The counter-culture is filled with memes or ‘brands’ competing for visibility within the larger culture. The most visible of these are usually apocalyptic scenarios of various flavors: Peak Oil, Collapse, 2012.

Each of these scenarios has a certain amount of value as prods to motivate people towards asking questions and constructing creative alternatives for the future. But with Peak Oil and the primitivist Collapse scenarios, the motivations are usually negative: change or else you’ll die. 2012 is a little different, but only because it is much more vague. Something about Mayans and obscure calendrical matching games, etc. And aliens might have something to do with it…?

Nobody really knows. That’s the point. And that is exactly why 2012 is a bad “brand” to communicate with: it’s an unspecific promise and therefore can’t ever really be fulfilled. The essence of marketing (we’re talking competing in the marketplace of ideas here) is to make a promise which you can unequivocally deliver on. That’s how you get customers/adherents to your philosophy. You say, in essence, if you adopt this viewpoint, the following positive benefit will result in your life. What’s the positive benefit which 2012 concretely promises? There simply isn’t one.

Peak Oil, outright Collapse and even Global Warming are obviously no better, either. All doom and gloom are their promises. Why would I want to adopt that philosophical approach to life if the terminal point of it is simply death, disaster or difficulty?

I bring this up because people in the counter-culture are, rightfully, looking at ways to motivate people to adopt new patterns of behavior: patterns which when they really catch will transform human life. Marketers will always beat the counter-culture though until people on the “other side” recognize that to motivate someone to action you need to (1) make a promise and/or example of positive benefit attained through that action, and (2) make sure that you follow through on that promise. In other words, make sure your promise is universally true and attainable. It should be obvious, but for some reason it’s not.

Maybe more importantly than the negativity or vagueness of most of the counter-culture “brands” running around right now is the fact that they are short-sighted. Say civilization collapses, what then? What happens after oil peaks? How will we live with Global Warming? After 2012 fizzles out, what will we do? These brands are simply not sustainable because they rest upon a fixed event within time, instead of a lifestyle or a way of interacting with the world which is infinitely extensible. People who are truly on the progressive edge need to begin looking past their own short term predictive scenarios and start looking at 20, 50, 100 years into the future. We are talking Long Game here. Nothing else will allow us to get through any potentially hard or weird times which may arise for human society. If our plans are only that disasters will happen, but we do not have any plans for how to pick up the pieces after that happens and simply to continue living past that point, then we will be at a total loss if and when these events actually occur.

If we can slow down our thinking for a minute, we may be able to see that there are other models which can be applied for cultural change which - in my opinion - are much more likely to pay off because they are built on slow change which can be sustained over greater periods of time, instead of rapid cataclysmic climax. Try out the slow movement, for one, which gave birth to the slow company philosophy:

Most businesses see speed of growth as a measure of success, and aggressive growth is typically encouraged. In contrast, slow company is an approach that pursues tradition and the creative aspects of organizing business. While such businesses can respond quickly to customer’s needs, they have measured, organic growth. They tend to contain value growth with long-term relationships and priorities but react slowly to growth pressures. The term “slow company” is fashioned after Slow Food, a movement started in Italy as a resistance movement to “Fast Food”.

The slow company approach is supported by a number of open source companies which combine public interest and innovation.

This is the kind of human-centered thinking which will carry us through and past catastrophe. It’s the kind of thing we need to encourage, as opposed to the chicken with its head cut off hysteria which has so totally infiltrated the ranks of people who are supposed to be the creative catalysts for change.