IMAGINE A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD ASKING: “WHAT if we didn’t have to go to school?”
Okay, maybe it’s not so hard to imagine a twelve-year-old asking that question. But what if it were a philosophical query that provoked real change in the way people valued and structured education?
At age twelve, Dale Stephens wondered just that. Frustrated with the classroom setting, Stephens decided to leave school and dove headfirst into “unschooling.” Unschooling is a type of homeschooling that emphasizes real-world learning experiences over text-driven classroom learning, a student-directed “curriculum” over teacher- or government-dictated mandates. While his peers attended traditional middle and high schools, Stephens started businesses, lived abroad, worked on political campaigns, and helped build a library.
In 2011 Stephens founded UnCollege, giving himself the job title “chief educational deviant.” UnCollege provides resources to students who wish to avail themselves of educational opportunities beyond the domain of traditional higher education, like colleges and universities. Inspired by his personal experience with unschooling and his frustrations with the college experience (for a short time, he attended Hendrix College in Arkansas), Stephens says that the goal of UnCollege is not to convince people not to go to college but to shine a light on educational alternatives—and to encourage more people to consider the opportunity cost of attending a traditional institution of higher learning.
As a kid, Stephens had the wherewithal to seek out mentors who could teach him what he wanted to learn. When he was fourteen, Stephens learned that a friend’s parent was a writer, so he asked if she would mentor him. For a few years she did, until Stephens’s writing improved and he felt confident going it alone. Stephens also took classes that he and other unschoolers organized themselves, around topics that interested them. “It was great [in contrast to] when I was in school, [and] I remember thinking, ‘Why should I spend seven hours a day dealing with teachers and students who didn’t really want to be there?’ It was a waste of time.”
In assuming responsibility for his education, Stephens feels that he learned valuable soft skills often overlooked in traditional classrooms. “I was able to develop more meta-skills rather than just [be exposed to] subject matter. While I learned math and history, I also learned about how to evaluate myself, how to find mentors, and how to set goals. And, most importantly, how to be self-aware. All sorts of things that nobody was bothering to teach me when I was in school.”
At sixteen, Stephens decided he wanted to get more involved in start-ups and technology. His first job was at a tech company, working alongside a group of college dropouts from Princeton who sought to match students with colleges. “It was a bit funny, because we were all dropouts funneling people into the educational system. But I learned a lot.”
Despite his success, Stephens is surprised by the extent to which he has to defend his decision to leave school. “I’ve had to argue my case every day since I left. When I say ‘I’m gay,’ nobody is like ‘Oh, have you considered being straight?’ But they do say ‘Oh, what if you had stayed in school?’ ”
The unschooling movement may be a niche, but alternative education is a growing marketplace. “Our education system was used to make industrial workers out of agricultural workers. It is no longer adequate,” Howard Rheingold told us. Rheingold, sixty-seven, is the former editor of Whole Earth Review. Founded in 1985, Whole Earth Review was a countercultural publication evolving out of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and rooted in “that old American tradition of self-reliance,” Rheingold shared, “building on that misfit streak started by Emerson.” In Rheingold’s perspective, Whole Earth Review was all about sharing tools and ideas to get people to take more control over their lives. “There was this hope that you didn’t have to depend on distant institutions—government, business, religious organizations—to shape your life.” Many came to realize that it was impossible to live completely outside of American society. Whole Earth wasn’t a solution but an ideal. It was a provocation for Americans to tap into greater self-reliance, to become makers and craftsmen.
Today Rheingold is part of Dale Stephens’s mission to reimagine our educational systems along similar lines of self-reliance and autonomy. “School is largely about compliance,” he told us, “sitting in your desk and keeping quiet.” Rheingold is working to develop models of peer education in which students are no longer passive consumers of content but are able to co-learn with each other. It is provoking a similar ideal to Whole Earth, with the message “Take charge of your life; don’t depend on formal (educational) institutions, but do it yourself.”
Howard Rheingold, Kio Stark, and Dale Stephens belong to a tribe of misfits who are provoking the education conversation: questioning dogmas and assumptions about how we learn and how we teach, and pioneering different approaches to education. As Rheingold told us, “We are in an era of extremely rapid change. What works today won’t work tomorrow. We are going to need misfits for society to find its way. Misfits who can point out tomorrow.”
