Al Ries and Jack Trout point out in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing:
Many people think marketing is a battle of products. In the long run, they figure, the best product will win.
Marketing people are preoccupied with doing research and “getting the facts.” They analyze the situation to make sure that truth is on their side. Then they sail confidently into the marketing arena, secure in the knowledge that they have the best product and that ultimately the best product will win.
It’s an illusion. There is no objective reality. There are no facts. There are no best products. All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions in the minds of the customer or prospect. The perception is the reality. Everything else is an illusion. . . .
Most marketing mistakes stem from the assumption that you’re fighting a product battle rooted in reality. All the laws in this book are derived from exactly the opposite point of view. . . .
Marketing is not a battle of products. It’s a battle of perceptions.
Note that word, “perceptions.” Along with its verb form, “perceive,” you will see it used frequently throughout this section of The Lifelong Activist. Ries and Trout are absolutely right: in marketing, there is no objective reality—it is all about perception.
The Evidence is Overwhelming
We all wish the world worked differently, and that it were the quality of whatever it is you are selling that determined your success. Unfortunately, however, the evidence in support of Bitter Truth #1 is overwhelming. Just look around you, and you will see that the world is filled with shoddy, useless or even destructive products that are far from being “quality,” but that millions of people have been marketed and sold into believing they need.
For some more evidence in support of Bitter Truth #1, answer these questions:
• Is McDonald’s the best restaurant in the world?
• Does Microsoft produce the best software?
• Is John Grisham the best writer?
The answer in all three cases is, of course, “No,” but that doesn’t stop McDonald’s, Microsoft and John Grisham from being perennial best sellers, largely on the basis of their marketing and sales efforts.
Let’s also be clear, however, that “quality” means different things to different people. McDonald’s may not win any haute cuisine awards, but the company isn’t going after the gourmet market. Rather, it’s going after the cheap food/comfort food/consistency of menu/convenience of service/child-friendly markets, and if one or more of these criteria are important to you, then McDonald’s does indeed offer a quality product. You can make a similar argument for Microsoft software, John Grisham’s novels, or any other popular consumer product. The very fact that the product is popular proves that a lot of people see it as “quality” in at least one crucial attribute.
Needless to say, Bitter Truth #1 also applies to the political and social arenas. It explains why some people become president, and some do not. It also explains why you sometimes have trouble selling your “common-sense” or “obvious” viewpoint to audiences. While your cause may indeed be “gourmet,” your audience may well be craving “comfort food.” Whether they truly want that comfort food (or “comfort politics”), or have simply been convinced they want it by the opposition’s zillion-dollar marketing-and-sales campaign, is irrelevant to our discussion. Marketing is about perception, not truth.
In business and in activism, expecting the customer to automatically share your standard of quality is a classic screw-up, and usually fatal to the endeavor at hand. Your job is not to dictate to the customer what he or she ought to think or like, but to adhere to the three-step marketing process described earlier: locate your likeliest customers—meaning, the ones most predisposed to like your viewpoint; repackage your viewpoint to appeal to them further; and connect the customers with your viewpoint.
Bitter Truth #2
People buy a product not because of its intrinsic qualities or characteristics, but because they believe it will either solve a problem or meet a need that they have.
In other words, we don’t buy something because we think it is wonderful or beautiful or valuable—although the thing we are buying may possess all of those qualities and more. We buy it because we believe it will help us either solve a problem or meet a need that we have—in other words, as a means to an end.4 There is even a business axiom that neatly conveys this concept: “People don’t buy drills; they buy holes.”
In my experience, novice businesspeople don’t like Bitter Truth #2 any more than they like Bitter Truth #1. They would prefer that people buy their programming, cooking, art and other products because of the products’ (and, by extension, their) intrinsic excellence. This is especially true if the need the customer is filling seems wholly unrelated to the merits of the product in question. Many artists, for instance, hate it when people buy their work for reasons of status, or “to go with the décor,” and many computer programmers hate it when their customers show a lack of interest in the subtleties of their code, and only ask, “how fast can you get it done?” This attitude, by the way, is the exact opposite of that held by most experienced businesspeople, who are thrilled if someone buys their product for any reason. They are not inclined to dictate to their customers what their motivations should be.
