The last couple of weeks I’ve been highly active on Reddit discussing the issues with Sonos speakers and the fiasco that occurred earlier this year when Sonos “upgraded” their app, causing it to malfunction for a ton of their users.
This got me thinking the last day or so that when I reflect back on my life, I’ve been highly active as an advocate for communities in the past.
Back near the end of the 1990s, I was an end user advocate for gamers, both as a gamer but also as a person who built sites and communities for gamers within the gaming industry at the same time as well.
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, I was an advocate for people who had been laid off so carelessly from it.
Then over the past decade or so, I’ve been an advocate within a couple of gaming communities again, both in terms of trying to drive change within the communities but also trying to drive a change with the developers of the games as well.
All said done, I found that when I’m backing a cause, I can become quite passionate and voraciously driven, especially if it’s an us vs them situation.
But reflecting upon this the other day, I realized that one of my deepest causes doesn’t really have a specific “them” to rally against. Why? Because it’s not so much a singular organization but rather an organizational mindset.
Even more so, what this means is that the “enemy” isn’t out there so much as it is within you, a part of your own mindset. So how does one become an advocate to fight against a limited, outdate mindset, when it’s not represented by a singular organizational body but is embedded collectively within the work world which is in itself embedded within your mind?
This touches upon what Alvin Toffler said about the future being about learning how to unlearn. The enemy isn’t out there. It’s within us, within our minds. It’s a narrative and belief that we need to let go of, yet most people are completely unaware of it.
Again, I know how to rally people into a community and advocate for them against an external entity. But when the entity is a belief within you, how do you rally against that?