Category: Articles

Most readers of this fine blog may not know who Peter David is. But to millions of comic book and science fiction fans, Peter David is a recognizable name. To thousands of loyal followers, Peter David is the Writer of Stuff and they tend to place him in the same esteem as pizza and their own children. (Yes, the two are equal). While many of Peter David’s fans are not interested in Canadian politics or public affairs, the two spheres briefly overlapped a few weeks ago. Peter David answered a question about Romani representation in comics. It went as well as you can imagine. Cue the negative coverage. It’s the kind of reaction that would normally cause an individual reputational harm. Had it spread like fire, it would have introduced David to whole new audiences as a racist. Luckily for him, that didn’t happen. And he can thank his rabid fan base, which served as a buffer. Let’s explore this further.

Community Mapping in a Crisis

First, let’s talk about what community mapping involves. The degree to which an individual is well-known within a specific audience, is easy to find. Digital analysis includes the mapping of people’s interests using ‘affinity categories’ or topics based on the content they engage with most online. They show which subjects a given social media profile or accounts’ followers or friends are also interested in. Conversation around a topic or affinity category can also be analyzed for demographic information. Using affinities, we know for certain that typical readers of our blog are not particularly interested in comic books or Peter David. In a crisis, audience affinity data helps articulate which groups are most upset by an issue and how they feel they were wronged. Understanding nuances in how a narrow interest group communicates helps with any messaging situation, but in a crisis, affinities can be used to develop the most effective response using language that best connects those impacted to the issue.

What Is Buffer Content

Second, let’s go over buffer content. Buffer content is exactly what it sounds like: it’s the web links or pieces of digital content that insulate online entities from bad press. For a very general example, most businesses use internal links to have a number of their own website pages appear in search engine results and act as literal buffers against unflattering news stories or competitors’ pages appearing in the same place or being closely associated with their brand or keyword. In a developing crisis, using owned social media channels to share content, advocating for a specific point of view, and responding in line with a company’s message, can shift the narrative in your brand’s favour. More importantly, by amplifying content and reaching people unaware of the incident, these accounts can stop potentially damaging narratives from spreading. When used correctly, they can contain a reputational crisis by addressing applicable online communities with deliberate messaging.

The Public Affairs Emergency

So what happened with Peter David? On October 7, he was on a panel at New York Comicon. When asked a question about Romani representation in superhero comics, he responded with an anecdote about gypsies crippling their children to make them more effective beggars. He also started yelling at the person who asked. This video of the incident quickly circulated on social media. David eventually apologized, but not before doubling down on his initial stance. As can be expected in the world of comics, most coverage was online and on social media. In similar cases with niche celebrities, and especially when the story breaks through a video on social media, online outrage drives mainstream coverage. People angrily tweeted at David and activity related to his name or in his interest category skyrocketed. However, because David’s existing fan base contributed an incredible amount of support —and in some cases rebuttals — overall, there wasn’t an overwhelming amount of negative commentary that stood out.

Looking at the sentiment of tweets referencing or directly mentioning David before the incident, 36% were positive, 50% were neutral, and 13% were negative. These numbers include negative general discussions about his work, including literary criticisms. They’re normal numbers—nothing to get worried about. In fact, the negatives are negligible. Sure, overall volume of the conversation was high, but the ratio of negative to positive or neutral sentiment determines whether or not there is a crisis. And at this point, before he made his unfortunate comments, he was by no means in a crisis.

Social Media Followers Become Your Advocates

The week of the incident, social media posts about Peter David increased about 630%. What’s amazing is that overall sentiment only changed to 20% positive, 62% neutral, and 18% negative. Let’s just pause on that for a moment. He accused gypsies of deliberately paralyzing their own, and the conversation around him was only 18% negative. Few prominent individuals would get away with that. Sure, the Romani issue had more volume than any other topic but it did not dominate the overall conversation. This is because of who was responsible for posts related to his response on Romani representation. Before the incident David had 14,694 Twitter followers. Eighteen days after the incident, he actually had four more followers: On October 25, he was at 14,698. Though the outburst drew criticism from Romani activists and outlets covering the convention, it did not resonate with David’s existing follower base. There’s a lesson here: how your stakeholders or online community react to an event plays an important role in contextualizing any damage to your brand.

