seeing wetiko: tracking the spread of memes on social media

“Seeing Wetiko" Tracking the Spread of Memes During Our Campaign

Image credit: Kagloos from SeeingWetiko.com

Analytics Report Prepared by Joe Brewer

September 2016

Executive Summary Our team at /TheRules set out to birth a meme—the concept of “wetiko” from the Algonquin tradition—in a unique campaign earlier this year. We did this by recruiting artists and writers from around the world to create expressions that capture it. As this report shows, we found the meme has qualities that create resistance to spreading. In the process of watching how various people reacted to it, we learned a great deal about the larger cultural patterns that our work seeks to influence.

Our hope was to cultivate a diversity of expressions for this concept, which roughly translates as cultural cannibalism because it describes how pathologies of culture do psychological and environmental harm. In this regard we can call the campaign a success—an online gallery of photographs, songs, 3D interactive constructs, masks, and more can be found on the campaign website. 1

Yet when we monitored social media activity and other indicators of popularity, it was equally clear that this is an idea with properties that make it feel alien, mushy, too spiritual or exotic to resonate with many audiences. We ran parallel tracks for content that explicitly named Wetiko and content that expressed its conceptual features (like the core logic of cannibalism) without using the term.

What we learned was that the word itself hinders its spreading. At the same time, the deep cultural critique it offers is highly resonant with people around the world who feel anxiety about the ecological crisis, or have been marginalized and excluded by the dominant economic paradigm.

Read on to learn with us. Together we can apply this knowledge in future social change efforts that connect the dots across social movements and issues around the world.

http://www.seeingwetiko.com/ 1

http://www.seeingwetiko.com/

The Campaign And Its Objectives Earlier this year, we launched a campaign called Seeing Wetiko with the express goal of introducing the Algonquin concept into the global discourse on poverty, inequality, and climate change. The word has been used in obscure scholarly circles for decades and among First Nation tribes of North America for centuries—yet is generally unknown to the broader public.

This created a unique opportunity to track a new term as it spread across social media channels. The campaign had several measurable objectives defined before launch to help us set up monitoring and tracking tools when it went live. These objectives included:

✦ Engage a diverse collective of artists to create multimedia artifacts around this theme;

✦ Draft or curate written materials exploring the Algonquin concept of “wetiko” as it applies to the various crises humanity is confronting today;

✦ Establish rapport with indigenous leaders around the world to ensure that our campaign did not inadvertently become cultural appropriation; and

✦ Test a new model for campaigning that we call “starbursts” by releasing a diversity of content into the world—across different social media and interpersonal pathways—within a defined window of time.

An essential piece of this campaign was to establish a baseline of mentions for the keyword Wetiko and track its performance in time. This was done with the assistance of Braulio Medina at Vortio, a social analytics company based in Brazil.

The findings are included in this report. What we learned overall is that social change can be understood as an immune response from the established culture. Even when a concept does not penetrate or spread well, much can be learned by observing the reactions to it. What we learned is that there is

substantial resistance to the Wetiko concept—revealing insights into what people share, how others around them respond, and why the discourse has many structures that function as barriers to change.

Informed by this knowledge, we are better prepared for the work that lies ahead.

Establishing A Baseline One thing that has limited many social change efforts is a lack of rigor in the ways they measure impact. We knew going in that it would be difficult to know how things have changed if we didn’t look to see what was happening in the world before our campaign began. So we started a monitoring process for the keyword wetiko every time it was mentioned on Twitter in the month of May.

This is what we observed:

The “background” activity on a daily basis was very low—rarely were there more than 10 tweets mentioning the word on any given day. The total number of mentions for the entire month was 276. Three peak days can be seen, all of which correspond with activities related to our campaign: a call to artists on May 11th,

Seeing Wetiko VORTIO

Total number of posts after filtering non-relevant data: 404 posts

Number of tweets in may: 276

Daily number of tweets in may:


Daily number of tweets in june:

REPORT

follow up on May 19th, and early publication of an article by Makia Freeman (a collaborator) on May 29th.

This pattern continues throughout the month of June:

Again the typical day shows low activity—with a pulse on June 9th when one of our followers gave us a shout-out to invite artist participation. The total number of mentions in June was 136. What we can see in this two-month time series is that Wetiko was a little known word that wasn’t stimulating very much conversation prior to our campaign.

We also tracked the thematic content of these tweets to get a qualitative look at the dialogue. This involved creating “tag clouds” for words mentioned in the tweets and the construction of pie charts based on the statistical composition of these themes. Since the data set was fairly small—404 Twitter posts during the two-month period—the results are clustered for May and June. Graphics are presented below.

