Yesterday, Mike Lux touched off a fascinating discussion on Open Left on Theories of Change.  The basic question was, what will it take to enact really monumental changes - like stopping global warming, enacting universal health care, or dismantling the military-industrial complex?  Lux listed seven theories, none of them mutually exclusive and some of them actually quite similar to one another.

I want to expand on that discussion a bit, by pointing out a couple of theories which Mike didn't list in the original post. Follow me across the flip for more...

Jay Rosen posted a thought-provoking piece at Press Think this week, National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News.  The post takes the case of an excellent piece of explanatory journalism - Ira Glass's The Giant Pool of Money, which is a one-hour tutorial on the mortgage crisis - and bemoans the shortage of good explanatory journalism, especially given the possibility that if more people understood a story, they would be prone to seek out more news about that story.   Rosen even suggests that the primary one interesting audience for this kind of explanatory journalism would be other journalists, whose coverage would improve from better background understanding of a complex story.

More thoughts on explanatory journalism, and how it can become a more prominent feature of the news landscape, across the flip...

Yesterday's blog post about the Progressive Strategy Brain got me thinking about a problem which the authors of Finding Strategy (PDF) have discussed in the past: what would a grand strategy for progressive power look like?

In addition to giving blog posts like this one a really cool-sounding title, grand strategy is a coherent composition of several different strategies which together address all of the different forms of power relationships in society.  It's quite a tall order, which would explain why no one has really developed a grand strategy for progressive power.  (Full disclosure: As I mentioned yesterday, one of the authors of Finding Strategy is a personal friend.)

I don't pretend to have the answer to this question, but I'd like to piece together some thoughts on what such a strategy might look like. As Finding Strategy argues, strategy consists of six components: goals, assessment, tactics, resources, dynamics, and evaluation.  Today, I'd like to focus on the first two components; I'll delve into the other four in follow-up posts.  Follow me across the jump for more.

Last summer I highlighted a report on the state of progressive strategy called Finding Strategy: A Survey of Contemporary Contributions to Progressive Strategy (PDF).  At the time I didn't do much more beyond summarize the report and promise follow-up at a later point, which, I grudgingly admit, I didn't really do.

However, the  Progressive Strategy Studies Project (PSSP) has recently released a new companion tool for the report, so I thought I'd revisit this discussion.  The tool is called the Progressive Strategy Brain, and it's explained in an introductory blog post at the Progressive Strategy Blog.  The brain is a visualization tool which allows users to navigate a library of about 4,100 articles or entries related to progressive strategy.  The screen is split in two vertically, with the top half depicting an interconnected web of concepts centered on a single, active concept, and the bottom half providing text and description of that concept.  You can click on any concept in the top half to make it active.  While some entries have very sparse text and merely exist to depict a relationship between other concepts, others include a full report's worth of HTML.  The tool is still evolving, and PSSP hopes to update it every week.  The software which runs the whole show is called The Brain.  (Full disclosure: Wolfgang Brauner, one of the authors of the original report, and of the Progressive Strategy Brain, is a personal friend.)

Clicking around inside the Progressive Strategy Brain is quite fun, as you can navigate between all sorts of interesting topics, individuals, organizations, and even abstract ideas.  There are a few interesting jumping off points, though, such as Finding Strategy (2006) strategists (a list of strategists listed in the original report), Progressive Challenges (challenges which face the prorgressive movement), Progressive Strategy Types, and Progressive Strategy Literature.

Last weekend I posted about the idea of buzzing against McCain as a tactic to augment the McCain Googlebomb project start by Chris Bowers.  The idea is to schedule regular "bursts" of anti-McCain memes throughout the social networking-o-sphere, in order to create negative "buzz" around John McCain.  My diagnosis is that many people think they know McCain well, based on hazy impressions left by positive media coverage.  The hops is that a steady stream of negative messages coming from friends and relatives will help clear up those hazy impressions, and encourage voters to deal with McCain as he is - a conservative politician who will be just as disastrous as George Bush was as president.

Today I'd like to flesh out the idea a bit more, and to use this entry to brainstorm the project a bit.  Join me across the flip for more details, and please contribute your own thoughts in the comments.

On Thursday Digby wrote a fascinating post at Campaign for America's Future on the difference between transactional and transformational politics.  The post pointed out the difference between "transactional" politics (what can I get in the political marketplace?) and "transformational" politics (how can I change the marketplace?).  Digby argues that elected officials should be doing two jobs at once - getting the best reforms they can in the current environment, while working to change that environment so that it is more favorable to progressives.

I think it's important that we recognize the difference between these two forms of politics, and also that we push our elected officials to strive for political transformations even as they try to get the best "deal" on each political "transaction" they make.  Indeed, that is perhaps the central purpose of the progressive blogosphere.

However, I think we should also think more broadly about political transformation and the other forces, besides the machinations of Democratic politicians, which might create political transformation.  In particular, we need to be aware of the cultural institutions which frequently shape our political environment, and we need to push those institutions to create political transformation as well.  Follow me across the flip for more details on how, in my opinion, cultural institutions shape our political environment, and what (in somewhat high-level terms) needs to be done about those institutions to create the kind of progressive political transformation we seek.