The majority of negative posts were from accounts that were not part of his usual fan base: they made one or two comments about the incident and then moved on to other things. At the same time, David’s fan base was fuming over (spoilers) the death of Jamie Madrox in the latest Death of X issue, which undid the happy ending David had given one of his most popular characters in the new line of story continuity. Immediately after the incident, there were a number of posts calling David a racist. However, as these accounts never engaged with David-related content again, the steady stream of complaints about how Jamie Madrox — aka, Multiple Man — died eventually became the focus of conversations. These initial tweets on his death developed into different users discussing why they didn’t like the comic and others sharing their favourite Madrox moments from when David was writing the character.

From October 8-20, the percentage of social media posts calling David a racist declined from 10% of all relevant conversation, to less than one percent. At the same time, conversations about recent Marvel comics and their relation to David’s work also picked up on Twitter. They started at 6% at the beginning of October, and have since grown to roughly 10% of the activity related to David. Anyone scanning his Twitter feed looking to write about recent developments would see some content related to racism and his Romani response, but would also see much more content about comics. It would appear that it’s business as usual, and his reputation stands mostly in tact.

Of course David is suffering some fallout. The point is that his passionate fans were able lessen the damage. Remember, these people are also his key audience. As long as they support David, there’s reason to continue booking him at conventions and stocking his books. In other words, this was not a reputational crisis. While the incident certainly offended a lot of people, it did not bother those responsible for building Peter David’s reputation in the first place.

Protecting Your Reputation Before A Crisis

Peter David has been indirectly grooming his audience for online advocacy his entire career. Most —if not all —of his comic books, novels, or television scripts include specific references to his other works, encouraging dedicated fans to spot the allusions and connect the ‘Peter David Universe’ in their heads. He regularly engages with social media content on public channels and maintains a dedicated fan site, which is updated regularly and houses more niche content about his interconnected work. He cultivates his own affinity category or sub topic within general comic books by first creating content necessary for such a niche community to form, and then by rewarding people who engage with it by engaging back and providing more of the same type of content they enjoyed in the first place. Over the years, this has encouraged more and more broader comic book fans to join the ranks of Peter David fans, immersing themselves in his work, discussing it online, and eventually adopting common quirks in taste or expression. Because they become so wholly involved with the material, criticisms of Peter David’s work become criticisms of his audience’s sensibilities, which can lead them to defend him more aggressively than fans typically defend their favourite author. The kind of behavior his fans demonstrated earlier this month dilutes conversation in small affinity categories or niche interests, like Peter David, making it appear to people without much context (and especially to most monitoring software) that nothing is out of the ordinary. David may not have asked his followers to defend him online, but he did cultivate the kind of fandom that insulates any public figure from certain degrees of reputational damage.

This should not imply that whatever is happening on social media is fact. However, in the world of public perception, what people are saying in the moment can be almost as important as what is actually true. Dedicated followings are the best kind of buffer content, because as soon as a crisis hits, they automatically respond more directly than any individual or company involved ever could, they dilute conversation to lessen immediate damage, and they help push negative content out of search-engine results pages and social feeds.

Peter David is an extreme example, but his community management can be applied well beyond comics. Broadly speaking, buffer content should act like David’s version of Jamie Madrox/Multiple Man — gradually building and consistently maintaining an audience before a crisis (or for the fans: using cloning powers to efficiently learn new skills and make more allies to avoid swarming his enemies in a fight). At a minimum, a little bit of community management or affinity mapping can help determine if a public embarrassment is really a reputational crisis based on who exactly was offended. Through affinity mapping and then community maintenance, businesses can duplicate what Peter David did and develop a passionate audience that safeguards their digital reputation before contained embarrassments become public shames.

Ugh. Where to start? I mean, where to begin with this most depressing of American presidential campaigns? November 8, 2016 just can’t come soon enough, right? We’ll just all wake up from this horrible dream, relieved it’s over and get back to normal. Such a peaceful thought. If only we could live our lives through rose-coloured lenses. Truth is, I know things aren’t right in this world when I find myself agreeing with a Globe and Mail columnist. John Ibbitson recently predicted that while Trump will likely lose, ‘he is the final warning to the elites.’ I’m afraid he hit this one on the head:

‘Unless political elites of both the left and the right become more humble, unless they once again ask themselves how their agendas will play in Peoria, the next rough beast might slouch over the corpse of the republic.’