If you think about it, Bitter Truth #2 actually explains Bitter Truth #1. If we buy something because we believe that it will fill a need, and if marketing and sales are the primary vehicles sellers have for fostering that belief, then it makes sense that it is the quality of your marketing and sales, rather than the quality of the thing you are selling, that will determine your success.
Types of Needs
There are hundreds of needs that people can have that can compel them to buy things. We tend to be very familiar with our pragmatic “surface needs” for things such as clothing, food and transportation, but all of us are also motivated to varying degrees by emotional “deep needs” for love, beauty, youth, virtue, etc. More precisely, what we crave is the feeling or emotional state of being loved (or in love), beautiful, youthful, virtuous, etc.
Needless to say, we also strongly crave to avoid negative or painful emotions such as guilt or shame.
Deep needs derive from our individual personality and experiences, and tend to reflect our most profound desires and fears. They are thus extremely powerful motivators; so powerful, in fact, that even manufacturers of mundane products often choose to market and sell by appealing not to the obvious surface need that the product addresses, but to one or more deep needs. Many ads for packaged foods, for instance, feature an image of a traditional family enjoying a meal that Mom is serving them. The image is designed to address at least three deep needs that the purchaser (usually a real-life mom) has:
• The need to feel as if she’s succeeding at her immediate goal of feeding her family.
• The need to feel as if she’s succeeding at her larger goal of creating a happy and healthy family life.
• The need not to feel guilty about serving packaged foods, as opposed to a home-cooked meal.
These can all be lumped into one “mega-deep-need”: the need to feel like she’s a good mother, or at least not a bad one.
As this example suggests, we usually act from several needs at once, and often our needs are multi-layered. When making a purchase, we may be conscious of some the needs we are fulfilling, and only semi-conscious, or unconscious, of others. We may download an MP3 music file because we enjoy the music, for instance, but we may also download it because, less obviously, we enjoy the “hip,” “affluent,” “authentic,” or “artsy” feeling(s) we get when we do. In other words, the purchase helps us meet our need to feel a certain way about ourselves.
Smart businesspeople learn to market their products by identifying the customer’s most urgent needs and presenting (or “packaging”) their product as a solution to those needs. And, as we shall see in the next chapter, smart activists do the same thing.
Hard as many businesspeople find it to accept Bitter Truth #2, many activists find it even harder. That’s because the things activists sell—peace, justice, freedom, equality, etc.—tend to be of extremely high value: the most valuable things on the planet, in fact. This blinds them to the fact that Bitter Truth #2 holds no matter how valuable the thing you are selling is.
Here’s Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals:
The first requirement for communication and education is for people to have a reason for knowing. (Italics his.)
In other words: a need. He also writes elsewhere:
Communication for persuasion . . . is getting a fix on [your audience’s] main value or goal and holding your course on that target. You don’t communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts or ethics of an issue.
Notice how neatly he incorporates both Bitter Truth #1 and Bitter Truth #2 into that concise statement.
Activists who don’t understand or accept Bitter Truth #2 are usually easily spotted. They tend to be ineffective, and they also tend to go around asking questions such as the following, often in tones of high frustration:
• What’s wrong with these people?! [Meaning: their audience.] Can’t they see that my cause is in their best interests?
Usually, the activist is asking rhetorically, which is a shame: if he asked for real, he might have a shot at answering the questions, thus arriving at Bitter Truth #2 and the key to improving his effectiveness.
As activists become more and more frustrated, they often ask more pointed questions, including:
• How can people be so ignorant?
• How can people be so selfish?
• How can people be so short-sighted?
And the ever-popular,
• How can people be so stupid?!
At this point, the activist is actively blaming the victim—i.e., his audience—for his own inability, or unwillingness, to market and sell effectively. And the sad truth is that anyone who feels so negatively about his customers is unlikely to succeed at selling them anything. So the more frustrated and embittered an activist gets, the more likely he is to fail.
If You’re Frustrated . . .
