Commusings: Troublemakers by Jessica Elefante

Dear Commune Community, 

In the late 19th, miners brought canaries into coal mines as a way to detect the presence of carbon monoxide. The metabolism of birds is faster than that of mammals, so they would show symptoms of distress from toxic gases much earlier than humans would.

If a canary became ill, this was a sign that the atmosphere in the mine was unsafe and miners would evacuate. Essentially, the bird served as an early warning system of impending danger.

Ten years ago, my daughter Phoebe and I had a Friday night ritual. I would take her to the Brooklyn Night Bazaar in North Williamsburg. The experience was an elixir of art fair, food festival and concert venue set in an old warehouse. Phoebe and I meandered through the labyrinth of crystal and essential oil vendors, stopping here and there to dab lavender on each other and try on fedoras.

It was here, in this nocturnal souk, that we met a canary. Phoebe was nine, but precocious beyond her years. While I was sipping an IPA (oh those days!), Phoebe struck up a conversation with a woman hocking sweatshirts embroidered with the exhortation “Folk Rebellion.” I sidled over. Jess wasn’t promoting her merchandise to Phoebe. She was teaching her a new word, “Nomophobia.”

Nomophobia (or NO MObile PHone PhoBIA) is the psychological condition used to describe people with a fear of being without their phone or detached from mobile phone connectivity.

Jess was starting a movement based on in-real-life connection.

Prior to the COVID-accelerated loneliness epidemic, the Zoom life, the misinformation that led to January 6th, the use of deep fakes, the vitriol of Twitter, global cyberattacks and the hand-wringing over AI, Jess was pointing us toward human intelligence.

She was, and is, a canary in the coal mine. I am thrilled to feature her writing here.

Straddling the analog and digital in Topanga and on IG @jeffkrasno.

In love, include me,
Jeff

• • •

Troublemakers
by Jessica Elefante

Excerpted from Raising Hell, Living Well

I could not think of a role model when I was tasked with the homework assignment “Write about someone who inspires you.” The people who inspired me were the people who railed against a system that tried to tell them who to be and how to live. My heroes were somewhat antiheroes—disobedient eccentrics, weirdo artists, transgressive authors who loathed authority and felt confined by social norms.

Even at a young age, I was all too aware that turning in a paper about John Waters, the creator of cult favorites Cry-Baby and Hairspray, which at the time were banned but today are praised, or Charles Bukowski, who famously said, “We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system,” was sure not only to get me a low grade but also have me flagged as a lowlife. So I picked Theodor Geisel, thinking it was a great middle-of-the-road for my thesis—acceptability and firebrand.

He was a curmudgeonly idealist who devoted most of his creative life to opening people’s eyes to a broken society through his illustrations, stories, and books. Yup, beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss. To this day, many people don’t realize he was advocating for social change through parables about the environment in The Lorax or the arms race in The Butter Battle Book. To me, his brilliance was in how he used his immense talent to share his deeply held convictions about things like fairness and acceptance and influence people without their realizing it—making him one of the most influential people of our times. I thought it was a great angle.

I worked very hard on that smart and well-written paper only to receive it back with “Dr. Seuss??” scrawled in the top corner. A sad face after the double question marks was followed by a low grade not reflective of anything except my teacher’s disapproval of such an unserious role model. The brownnoser next to me flashed me the A plus on their postured choice—Mother Teresa. No offense to Mother Teresa. She was incredibly influential, but the choice was painfully obvious.

Sometimes the person who can enact the most change isn’t always the most obvious choice. Sometimes they’re downright sinners, not saints. Or at least they start out that way in the eyes of others, because to break a mold, defy a norm, or restructure a structure, you need to ruffle a few feathers along the way. The most influential people in history were often considered mad because of their grand ideas. Some got their due while they were alive to enjoy it, like when an invention such as the lightbulb finally worked after a thousand failed attempts. Others didn’t live to see their genius go from scorned to celebrated. It takes humans a while to come around to new ideas. To do good things in the long run means you might be considered an outlier in the present moment.