We shouldn’t underestimate the strength of the anti-establishment sentiment in the US. It’s not going away anytime soon. Those of us looking for a return to normal are in for a surprise if Clinton wins. Her victory will bring immediate relief to just about everyone north of the border, but we won’t have time to catch our breath before an unsatisfied, unhappy underbelly of discontent rears its ugly head. I’d like to think the anti-establishment movement could shed itself of the racist, bigoted, protectionist elements that make it such a foul movement. But, I suppose that’s probably a pipe dream. I’m not the only one yearning for a return to something a little more—I don’t know—gosh darn sincere.

And for a brief moment, we all got that aw shucks sincerity. You may have heard of him. He was an Internet sensation for a couple days (that’s like 80 years in Internet age). Yep. Ken Bone, ye of perfect meme nomenclature. Amongst the wreckage of personal attacks that plagued the second presidential debate, this man-in-the-red-sweater asked a snoozer of a question about energy policy. Proving just how nerdy we really are, the Internet found love at first sight. In hindsight, I suppose it makes sense; Ken provided a respite from the divisiveness of this horrible campaign—a breath of fresh air in a moist, damp locker room.

What followed was as predictable as a Harlequin romance.

We Find Love

Within hours, people already had their perfect Halloween costume. Ken’s Twitter followers grew from a mere 7 to a whopping 250,000. He got play on the Late Night circuit and for a brief time symbolized all that is right with the world. We wanted to know why he went with a red sweater. We wanted him as a candidate. We couldn’t get enough. Why didn’t we see more of this in this campaign?

I’m not sure Ken knew what predicament he found himself in, but it was pretty much the worse place to be: the Internet’s hero. Once you reach that level, you can only fall, usually with a bruising thud. And when the Internet turns on you, it cuts deep. In truth, we all leave a trail on the Internet. And as we started digging, we found that our shiny new object wasn’t so shiny after all.

Our Hearts Are Broken

The debate question everyone loved…’what step will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?’…wasn’t as innocent as it first appeared. Ken works in the coal industry for a company that opposes climate regulations and has dodged current legislation to be environmentally friendly. In hindsight, his question seemed a little more self-serving.

He took to his fame by hosting a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). Sure, he was a gracious host, and started a T-shirt campaign to raise funds to fight homelessness — but he foolishly used his old username, which made it dead simple for anyone to dig into his past musings. He apparently left a comment on a pregnancy subreddit describing expecting mothers as ‘beautiful human submarines.’ He confessed to viewing naked pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and, uh…enjoying it. He committed felony insurance fraud and even suggested the shooting of Trayvon Martin was ‘justified.’ He used his fame for a one-off Uber promotion in St. Louis. Just like that, our hero had become an ‘ignorant bonehead‘, and a seedy sell-out.

We Piece Some of it Back Together

With the nasty stuff out of the way, some writers tried to paint a picture of a man—who like the rest of us—has many layers. No single person can be summed up in an Internet meme. This same Ken also wrote that he’s a conservative who likes Obama. He wrote a compassionate response to a rape victim. He condemned Stanford rapist Brock Turner.

Now Ken spends what appears to be considerable effort defending himself. He has clarified some of his comments. ‘I do not condone the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Justifiable means legal, not right.’ His Twitter feed now contains links to threads and articles that defend him. He still has fans who work feverishly to push out a more sympathetic narrative of Ken. But most of us have moved on. We’ve already had enough of Ken. He’s yesterday’s news.

I’ll leave it to Ken and his fanbase to defend his words and deeds. I only highlight his story as an example of how fickle we are. We don’t have time for old news. We move from one meme to the next in just about the same amount of time Usain Bolt runs 100 meters. It’s an unforgiving place—time is never on your side, and people are apt to remember the most negative thing that was last said about you. Never mind the full story or context. That’s boring. We want to be entertained.

