Controversy and extreme actions attract the attention of the media, which is the whole point. If you play nice, no one notices or cares. You have to give people something to talk about even if it's with disgust that someone would actually do that. I think it's like advertising. If someone comments about how stupid that commercial was, it's considered a win for advertising because it's being talked about, albeit unfavorably.
Hi Wayne, are you familiar with Benjamin Lay, an 18th century Quaker with dwarfism? A historian uncovered him, he had been erased from Quaker history for being 'insane". Book title -- The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The First Revolutionary Abolitionist. Smithsonian guy rediscovered him. Thank God.
I cannot imagine anyone more disruptive than this "impossible man". He hid some fake blood (cranberry juice) in an animal bladder under his great coat and stood up from his seat in the balcony of a Meeting House stabbing the bladder with a big sword, causing blood to fall onto women seated below, causing some of them to scream and faint, while bellowing about "blood on our hands", "slaveholding is the worst soul sin in the world" (Quakers were still slaveholders then). He got thrown out on his head for that (but nobody can stop a Quaker from attending Sunday worship. So he kept going back and doing his very disruptive theatre.
Like smashing expensive tea cups with a hammer outside the Meeting House to protest refined sugar, the death and atrocities being visited upon the slaves who worked around the boiling vats. He lived in Barbados and saw with his own eyes.
He was an animal welfare activist and a vegan 3 centuries before the word was invented and very vocal about women's rights. So much more. I'm sad that I can't read The Fearless Benjamin Lay again for the first time! He ended up influencing youth and made a concrete difference towards Quaker Abolition in Pennsylvania, after he had died. And then, of course, the Quakers ran underground railroad after they saw the light.
Doing unpopular things proves your commitment and your strength of character. These are perceptions that influence culture, at first subterraneanly, with a sort of begrudging admiration even from those who disagree; then more overtly, when the resilience of those who first exposed themselves to danger or ostracism is seen as foundational to change. Two random examples came to my mind - but there's countless of them: the first Christian martyrs were roundly despised as eccentric and heretics, but the mode of their death proved excellent PR to the budding institution of the Church, and enforced its credibility. Less dramatically, I remember reading Greta Thunberg about the way she looked forward to a more effective tactic than the everyday marches and school projects about the environment her peers were joining. These later activities were zero-cost and incurred in praise; what she choose to do - public sit-ins on school days - was much more effective to her cause because it was defiant, and her willing to shoulder the costs (the missed school hours and general commitment) proved her cause to be mightier than the social penalties she could expect. I'm not saying to get killed - or skip school, even - but look for the hard, unpopular thing that makes sense in your context, and have the courage to do it.
The statement that "PETA created a real movement when nothing existed in the 1970s" is a good example of how the prominence of PETA from the mid-1980s on has eclipsed the significant & already prominent animal rights movement that preceded PETA, beginning with the formation of Animal Rights International by Henry Spira in 1976, continuing through to the first national animal rights conference organized by Alex Hershaft in 1980. That was a conference focused on how to form & build animal rights organizations. PETA, Trans-Species Unlimited, Mobilization for Animals, & several others of subsequent note emerged out of it. Spira at that time had already won cancellation of cat sex experiments at the American Museum of Natural History, the first cancellation of any federally funded animal experiment, and agreements from Revlon and Avon to stop animal testing. The National Catholic Animal Welfare Society, founded in 1959 by Helen Jones, had become the International Society for Animal Rights in 1978. Paul Watson had already left Greenpeace to form the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1979, & had already sunk the pirate whaling ship Sierra off Portugal. As ghostwriter for the now forgotten libertarian philosopher Tobias Grether, who took a very early interest in animal rights philosophy, I had been made aware of Peter Singer's work in August 1975, and by 1980 was already acquainted, as a journalist, directly or indirectly, with Spira, Animal Rights Network founder Jim Mason, Trans-Species Unlimited founder George Cave, Mobilization for Animals founder Richard Morgan, and Fund for Animals founder Cleveland Amory and International Fund for Animal Welfare founder Brian Davies, both of whom had founded their organizations in 1968, but counted themselves