To provoke, of course, means to arouse or stir up feelings, desires, or action. Within the Misfit Economy, provocation is about stepping out of reality, imagining something different. It is about poking and prodding business as usual to get others to wake up to different possibilities, just as Dale Stephens did.
The principle of provoke isn’t about having all the answers or even any of the answers. It’s about creating the conditions for a new conversation to take place, challenging orthodoxies, encouraging dissent, and imagining alternatives.
Ultimately, provocation is about learning to harness your own self-expression to take a stand and shake up the status quo. This skill is important for anyone—manager, spouse, parent, entrepreneur—who may not be a political agitator but may feel “stirred up” to take a stand within a company, marriage, school district, or start-up. To challenge “the way we’ve always done things” and make room for something new.
In an age of sexual prudishness, Helena Wright challenged women to think about sex as a pleasurable activity beyond reproduction. Writers Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne got us to think about the feasibility of space flight. Jane Austen called our ideas of marriage into question through her romantic fiction. Rosa Parks challenged norms around segregation by refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Coco Chanel pushed the boundaries of women’s fashion and never hesitated to speak her mind (“The most courageous act is to still think for yourself, aloud,” she once said).
Artists and writers, protestors and social reformers, misfits all. But call them what they are: successful. Like all great entrepreneurs, misfit provocateurs make us believe in a different version of the truth because they have the audacity to imagine a different world.
Artist Angelo Vermeulen told us that he never expected to become a commander for a NASA space mission. In April 2013 Vermeulen (who also has a Ph.D. in biology) became a crew commander for HI-SEAS, a space mission simulation intended to re-create the experience of living on Mars. For four months Vermeulen lived with five other people in a simulated space station on the volcanic soils of Hawaii.
Funded by NASA, the mission was set up primarily to explore how to offer nutritional food to astronauts during long periods of isolation. The experiment also offered insights into crew structure, leadership, and community building in cramped quarters.
Vermeulen told us that at times the simulation felt incredibly real, like living on Mars. Whenever the crew took part in extra-vehicular activities, for example, they wore space suits to leave the station. But other days, “when you are homesick or you have a difficult moment, you step out of the illusion and realize you are just on a volcano in Hawaii,” Vermeulen said. It was important for the well-being of the crew to maintain the simulated reality. “The closer you get to the feeling of really being on a mission, the more you enjoy it.”
The Mars simulation is similar to many live-action role-playing games (known as LARPs). Though LARP is a misfit subculture often associated with nerds running around with swords in the woods, it is being used increasingly as an experimental artistic medium to explore alternative worlds. There have been LARPs set up to explore important themes, including refugee camps, prisons, AIDS, homelessness, and gender roles. The game Motherland was a LARP set up as an alternative history in which Germany had won World War II. Another LARP organized in Sweden was built around the premise of a fictional girl who had been kidnapped. This LARP used online and offline elements, mixing a TV series and an Internet platform that enticed players on a real-life scavenger hunt to find the missing girl.
LARPs can allow players to experience particular emotions, step into another’s perspective, and explore artistic and political visions that might not be part of mainstream culture. LARPers build temporal realities that one can explore and learn from. LARPers call it “bleeding” when what you feel or learn within a game moves into your everyday life.
In some ways, the Mars simulation was an extended LARP. While crew members got to be themselves, they had to pretend to be living on Mars, and often it was hard not to break the simulation. To cope with the intensity of being trapped in relatively cramped quarters, some crew members would listen to music from their teenage years or play video games or even think about holiday plans for after the four-month mission. To keep up the illusion, Vermeulen worked to create a temporary structure. The crew would have a schedule, with morning meetings and chores. He tried to promote a lot of interaction, too, so the crew would feel more like a makeshift family.
The crew was being studied by NASA scientists who were interested not only in food strategies for living in space but also in the psychological implications of that kind of isolation. The crew’s correspondence with the outside world was studied to see if triggers could be found in communication that indicated certain psychological tendencies or states of well-being.