Knowing how hard activism can be, I certainly wouldn’t blame any activist for experiencing, and venting, occasional frustration. If you feel frustrated a lot, though, you should take a step back and, with the help of friends, colleagues and mentors, assess the situation. Maybe you need to change the way you do your activism. Or, maybe you’re burning out, and need to take a break. Try re-assessing your Mission, and see where that process takes you.
Many activists seem to operate under the principle that if they just badger people enough, or make them feel guilty or ashamed enough, then those people will finally see the error of their ways and embrace the activist’s viewpoint. A word for this behavior is “bullying,” and there are (at least) three problems with it:
1. Bullying is not marketing and sales. It is, in fact, the antithesis of marketing and sales, which seeks to build a strong positive relationship with the individual. Even the stereotypical manipulative used-car salesman acts like he is your best friend, at least until you buy the car.
2. Bullying, even for the noblest of reasons, is cruel, and therefore not consistent with progressive ethics.
3. Bullying doesn’t work. It is, in fact, more likely to motivate people away from your viewpoint than toward it.
Bullying can masquerade as activism, but is in fact antithetical to it. If you spend a lot of time talking at people instead of listening to them, you should give serious thought to the question of whether you are, in fact, bullying. And even if what you’re doing doesn’t quite cross the line into actual bullying, it probably isn’t the most effective activism, which, as you now know, involves gentle Socratic questioning.
Many of us know activists who bully others. And, perhaps because bullies tend to be fearful and timid at heart, they often tend to bully not the opposition or the unconvinced, who probably wouldn’t put up with that kind of treatment anyway, but other activists, and their own family members. They blame and shame and hector their victims for committing “the crime” of only agreeing with them 50 percent or 70 percent or 90 percent of the time. Here’s Alinsky again:
I detest and fear dogma. I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic. Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.
Rampant bullying also leads to the kinds of ongoing sectarian wars that can suck the very life out of a social movement. Todd Gitlin, in Letters to a Young Activist, points to what I would characterize as a disparity in internecine bullying as a key reason for the Right’s recent successes and the Left’s corresponding failures. “The fanatics of the Right . . . believe in submerging differences for the sake of victory,” he says. And elsewhere:
The activists of the right are, above all, practical. They crave results. They are not terribly interested in pure parties or theoretical refinements, not even in ideas or morals as such. Once the Christian right decided to launch out of their churches and work the political arena, they preferred actual political and judicial power to private rectitude. To agree on a few central themes—military power, deregulation, tax cuts, tort reform, cultural rollback on abortion, gay rights, and affirmative action—was enough.
Don’t bully.
Bullying v. “Hardball”
When I say not to bully, I am not saying that you shouldn’t fight as hard as you can for what you believe in, or use every non-bullying tool and tactic at your disposal. How could I, when Dr. King himself said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” and Fredrick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”
Let’s remember, however, that when you’re trying to influence an organization, what you’re really trying to do is influence the individuals within that organization—and that you gain nothing if you wind up alienating them. Expert activists make it their business to learn the fine art of opposing someone without alienating them—an art that begins with progressive values such as respect, compassion and tolerance. Recall Nicholas Wade’s observations on activist Henry Spira, quoted in Peter Singer’s Ethics Into Action: “I think he was effective because he was such a friendly, outgoing moderate sort of person. He wasn’t strident. He didn’t expect you necessarily to agree with everything he said.” Later, Singer quotes an executive from Revlon, Inc., on Spira, who was working to convince the company to stop testing cosmetics on animals: “On the top management floor…there wasn’t one person who didn’t get to personally know Henry, and like him.”
There’s one important thing you should notice about both Henry Spira’s and John Robbins’s approach to activism: that while they moderated their behaviors, they did not moderate their viewpoints and goals. The idea that to achieve radical goals you need to employ bullying methods is a fallacy, and a self-defeating one.
In How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie writes, “If out of reading this book you get just one thing—an increased tendency to think always in terms of other people’s point of view, and see things from their angle—if you get that one thing out of this book, it may easily prove to be one of the building blocks of your career.”