as animal rights movement fellow travelers. The animal rights-oriented International Wildlife Coalition split from IFAW in 1985, taking with it a constellation of people who have subsequently led animal rights struggles from Canada to Brazil, all active pre-PETA and those still alive all still active. Apart from people overlooking all of this history, people today often tend to ascribe the achievements of Trans-Species Unlimited and Mobilization for Animals, in particular, to PETA. Exposing the University of Pennsylvania baboon head injury experiments, for instance, was a Trans-Species Unlimited campaign. Exposing & protesting against the annual Hegins pigeon shoot, a 12-year cause celebre, was originally a Mobilization for Animals campaign, picked up by the Fund for Animals. Exposing the Baby Fae baboon heart transplant debacle was a Last Chance for Animals campaign. Practically every other west coast anti-vivisection campaign of the 1980s and 1990s was led by In Defense of Animals; PETA barely had a west coast presence before circa 1995. Animal rights activity here in the greater Seattle area was led by the then-relatively mighty Northwest Animal Rights Network, originally a PETA affiliate that split off (or was cut loose) in 1986. What PETA really did, that few of these other organizations did as well, was survive the "Great Extinction" that followed the colossal economic drain on the animal rights movement resulting from the hugely ill-advised 1990 March for the Animals in Washington D.C., & the even more ill-advised 1996 encore march. Almost half of the animal rights organizations & publications that existed in 1990 & participated in the 1990 March for the Animals were defunct or survived only on paper by the end of 1996, with most of the failures having come in 1991-1992.
This is very helpful context, as always, and shows how my post is not sufficiently nuanced. Thanks, and I'll probably link this reply to in my next newsletter.
Whether PETA's approach is more effective than some other, more normie-friendly version of the same pitch is hard to say! Some folks I talked to recently on the other end of the spectrum -- through and through nice, agreeable folks -- expressed interest in turning this into an RCT, though some of the operationalization details are going to be tricky.
"there’s a tradeoff here, with Vegan Outreach on one side and PETA on the other. Vegan Outreach can get everyone to agree in principle that factory-farming is bad, but no one will pay any attention to it. And PETA can get everyone to pay attention to factory farming, but a lot of people who would otherwise oppose it will switch to supporting it just because they’re so mad at the way it’s being publicized."
Of course that's _also_ a causal claim with just anecdotal evidence to support it 😃
I think the way you (and Scott) pose the tradeoff is roughly correct! And I would be SUPER interested in a RCT in this regard. I know Rob's lab has done some stuff in this regard.
The one thing I'd add to attention-grabbing tactics is that they have interesting relational impacts (not necessarily all positive) that less attention-grabbing tactics do not.
I'm taking points from one time Union Theological Seminary scholar Kelly Maeshiro, "The Capitalist religion and the production of idols," 2016. In this paper he writes of 'finite concerns' that I guess crowd out peoples' better judgements about things, https://independentscholar.academia.edu/KellyMaeshiro . Lives made up of one or many personal worries raised to immense proportions are amenable to being joined to a religion that can rule out God, or much of a free society, think of Mad Max Fury Road. So naturally indecorousness can come across as more persuasive and authentic, where a spirit of Cain is all-pervasive and marshalls folks. There might be an infinity of short-term goals or desires people can have, and how better to track and influence them, if not with a $300 million data center rumored to be going beneath the Trump ballroom, funding coming from Palantir and Lockheed Martin?
I will circulate this piece among fellow advocates in Sri Lanka. It's a highly connected country where mobilizing activists to create a nation whose identity supports animal protection should be *relatively* easy.
I agree in principle. But I don't think this scales linearly with movement size. A disruptive group representing .001% of the population is less than -.009% as effective as a group representing .01% of the population.
I'm not confident that the animal movement in general is sufficiently large enough to justify PETA. Maybe for subtopics; like fur. Or maybe (different mechanism) disruptive stuff is still better for movement building.
Controversy and extreme actions attract the attention of the media, which is the whole point. If you play nice, no one notices or cares. You have to give people something to talk about even if it's with disgust that someone would actually do that. I think it's like advertising. If someone comments about how stupid that commercial was, it's considered a win for advertising because it's being talked about, albeit unfavorably.
Yep!