No theme stood out as dominant. Words like shadow and virus appeared with a similar frequency to capitalism and humanity. We can see in the figure that commentaries focused on a Disease Metaphor where culture is considered to be




Daily number of tweets in may:


Daily number of tweets in june:

REPORT

“sick” and in need of healing. The specific type of illness is a “mind virus” that can be cured with the right antidote. Problems associated with capitalism (or Neoliberalism) are linked with this disease as a root cause.

Add to this the composition of tagged words and we can see how the themes are emphasized in the content. Two things stand out in this analysis: (1) Most of the terminology is names for articles; and (2) this is melded with descriptive identities for poets, artists, and activists who were invited to join the campaign.


Tag cloud of the posts:

Tagged memes:

REPORT



Tagged memes:

REPORT

The basic take-away from this baseline survey is that the conversation about Wetiko prior to launch was largely non-existent. Most of what was discussed during this two-month period came from our seeding process for recruiting artists and sharing initial content to get the campaign going.

Monitoring Of The Campaign Period Having established a baseline, we were ready to observe how activity changed online—using Twitter as a proxy for the campaign writ large. What we noted in 2

general was that new “pulses” of activity could readily be seen, yet the discourse overall was largely unchanged by our effort. We will explore further what this means and how much we were able to learn from this seeming failure in the next section.

Preparation for launch included a co-creation period where we put out a call for artists, selected fellows to receive a stipend for their work with diversity of cultural expressions and types of media in mind, and the creation of the online gallery linked to earlier in this report. Then, in mid-July, our content rolled out into the world.

Other social analytic measures were also used, including the tracking of views and shares for published content.2



Number of tweets in july: 409

Daily number of tweets in July:


Daily number of tweets in August:

REPORT

��

Several RT’s made by

@JustABonobo

The Cannibalistic Disease Consuming Our Planet and

Society

The jump in activity is easily seen on July 22nd. It is followed by a week and a half of greater sharing—but nothing spectacular that would suggest virality. The wetiko meme did not take off with the initial burst of publishing.

Moving into August we see that another pulse continued the exchange up to roughly the 8th or 9th—completing the three-week time period for the official “starburst.”

The thematic content evolved during the campaign period, as can be seen below. Note how Algonquin appears prominently—reflecting the cultural association to indigenous wisdom—alongside other terms like greed, pathology, cannibalistic, and sickness.



Number of tweets in july: 409

Daily number of tweets in July:


Daily number of tweets in August:

REPORT

��

Several RT’s made by

@JustABonobo

The Cannibalistic Disease Consuming Our Planet and

Society



Tag cloud of the posts during the previous period

REPORT

We can see how the Cultural Sickness theme stands out in the campaign materials. This is a continuation of the Disease Metaphor that was emphasized in the baseline period, adapting to the release of materials linking it specifically to the Algonquin Tradition and moral dimensions of economic and political culture.

Said succinctly, the material shared focuses on cultural “root causes” of harm in the world. This can also be seen in the compositional makeup of terminology shared.

We can see that the discourse is now comprised of major topics—cannibalism, pathology of greed, cultural sickness, and wakefulness as an indicator of awareness. This implies an Insider’s Perspective for people “in the know” about the Wetiko concept. A categorical distinction emerges between those who are awake to the Wetiko Virus and those who are still asleep.

This is a topic we will return to later in this analysis, when we explore how memes spread (or don’t) between communities of people who differ in their cultural makeup. What we are seeing here is a clustering of people around their belief in


Tagged memes:

Tagged memes on the previous period:

Wetiko—whether or not a person is about to “see” it in the world and use this label to signify what they see.

Broader Patterns Of Spreading Looking beyond Twitter, we can also consider how our content spread (and why it didn’t) based on views, shares, and observed behaviors surrounding them. Combine this with language analysis for comments and we begin to see the fuller picture for what happened during this campaign.

Let’s start with the article Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition, written by Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk at /TheRules. It was published in Kosmos Journal at the launch of the campaign and was later 3

republished on the Films for Action website where it garnered 15,510 views (current value at time of writing).

The original version received several comments, including this one:

For those that truly see/experience Wetiko (Wendigo) in themselves or around them, you do no suffer alone. When I do see and feel it, I can only describe it as painful, frightening and overwhelming. The more I recognize it the more clear it becomes and the deeper the sense of urgency becomes.

This comment exemplifies the Insider’s Perspective described in the previous section—how those who “see” Wetiko often find themselves separated from society writ large. They experience isolation from the dominant culture and find resonance or solidarity with others who share their perspective.

Another commenter made this observation:

http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capitalism-mind-viruses-and-antidotes-for-a-world-in-3

transition/

http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capitalism-mind-viruses-and-antidotes-for-a-world-in-transition/

After posting to my social media channels: LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and Twitter a horrendous backlash arrived. I was dumbfounded by the unbridled anger received for my confession of wrongdoing. Close friends and family members rebuked me for having stated such heresy. The more I analysed their comments, the more a pattern developed. Those who reacted vehemently appeared to be carrying the heaviest burden of guilt. Their arguments and justifications were devoid of empathy or compassion. They shamed me for having pointed a finger at them, even though as I protested, I had also included myself in the sentencing.

