Controlling Narrative Infrastructure w/ Lina Srivastava

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: Welcome to Block and Build a podcast from Convergence Magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence Caden Mock. On this show, we are building a roadmap for the movement that’s working to block the impacts of rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience of the broad front that we need to win.

[00:00:24] This week on the show, I’m joined by Lena Srivastava, founder of the Center for Transformational Change. She’s developed a framework to help communicators, creatives, and organizers think through the infrastructure that we need to build narrative power. The power not just to tell the stories that we want told, but to shift the landscape of common sense about the issues that we’re struggling to win.

[00:00:42] I spoke to Lena a couple weeks ago, but the insights and lessons she shares feel more relevant than ever as we navigate the changes looming on the horizon as factions of the far right fight amongst themselves. About the meeting of Charlie Kirk’s murder and our movements face intensified scrutiny and attacks.

[00:00:57] Please enjoy our conversation.

[00:00:59] Hey there, block and build listeners, this is Josh, the producer of the show. I’ve got a quick housekeeping note before we get to Caden’s interview with Lena. We’re actually gonna be off next week, so there’ll be no YouTube episode on Friday. No podcast drop in your feed on Monday.

[00:01:17] However, the reason we’re off is that I’m getting married, which is really exciting. And if for some reason you also wanna celebrate that, that’d be wonderful. And an easy way you could do that is tell a friend about this show. If you think you know somebody who might enjoy block and build. Send them a link to the YouTube or the podcast feed.

[00:01:36] Invite them to subscribe. Or if you really want to help support convergence in this show, you can go to convergence mag.com/donate and make either a one-time donation or become a sustaining member. Anyway, let’s get back to that interview with Caden and Lena. Thanks for listening.

[00:02:01] Lena, thank you so much for joining me today. 

[00:02:03] Lina Srivastava: It’s such a pleasure to be here. 

[00:02:05] Cayden Mak: To start us off, can you orient our listeners a little bit to the framework that you’ve developed, and then I’d like to get a little into how you developed it and like the context in which you developed it. But let’s start with these sort of four big categories of infrastructure for narrative change.

[00:02:22] Lina Srivastava: Yeah. And specifically for narrative power. So I’ve been thinking about the question of narrative and lived experience for 20 years now, and what kept coming clear is how much of our ability to tell stories those of us with lived experience, how much how much platforms and control over media distribution has degraded, there are so many it’s always been a struggle. It’s always been an uphill battle to a certain extent, to get, authorship and ownership of story out there. It’s, in my experience, over the last, like two decades, it’s never been this hard. So the, what we do in my enterprise Center for Transformational Change is we look at leadership, community, and narrative, and.

[00:03:06] The way we’ve connected to narrative a lot is through the documentary community independent media around the world and in the us and there used to be like this again, it was always difficult and it was underfunded. But there was an infrastructure to a certain extent, like there were pipelines, right?

[00:03:24] And there are organizations that were dedicated that to pipelines. All of that is is under threat right now. And so the last two years or so, I’ve started thinking about what do we need in order to start cultivating our narrative power, our collective narrative power as.

[00:03:43] People, on the left, people who want justice and equity, however you identify. How do we make sure that our lived experience and our narrative power is fueling movements and fueling, the co the project of building futures and the present that have, more equality, equity, and justice built into them.

[00:04:05] And what kept coming up was the lack of infrastructure, the lack of funding, and platforms and such. So the four pillars that I started thinking about. Are one storytelling, right? So the first one is like an ecosystem of storytellers, artists, creators, creative technologists who produce works that are aimed at social impact, social change, social justice, all those things that catalyze and model, economic, political, and culture transformation.

[00:04:36] So that’s like a community and ecosystem of storytellers. The second one, the second pillar is what we’re call, what we call advocacy, right? So it’s like. An ecosystem of leaders, change makers, organizational, organizations, collectives, cooperatives, whatever you want who are exercising their narrative power, right?

[00:04:57] Who are connecting with storytellers who strategically connect those stories to change efforts. The third one is resources, right? So it’s financial resources for sure, which are. 

[00:05:10] Cayden Mak: Obviously huge. 

[00:05:12] Lina Srivastava: Obviously huge and very much absent right now. Like a lot of there, there’s so much, so there’s so much fewer like so many fewer funds.

