assignment 3: manifesto
Manifesto: Shaping the World-to-Be
length: 3-4 pages (again, on to the fourth sheet of paper by at least a word, but not on to a fifth)
due dates: 10.22 (proposal), 10.29 (draft), 11.2 (final)
Thus far we’ve reported on and dispassionately analyzed the future; now, we will get more explicitly rhetorical. A manifesto as we have discussed it is a public declaration of principles and intentions, especially but not exclusively of a political nature, and it is a label usually applied to statements made by groups outside of the mainstream. Manifestos are a kind of intervention into some undesirable aspect of the status quo–an aspect that, the manifesto author believes, has not been sufficiently subjected to rational critique. As such, writing a manifesto is a way of raising one’s voice, of speaking loudly and jarringly enough to get noticed where other articulations of one’s point might not make any headway against the status quo. Manifestos are thus a more intrinsically creative form than the analyses and reports we’ve generated thus far; think of the “Letter to Mother Nature” and its conceit of directly addressing mother nature and reworking mankind’s contract with her. Your writing here should be more adventurous, more experimental, more attention-grabbing in one way or another. This can be a product of style, tone, structure, presentation, typography, etc., any number of which ought to reinforce the novelty of the principles you’re proposing.
The main tasks of the manifesto are a) to carve out a rhetorical space for your particular intervention (by shaking your fist at the status quo in a way that people are inclined to notice and listen to), b) to establish the principles by which you mean to change the status quo, and c) to successfully and enthusiastically sell those principles as plausible and desirable despite their deviation from the familiar and the comfortable. If we’ve talked about the future as being “out there,” external to ourselves and to the lives with which we are familiar, then the manifesto’s future is “out there” in another way: a little bit wacky, a little bit off-putting, a little bit noisy, but thus a little bit exhilarating. In “Live Free or Drown,” Patri Friedman characterizes his seasteading movement this way: “This isn’t enough to create a whole new civilization. But this is a seed.” Think of your manifesto, then, as the seed of something new, out of which a more desirable—and in some way radically different—future might grow.