Mind, Matter, Meta: Three Domains of Activism

Divide, dissect, disintegrate important stuff. The more the marrier. How do you divide your activism space? One way which has served me well is the 3M (like the glue company): Mind, Matter and Meta. They're all deep interconnected but the way to differentiate is to look at the main target, area, space in which action should lead to change. For example, undercover investigation are trying to change the minds of humans. Promoting alternative proteins tries to change the environment, matter, in which those minds operate (and bring more options in the supermarket). Doing research to inform activists about effectiveness of different interventions is meta, empowering groups that change mind and matter for the better (we hope).

Matter activism can include promoting good tech (like non surgical fertility control for cats), but also inhabiting bad tech (like the insect protein industry).

The animal rights movement used to be very scarce in meta-services but this has changed. Here are some examples (very non-exhaustive):

• Hive is doing global community building like
• Mission motor is monitoring and evaluation like the Mission Motor
• Vegan Hacktivists empowering the Movement through expert tech services
• You have much more available grants, and the amount of money in the movement for farmed animals, currently below 400M, is supposed to increase dramatically in coming years with the IPO of Anthropic and other companies
• Animal Charity Evaluators is evaluating orgs, Faunalytics makes research accessible to activists.
• Much more