But, we’ve gotten to the point where that entertainment is blurry. It’s not fun, even if we try to make it that way. There’s no escaping the slog of this campaign season. There was one symbol—even if we never really took it seriously— that was supposed to provide some kind of light in a dark world. Ken, version 1.0, made the Internet pleasant, at least for a couple hours. Now that light doesn’t shine so brightly. In a way, Ken has become a symbol of this campaign. Whenever we have thought that it might get better, it only gets worse. Everywhere we look, it’s ugly. All of it. And I’m afraid it only gets uglier here on in, no matter what happens on November 8.

On that cheery note, let me get back to what really matters.

The Internet is an art project. So says Virginia Heffernan in Magic and Loss — a treatise on Internet culture that likens the World Wide Web to a communal humanist effort. This kind of thinking is useful to explain, in part, why we never seem to be able to stop trying to explain the web and what it is doing to us. The Internet reflects us more than we would like to believe and we have organized our platforms, and our associated judgements of those spaces, with aesthetics and feelings that are not web-specific, but specific to the way create, and have always created, a collective consciousness.

The magic of the web, as we think of it in everyday terms — the communicating, the efficiency, the ease — is a practical and often lifeless way to explain the Internet, that drains it of its personality and excitement. Heffernan delights in the low and high culture that exists simultaneously online, from retro or hectic designs and interfaces of chatrooms to the coolly minimalistic and decidedly luxe graphics of new apps. The loss part is a rumination on what we’ve given up as we’ve left the analog world. But Heffernan frames this as an inevitability of technological shift, something to be expected as we move from one era to another. Things are always lost in the fire, but that loss doesn’t necessarily detract from the magic that replaces it. Also, we haven’t lost as much as we think: we’ve just moved it to another arena.

The pendulum of anxiety for the web swings from worrying about ephemerality to worrying about its permanence. Things disappear quickly — like on Twitter, where Heffernan points out, we obsessively read content that is oftentimes poignant and precise. Or, things stay forever — like your search results, which will never be truly scrubbed of the embarrassing thing about you that you wish didn’t exist. Moving through the building blocks of the internet — design, text, images, videos, and music — Heffernan talks about each as they exist within our lives, as much as how they exist online.

Outside of Heffernan, there’s an easy example of this: Minimalism has progressed from a design aesthetic to a life aesthetic, with people eschewing clutter in favour of the right possessions. As Mirelle Bernstein wrote in the Atlantic in March, being able to embrace a minimalistic approach is a privilege of its own kind. Detailing Marie Kondo’s (Japanese author whose book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up started a minimalist movement) advice to rid yourself of nostalgia, Bernstein notes that minimalism ignores a lot of the sentimentality we attach to items, especially when those items were hard to come by. She relates it to her and her parents’ experiences as immigrants: being able to throw out things you haven’t used in a while means you feel confident that you’ll be able to purchase and/or acquire those things when the time comes.

We can apply this to the Internet. In a world driven by search engine optimization, keywords, and advertising, your web efforts to make money need to be hidden. Anything conspicuous screams of desperation: click-baity content intended to drive traffic rather than quality. This too is a privilege. Existing on the web simply to exist is, in part, a luxury, signifying that you don’t need the attendant marketing push that so many others do. From a design perspective, the minimalist and ‘clean’ look aspires for a kind of simple elegance that aesthetics loaded with information, text, and animation,make tacky and complicated. Minimalism is a feeling — one of restraint and discipline — with an inherent judgement of superiority.

Social media functions in a similar way. Describing Beyonce’s social media presence, writer Jenna Wortham notes that Beyonce has been able to use social media to become more mysterious rather than less, an idea that is counterintuitive to the constant life-casting that many participate in online. However, this kind of self-restraint is particular to those who have an established personality and star power. People have to want to know about you for them to feel a lack of knowledge; absence only makes the heart grow fonder if the heart was hungry in the first place.

Since the web was created there have been anxieties about the anonymity of online interaction. People hide behind usernames and avatars. In the early days of AOL chat rooms and the more R-rated Chatroulette, such anonymizing aspects were suspected of covering a whole matter of sins. Today, existing online with such secrecy is a privilege, reserved for those unnaturally adept at concealing their tracks or completely abstaining from online activity. On October 3, a post on The New York Review of Books’ blog revealed the – allegedly – true identity of Elena Ferrante, an Italian writer who has managed to keep her identity a secret while becoming a beloved author. Most of her fan base does not want to know who Ferrante ‘really is’ and reacted with anger to the ‘outing.’ Ferrante had created a personal and deep connection with her readers that didn’t need to be bolstered by her identity or details of her life. In a crossover of a pre-digital age and the now wholly digital age, Ferrante kept her pen name in place by responding to (some) interview requests via email. As she stated in a 2014 interview, ‘I didn’t choose anonymity; the books are signed. Instead, I chose absence. More than 20 years ago I felt the burden of exposing myself in public. I wanted to detach myself from the finished story.’