As Vermeulen told us, “We were not really aware of what exactly NASA was learning or what came out of it.” The mission generated a lot of press, and in turn, that made the idea of living on Mars a little more tangible for people. “The idea of how to feed your astronauts and keep them healthy touches a nerve for people,” Vermeulen said. “Grounding outer space in a discussion of the food reality makes it seem realistic and like not such a distant future.” Ultimately, the experiment was more of a provocation than an intensive research expedition.
As an artist with a background in the sciences, Vermeulen uses art as a way of probing into possible futures. He explores space colonization through art. Another project he is involved with is around starship design. Called Seeker, the project brings together volunteers to design the interior of a spaceship. The spaceship travels around the world, and new groups of people reconstruct its interior to fit their needs or experiment with different building materials. As with the Mars simulation, Vermeulen started running his own “isolation missions” in the fabricated starships. At the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Vermeulen spent four days with five other volunteers inside the starship, where they discussed interstellar voyaging and experienced what it was like to live in a starship of their own design.
Seeker is a community-designed art project that allows people to experience and reimagine the future of human habitation. Vermeulen admitted that part of his penchant for starship design owes to science fiction and the space architecture you see in shows like Battlestar Galactica. “It isn’t just engineers who drive research possibilities. It is artists as well.” Vermeulen’s background in biology allows him to do architectural modeling for starships that mimic biological structures and systems; his art uses biology and computer simulations to generate speculative designs. “It’s this hybrid identity, as an artist and researcher—or a researcher through the arts—that is the driving force of my work.”
THE USE OF ART TO push the boundaries of the public imagination around space is nothing new. In 1835 Edgar Allan Poe penned a short story called “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” that told the story of one man’s journey to the moon using hot-air-balloon technology. The story was one of Poe’s lesser-known writings and didn’t draw too much attention. Dissatisfied, Poe put on his con-man hat and published a fictitious news article in 1844 in the New York Sun (a politically conservative newspaper) about a man who traveled the Atlantic Ocean by hot-air balloon in only three days. The newspaper article was later revealed as a hoax and retracted. But before the story was discredited, it proved quite popular. Poe had described the mechanics of propulsion in great detail and had excited—through his deceitful shock-and-awe tactics—the popular imagination.
Both of Poe’s stories would later influence Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865). In turn, Verne’s story went on to inspire many early space flight pioneers. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a Russian schoolteacher influenced by Verne’s novel. Verne’s story is full of calculations around space flight. Engaging with Verne’s text, Tsiolkovsky went on to show that space flight was possible. He rightly predicted that liquid fuel rockets would be needed to get people to space and that hydrogen and oxygen would be the most powerful fuel. Robert Goddard was another space flight pioneer who, as a teenager, was influenced by reading Verne as well as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897). Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926 and earned more than two hundred patents for his work in space flight.
In speaking with economist Alexander MacDonald, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we came to appreciate the influence of science fiction in provoking the scientific imagination around space flight. “Many people who work at NASA are inspired and motivated to do what they do because of the influence of science fiction in their lives.” MacDonald told us that many of his colleagues at NASA have taken part in science fiction communities; many have even penned novels. “Science fiction writers are versed in the more technical aspects of space flight, and so there is a lot of exchange and inspiration that flows between NASA scientists and writers.” MacDonald told us that science fiction writers are sometimes invited to speak at NASA conferences.
Science fiction author and blogger Cory Doctorow, for example, published a novella for Project Hieroglyph, a platform for science fiction stories. Doctorow wrote about maker-space hardware hackers and Burning Man devotees who build 3-D printing robots to send to the moon. Accompanying the story, Hieroglyph hosts on their website a discussion with scientists around the feasibility of 3-D printing on the moon. Hieroglyph is a matchmaker of sorts, encouraging the conversion of science fiction stories into reality. The name comes from the recognition that certain stories serve as “hieroglyphs” or symbols—like Isaac Asimov’s robot—that activate the minds of engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists around how an innovation can come to be. In other words, the platform fosters an appetite among innovators to bring science fiction “hieroglyphs” into reality.