Hi Wayne, are you familiar with Benjamin Lay, an 18th century Quaker with dwarfism? A historian uncovered him, he had been erased from Quaker history for being 'insane". Book title -- The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The First Revolutionary Abolitionist. Smithsonian guy rediscovered him. Thank God.
I cannot imagine anyone more disruptive than this "impossible man". He hid some fake blood (cranberry juice) in an animal bladder under his great coat and stood up from his seat in the balcony of a Meeting House stabbing the bladder with a big sword, causing blood to fall onto women seated below, causing some of them to scream and faint, while bellowing about "blood on our hands", "slaveholding is the worst soul sin in the world" (Quakers were still slaveholders then). He got thrown out on his head for that (but nobody can stop a Quaker from attending Sunday worship. So he kept going back and doing his very disruptive theatre.
Like smashing expensive tea cups with a hammer outside the Meeting House to protest refined sugar, the death and atrocities being visited upon the slaves who worked around the boiling vats. He lived in Barbados and saw with his own eyes.
He was an animal welfare activist and a vegan 3 centuries before the word was invented and very vocal about women's rights. So much more. I'm sad that I can't read The Fearless Benjamin Lay again for the first time! He ended up influencing youth and made a concrete difference towards Quaker Abolition in Pennsylvania, after he had died. And then, of course, the Quakers ran underground railroad after they saw the light.
Yes, there's a great youtube video about Lay by my friend. (If you're interested, I'll circulate a link.) He was an incredible man.
I would love to see the video by your friend. You're the only person I've encountered who knows who Benjamin is!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIkQrr8pgSI
Doing unpopular things proves your commitment and your strength of character. These are perceptions that influence culture, at first subterraneanly, with a sort of begrudging admiration even from those who disagree; then more overtly, when the resilience of those who first exposed themselves to danger or ostracism is seen as foundational to change. Two random examples came to my mind - but there's countless of them: the first Christian martyrs were roundly despised as eccentric and heretics, but the mode of their death proved excellent PR to the budding institution of the Church, and enforced its credibility. Less dramatically, I remember reading Greta Thunberg about the way she looked forward to a more effective tactic than the everyday marches and school projects about the environment her peers were joining. These later activities were zero-cost and incurred in praise; what she choose to do - public sit-ins on school days - was much more effective to her cause because it was defiant, and her willing to shoulder the costs (the missed school hours and general commitment) proved her cause to be mightier than the social penalties she could expect. I'm not saying to get killed - or skip school, even - but look for the hard, unpopular thing that makes sense in your context, and have the courage to do it.
Spot on
It seems you can't edit comments anymore, so, "looked for" instead of *forward to, "chose" instead of *choose and "willingness", not *willing. Oh my.
The statement that "PETA created a real movement when nothing existed in the 1970s" is a good example of how the prominence of PETA from the mid-1980s on has eclipsed the significant & already prominent animal rights movement that preceded PETA, beginning with the formation of Animal Rights International by Henry Spira in 1976, continuing through to the first national animal rights conference organized by Alex Hershaft in 1980. That was a conference focused on how to form & build animal rights organizations. PETA, Trans-Species Unlimited, Mobilization for Animals, & several others of subsequent note emerged out of it. Spira at that time had already won cancellation of cat sex experiments at the American Museum of Natural History, the first cancellation of any federally funded animal experiment, and agreements from Revlon and Avon to stop animal testing. The National Catholic Animal Welfare Society, founded in 1959 by Helen Jones, had become the International Society for Animal Rights in 1978. Paul Watson had already left Greenpeace to form the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1979, & had already sunk the pirate whaling ship Sierra off Portugal. As ghostwriter for the now forgotten libertarian philosopher Tobias Grether, who took a very early interest in animal rights philosophy, I had been made aware of Peter Singer's work in August 1975, and by 1980 was already acquainted, as a journalist, directly or indirectly, with Spira, Animal Rights Network founder Jim Mason, Trans-Species Unlimited founder George Cave, Mobilization for Animals founder Richard Morgan, and Fund for Animals founder Cleveland Amory and International Fund for Animal Welfare founder Brian Davies, both of whom had founded their organizations in 1968, but counted themselves as animal