Wortham echoes the sentiment behind this statement in her aforementioned piece on Beyonce. In thinking about online personalities, she sees the selective representation that Beyonce projects as an ‘illusion that feels intimate and real, a hologram self for us to interact with that, in theory, provides the actual Beyonce space to exist away from our prying eyes.’ Wortham notes that hierarchies and biases exist online, they’ve just been coded a different way. Social media has given room to create other selves, and perhaps, paradoxically, a way to preserve a sense of our true identity. It can be its own version of the pen name. While there have always been worries about the meretricious nature of social media as it applies to our personal lives, both Wortham and Heffernan seem to suggest that embracing, rather than fighting, this aspect can be more fulfilling. For Heffernan, it’s part of the delight — the mix of high and low — and the way we construct our culture and consciousness. For Wortham, it’s self-preservation: ‘We could instead use social media as a prism through which we can project only what we want others to see. We can save the rest for ourselves — our actual selves.’

Perhaps this is why we have worked to make certain online spaces look and feel a certain way. Lacking the physical markers we’ve come to associate with the experience we should expect, we’ve aestheticized spaces to evoke a first impression. Design serves a deeper purpose than just surface looks. From the classic air of the digital New York Times to the back-web of 4chan and Reddit, we have categorized the ‘type’ of people and conversations that happen online by the way these space look. While the mainstream revels in clean typeface, negative space, and intuitive navigation, those familiar with the web’s behind-the-scenes are comfortable delving into the messy threads filled with obvious bounding boxes, splashes of courier new, and self-direction.

A portion of this harkens back to the loss aspect that Heffernan explores. There’s something nostalgic in design that reminds us of Web 1.0 (pre social media). Heffernan weaves this throughout her narrative, revelling in the newness and excitement of the web and the sentimentally of what we’ve discarded, recalling hours-long phone conversations that were physically grounded by a telephone cord. But besides being able to move freely between the joys and yearnings that digitization creates in equal measure, the most impressive aspect of her book is that she so firmly conceives of the Internet as a cultural construct. Of course the web has aesthetic periods. It reflects any other time of our collective consciousness. Things move into and out of fashion within the web like anywhere else, and perhaps we are now finding different ways to express the things we mislaid with digitization. There’s a lot to be gained in conceding that the Internet is as much a humanist endeavour as a technological one — and much of what is gained mitigates the loss.

A lot has been made of Donald Trump’s online supporters—many of whom are part of a social media brigade of trolls posting offensive, oftentimes racist and sexist memes to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Hillary Clinton made these people—known collectively as the ‘alt-right’—the subject of a speech in which she attacked Trump’s association with the movement.

Trump is not the first political candidate to have a major online following. During the 2008 and 2012 GOP primaries, Ron Paul was famous for his Revolutionaries whose ubiquitous social media activity ensured that ‘End the Fed’ was a top post on even the most obscure and unpolitical YouTube videos. In 2016, Bernie Sanders’ mass of young, white men posting in support of single-payer healthcare and free college tuition became known as ‘Bernie Bros.’

Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump all mobilized sizeable and enthusiastic online followings. But, only Trump has been able to transform that support into tangible electoral success. Why?

In 2008, Ron Paul earned just over one million primary votes. He barely doubled that number in 2012 when he won (controversially) a majority of delegates in four states. During the 2016 primaries, Sanders undoubtedly generated more electoral success than Paul when he earned over 13 million votes and won 23 states. Still, neither of these men were able to clinch their respective nominations. On the other hand, Trump captured 14 million votes as well as the Republican nomination.