When astronaut Neil Armstrong returned from the moon as part of the Apollo 11 expedition, he referenced Verne’s novel in a television broadcast before reflecting on his own time in space. Without Poe and Verne creating the imaginative possibility of traveling to the moon, Armstrong might never have gone. In this way, art is a powerful tool in opening up our consciousness to new possibilities. In Edgar Allan Poe’s showing how space flight could work, or Vermeulen’s conceiving how life on a Mars space colony or in a starship could be, a writer and an artist opened doors for scientific discovery. They were provocateurs of the public imagination. Their influence may be difficult to trace and parse out, but it’s also undeniable.
INSIDE A MOUNTAIN IN WESTERN Texas, a ten-thousand-year clock is currently being built out of stainless steel and titanium by a group of artists and engineers. The clock will be hundreds of feet tall and designed to tick for ten thousand years, approximately the length of our civilization at present.
We spoke to Alexander Rose, the “project manager” for this ambitious undertaking. Rose, who grew up in a junkyard in Sausalito, where he honed his passion for tinkering, told us that the purpose of the clock is to “create an icon for long-term thinking that can inspire us to solve problems with long time spans.” At the moment, Rose feels that with many of the problems we go after, we look for solutions that pay off within a few years. “But so many of the problems we face—from climate change to environmental collapse—are not problems created overnight, nor problems that will take just a few years to fix.”
As much as the clock poses an engineering challenge, Rose sees the project as more of a provocation in the spirit of art or theater, to get people to challenge their established time scales. “We are trying to change the conversation people are having. Designing an experience that people move through and are affected by, like theater.” The clock is being built to capture people’s attention; its size is part of this strategy. Rose tells us that the clock must be designed to impress people so they’ll tell stories about it. “New myths are being created,” he told us. “People are being given permission to think about things at a longer scale.”
The ten-thousand-year clock shows how certain short-term ways of thinking are misguided or broken. It asks us to change our assumptions about time. And this is the essence of the provocateur experiment—the ability to completely redefine assumptions, to ignore the status quo and mentalities that say, “This is how we’ve always done it.” In provoking, we can’t be afraid to simply ask,“Why?”
When considering how and why to provoke, remember that provocation doesn’t usually lead to a direct cause-and-effect change, right here, right now. When you are provoking, you aren’t tied to a specific outcome. You are taking a stand—and you aren’t always aware of the consequences.
La Barbe is a group of French feminists. Its activists wear fake beards and storm male-dominated events to denounce the underrepresentation of women. They were inspired by Guerrilla Girls, a New York City–based feminist group of artists who donned gorilla masks in 1985 to protest the lack of gender diversity at the Museum of Modern Art. In March 2008, at one of La Barbe’s first public events, the group showed up in Paris on International Women’s Day to glue a beard on one of the statues in Republic Square. Since then, the group has staged somewhere between 150 and 200 interventions. La Barbe has provoked a response at many male gatherings, from political conventions to business board meetings. But one of the most notable was during the Cannes Film Festival.
On May 12, 2012, La Barbe gained attention by having one of their opposition pieces run in Le Monde, entitled “In Cannes, Women Show Their Reels, Men, Their Films.” The piece brought attention to the fact that the twenty-two films in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival had been made by twenty-two men. The content was picked up by international media and provoked a petition in the United States that was signed by leading feminists and women in the film industry.
What makes La Barbe unique is that it is an entirely decentralized organization, without any one leader or spokeswoman. A lot of the video footage from their protests is uploaded to YouTube in a very old-fashioned movie style, mimicking silent films from a bygone era, as if they are disrupting nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century worlds where male dominance was more accepted. Their message is often ironic, congratulating men on the system they have created and telling them how proud they are of them.
La Barbe activist Alice Coffin shared what happens during a demonstration: “At the beginning they are puzzled. They don’t know if we are men or women. They get a little scared for a moment, as they feel they are losing control of the situation.” Coffin told us that the responses really vary. “Sometimes the men are aggressive or make sexist comments or call you a clown. They call security and get you dragged out.” Coffin was once locked in a closet after protesting at the Rugby Federation.