What this shows is that the self-critical quality of seeing Wetiko in one’s self added a reactionary dimension to those who were witness to it. The commenter not only felt separation and isolation from others in her social sphere, but also that there was active resistance to the concept when she shared it with her networks.

Another article that I wrote—titled The Cultural Sickness Needs to Be Named—was published on the Medium website and received 29,000 views. This was achieved 4

by peer-to-peer spreading, mostly on Facebook. The commenters tended to be more intellectual in their responses, such as this one drawing support from a highly regarded sociologist who came to similar conclusions:

If you are not familiar with the work of Emile Durkheim you should do a little research. He was looking at this from a sociological, rather than spiritual, perspective, but it really comes down to the same thing.

And this one expressly articulating the “cancerous” logic of Wetiko:

Wetiko is adding a word that make on the one hand the cancer of unlimited growth visible.

https://medium.com/art-marketing/the-cultural-sickness-needs-to-be-named-1b4d140cb6a0#.iqaiy011v 4

https://medium.com/art-marketing/the-cultural-sickness-needs-to-be-named-1b4d140cb6a0#.iqaiy011v

In parallel with the official Seeing Wetiko campaign I drafted a series of articles that make use of the “logic” for Wetiko without explicitly mentioning it by name. The purpose for doing this was to explore how people reacted to the concept itself, when separated from its cultural and spiritual associations.

One article was Capitalism Has A Metaphor: It’s A Cancer, which received 3,600 views on the Medium website. It did not mention Wetiko—instead focusing on the 5

“selfish” logic of wealth hoarding in an extractive economic system.

It was not surprising that pro-capitalists appeared in the comment thread to engage in some combination of ad hominem attacks, claims that I was misusing the term capitalism (there is a tendency for these people to presume it to be whatever is good in democratic societies with little knowledge about the actual history), or to venerate the notion that “greed is good” and profit is the motivator for societal well-being.

This pattern emerged again in another article titled The Parasitic Logic of Profit-Making that received 4,700 views. It was evident that the framing associated with 6

these articles provoked a worldview-level response—meaning the comments submitted were mostly operating within established worldviews (pro-capitalist, socialist, Marxist, etc.). Contrast this with the Wetiko commenters who focused more at the level of “root” consciousness and the psychological tendencies that give rise to worldview identities.

Said another way, the contrast between Wetiko and non-Wetiko articles makes clear that the campaign materials resonated at a deeper conceptual level than the articles about wealth hoarding and extractive economic paradigms that didn’t mention the Algonquin word.

In concluding this section, we can note that Wetiko evoked varied responses among those exposed to it. Some people resonated deeply and felt connected to the idea at

https://medium.com/@joe_brewer/capitalism-has-a-metaphor-its-a-cancer-768baf05c942#.i1islnx2n 5

https://medium.com/@joe_brewer/the-parasitic-logic-of-profit-making-a8969fd3100b#.qky25r71i 6

https://medium.com/@joe_brewer/the-parasitic-logic-of-profit-making-a8969fd3100b#.qky25r71i

https://medium.com/@joe_brewer/capitalism-has-a-metaphor-its-a-cancer-768baf05c942#.i1islnx2n

the identity level. Others experienced strong emotional reactions that prompted them to distance themselves from the conversation, even to the point of attacking the messenger in some instances.

We can also see that the logic of separation, extraction, and self-destruction associated with Wetiko—when considered in a more recognizable economic or political critique—brought forth the defenders of the dominant economic worldview. This behavior was not observed for Wetiko content, suggesting that non-Wetiko conversations may be more mainstream and less deep in their reframing qualities.

Memes As Cultural Immunity The previous section gave a sampling of psychological and behavioral responses to the Seeing Wetiko campaign. At this point I would like to share one of the more nuanced insights that can be gained by taking the “meme’s eye view” for the reactions that people have when confronted with a piece of information.

Recall that a meme is any unit of culture that can be transmitted from one person to another in a recognizable manner. The “thought construct” of Wetiko as a mind virus that spreads across a specific society is thus a memetic construct. Relevant to this campaign we can say that memes spread when they resonate with a psychological disposition within the mind of those who embrace and propagate them. One way to think about this is that any mind that can be infected with the idea must in some way be susceptible to it.

What we can see with the Wetiko concept is that some people are very susceptible to it—meaning they readily understood and internalized it into their perspective. Others were less receptive and either got turned off by the idea or were actively resistant to it. This is akin to an immune response to a psychological phenomenon.