By nature, rebels are almost always underdogs fighting back against something they see as oppressive. As their influence shifts a collective consciousness, they end up gaining some sort of respectability in retrospect. While these future role models may not be well thought of in the moment—as they’re breaking rules, picking fights, and standing up—it is their inherent selflessness that made them good all along. Influential people are often troublemakers who felt stifled by the system as it was. Throughout history, the artists, innovators, pioneers, intellectuals, leaders, and icons who show up with their bad selves as agent provocateurs blaze their own way, and by doing so, open pathways for others.

Conformity is a word that refers to the propensity of a person to follow the unwritten norms or behaviors of the social group to which they belong. For a very long time, academics and psychologists have been interested in determining the degree to which individuals conform to societal standards or rebel against them.

Troublemakers are labeled as such because they speak up when others won’t. Troublemakers are alternate voices. Troublemakers stand up against the people, the structures, and the that’s-just-the-waythings-are mentality when nobody else will. They don’t conform— and by doing so, or not doing so, become influential.

Psychologist Solomon Asch performed a series of tests during the 1950s known as the Asch conformity experiments, where he discovered that (many!) individuals would rather lie or offer an inaccurate response than stand out. It’s the troublemakers who save us from ourselves, the very ones often weeded out of important influential places like government offices and executive boardrooms. When the majority remain silent, even knowing that there is something wrong, it’s the handful of noisy, pesky, loud-mouthed dissenters who keep us honest. And those voices, those people, are not always welcome. What is a hero to some is a complete pain in the ass to others. Usually those with something (money) to lose.

Today it’s hard to picture driving a car without seatbelts or airbags but that was very much the norm before a troublemaking car executive decided to sound the horn on an industry that was putting sales above its consumers’ safety. Aptly nicknamed Nader the Crusader, Ralph Nader is responsible for the automobile safety manufacturing laws we see today, including seatbelts. In a groundbreaking investigation of the auto industry, he was able to show how car manufacturers were putting their drivers in danger. His book showcasing his findings had a massive effect on the auto industry and society as a whole, resulting in the creation of the U.S. Department of Transportation and millions of saved lives! Not surprisingly, some automakers, especially General Motors (then the most powerful corporation in the world), attempted to downplay Nader’s critiques, going so far as to hire private investigators to dig up dirt on him in the hopes of creating roadblocks for his mission by smearing his name, but the “crusader” persisted and eventually persevered. New crashworthy standards around brakes, tires, seatbelts, and airbags were proposed and later adopted universally. In 1967, Henry Ford II warned that the standards “would shut down the industry”—because, of course, in America we think first of saving industries before saving people. It took ten years, but Ford finally conceded, noting on NBC’s Meet the Press, “We wouldn’t have the kinds of safety built into automobiles that we have had unless there had been a federal law.” 

Alas, nothing to fear here! The auto industry that wouldn’t act in good faith without the regulation that forced them to is still alive and kickin’ as are millions of people, thanks to the good influence of a troublemaker motivated by selflessness.

Decades later Nader’s antiestablishment mentality and for-thepeople advocacy would bring him into the world of politics, making him a key and controversial figure in the 2000 U.S. presidential election—tarnishing his reputation in the process. But the 2006 film An Unreasonable Man set out to restore his reputation and legacy. The title took its name from the playwright, critic, and political activist George Bernard Shaw’s quote: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Shaw’s notion that it takes the “unreasonable man”—the one who refuses to accept the world as it is—to influence future progress is not just profound but logical.

During my speaking engagements for Folk Rebellion, when I likened the “safety” of the internet to that of cars before serious regulations, people would say I was being unreasonable. Unreasonable, even though we are metaphorically drunk at the wheel, kids rolling around willy-nilly in the back seat, drivers running through intersections at high speeds with no cares in the world. 

The tech industry is like the auto industry of the 1960s. They don’t want any troublemakers to bring regulation into their free-market windfall. This time we might not be driving headfirst into one another, but I think everyone can agree we are in a collective crash and burn. Fortunately, there are troublemakers beginning to step up in this area too.