Bitter Truth #2 says that people buy to fill a need, with the implication being that you need to sell to their needs. This can be hard to do if we succumb to the all-too-human temptation to place our own needs front and center. Most people have a tendency toward that kind of egocentrism—to be “the star of the movie,” as I like to put it—but serious activism demands that you learn to subordinate your needs to your customer’s, at least during the sale.
Here’s Carnegie again:
Thousands of salespeople are pounding the pavements today, tired, discouraged and underpaid. Why? Because they are always thinking only of what they want. They don’t realize that neither you nor I want to buy anything. If we did, we would go out and buy it. But both of us are eternally interested in solving our problems. And if salespeople can show us how their services or merchandise will help us solve our problems, they won’t need to sell us. We’ll buy.
And here’s Beckwith in Selling the Invisible:
The most compelling selling message you can deliver in any medium is not that you have something wonderful to sell. It is: “I understand what you need.” The selling message “I have” is about you. The message “I understand” is about the only person involved in the sale who really matters: the buyer.
And so, we arrive at our final Bitter Truth:
Bitter Truth #3
In any transaction, the other individual’s needs and viewpoints count far more than yours. In fact, yours hardly count at all.
Here’s how Bitter Truth #3 plays out in a business context:
• A “fashionista” opens a clothing store and stocks it only with clothing she likes—and is surprised when her sales are meager.
• A chef opens a restaurant whose menu consists solely of his favorite dishes, which tend toward the complex and esoteric. He also refuses to compromise his culinary standards and therefore uses only the most expensive ingredients, even in dishes where his customers can’t tell the difference. His restaurant runs at a loss until, less than two years after it opened, it is forced to close.
• A freelance programmer takes pride in her elegant and “tight” code. Only, her projects frequently take too long and go over budget, so her customer list is dwindling.
Each of these entrepreneurs has put his or her needs—or ego, if you prefer—before the customer’s. The fashionista’s shoppers want to see clothes that they like in her store. The chef’s diners want comfort food—and don’t bother with the truffles. And the programmer’s clients don’t care about elegant code, or code at all: they are not buying code but an inventory-management program. They just want it delivered on time and within budget.
Placing your needs ahead of the other individual’s is a common reason for business failure—and also for activist failure.
A day in the life of a successful activist could be a day in which she or he:
• Won a significant victory in a campaign.
• Didn’t win a victory, but participated in a series of productive activities related to the campaign.
• Experienced a “defeat” or “failure”—but handled it well.
• Spent the day doing paperwork. It wasn’t too exciting, but it wasn’t that stressful, either, and it had to get done.
• Procrastinated on work for four hours—but not five!
• Procrastinated for five hours—but not six!
• Finished one-tenth of what she had planned to do—which is still better than not doing any of it!
• Didn’t shame, blame or criticize herself for any of the above or other perceived “failures.”
• Didn’t do much, or any, activism, but performed well and in a low-stress way at her classes or day job.
• Spent the day working mainly on health and relationship goals, or reworking her Mission or Time Management.
• Didn’t work on any goals at all—just had fun!
• Didn’t do much of anything—was feeling stressed out, so stayed home and took a low-stress “mental health day.”
A successful activist will experience all of these types of days, and many more. Some days will seem more productive than others—although you should be careful about defining productivity too narrowly, since a day spent catching up on paperwork or taking a needed break definitely qualifies as productive. You should also avoid labeling days “good” or “bad,” since almost every day, no matter how much it may seem to tilt in one direction, will probably be a mix of both.
Of course, the secret that all empowered activists know is that every day you spend fighting the good fight—no matter how “much” or “little” you achieve—is a good day.
Welcome! My goal is to help you recognize and overcome any disempowering forces in your work and life so you can reclaim your joyful productivity, and achieve your personal and professional goals more quickly and easily than you ever imagined! Thanks for checking out my site, and I always welcome your comments, suggestions, and questions athillary@hillaryrettig.com.
In this episode of National Geographic’s 
g victims are forced into sexual servitude by a pimp or handler. More surprisingly, not all pimps fit the stereotype of the flamboyantly attired street hustler. Some appear to be successful business professionals.
By Saru Jayaraman, Director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United
Camden Civil Rights Project 