[00:05:24] So much less funding than when I started, a while ago. That is dedicated to lived experience storytelling, to documentary, et cetera. And we’ll talk about that in a second. I keep saying lived experience, storytelling. It hasn’t always been like there’s a lot of like people who helicopter in and tell 

[00:05:41] Cayden Mak: sure or 

[00:05:42] Lina Srivastava: stories, but let’s just talk, we’ll talk about that later.

[00:05:46] But anyway, there’s resources, funding tools. Support that’s deployed by resource holders right in partnership with communities. And then the fourth one is platforms. And this is where you find your audiences. Storytellers, resource holders, et cetera. We’re all audiences too. But this is where you find the audiences that are not necessarily.

[00:06:06] In the production distribution thing. So it’s like channels anywhere from, media distribution to social media that distribute content and then engage, like where you can engage stakeholders and where you can engage audiences in change efforts. So those four pillars. And the question is where do you fall?

[00:06:25] And where can have influence? Where can you move the dial? So that we have a more robust narrative infrastructure that helps us catalyze collective narrative power. So this is what I’ve been thinking about in the realm of narrative strategy for the last couple of years, and we just created a framework around it.

[00:06:45] Cayden Mak: Great. Yeah, I it hits for me also in part ’cause a lot of these things are the ways that. I was taught more general strategic thinking and strategic sort of like lines of questioning about how you choose to use the resources that you have and applying it specifically to this, to like building narrative power and your experience also globally in this sort of narrative space is really interesting to me.

[00:07:08] You said that you wanted to dig into this sort of like lived experience, storytelling, framing of. Of the kind of narrative work that you’re involved in. And that I think is obviously very important and it is part of, what we do here at Convergence in a big way. But I think probably a lot of our listeners will have some familiarity with the like inverse of that, which is, as you say, people helicoptering in.

[00:07:33] And I’m curious how you have seen that like. Dynamic change over the past, honestly, maybe 10, 15 years. ’cause it seems like there was a moment, I don’t know, maybe seven or eight years ago where people were really excited about Yeah, like bringing up filmmakers who were from communities that often didn’t have access to the means, the tools, the like education and the capital to make their own films, make their own audio content, whatever it might be. But I’m curious about that dynamic that you’ve seen. 

[00:08:09] Lina Srivastava: Yeah, I think there was a time where people were excited about it. That was a result of a number of us pushing for it. In the documentary space particularly, so I work with narrative.

[00:08:22] Across many different ways. So I work with documentary, I work with testimony, I work with narrative in the humanitarian space, which is used for evidence and 

[00:08:30] Program design. So there are many different ways that I connect with narrative. In the documentary realm itself, it was, when I first started I worked with filmmakers some of whom worked from the community that they were depicting and.

[00:08:45] Some of them wouldn’t necessarily take the time to develop, to be in community, right? With the people to really understand from an inside perspective or wouldn’t give the camera over, things like that and funders would expect, so I remember there were a few.

[00:09:03] There were a few projects where God, you would hear it all the time, like where, someone from a community would want to tell a particular story and the story would be taken away from them. The funding would be given to a quote unquote established filmmaker. 

[00:09:15] Cayden Mak: Who? Austin 

[00:09:16] Lina Srivastava: White, western or something like that. That happened. A lot. On the flip side that I worked, I, some of the projects I’ve worked on are with Western white male filmmakers who are incredible, right? Who are, who take the time, who are in community, who, let the story unfold from the perspective of the community that is being depicted itself.

[00:09:38] So it’s not it’s just that it has to be from the community. But there is a there is a way. To be in community with someone and unearth the stories either by making sure that the people themselves have access to the funding and the cameras and the production credits and all those things.

[00:09:57] Or you can spend time and be of the community. And there’s some really interesting, we’d, I used to co-lead a community called Regarding Humanity that we had started, oh God, like way back when in like the early, 2010s based on work we did in 2008 and 2009, and it was specifically about ethical storytelling and design in the humanitarian aid spaces that included documentary.

[00:10:20] And we kept pushing and there were a number of efforts back then to try to get people funders in particular, but also programmers to make sure that. Stories were being told either by people with lived experience or directly in partnership with, or in support of people with lived experience. So for example, one of the, one of the projects that I worked on for a really long time was a project called Who is Ani Christelle, which is like now 12 years old.

[00:10:48] We had worked, it was a 10 year project that we started working on in 2008, and it’s about. Border crossing death. Across Mexico border. And it was really, it was like, it was my education in immigration law and, in, in the US it was, like I said, it was a 10 year project and we did it to the filmmaker that I was in partnership with.