Being in La Barbe has given Coffin and many of her fellow activists more confidence. “It strengthens you,” she told us. “You are no longer so afraid to say something.” And the impact? “We have the power to make journalists react,” Coffin said. “We get the media to report on important stories where there is a lack of gender diversity.” Sometimes La Barbe has triggered internal conversations among the organizers of some of the events where they’ve intervened. “We get fan mail from people inside some of these institutions who thank us for saying something.” Sometimes La Barbe is even invited by these institutions to give advice on gender inclusion. But Coffin told us that isn’t their role. “We aren’t experts or advisers. It isn’t our business to come and advise you. We stick to being activists.”
THE ACTIVIST GROUP THE YES men uses provocation in a similar way. Built on a spirit of improvisation, Yes Men was created by fictitious personalities Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, respectively), a pair of activists looking to expose the truth behind social, political, and economic issues.
We spoke with Andy Bichlbaum about the challenges of provocation. “It is hard to say what it is we are doing to shift things,” he said. “In themselves, our actions don’t really do anything, but in the context of a movement, they can do something.” Like La Barbe, the Yes Men’s primary lever for change is to grab media attention. “We provide excuses (often in the form of jokes) for journalists to cover important things.”
Bichlbaum told us that the problem is there are all these “mainstream journalists who want to do something interesting and want to say something interesting, but they find themselves within these structures where they can’t just cover something really important.”
Pranking has always been part of Bichlbaum’s DNA, but it wasn’t until he was nearing thirty that he found a way to direct it to activism. His first activist prank was as a computer programmer at a gaming company. Bichlbaum was making a game called SimCopter and put kissing boys into the video game. “I did it out of annoyance at my job. I knew something would happen, but I didn’t know what.” When the game was released, it turned into a big media story, and Bichlbaum liked the attention. He wanted to keep doing corporate sabotage work, so he built a fake website where disgruntled employees could crowd-fund ways to sabotage their companies.
A fake financing website for corporate sabotage was just the first step. Next, Bichlbaum and Bonanno built out the Yes Men as a public relations agency for “counter-cultural mischief activism.” The Yes Men’s first real success was a prank website that they set up in 2000 to amend the World Trade Organization’s website on tariffs and trade (http://www.gatt.org/), adding: “At a Wharton Business School conference on business in Africa that took place on Saturday, November 11, the WTO announced the creation of a new, much-improved form of slavery for the parts of Africa that have been hardest hit by the 500-year history of free trade there.”
As a result of this prank, Bichlbaum and Bonanno began receiving requests to represent the WTO in front of groups and organizations. They responded in the guise of official WTO representatives. The prank received international attention and gave the Yes Men a global platform.
Since the success of their WTO prank, they have continued to stage humorous, satirical hoaxes and share their improvisational practices through the Yes Lab, an incubator for activists. But Bichlbaum is careful not to overstate the impact of the Yes Men’s pranks: “We grab media attention, but just talking doesn’t change things. We can only help build pressure and interest.”
What can you learn from provocateurs? Provocateurs like the Yes Men and La Barbe teach us not to compromise our vision or purpose. Provocateurs are also not afraid to challenge authority or fixed minds. Most of us can channel the spirit of provocation by becoming “myth busters in residence.” We can shake up organizations in need of change by showing how certain ways of thinking are misguided or broken. But for many of us, our success as provocateurs comes with behaving gracefully and tactfully and knowing the right moments to ignite such conversations.
One of the most historic cultures of provocation is that of the festival. In the summer of 2014, Tom Kenning decided to visit as many festivals as he could in England and mainland Europe to ask the question: “Why can’t it be like this all the time?” Or: What can we learn from the festival spirit to inspire everyday life?
Historically, harvest festivals and religious festivals and feasts were used to usher in celebratory and sacred events that offered a departure from the hardship of everyday life. Many of today’s festivals are big music festivals like Coachella and Glastonbury, but increasingly, there are more experimental festivals like the Secret Garden Party in England, the Borderland in Sweden, and Burning Man in Black Rock City, Nevada.
As Kenning told us, he was interested in exploring how the goodwill of festival culture could be brought “outside the festival gates to combat the tedium and isolation of working life.” What he found was that for many, festivals provided an escape from self-consciousness. Festivalgoers were able to feel a sense of unity and connection. Festival life offered opportunities for spontaneity and the full experience of the senses. Not surprisingly, music, dance, and performance brought a greater embodiment than most found in the office. But aside from an increased appetite or fluency for talking to strangers and memories of freedom and flow, a lot of festival spirit seemed to vanish in the sobriety of normal life.