Yesterday Chris Bowers got the ball rolling with the Googlebomb John McCain project.  I admire Chris's work a great deal, and in particular I think his innovative Google-bomb campaigns have been absolutely phenomneal.  But I think beating John McCain will require a lot more than just a Google-bomb.

Google-bombs work best in a low information election.  For background, the point of a Google bomb is to cause a negative but neutrally sourced news article about a candidate to appear high in Google search engine rankings when web users search for the candidate's name.  So Chris's Google-bomb for 2006 House Republican candidates worked really well because voters quite often didn't know much about those candidates.  In the weeks before the election, voters sought out information about those candidates by typing their names into Google, and came up with the negative stories that bloggers helped push high into the search engine results.

The problem with John McCain is that he's extremely well-known, in a shallow way, by a lot of voters.  The general perception is that he's a maverick clean-ethics Republican, and is therefore more moderate than the rest of his party.  There is also a quiet perception that he's very hard to beat, and that "most" voters like him.  This meta-opinion about the election is perhaps just as damaging to our activists as the fuzzy notion of McCain as a whole, because it dampens the effect of our enthusiasm gap.

While I think Google-bombing will do some good, I think a really effective solution will have to go further.  I think it will have to incorporate a grassroots messaging campaign which a) informs progressive activists that McCain isn't really a maverick, clean-ethics, moderate Republican, and b) informs progressive activists that beating McCain is not going to be difficult.  This campaign has to be virally spread, pushed from friend-to-friend via blog posts, Facebook notes, YouTube embeds, and all sorts of other peer-to-peer venues.

My recommendation is that progressive bloggers establish a regular routine of "buzzing against McCain".  Similar to Atrios and DailyKos's monthly Kerry fundraising days in 2004, these will be days when we exhort progressive activists to flood the social networks with some small, simple, anti-McCain meme, like "McCain is unelectable", "McCain is a lobbyist lap-dog", "McCain wants another 100 years in Iraq", and the like.  Ideally, I'd also like to see some kind of distributed badge infrastructure which allows bloggers to display the meme of the week (or month, or whatever) prominently on there blogs, right alongside a photo of "the hug".  OpenLeft has been doing some great spade work on establishing an anti-McCain narrative in recent weeks, and I think some of that work will come in very handy as we try to come up with anti-McCain memes to be spread virally.  But we'll have to go beyond the Google-bomb to win this election.

(Full disclosure: my company did a bit of technical/design work for Chris and Open Left last year.)

There's been a lot of buzz lately about Facebook "censorship" of free speech.  The Blackadder One case I wrote about a couple weeks ago was just an early warning sign of more trouble to come.  Recently Jon Pincus has been posting a series of diaries at Tales from the Net and Liminal States about his encounter with problems very similar to those Derek Blackadder ran into when he tried to organize workers on Facebook.   Pincus's posts include a very good trail of documentation of the problems he's encountering, which make this series one of the more interesting resources on Facebook censorship I've seen.  (As an aside: thoroughly and clearly documenting the problems you have with software is one of the best ways you can help your software or service provider diagnose and fix the problem.  But that's a rant for another day.)

As it turns out, Blackadder and Pincus are running up against Facebook's rather crude anti-spam filters, which, in certain cases, flag a discussion board post as spam if the post includes a link to a web page outside of Facebook.  While one can certainly sympathize with Facebook's desire to block spam on its services, it's easy to see how this kind of crude filtering technology (which is well behind the cutting edge of spam filtering software, by the way) can cause problems for those trying to organize Facebook users for legitimate purposes.  It does appear that Facebook isn't trying to block or suppress speech per se, since spam-filtered posts are often ensconced in a trail of other, non-filtered posts with very free-ranging discussion.  Still, the result of Facebook's crude filters is, as Pincus says, a chilling effect on political speech.

Now Pincus is extrapolating his experience into something which is hopefully more useful to the wider Facebook community - a guide for responding when Facebook censors your political speech, based at Wired's how-to wiki.  If you're having trouble with spam-filtering on Facebook, check out this resource, and if you have more to add, go ahead and do so.

I hope that this resource will lay the groundwork for later resources which help online activists fight draconian online corporate policies in a variety of contexts, like Google account shutdowns and the plethora of Beacon-like Facebook abuses likely to come in the future.  Eventually, I'd like to see a resource that provides top-notch practical and legal advice to social networking consumers, and perhaps serves as a hub for organization, in much the same way that Chilling Effects serves bloggers who are harassed by corporate cease-and-desist letters.  Extrapolating out a bit, such resources could be the starting point for a well-organized online consumer movement which I wrote about yesterday.

For now, though, if you are running into Facebook's spam filters, or if you are having similar problems at other social networking sites, check out the Pincus guide, and add on to it if you have more to contribute.