[00:11:07] I was a social impact strategist. He he is a British man who’s like a white British man and. So storytelling was he spent three years with the community while I was, building relationships with the NGO communities and such. And we we did it in a way that even before the film came out for three years, we were working in community with people, right?

[00:11:29] Making sure that the community that was depicted, in this case, it was a community in Honduras, a little outside of. That they were leading the story, that they were leading the social impact strategy, the change that we were trying to make. So there was a very particular methodology that we wrote up, that we wrote up in an impact report about how we did that.

[00:11:52] So that was, that’s always been really important to me. And there were like, we were part of a movement of people who were trying to do the same thing. So I’m on the capacity council of an organization called Brown Girls Doc Mafia which is, it’s a, I think we’re like four or 5,000 members strong now around the world of women and non-binary folks and trans folks who are, who identify as people of color.

[00:12:18] Around the world, who are trying to create a pipeline of production and distribution, et cetera. There’s still efforts like that and the, that sort of, and that, that was mirroring, the sort of decolonization efforts in the human rights and humanitarian aid sectors, particularly right after the murder of George Floyd.

[00:12:37] So you have this huge upswell right of conversation, dialogue and like commitment, right? Commitment for funding, commitment for, for distribution, et cetera. Most of which dissipated without ever actually coming to fruition. Like people, when you talk to people, there were so many commitments to like, elevate, say black women leadership.

[00:12:59] Didn’t happen. And today you have, I, it’s in the hundreds of thousands in the last four or five months, black women who’ve lost jobs. Yeah. So you like that, right? That backlash. The last six months have been like just this, it. There was backlash after two or three years, like the conversation around decolonization or diversity, equity, inclusion, however, whatever you think of that frame or anti-racism, any of those things, particularly like across the board, but also in the storytelling fields and the narrative fields.

[00:13:33] There was a backlash, right? Even two or three years after that started stalling a little bit. And. Now it’s dead in the water, so it’s, we’re in a, we’re in a really precarious position. 

[00:13:47] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And it strikes me that part of that precarity right, is like.

[00:13:51] One MAGA using state power and doing things like dismantling the corporation for public broadcasting. And like some of these sort of like legacy resource distribution and like platforms that previously were honestly very important for the development of these kinds of storytelling artists here in the United States.

[00:14:10] But I’m sure that they have relationships and. Like impact beyond the US too, in terms of supporting filmmakers and that kind of thing? 

[00:14:19] Lina Srivastava: Yeah, I think, I just, executive produced a documentary last year called Standup for Medina which is about a state legislator in Delaware.

[00:14:29] And it’s a, she is it’s called Standup for Medina because Medina is she leads a, a. An effort to get a ceasefire resolution in the State House, which is successful. Great. She’s also a standup comedian, so it’s it’s a short film. It’s available on Al Jazeera. So Al Jazeera witness picked it up.

[00:14:49] Oh, cool. Yeah, so that was great. It was like, Zan is the is the film’s director. It’s her first sort of independent film. It was a, it was great. It was a great experience. It was, I don’t know what would happen this year. I think Al Jazeer would still pick it up, but as we were considering options, again, this was before the election but as we were considering options, we were taking a look at, the different distribution platforms and again, it was it’s really different than when I worked on.

[00:15:18] The first documentary I worked on, which was in 2003, 2004. And then over the last 20 years, distribution, public distribution has changed so much. ITVS, frontline, PBS, all these things. POV, that’s, part of P-P-P-B-S in this country. And then Al Ja, there are other there are a number of different, distributors.

[00:15:40] It is. Really hard to get distribution because funding has been so bottlenecked in a lot of ways. I do love the work that, the people at ITVS do, or PBS, like they do really good work. They understand how to tie social impact strategy to documentary. They like, they do a really good job and w.

[00:16:03] The fact that we could be losing quite a lot of that, like that part of the infrastructure is really, it’s scary. 

[00:16:10] It’s really scary because what we’ve got right now on the streamers like HBO still does a pretty good job, with what they select. But the streamers. You know it’s true crime and music biopics, 

[00:16:23] Cayden Mak: right?

[00:16:24] Yeah. And they’re trying to, they have a different bottom line that they’re answering to and they want subscribership at the end of the day. Yeah. 

