Travis Nichols on Greenpeace’s New Reggie Watts Campaign

Droughts, superstorms, floods, resource wars, and a hellacious buffet of other climate disasters.

Have you noticed that we’re currently dying miserably?

It’s hard not to feel like our fossil-fuel-loving corporate overlords are winning the battle for the future handily.  It’s also hard not to feel like joining the march, signing the petition, or waving the banner isn’t going to do anything to stop our slide toward the inevitable dystopian nightmare sponsored by the Koch Brothers and Exxon.

I think this is especially true for artists, writers, and musicians—people who spend their time interrogating language, visual patterns, and sounds. It can be hard to coordinate when your brain is full of chaos. And it often feels like “the movement” values the work of artists, writers, and musicians in the exact same way corporations value it—as a resource to be mined.

This is depressing.

But we’re not going to win if we keep playing on the corporate overlords’ gameboard. Which is why I love these Reggie Watts videos:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=PLM7FXuZFUgYT3TKEJy9VxfMrKQQ2d_GIU]

The environmental movement is currently in a curious moment. Climate activists are doing massive work every day to hold the effects of climate change at bay and those responsible accountable—and yet it still feels that corporations like Shell, Duke Energy, and Amazon are making everything worse. I think we make it too easy on them when we only play by the established rules of activism—when we keep “serious” work in a box far away from our “playful” work.  Obviously, direct actions take courage, and we desperately need them (in Ferguson right now, for example), but we need to know what else we can do, too. Corporations have had forty-plus years of practice handling activist tactics and they have seasoned response teams who know what to do when they rear their gnarly heads. Corporate PR disinforms and proceeds as planned.

So what freaks them out in a way that short circuits their defenses?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAE3IKhN4Fo?list=PLM7FXuZFUgYT3TKEJy9VxfMrKQQ2d_GIU] 

Separating work from play leads to an echo chamber of wonkery and choir-preaching. Of course, wonkery and choir-preaching have their place, but sometimes we need the fake German and rhythmic prairie dogs, too. This is what Greenpeace in the old days used to call a “Mind Bomb,” something that short-circuits our received wisdom and gets us to see a problem in a new way.  Because, to be honest, our corporate overlords win if we keep the discourse as it is.  Luckily, the internet was made for Mind Bombs. And Reggie Watts is a Human Mind Bomb.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBWdeD8uSW4?list=PLM7FXuZFUgYT3TKEJy9VxfMrKQQ2d_GIU]

The Internet was also made to use massive amounts of energy. If the Internet were a country, it would rank 6th...