Whistleblowers are some of the most important, charitable, and good people of our time. They sacrifice themselves to hold accountable those with too much power who use it illicitly at the cost of others. This time, saving us from ourselves is an ex–Facebook manager, data engineer, scientist turned whistleblower, and child advocate named Frances Haugen. Originally joining Facebook with an interest in misinformation after someone close to her became radicalized by the platform, she said she “felt compelled to take an active role in creating a better, less toxic, Facebook.” What she saw once on board was a pattern of prioritizing profit over public safety, and her attempts to make changes from the inside as a product manager in the “civic integrity department” were met with stonewalling. On October 5, 2021, Haugen testified before the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security of the United States Senate’s Commerce Committee. Not so ironically, this is one of the many committees that were created in part thanks to the “father of the consumer protection movement.” Yup. Ralph Nader.

Haugen’s legacy, her influence on our world, is still being written, but her focus on enhancing awareness of the harms of social media and big tech through government regulations and litigation strategies has already created a tidal wave of change. In 2021, she appeared before the European Parliament’s Committee on Consumer Protection. In the hearing, she urged the parliament, which was debating the Digital Services Act—a legislative proposal by the European Commission regarding illegal content, disinformation, and transparent advertising—to mandate that social media platforms operate transparently and not create loopholes that big tech could exploit. She said they had “the potential to be a global gold standard” and an inspiration for other countries on safeguarding democracy on social media. In 2022, an agreement was made. Her disclosure of tens of thousands of Facebook’s internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal started a rebellion against harmful things influencing everyday people in their everyday lives. For her selflessness in her advocacy for children, she has been honored with the Fred Rogers Integrity Award, named after yet another countercultural troublemaker, Mister Rogers.

Don’t let the cardigan sweater fool you. His soft voice and gentle puppets were a means to an end. He hated TV. When he turned it on, he was disgusted by the things he saw—violence and people demeaning one another. To counter what he felt was televised inhumanity, he decided to make change within the medium. Was Mr. Rogers bad? No, absolutely not, but the decisive way he chose to counterinfluence the state of programming by operating as a rogue rebel within it is pretty badass. In the same way Dr. Seuss used cartoons to soften (some would say hide) the delivery of his perspectives on provocative topics, Fred Rogers used his platform to bring about conversations around challenging subjects like war, gender, race, and poverty. Instead of bringing fear into our homes by way of a child’s face on a milk carton, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood broadcast patience, love, and understanding into the living rooms of young children—and their parents— during a time rife with uncertainty. He and his hokey, low-budget program, with its gentle advice for children, is continually revisited because of its lasting impact. He’s been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in addition to honorary degrees and other awards for his contributions. As a visionary leader for children’s well-being, the effects of his work to influence television programming are still being understood.

To become influential far beyond your individual self is to create a legacy of influence in your wake. It can benefit a few to many, and in the most influential cases, it can affect not just many people, but many generations and formats, making everlasting changes.

With so many ways to gain influence and wield it these days, people have the power to shape communities, shape culture, and shape the world. Hopefully, they’ll choose to use it for good. Becoming truly influential isn’t seeking fame, fortune, or an A plus on a paper. It’s being considered unreasonable—and standing up in the face of the status quo.

Jessica Elefante is a writer who has spent the last few decades examining what it means to be human in our modern world. Her essays have appeared in The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and more. As the founder of acclaimed Folk Rebellion and a critic of today’s culture, Elefante’s award-winning talks, films, and work have been featured by Vogue, the Los Angeles Times, The Observer, Paper magazine, Wired, and elsewhere. In her previous life as a brand strategist, she was recognized as one of Brand Innovators’ 40 Under 40 and has been a guest lecturer at Columbia Business School and New York University. She’s influenced by the social, cultural, and technological circumstances of her life but mostly by her desire to lead a colorful one. Raised in Upstate New York, she now lives in Brooklyn with her family. She is no longer bullshitting.

Excerpted from Raising Hell, Living Well copyright © 2023 by Jessica Elefante. Used by permission of Ballantine an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.