[00:16:32] Lina Srivastava: Yeah. And doesn’t mean you you can demonstrate audience for like social issue films that are done well.

[00:16:38] It’s, it, I think it’s a little bit of, there’s a little bit of fear around what can be programmed and what people are going to say. There is reticence, all across the line. I was talking to a friend yesterday who said she was in LA and there was this producer who was like, yeah, DE i’s dead.

[00:16:57] Again, DEI is a very flawed framework. Diversity equity. I just heard this, I just heard this professor say, do not call it DE. I call it diversity equity inclusion. Don’t make it an acronym because you need to say the words, because whoever’s against those things is for homogeneity inequality, and.

[00:17:16] Yeah. 

[00:17:17] Cayden Mak: And the, this is the same thing with the like critical race theory thing, right? It’s like they turn the acronym into this boogeyman and it’s, yeah. Its meaning. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of narrative power cheese, 

[00:17:28] Lina Srivastava: speaking of narrative power, speaking of narrative power like this, some of the source, like of, for me, I actually was I went to law school and Derek Bell was one of my professors who was one of the architects of critical race theory, and he passed away rest in power. And if he could see what was happening with his framework right now, think his hair would be on fire, but a lot of that was grounded in, in shifting narrative. Shifting narrative around. It was, it’s a it’s very much a legal framework.

[00:17:52] It’s very much, not what they made it out to be. 

[00:17:54] Cayden Mak: You are not teaching actual critical race theory to high schoolers, but anyway, 

[00:18:00] Lina Srivastava: But that is a source of power, right? That like that framing the narrative in that way is gave me the power, to start thinking about these issues in a very different way.

[00:18:09] Yeah. 

[00:18:10] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I think that this does open another vista on the question of narrative power, which like. Is one of my great preoccupations and I am currently rereading Nancy McLean’s great book democracy and Chains. Thinking specifically about this right wing narrative machine that, I think that a lot of people don’t, one, they don’t realize what a long game.

[00:18:33] Yeah. This sort of like extreme right. Has been playing, which is a long game that goes really all the way back to the forties, to be honest. Yeah. But it is about some of the victories of the labor movement in the twenties and thirties. Yep. But also that it is this sort of in a lot of ways, like a sort of like fun house mirror of some of the stuff that you’re talking about in terms of getting elected officials people in the administrative side of government academics, and then also at first more like traditional news media people, but like all kinds of media people like onboard with the frameworks, the ways of looking at the world. And then also the ways of running organizations frankly, that come out of that way of looking at the world.

[00:19:13] And I think a lot about, I’ve been thinking a lot about the sort of challenge that we’re up against right now, which is that if this started in the forties, like we are at the tail end of not 20, not 30. Not 50, but 70 to a hundred years of backlash where they’ve built this infrastructure that like churns out stuff like suddenly radicalizing people or like polarizing people around ideas that were either like, like academic.

[00:19:39] Like critical race theory or things that were like, honestly pretty milk toast diversity, equity, inclusion, like just like corporate, frankly. Like compared to actual frameworks around racial justice, like corporate slop, right? But being able to polarize people around those things and I dunno, truly apprehending the infrastructure that they’ve built is such an important piece for us to think about what our strategy needs to be to fight back and yeah. I’m curious like what things in the infrastructure that the far right has built have really I don’t know, giving you like cases in point for this framework and then also led you down a path to be like, there’s another way we need to approach this because they’ve changed the game.

[00:20:23] Lina Srivastava: Yeah. So I think to your first question, the right wing has done a really good job building narrative infrastructure. People always like, they, they’ll often ask me like, when we build a new infrastructure are you afraid that the right wing’s gonna use it? And I’m like, I have no control over that.

[00:20:37] Yeah, this is not something you can do anything about. I can put it out there and whatever, but I also don’t think the right wing’s. Maybe they are, who knows? But I don’t think they’re like, combing to see what, what does lean up put out next? Who knows? But I think that, I think they’ve done a very good job.

[00:20:50] Building some of the, I think they know how to advocate for their position and to collectivize in a way that silences all the voices. Ours, our power right on the left is that we can build coalitions without sing people sometimes. Sometimes we do. For better or worse? Yeah. For better. For better or worse.

[00:21:07] For better. Or worse, yeah. For better or worse. I think I think that there’s sometimes too much. Like too much focus on the left on chasing the right wing narrative though, right? So so they’ve been very, they’ve been very successful. Let we can say that they’ve been very successful.