Trump has been able to inspire support, both online and offline, because his message is emotional rather than ideological. In contrast to Trump, Ron Paul had the least emotional and most ideological message of these three candidates. During debates he would rail against the Federal Reserve and fiat currency, even getting booed for suggesting the 9/11 terror attacks were a result of blowback from U.S. foreign policy. Ron Paul’s ideological campaigning was strong enough to make celebrities of two obscure economists when he urged his supporters to search out the works of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises to understand his economic policies.

Sanders preached a similarly ideological message, and, while it did contain emotional elements—the attacks against the 1%; appeals to Americans who were hurting from the economic collapse, who, unlike the major banks, received no bailouts—the message still came from Sanders’ years of studying socialist doctrine. From his time at a Marxist kibbutz in Israel, to his tenure as a member of the far-left Liberty Union Party of Vermont, Sanders honed his thinking around economic inequality and the power of democratic socialism.

From what we’ve seen of Trump, he has no ideology. The only author he ever cites as inspirational is himself as author of The Art of the Deal. The only book he claims to like more than his magnum opus is the Bible, which he has shown little evidence of having actually read (when asked his favourite verse Trump replied, ‘Well, I think many. I mean, when we get into the Bible, I think many, so many,’). Likewise, unlike Ron Paul and his supporters—who exalted the Constitution—Trump’s claims of constitutional support seem false: he stated that he would ‘protect Article I, Article II, Article XII.’ There is no Article XII of the Constitution.

These gaffes don’t shake Trump’s supporters, though. Had Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders made a similar mistake, it’s unlikely they could have survived. Their supporters were more dedicated to ideology than they were to the candidate. Paul’s Revolutionaries refused to support his slightly less libertarian son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, for president, and the Bernie Bros bristled at the idea of backing Hillary Clinton, who they saw as a Wall Street sell-out. Trump supporters have no ideological test for their candidate—and many of them don’t desire one. Trump has never required an ideological test for his supporters either. Instead, he appeals to the emotions of voters who feel left behind and ignored. Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders told voters if they learned enough they could change the system. Trump told voters they were allowed to be angry—angry at an economy that’s shifting jobs away from America’s heartland to China and Mexico—and that they were allowed to be fed up with politicians who promised workbooks of policies they would implement and then compromised behind closed doors after getting elected. Paul and Sanders gave voters instructions to use their brains; Trump gave them permission to listen to their hearts.

After Clinton’s speech about the alt-right, several leaders of its online movement held their own press conference to answer questions about their ideology. Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration author and editor-in-chief of VDare.com; Richard Spencer, a white nationalist blogger and head of the National Policy Institute think tank; and Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed ‘race realist’ and founder of American Renaissance magazine; told the press that, while they and their supporters want Trump to win, they don’t think he shares their racist convictions. It was a bizarre moment in the campaign. Trump has been labelled by the mainstream media as a bigot since he announced his candidacy and here were three of his supporters complaining that he wasn’t racist enough. But, they tempered their criticism by explaining they had no delusions about his lack of ideological devotion to their ideals. Instead, they were supporting him because Trump was an emotional lightning rod that drew white, working-class support. He may have stumbled onto some shared policies—deporting illegal immigrants and barring Muslims from entering the country—but ultimately it was more important that Trump win than he be a true believer. To them, Trump represented the test of a supposition: could a candidate win without appealing to minority voters and by criticizing multiculturalism and immigration? If Trump could accomplish this, it would not matter if he followed through on his promises. If Trump could pull off the election he would prove to the alt-right that there was an opening for its candidates. Trump would break a hole in the system wide enough for a new generation of ideologically rigorous alt-righters to climb through.

This promise of success is a major contributor to Trump’s support among lower-class, poorly educated Americans. Similarly to how the alt-right views Trump, residents of rural Appalachia and the former manufacturing strongholds of the Northeast (the areas Trump performed the strongest during the primaries) see in Trump a chance for salvation. These rural voters, like the alt-right online, have no meaningful representation in the political process. Due, in the case of working-class Americans, to their lack of economic agency, and in the case of the alt-right to their socially unacceptable political views, both groups see Trump as a bomb that can blow up the system and provide them an opening.

