Effort to Results Ratio

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Nothing is worth doing "at all costs," Babycakes. Give that shit up right now and you'll save yourself some heartbreak and headaches. I don't care how romantic it sounds to waste your life screaming about something that will never be resolved because "someone has to do it," the only thing that gets you is a world of problems and maybe temporary pants access to an idealistic moron of your preferred gender. Tilting at windmills is not a life goal. You have some math to do here.

If you want people to join The Cause, you're going to need to demonstrate to them that the effort to results ratio is sufficiently low. The two ways you can try to go about creating that perfect ratio are lowering the effort to nearly zero or picking off low hanging fruit. Scientology was textbook low hanging fruit: they get mad about anything, couldn't secure their websites worth shit, and the public was eager to hear terrible things about them. Slam-fucking-dunk. Online petitions are a zero effort and occasionally get results. These are the things that work.

"But mama duck!" I hear you say, "I don't want to waste my life on low hanging fruit and rarely effective zero effort drives! I want to Change the World!" Of course you do. We get born into this place where the only people who feel they have a right to rewrite the rules are sociopaths and the first thing you think when you see the world as it stands is "Shit, I could do better than this!" And you probably could, Babycakes, if you weren't on a planet full of crazy humans who would rather be comfortable than kind, rather be right than wise, rather yell than listen. It's not their fault either (or yours), it's just the way we were wired. The way we survived. But we can survive and still work on being better. We do it all the time.

Don't marry yourself to The Cause. Don't shit on other people for their lack of dedication to Sparkle Motion. Keep your eyes open for that low hanging fruit, for the low effort options. When there's a big target, be willing to do big things, but never out of proportion to what you can hope to achieve. The goal of a rally is never "to have a rally," and anyone who says otherwise, or talks too much about "raising awareness" when they should be talking about "actual fucking goals," kick 'em in the teeth. Breaking windows won't stop governments from having a chat every couple of years about how the economy is doing. Throwing a parade so ridiculously fabulous that people are forced to acknowledge your right to love whoever the fuck you want? That's results. An online petition won't stop an international treaty, but blacking out the Internet and throwing huge protests around the world probably will.

The Cause will always be there. Save your effort for the actions that will count.

[Reginald Ret]

Nice!

[LMNO]

[Cramulus]

I dig it a lot.

This is memetics 101 - if you want an idea to get loose in the network, you have to make it something smooth, something easy to swallow, easy to get involved with.

When I'm designing larp stuff, that's maybe the most important part - how to get people there as painlessly as possible. Remove the hoops they have to go through to get to the creamy center. Make it so people can just show up and have a good time.

That was part of the omgasm initiative too -- telling people that if you start a mission, you have to make it easy to get involved. That's why with colbertgasm, we wrote several different form letters people could print and mail. If the project is about hitting print, slapping a stamp on it, and sending it off, you're going to net more people than if the project is writing a letter from scratch and then mailing it.

That's probably a factor in why nobody writes intermittens anymore - putting together a magazine takes a certain skill set, and it's kind of a pain in the ass. It's a big hoop to jump through.

I keep thinking about those studies which show that hitting "like" for a cause on facebook makes you more likely to donate money or get involved in that cause in 3D meatspace. It's kind of about building channels into the person's brain, making them accept an idea as part of their identity.

But you're right, merely building that channel can't be the goal in itself -- "raised awareness" isn't an outcome, it's what leads to an outcome.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I like this A SHIT TON. It would do hella nice in Bitter Tea if you don't already have other plans for it.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Please do. I have one more piece I'm still hammering out about the terrible calculus of revolution that 'd like to submit, too.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Woohoo!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This is fucking AWESOME.

[Pæs]

Fuck yeah, I know a ton of people who need this.

[Salty]

Yes. This. This is just what needed.

It is so easy to turn your own self, body and all, into a single, cause-driven machine, eventually yielding self destruction.