“A kangaroo court is a judicial tribunal or assembly that blatantly disregards recognized standards of law or justice, and often carries little or no official standing in the territory in which it resides. Merriam-Webster defines it as a “mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted.” – Wickipedia.
Since I started writing about the New York Carriage Horses I’ve received scores of messages from people pleading with me to send my columns to the New York Times or other newspapers or bring them to the city’s mayor. I’m touched by these messages, they are flattering and humbling, they give me much more credit and influence than I have or need. The blog is my medium, I’m happy writing here, the messages will make their own way into the world, or not. I believe memetics – the study and application of memes – is a lot more important in our world than editorial pages.
I don’t think newspaper reprints of my blog would do much for the carriage horses, we are well beyond that. I don’t believe the New York Times or other conventional media will save the carriage horses. Newspapers are losing circulation, influence, resources. The New York Times is not interested in my views on carriage horses, not do they seem to care much about the horses themselves. The city’s mayor is not going to read my column, he made up his mind about the carriage horses a good while ago, it would be a humiliating reversal for him to change course now and turn away from the people who gave him so much money and electoral support.
Issues are not resolved that way in 2014, not in the new world of information technology, which shapes opinion much more powerfully and quickly – and virally – than editorial pages. To understand this idea, one only has to look at the devastatingly effective social media campaign waged by the people who call themselves animal rights activists against the carriage horse industry. It has been conducted almost entirely on social media and various blogs and websites.
These groups may know little or nothing about animals, but they do understand the manipulative and emotional power of images on Facebook. If you put up enough photographs of injured and dying animals – it makes no difference if they offer any real perspective – you will get a lot of petitions signed, raise a lot of money, arouse a lot of people and shape the public perception of just about any issue.
The carriage horse industry is many things, but media savvy is not one of them. They gave their opponents a four or five-year head start, and catching up will be difficult. They, like many of my good-hearted readers, still have a 20th century notion of civic conflict, they believe someone in the city will have a rational and open discussion with them. It’s not going to happen. There is no rational or fact-based driven discussion occurring in New York about these horses, there will not be any.
Forget about sending columns to the New York Times, drop the fantasy of the mayor suddenly awakening and seeing that his supporters are far from the mainstream when it comes to understanding animals, this issue of abuse is a chimera, it is paper-thin, it has nothing to do with real animals or their lives. This assault on the carriage horse people is a true Kangaroo Court, the mayor and the animal rights people have never spoken to a carriage horse owner or driver, they’ve never come to see the stables or meet a horse.
This conflict is not about reality, it is about memetics and the transmission of ideas, images and emotions through electronic media, it’s the only way to understand it, the only way to save the horses. The people who want the horses out of New York understand it very well, just look at their Facebook page, now focused on protesting the arrival of the Ringling Brothers Circus, the “cruelest show on earth.” (But don’t try to comment there, disagreements are deleted, disagreers blocked.)
When I wrote for Wired Magazine and Rolling Stone I was fascinated by the subject of memetics, it became the foundation for my work on the Internet and my blog, which had more than four million visits last year, about 303,000 unique visitors.
Memetics is the cornerstone of new media and the transmission of ideas. It is a theory of mental content. A meme is analogous to a “unit of culture,” an idea, belief or pattern of behavior. The study of memetics is the study of how ideas travel through the culture, especially through new and electronic media. Some memes thrive, others die. Memes are like viruses, they jump from mind to mind, they shape our perception of ideas and issues. NYCLass, the spearhead of the move to ban the horses from New York understands memetics intuitively: Animals Who Work Are Abused, The Carriage Horses Are Mistreated, Horses Have No Place In New York In the 21st Century. The idea that life for the carriage horses is cruel and abusive has become the dominant meme in this conflict, it is an idea that replicates itself constantly on blogs, in media, on Facebook, in petitions and on mailing lists. It is the reason the carriage industry faces being banned from New York, the horses banished to rescue farms and slaughter houses. If I were constructing my own meme today, it would be this: “Save The Carriage Horses.” Steal the meme back.
The Internet and social media like Facebook are the most powerful transmitters of memes ever conceived in human society. Memetics helps us understand how ideas are transmitted in modern times, I use them all the time: Red Is Hard Working, Lenore Is A Love Dog, Frieda Is A Helldog, I Live A Creative Life, Maria Is An Artist, I Seek A Meaningful Life. The carriage horse industry, like many people who live and work outside of new technology, still believe in fact-based negotiation and resolution, the old idea of civics. If only one person in the carriage horse trade has been accused of abuse in 150 years, then it makes no sense they will be driven out of business for being abusive. Why does no one in New York City know of this staggering statistic? Because no one has sent this meme out into the world.
Memes are not necessarily about truth, they are simply ideas that replicate through new technology the same way a germ might travel through the human body. If the mayor were interested in truth (or an author’s blog), he would, of course, talk to the carriage horse owners and riders, or go see the animals and the stables. The activists are not interested in factual truth either, as is clear from their sites, their memes are emotional and ideology based, a unit of culture advancing a particular and very narrow view of animals in our society. In this view, almost all of the people reading this, including me, meet the new criterion of abuse. My dogs and donkeys lead a much rougher life than any carriage horse in New York, they do not get five weeks of paid vacation. Memes are temporal, technology is always thirsty for them.
The mayor may not be so happy to be associated with this movement when dog and cat owners awaken to its implications.