One group working to unlock festival spirit amid the humdrum of urban life is Morning Glory. Started in London in May 2013, Morning Glory offers sober morning raves for those who want to start their day with dance, smoothies, and wake-up massages. The raves start at six thirty A.M. and typically go until around ten thirty. While Morning Glory started as a provocation for the daily commuter to defy the typical morning routine, it has since grown to become a regular event operating worldwide.
After receiving hundreds of letters from people who wanted to bring the morning rave to their city, Morning Glory opted to franchise their model. They recruit “Glory Agents” or event producers around the world. Each Glory Agent is interviewed or given an “aura check,” screened not only for their passion but also for their skills in event production, marketing, and public relations. Each agent is given a “Glory Guide,” which is essentially a big manual outlining the principles, values, and business and branding guidelines of Morning Glory. In return for the Morning Glory affiliation, the franchisees pay a onetime licensing fee of around a thousand dollars and a small annual fee.
To date, Morning Glory operates in fourteen cities, including Barcelona, New York, London, Tokyo, Bangalore, and Melbourne. We asked New York producer Annie Fabricant why she thought Morning Glory was catching on and how it was impacting people. “It’s funny to think of morning raves as life-changing, but they are. People leave buzzing and with a renewed faith in humanity. There is this explosion of energy and love that isn’t dependent on alcohol or drugs. And that gives more meaning to people’s lives.”
While a lot of festival cultures may have dubious lasting impact, the ability to step into and imagine a world radically different from everyday life is the mandate of any provocation. The festival and the spaceship of science fiction are not so different—both offering temporary worlds that can help us to reimagine reality and fortify the operations of the imagination.
IN THE EARLY NINETIES, AT the age of sixteen, Tom Farrand and his friends would frequent illegal raves across England. He remembers once driving a decked-out Ford Transit; on the road, one of his friends got an anonymous call. When they called the number, they were told to go to a gas station. At the gas station, they were directed to an empty field off a nearby highway. At that first rave, only three hundred people turned up. Around five years later, there were more than thirty thousand.
Raves weren’t just a hedonistic outlet for Farrand. They were about creating a different kind of culture. “We had this collective experience,” he told us. “A bucket went around if someone was running a generator, and everyone tossed in a bit of money. It was about feeling free, connecting to something bigger, and allowing for spontaneous organization.”
As an adult, Farrand has spent over eighteen years working in brand and business innovation for companies including Procter & Gamble, WPP, and Oliver Wyman. In 2009 Farrand founded an organization called Good for Nothing that enabled him to merge his experiences with growing brands and managing innovation processes with those of attending raves.
Good for Nothing brings together innovators who want to “think, hack, and do” through “gigs,” one-to-two-day pop-up events organized around a spirit of informality. “We let go of power and control and allow for people to self-organize and for ideas and collaborations to emerge naturally,” Farrand told us.
Good for Nothing operates in more than twenty-five cities internationally, and some of the projects include tackling food waste, building out community infrastructure, and designing local campaigns to create energy-efficient homes. At one of the meetings, Good for Nothing called for all participants to show up at five P.M. at a random location in Suffolk, England. They were met by a 1930s bus and taken to a campground for the weekend to work on challenges that had been identified by the community. As at a rave, there was a feeling of immersion, of excitement, and of not knowing what would happen next.
The value of provoking is in starting a conversation. A protest movement doesn’t last forever. A science fiction novel is only so many pages. A prank holds its surprise only so long before it is revealed. But groups of people who ask the right questions or probe alternatives often pave the way for true change to emerge. Cultures like live-action role-playing or Burning Man that pop up temporary worlds can generate insights that spill over into mainstream reality. We may not all want to spend all our time dressed in festival garb and bartering in a desert gift economy, isolated in a simulated Mars mission, or protesting in Zuccotti Park, but the temporary worlds created by the provocateurs spark dialogue in our mainstream culture and create the conditions for innovation to occur.