[00:21:22] There are a lot of people, who are quote unquote on our side who have been very successful too. And I don’t think that they’re necessarily in the same project that we are. So those people aside, I think some of. Some of the people on the left have spent a really long time trying to build counter narratives right.

[00:21:42] To what the right does. And we can see that. And every time, someone says something, people rush to get a campaign out. Yeah. About that. I think that there’s a place for that. So I’m not denigrating that work, but that can’t be the only focus, right? The focus I think has to be on how do we one, build our own infrastructure that, collectivize our stories, that collectivize our power that presents.

[00:22:09] New visions, right? For people to be, to hang onto, to be inspired by, right? To say, oh, okay, this is the way we want to, build our institutions. This is the way we want to vote. This is the way we want to build welcoming culture for refugees and migrants. This is the way we want to X, X, y, z.

[00:22:30] We have to, build. Stories that allow people to see themselves in that, right? Because the cliche is, if you can see it, you can be it. Maybe but I think that there is, there’s a little kernel of truth to that because it’s not that you necessarily need to see it in order to imagine it, you don’t need to see it necessarily to understand the pain or the possibility that people are talking about. However, I. You do need permission structures, and you do need enabling conditions, right? To be able to grow, right? A a healthy, vibrant community that cares about each other, that has actual care within its structure. And we need stories to be able to to know, help people understand how to do that, right?

[00:23:13] And again, it’s not just, oh, we’re gonna do a messaging campaign. It’s not that, right? So a little while ago, I don’t work on electoral politics. I did take off three months of my life back in 2020 to like work on the presidential campaign. We got Trump out the first time, but hey and it, and I was like, you know what I don’t ever wanna do this work again because electoral politics, it just didn’t feel.

[00:23:39] The kind of community building because the Democrats at that point, and again I’m a registered democrat, so I can vote in the primaries, but I’m not necessarily a Democrat. But they weren’t to this point, they haven’t done a lot of community engagement. They’ve just lost that.

[00:23:54] Right? And it’s canned messaging. It’s not lived experience. It’s very much let’s lob things, into the. The social media ether and see what sticks. They’re not in community. 

[00:24:07] They’re just not community. And so I was like, this is really not for me. And I’m not sure I like, I want a strong government, but this is not for me.

[00:24:14] And then Zahar Ani, came into the New York City mayoral race and I was like, whoa what’s this? What is this campaign? And I’ve been so captivated, by the way, they’ve created this campaign, especially ahead of the primary when they had a little less. Focus and attention on them.

[00:24:33] But the way they constructed that campaign mirrored a social movement, so social movement architecture as opposed to electoral campaign architecture. It was very much about the lived experience of New York City residents and, coming from whatever, religion, ethnicity, country of origin, socioeconomic status, whatever.

[00:24:54] They’ve done a really good job. And some of it’s very fun. Like it’s very Bollywood, right? There’s aesthetics, right? Like they’re, I just, I remember there was this one, one time when he really got me was, there was this video that they did in Hindi and I was like, his Hindi is better than mine.

[00:25:09] Like, how is this happening? But it’s it is making, quote unquote socialism, understandable and legible to people as opposed to Ooh, he is a socialist. It’s okay, this is the stuff we wanna do. And he may be successful, he may not be, I don’t know, but I.

[00:25:28] The way they’ve constructed this campaign mirrors collective leadership and mirrors like narrative power and mirrors social movement strategy in a way that I haven’t seen in a, in electoral campaign in a very long time. So I wrote about. 

[00:25:44] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And it also strikes me that I think that a lot of the people who are just like, oh, mom, Donny’s campaign has such a good branding game.

[00:25:51] They’re really good at the internet are missing this piece. Yeah. That you’re lifting up that’s it’s not just that he’s mediagenic, which he absolutely is. Yeah. But it’s also that he is, he and his team have been running a campaign in the community organizations that sort of closed rinks around him, or running a campaign that was about regular people.

[00:26:12] Lina Srivastava: Yeah. And also regular people and, regular people who are connected to community organizations on the ground, right? So there’s, again, there’s this sort of infrastructure that they’ve plugged into that he was already a part of to a certain extent, because before he was an assemblyman, he was working, with the.

[00:26:30] With taxi drivers, right? So that union and went on a hunger strike, right? Like it was really, I remember, ’cause I remember his name from that I remember that strike happening. I was like, whoa. This is Mira NI’s kid. This is really pretty amazing. This is good.