Perhaps the most effective meme of the so-called activists is that the carriage horse owners and drivers are greedy and cruel and that the horses suffer chronically and terribly. There are no facts to support those accusations, I have been looking for weeks, but facts do not seem to have much of a place in this controversy as is often the case with memetics. Facebook is an emotional medium, not a thoughtful one.
The bottom line is this: if you believe animals ought to remain in our lives, and the carriage horses ought to remain in New York, don’t expect the New York Times or the mayor to fight this battle for you, get your own meme and put it out there. We all have to take responsibility for what we believe, I think my blog is a much better place for this discussion than the New York Times Editorial Page, itself an over-the-counter anesthetic. I don’t really care to have my writing there.
The other side has learned the power of the meme, they know how to transmit it. If you put photos of crippled horses on Facebook every day and say they are abused, and ask for help in stopping it, then that meme will replicate, this idea will become a pattern of thought, it will travel rapidly through the culture, acquiring money, believers and repetition through other media (like the very newspapers people think will read my blog and come to consciousness.) These memes have not been seriously challenged in some years, they are now firmly embedded in the consciousness of the public and the minds of many people who instinctively support animals when they are told they are being abused.
It is a characteristic of the Kangaroo Court that the accused never gets a real hearing. The accused never meets their accusers. Thus the great fear and pain of being unable to answer or confront the worst kinds of charges. Accusations are not based on testimony, factual evidence – no animal rights person has ever come to a stable to see the horses or talk to the owners – they are made from remote and safe distances, like computers and on Facebook pages.
The fight to save the carriage horses is not hopeless by any means, the dynamics of memetic conflicts can shift in a flash, but it will require a different way of thinking.
The answer is not to appeal to the New York Times or the mayor. Technology gives us the tools to help ourselves, raise our voices. The answer is to create a different memes: The Charges Against The Carriage Horse Industry Are Demonstrably False And Themselves; Work For Working Animals Is Not Abuse; The Horses Are Not Abused. Working Animals Have The Right To Live Among Us, Meaningful Work Is Their Salvation; Many Animal Rights Activists Do Not Reflect The Views of Animal Owners and Lovers; The Horses Are Treated Better Than Almost All Of The Horses In The World. One Horse Has Been Killed In Traffic In The Past Two Decades, 155 people were killed by cars in 2012 alone. The Carriage Horse Owners Are Human Beings, They Care About Their Horses. One Driver In 150 Years Has Been Accused Of Mistreating A Horse. Work For Working Animals Is Not Abuse, It Is Their Purpose. Ask Children If They Want To Ride On Horse Carriages Or Electric Go-Carts.
These memes need to be transmitted in the same form in which the accusations are made – that is to say, electronically. Facebook and Twitter, blogs and e-mails, websites, mailing lists and different kinds of images are the tools of the meme, the architecture of memetics.
This kind of issue cannot be resolved in conventional ways, certainly not when one side has made it so clear they are not interested in negotiation or compromise – or much truth. In memetic conflicts the principals rarely speak to one another – just look at Washington – politicians speak only to their own constituencies, most in texts, tweets, posts.
Conflicts are resolved not by changing opponent’s minds, but by creating new or larger or more motivate constituencies. Social media are the primary tool for doing that. The mayor made banning the horses a major element in his campaign, a major priority in his administration, he didn’t even mention the more than 15,000 New Yorker’s injured in accidents every year in New York City, he might regret that, that is a meme-in-waiting.
If you choose, you can do as much for the carriage horses as me, perhaps even more. The best way to support the carriage horses and help to keep them in New York is to work from the bottom up, not the top down. Every time I write about them, the posts are shared thousands of times on Facebook. Each day I get a half-dozen or so messages saying the information I have presented changed some minds, offered a new perspective.The columns are shared, relayed, posted to blogs, discussed at dinner. They remind me my work is important. One women wrote me yesterday saying she had signed a number of petitions in New York supporting the ban of the horses but then read some of my posts and realized she hadn’t been getting her facts straight, that her politicians were not telling her the truth. She was reconsidering her position, changing her mind. A different meme in her head. Every message like that is a movement towards saving the carriage horses and fighting a mob-like campaign that seems wrong.
Even from the vantage point of my humble blog, some new memes have emerged in some minds: This doesn’t sound right, I hadn’t thought of things that way, there is no factual evidence of any kind suggested the horses are being abused, I never thought about dogs and work, I just accepted the idea work is abusive for animals.
These new memes about the carriage horses are replicating, I can feel it, and perhaps one will go viral and alter the public’s perception of this issue. Perhaps someone with a lot of money will see the meme, maybe a politician or a good lawyer, perhaps the dynamic of the debate will shift. For years, there has been no real debate, just a one-side series of near hysterical and factually unsupported accusations. Now, the beginning of a genuine debate, there is an awakening, a sense of injustice, an unease at the abuse of people in the name of protecting animals. I don’t know if there’s time, that is not in my hands.
People who wish to help keep the carriage horses in New York, who believe work is not abuse for working animals, who believe that animals need to remain in our lives and not only be confined to rescue ghettos, who are uneasy about government inserting itself so brutally into our relationships with animals, can surely make a difference – they don’t need the mayor. They just need to empower themselves, to find their own meme and sent it out into the world, one person at a time, from the bottom up, not the top down.
I believe that truth matters, every time I write a word on this blog I ask myself only two questions: How do I feel? Is It The Truth? I will take responsibility for my ideas and send them out into the world to see if they live or die. The mayor can do the same.