The example of “pro-capitalists” in the previous section illustrates how this works:

1. Take a critical view of capitalism and argue it publicly. 2. This content stands out to pro-capitalists as something they recognize and

feel strongly motivated to battle against. 3. Thus they are susceptible to the critique at a psychological level since they have

difficulty avoiding the reactionary behavior.

Add the concept of Wetiko into the mix and there will be some who are oriented toward deep, consciousness-level critiques of dominator cultures. The people who are susceptible to this idea are likely to feel at odds with the mainstream—possibly even feeling oppressed by it as a kind of hegemonic influence overshadowing their lives. These people are a “natural” audience for Wetiko content. It will readily make sense to them and they will feel inclined to share.

At the cultural level, we can see the social feedbacks (like that mentioned earlier by the commenter who was attacked by the most guilty-feeling of her peers) that function to promote or actively resist the adoption of a new idea. Wetiko was inherently threatening to this social network and some people within it became active defenders responding to it as a threat.

Wrapping It Up We can learn a great deal by thinking about the campaign using this conceptual frame. When a new idea is introduced into the discourse—in this case the global dialogue on poverty, inequality, economic agendas, and climate change—there will be a variety of immune responses that can be monitored and analyzed to reveal insights.

This campaign has shown that an initial “pulse” of Wetiko materials was insufficient for having the idea gain adoption in a persistent manner. Instead what we achieved was to plant seeds in the minds of several key individuals (the number of these people being impossible to measure at present) who have internalized it deeply into their identities and worldviews.

While the content did not spread widely on Twitter, it was still able to reach large audiences through Facebook sharing and other pathways. When comparing how these audiences responded to the concept stripped of its cultural heritage (by removing reference to Wetiko as a word), the level of analysis was more shallow in the conversations that followed. People tended to arrive with their ideological hats on and it was difficult to take the critique to deeper levels.

This will inform how we continue to promote Wetiko after the initial starburst (what we are referring to internally as the “long tail” of the campaign—more on this below). It is clear that some of the people engaged with content from this campaign deeply, in a way that proved transformative to them.

Others were repelled by the notion and actively fought against its adoption in their networks. This tells us that we can become more effective by trying to anticipate where resistance will come from and the various forms it might take.

At the very practical level, we feel that this campaign demonstrates the power of cultural research to inform social change efforts. By combining social analytics with linguistic analysis, we are able to see patterns in culture that compel us to ask better questions and improve our practices for the future.

Next Steps For The Campaign At the start of this report, we named the objectives we had for the Seeing Wetiko campaign. Briefly summarized they were to engage a diversity of artists, create and curate useful content about Wetiko for future campaigns, establish rapport with indigenous leaders, and test a new model for campaigns (starbursts).

What this report shows is that we broadly achieved these objectives and are now ready to outline how to incorporate our learnings into the work that comes next. Bringing this analysis to a close, can review what has been learned and explore how it can inform what we do moving forward.

A top-level takeaway is that the Wetiko concept appeals to a select group of people who already feel separation from the mainstream and are looking for deep, systemic “root causes” of harm in the world.

These people readily incorporated the idea into their thinking and many reported feeling transformed irreversibly by the process. They were susceptible to the meme. Though likely small in number, they are akin to cultural seeds planted in a deep process of social change that promise to bear fruit in a future harvest season.

This suggests a short-term and long-term game plan.

Next Steps for the Near Future Between now and the end of 2016, we should focus on targeting more “deep converts” to this new way of thinking and work to deepen their understanding alongside those who have already become deeply engaged.

This includes furthering the integration of the Wetiko terminology into their lexicon—helping them apply it to domains they are passionate about— and helping this memetic tribe of Wetiko Warriors to become thought-leaders in their own right.

Later Steps for the Long-Term Future Develop a strategy for 2017 and beyond for getting these seedlings of community and conversation into the mainstream discourse we are seeking to reframe. Start with the idea that we are developing an inner cohort (the tribe) who might work with us to seed the idea into the mainstream over time.

This is different from earlier thinking that we might try to push Wetiko into the mainstream directly as an ongoing campaign of our own. The evolution of thought here is to focus instead on cultivating a community of thought leadership that creates its own pathways for communication and influence.

If we take this approach, it simply means the original “starburst” transitions into a “long-tail” of more gentle engagement—gradually educating, supporting, and nurturing along a cohort of emerging thought leaders.

Our task of applying Wetiko as a critical lens on the root causes of poverty, inequality, and ecological harm is then taken up by others whom we have helped with an initial seeding process, followed by provision of ongoing community supports.

We hope this report is useful for all who seek to make the world a more life-affirming and inclusive place. Let us continue learning together as we discover new ways to build community, critique and analyze the cultural traits of exploitation, and deeply reframe key discourses that impact humanity at the local and planetary scales.

seeing wetiko: tracking the spread of memes on social media

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