Checking my email this morning sent me into a bit of a rage. See, I’d opened up the latest in the unending stream of clicktivist emails I get as punishment for signing their petitions elsewhere on the internet. I often get upset when I open them, although to be fair, my rage is usually directed mostly at the content. This one, however, contained good news. It was even subject-lined “Finally, some good news” (though I could swear they’ve used that exact phrasing before, for previous victories on the LGBT front). From AllOut.org, this is the actual opening paragraph — bolding and hyperlink theirs:
“Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon delivered an incredibly powerful speech at the U.N. in Geneva. It’s not every day that a major world figure speaks out forcefully in defense of equality. But most people didn’t even hear about it.
Why? Because a handful of delegates stormed out of the meeting in protest and their story – that gay people should be denied human rights – dominated the day’s news.
But we are about to change that. Our friends at the U.N. just let us REMIX Ban-Ki Moon (complete with a dance beat chosen by the team at All Out). Will you take just 2 minutes to listen to this incredibly inspiring speech and share with your friends and family? When someone like Ban Ki-Moon speaks out, it makes a difference – but only if people hear what he has to say: (youtube screengrab, also a hyperlink)”
Do you see the problem here? This is news I actually appreciate — and even that I might not have gotten through other sources. Ban Ki-moon made a pro-LGBT speech on the floor of the UN. That’s pretty great (even if the actual speech turned out to be cursory and talking-pointy). BUT, the email makes such a point of trying to make me feel all ~*~*active*~*~ and ~*~*virtuous*~*~ for the mere act of watching a video on the internet that I feel disinclined to even watch it at all.
Granted, All Out’s whole platform is awareness-raising. But I recently found myself [finally getting around to] unsubscribing from Amnesty International’s similar clicktivist emails because they were all written in that same content-thin, patronizing register. AMNESTY FUCKING INTERNATIONAL, whose work I respect, whose projects I support, and whose news I would actually like to hear about, if only they would write to me like a literate, thinking adult. Friend @[redacted] over on Twitter used to work for clicktivist petition generator 38 Degrees, and writes “I helped draft/proof 38 Degrees emails… I was crap at it. Just couldn’t let myself write like that. They’re always so thin on information and full of supposedly emotive blah. They run emails through a sentence complexity checker.” I do not even know if that last sentence is a joke or not. And they ALL FUCKING DO THIS. It’s like every organization that gets big enough has the same marketing hacks come ’round to tell them how.
Finally, once I’d finished bashing my half-formed rage onto Twitter, I decided I might as well go ahead and watch the video. Only I was so distracted by the distracting bolding in their email that I’d missed the fact that this wasn’t just a link to the speech, it was a “REMIX … complete with a dance beat[!]” This would have been a terrible thing to do to Ban Ki-moon, if it actually were what it implied. Instead it was taste-offensive in another way: an over-slick intersplicing of Ban’s speech with emotive images of homophobic violence and soundbite-capture text quotations (complete with powerpoint word-swoosh sound effects), overlaid with music I guess you might dance to if you went to clubs that played documentary soundtracks.
No wonder God hates fags.
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