[00:26:44] Re 

[00:26:44] Cayden Mak: real heads know about Mira and I 

[00:26:47] Lina Srivastava: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Oh, look at that. And it’s interesting because I think that there’s. The mediagenic part of it, I think feels very native. Like when you look at like the way people are using like TikTok and Instagram reel and, those kinds of things and pushing people to text and pushing people out into the streets.

[00:27:06] There were so many people knocking on doors like canvassing phone banking and things like that. Like they were pushing people from, the video from the reel into action, which is really interesting in a way that feels very native to his generation in a lot of ways. So that is one piece of it, but the bigger piece of it and the piece that people are missing and the piece that the Democratic Party is, I think very willfully missing.

[00:27:34] So we can talk about why that is. But they’re very willfully missing that he is. It’s not like he’s oh, I’ve, I have the pulse of the people. It’s that he’s literally talking to people. 

[00:27:45] Cayden Mak: He’s talking, 

[00:27:47] Lina Srivastava: And there was some somebody pointed out that I think Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes who have been talking a lot about, attention economy and stuff like that kind of stuff just makes my eyes glaze over. Anyway, like we don’t even talk. We someday I’ll come back. This is a whole different podcast. Oh God. Anyway. Yeah. We won’t go down that road. But they were talking about it and they’re like, I think they were calling what he was doing.

[00:28:10] Native attention acquisition or something like putting this really bizarre framework around it. And I’m like, he’s talking to people and he’s listening. Yeah. He’s just being 

[00:28:20] Cayden Mak: A human actually. Yeah. That’s it. 

[00:28:22] Lina Srivastava: And I was like, why do you need to like, like I’m framework later. I love a good framework.

[00:28:27] Think about something. I’m like, okay, we need to write a framework. The center needs to write another framework. So I have tons of frameworks. Okay. But I think they’re helpful, but I think that, making something legible versus making something that you can charge money as a consultant are two very different things, right?

[00:28:43] Yes. And and again, like I’m not turning money down. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that I think you need to understand, right? Yeah, let’s, I’m putting it down to the universe, pay me. But what I’m saying is that. There is, it’s very natural, right? To a certain extent, to be someone who is lives in Astoria, is from New York City and is in.

[00:29:08] The DSA or in the Democratic, like the left wing of the Democratic Party. It has not been natural necessarily for the Democratic Party to be in community with people. It is natural for people who do community organizing and who do the work of, building community to be in community with people.

[00:29:25] And that’s what’s showing up, right? It’s it’s that simple. And you talk and you listen. Yeah. And you synthesize and you put it back out. You say, this is what I’ve heard. This is what people are asking for. And will we get free buses? I don’t know. I have no idea. Will we get some of these programs?

[00:29:40] I don’t know. I think, I think the pushback against him from the real estate cabal in New York City is very notable. It’s. Expected, and, whatever. But what is really disheartening even though it’s expected is the Democratic party’s response to him, 

[00:30:01] Sound on Tape: right?

[00:30:02] Lina Srivastava: He won the primary like, show up, and, it’s just it’s really not that hard. And I think. When I’m talking to get back to the question of narrative power. This campaign, the reason I was so captivated by it, even though I don’t love electoral politics, is that there, this is an example of narrative power inaction.

[00:30:23] And trying to get people to understand what does it take in a time that we’re living in right now, where things are so heightened and so scarce and so scary, right? Like, how do you show up with joy and love? And how do you like, use people’s stories to say, we don’t have to live like that, 

[00:30:41] Cayden Mak: right?

[00:30:41] Lina Srivastava: We live like this. This is not, we’re not reacting to that. We’re telling you what we’re gonna build here in New York City. This is what we’re gonna do. So it’s like they’re not. They have a counter narrative in the back of their minds and they know what they’re reacting to, but they’re not just doing that.

[00:30:57] It’s not, like we said, it’s not like Gavin Newsom. There’s a place for that. There’s a place for people, there’s a place for satire. I don’t know if I need the governor of California doing it. 

[00:31:06] Cayden Mak: I personally don’t. But 

[00:31:07] Lina Srivastava: yeah, as a California, it’s funny the first time, right? And like kudos to his like social media person who is, I think a young Latina woman.