rights movement fellow travelers. The animal rights-oriented International Wildlife Coalition split from IFAW in 1985, taking with it a constellation of people who have subsequently led animal rights struggles from Canada to Brazil, all active pre-PETA and those still alive all still active. Apart from people overlooking all of this history, people today often tend to ascribe the achievements of Trans-Species Unlimited and Mobilization for Animals, in particular, to PETA. Exposing the University of Pennsylvania baboon head injury experiments, for instance, was a Trans-Species Unlimited campaign. Exposing & protesting against the annual Hegins pigeon shoot, a 12-year cause celebre, was originally a Mobilization for Animals campaign, picked up by the Fund for Animals. Exposing the Baby Fae baboon heart transplant debacle was a Last Chance for Animals campaign. Practically every other west coast anti-vivisection campaign of the 1980s and 1990s was led by In Defense of Animals; PETA barely had a west coast presence before circa 1995. Animal rights activity here in the greater Seattle area was led by the then-relatively mighty Northwest Animal Rights Network, originally a PETA affiliate that split off (or was cut loose) in 1986. What PETA really did, that few of these other organizations did as well, was survive the "Great Extinction" that followed the colossal economic drain on the animal rights movement resulting from the hugely ill-advised 1990 March for the Animals in Washington D.C., & the even more ill-advised 1996 encore march. Almost half of the animal rights organizations & publications that existed in 1990 & participated in the 1990 March for the Animals were defunct or survived only on paper by the end of 1996, with most of the failures having come in 1991-1992.
This is very helpful context, as always, and shows how my post is not sufficiently nuanced. Thanks, and I'll probably link this reply to in my next newsletter.
I'd love to see what PETA comes up with if they truly threw public perception out of the window.
My imagination is running wild. :P
Whether PETA's approach is more effective than some other, more normie-friendly version of the same pitch is hard to say! Some folks I talked to recently on the other end of the spectrum -- through and through nice, agreeable folks -- expressed interest in turning this into an RCT, though some of the operationalization details are going to be tricky.
I don't have strong feelings about which approach is 'better' globally, though I did like this Scott Alexander piece on PETA's incentive structure: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
"there’s a tradeoff here, with Vegan Outreach on one side and PETA on the other. Vegan Outreach can get everyone to agree in principle that factory-farming is bad, but no one will pay any attention to it. And PETA can get everyone to pay attention to factory farming, but a lot of people who would otherwise oppose it will switch to supporting it just because they’re so mad at the way it’s being publicized."
Of course that's _also_ a causal claim with just anecdotal evidence to support it 😃
I think the way you (and Scott) pose the tradeoff is roughly correct! And I would be SUPER interested in a RCT in this regard. I know Rob's lab has done some stuff in this regard.
The one thing I'd add to attention-grabbing tactics is that they have interesting relational impacts (not necessarily all positive) that less attention-grabbing tactics do not.
I'm taking points from one time Union Theological Seminary scholar Kelly Maeshiro, "The Capitalist religion and the production of idols," 2016. In this paper he writes of 'finite concerns' that I guess crowd out peoples' better judgements about things, https://independentscholar.academia.edu/KellyMaeshiro . Lives made up of one or many personal worries raised to immense proportions are amenable to being joined to a religion that can rule out God, or much of a free society, think of Mad Max Fury Road. So naturally indecorousness can come across as more persuasive and authentic, where a spirit of Cain is all-pervasive and marshalls folks. There might be an infinity of short-term goals or desires people can have, and how better to track and influence them, if not with a $300 million data center rumored to be going beneath the Trump ballroom, funding coming from Palantir and Lockheed Martin?
Great stuff, and great link. Thanks for sharing!
You could put on a yearly awards for liberations ... 1st place Vegan Mad Max 2nd Vegan Dirty Harry 3rd Vegan DJT
I will circulate this piece among fellow advocates in Sri Lanka. It's a highly connected country where mobilizing activists to create a nation whose identity supports animal protection should be *relatively* easy.
I agree in principle. But I don't think this scales linearly with movement size. A disruptive group representing .001% of the population is less than -.009% as effective as a group representing .01% of the population.
I'm not confident that the animal movement in general is sufficiently large enough to justify PETA. Maybe for subtopics; like fur. Or maybe (different mechanism) disruptive stuff is still better for movement building.