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The Other 98% uses meme warfare and savvy boots-on-the-ground actions to challenge the corporations and billionaires that have hijacked our democracy, claims the description on their website. “We fight like hell for an America that works for the other 98% of us.”
According to The Other 98%, whoever wins the battle of the story wins the war. So the organization specializes in fighting this battle of the story through meme warfare with some of the internet’s most viral original political content. “Our massive online storytelling machine aims to disentangle complex policy, connect dots between issues like climate justice and reparations, and provide a home for like-minded — and not so like-minded — people to take ownership of these memes, and fight for them accordingly,” they claim.
Their content reaches 7-15 million people every day, making them the most important voice of social, economic, reproductive, racial and other forms of justice out there in the US. “We know that storytelling can change the world, because we've seen it happen again and again,” they claim positively.
Andrew Boyd is the author, activist and in his words “prankster of social change” also known as the co-founder of The other 98% and the man behind the “Billionaires For Bush” campaign. Together with Dave Oswald Mitchell, he edited “Beautiful Trouble. A Toolbox For Revolution,” which serves as a kind of instruction manual for creative activism.
In this interview, Boyd shared his thoughts on his vision of creativity meeting activism: “I am speaking of these sort of moments, whether it is a TAZ or an extraordinary epiphany moment, a carnival moment; whether it is in the streets of Seattle or in Occupy Wall Street, with its utopian longings. Or maybe it can be some of these lovely Critical Mass transitory moments. Bringing utopia into history, to make that happen – even if it´s just for a moment and on a localized place and experiencing it – affects you on a very visceral level.”
Moreover, Boyd argues that it affects us at the level of our nervous systems, of our whole beings and bodies and souls, “as opposed to just an intellectual argument.” He explained that “if you experience direct democracy, or an intimate community, or just an otherwise impoverished urban space suddenly made beautiful, it alters everything.”
The Other 98% follows this concept of taking a comical approach towards complex subjects, using the voice of the internet, and memes in particular, to spread the message.
