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SFR: You've just publicly launched
, a Web site that appears to combine some of the social networking conventions of sites like Friendster and MySpace with continuous opinion polls to encourage proactive political and consumer engagement. How does it work?
BR
: It's a tool to create dialogue between institutions and individuals. At dirt.com I'm focusing on corporations and citizens. I like to use the word 'citizens' rather than 'consumers'-somehow we're often referred to as consumers rather than citizens in this country and it really should be the other way around. But dirt.com encourages a community that is about rewarding corporations for doing the right thing as far as business practices and sustainability, but also a mechanism for challenging them if they're just trying to greenwash themselves or do PR to make it look like they're doing the right thing.
The idea of voting with your wallet is a pretty old maxim but it doesn't seem to have come to fruition as a democratic force.
Yes and no. It does work, but it hasn't revolutionized anything maybe the way people thought it would have. But on another level the language involved in all of this stuff regarding corporate responsibility and sustainability and being a good neighbor has truly filtered all the way up to the board room, even in huge companies, and that's never been the case before.
Are corporations ready to embrace ideals about sustainability regardless of the bottom line?
These guys aren't going to pay attention to it at all unless it can meet the bottom line. But what people are starting to understand is that doing well in your community and putting value in what they call environmental capitol and social capitol also will help your profit margin. It's a way to be well by doing good.
Does dirt.com somehow focus that idea?
The whole thing revolves around a voting mechanism, the rich media poll. The idea is to take complex issues and break them down into understandable chunks and then allow people to have a safe place behind their computer to voice their opinion about things. What's really important and what's new about what dirt.com is doing is that the poll is constructed to reveal the gray areas around any particular issue. By organizing the poll into intelligent, branching subsets of questions, we're able to determine where there is a certain amount of consensus and where differing opinions overlap. We believe these are the places where true, productive dialogue begins.
How does this dialogue actually take place?
It hasn't happened yet but, for example, Monsanto has just put a position out for hire for an ethics officer and on their Web site they have all this good language about community, etc. Well how could they be talking about that when they're suing organic farmers and shutting farms down? Can an ethics officer make a difference for a corporation like this? Is it all posturing? We can find out what people think, in an in-depth way, and then let Monsanto know how their actions are perceived by citizens and what people expect from them. If they respond, we can locate areas to begin dialogue and encourage responsible corporate behavior.
And corporations will care about this dialogue because they'll pay for the poll results?
Yes, the polling information will be open and transparent to the entire community, everyone can see the results, but interpreting the results is a different story and so businesses will pay for us to interpret the results, to reveal directions that may get a response or earn loyalty from a cynical group of citizens. Alternatively, if our community decides it's totally offended with a corporation, we won't do business with them, period.
Interpreting and selling polling information sounds straightforward-why also provide a means for all comers to network their own artwork, design products and ideas?
The purpose is to allow everyone to sort of build the life that they envision having…if they want to get involved on a global scale, there's this potential avenue of input into economics and corporate responsibility. If they simply want to make a living at what they love to do, they can just put their work out there. If they're going to build an innovative company from the ground up, the community can help guide its vision and values. It's designed to encourage the community to support each other to find ways to use each other's products and services. I've always had a soft spot for activists and entrepreneurs because that's what I am and the same is true for most of my friends.
There might be other communities that are more wired and ready to support this kind of activist/entrepreneurial/Internet synthesis…
I don't know if that's true but if it is, that's OK. I like it here, I'm happy to be a part of this community and, honestly, I've found a ton of support here. I don't even think in terms of geography; I just get a chance to live in a beautiful place and my prospects are as wide as the Internet.
And you believe both individuals and corporations will care about the dirt.com community because of a relationship between the life we want to live and the things we buy, who makes them and how?
It's all connected. The main question is how can we increase our quality of life? How do we make a living and also put our values out into the community? Wal-Mart has much more power to effect change with the stroke of a pen than I do. Maybe it's time to figure out how to encourage them to be the corporate citizens we want them to be.