This has been Trump’s power all along. His real-world political success is the result of what he represents to his followers. Whether he is a crypto-racist for the alt-right or a strong and competent businessman who will turn the economic fortunes of working-class America around, Trump’s lack of adherence to any clear ideology is what has allowed him to gain his political foothold. Trump supporters aren’t supporting a specific economic plan or set of moral guidelines, they’re supporting a man who has spent his entire adult life selling himself as a brand. Trump isn’t a politician so much as he is a promise—a promise of success, of glitz, glamour, and greatness. And in this campaign he has become a promise to so many Americans that the America they lost—the America that once employed millions in the Rust Belt in manufacturing and Appalachia with mining jobs—could one day return. That America could be Great Again.

Paul and Sanders built online followings by promoting ideals that had to be studied and researched. They inadvertently created ideological purity tests for their supporters and themselves. If they didn’t stick to the checklist of acceptable beliefs they created for their followers, they would be abandoned. By abandoning ideology in favour of his personal brand, Trump built an ideological following online and generated real votes at the ballot box. On November 8, we will see how many Americans buy what Trump is selling.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Sherlock Holmes

You will not find a more agonized fan than the one who awaits Season 4 of the popular BBC show, “Sherlock”. Diehards have been waiting for more than two years for the next installment of Benedict Cumberbatch running around the streets of London and solving crimes with the likes of Martin Freeman as Dr. Watson. Adapted from the 1892 classic by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the storyline in its modernized form still captivates audiences today as much as it did back in 19th century Britain.

Why? Humans are natural problem-solvers – goal-oriented, adaptive, and curious. We are very good at assessing our surroundings and deducing information from our experience. We are always looking for that one conclusion we can draw from our observations. In fact, the scientific method was one of the earliest creations of human society, passed down from the Ancient Greeks through Aristotle.

Eliminating the Impossible

Fortunately for progress, the reach of the scientific method of deduction has not been limited to ancient Greek culture or the fictional parameters of 121B Baker Street. In the medical world, it’s veritable equivalent is known as Occam’s razor. Translated from the original Latin, it posits: “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” Simply put, a simple explanation is preferred to a complex one.

This is also known as that moment in each episode of House, where Dr. Gregory House has that moment of clarity about the one obvious and perfect diagnosis that explains all the symptoms and solves the mysterious disease of his patient before (and sometimes after) they expire. Hint: it’s not lupus.

The theory of Occam’s razor was challenged centuries later by a man named John Hickam, MD. Hickam found the established process of eliminating causes and exhaustively speculating on rare diseases to explain all the strange symptoms in a patient ineffective. He thought it was far more likely for patients in these cases to have a set of common diseases, rather than a perfect cause that explained all symptoms. This led to the blunt conclusion: “Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please”.

Double, Double Toil and Trouble

In the public affairs world, the world that Navigator maps out on a daily basis, the same theories take on similar applications. Clients run to the experts and expect there will be one, all-encompassing solution to the issue, or set of issues, they face. Most of the time, the solution may be simple. For the rest, a more layered approach is required.

In a 1973 treatise, two German design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber coined the term “wicked problem” to aptly describe problems of such scope that could not be solved like the more “tame” problems found in mathematics and puzzle games. “Wicked problems” were much more complex – social, political, environmental – and required strategies that included more collaborative, unconventional approaches and “outside-the-box” thinking.

We are living in a world where our collective problems are becoming increasingly “wicked” and difficult to solve in a narrow sense. Whether you’re talking about climate change, armed conflict and terrorism, or democratization, these are not problems that can be solved in isolation or independent from the efforts of other global players.

Smart, Honest Counsel

Wicked problems are not confined to the international sphere, but are increasingly entering the world of public affairs. Few experts have decided to abandon the approach of Occam’s razor and turn to the Hickum’s dictum equivalent of diagnosing these problems and propose collaborative strategies. What they fail to realize is that some of these challenges are simply too complex and unique, essentially uncharted territory for many clients, and clients themselves will need someone who understands this new environment.

Gone are the days when you can simply knock on government’s door, make your case, and get an answer. To increase your chances of success, you may need to work with third parties with aligned interests. You may need to mobilize your online and offline supporters. You may need to get public opinion among Canadians onside with your proposal before coming to the table.

At Navigator, the solution will not always be the simple one for your company. Whether you’re seeking social licence for a massive cross-country infrastructure project, or engaging a major financial transaction affecting national interests, or activating a public advocacy campaign – you will need the smart, honest counsel that will get your public affairs goals to the finish line.