[00:31:15] It’s interesting. It’s interesting. It’s funny. It’s not. Especially because he’s throwing trans people under the bus, so I can’t even get on board with it. But I don’t need, I need, I think I need, what I need is I need Chris Van Holland. I need that narrative, right? I need someone to be like, oh, you’re gonna take one of my constituents and, send them CCOs.

[00:31:33] I’m going that’s what I need right now. 

[00:31:36] Cayden Mak: And I think there is such a difference between. I’m a sitting governor of one of the most populous states in the country versus like I am a challenger candidate, or I am some kind of like coalition of. Like outside organizations that’s trying to do something Yeah.

[00:31:54] Or I’m an entertainer who has an opinion. Yeah. It’s such a different vibe and No I think you’re right. And honestly, I think the governor who’s maybe doing this better is honestly JB Pritzker. 

[00:32:03] Yeah. 

[00:32:03] Yeah. Who’s like actually no. Like I’m taking seriously the fact that I actually have the resources of the state of Illinois to stand up against like a huge overreach.

[00:32:12] And frankly invasion of my most populous city that like you’re just not seeing from Newsom at the same time that he’s doing all this sort of

[00:32:22] Lina Srivastava: Yeah, internet mudslinging, especially given what’s happening in Los Angeles.

[00:32:26] It’s a strange, it is a, do. Is it a big tent? Do we need both approaches?

[00:32:30] Again, I don’t need it from Gavin Newsom. Do I need like the, we definitely need the satire, right? That is really important, right? So I, most of the storytelling I do is like fairly earnest, right? This is what’s happening. But we need sati, we need human, or we need all of that.

[00:32:46] We need to, burst the bubble of, the fascist media capture, that’s what we need 

[00:32:52] Cayden Mak: to do. 

[00:32:52] Lina Srivastava: That is absolutely, and we do need to laugh at it. We need to laugh at it. Like in our core, like for sure, like we need joy and laughter. We also need to laugh at it being like, you know what, this is a boogeyman.

[00:33:03] Like I don’t, you’re, you don’t scare me. I’m gonna laugh at you. People are clowns. 

[00:33:06] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:33:07] Lina Srivastava: Yeah. We need both of those things. I think we need, I think we need, again, comes back to like thing, like we need avenues for all of that. Humor is extremely important and we need to have that programmed.

[00:33:19] I’m seeing it like on TikTok, I’m seeing it on Instagram reels. I’m seeing like, those kinds of things. I’m not on social media like I used to be, like I used to be on top of it. Like I used to be like, oh my God, like I would five, 10 tweets, whatever a day like before it would was taken over.

[00:33:34] Rest in peace, Twitter. But but I think I’m not, I’m no longer connected to it because it feels to a certain extent, like a dis No, I don’t wanna use the word distraction ’cause I hate that word. It feels like something where I need to build, I. The, I need to now build the infrastructure, right?

[00:33:50] I need to be contributing to that and let other people be posting and, distributing in that way. Yeah. I still believe very much in the power of social media and the reach of it. Even though a lot of it is like a cesspool, there’s still things that bubble up. Like it’s still a really good way for people to speak, to, to speak to power.

[00:34:13] It’s a really good way to call out, to call in all of those things. I no longer do it as much as I used to because I’m like, okay, I need to take a step back and stop posting and tweeting and start like building longer, like longer lasting structures, right? So that’s why. I’m doing it I think that there is a role, when I talk about platforms, social media is one of those platforms.

[00:34:34] It’s not just streamers and public media and screenings and one-to-one dialogue. It is also social media. We cannot throw. Like I know a lot of people are like, why are you still on Blue Sky? Why are you still on, why are you still on Instagram? It’s a meta product,

[00:34:49] get it. But I still think that we need to I don’t know if we can abandon those platforms. 

[00:34:55] Cayden Mak: I, and this has been my thing from time immemorial too, is that like, where do you fight a Nazi? Wherever you find a Nazi. Yeah. And if the n, if the Nazis are there, they’re speaking to people who, if we abandon those platforms, we’re not speaking to those people either.

[00:35:09] And like they need, people need to be able to hear. Other ways of relating to the world and relating to the big existential problems that we as a society face and that Yeah, I’m with you. That if we fully abandon, if we fully abandon any platform that like, there’s really a, there’s a dilemma about.

[00:35:29] Who then will remain in that gap and contest those narratives? Yeah, because 

[00:35:33] Lina Srivastava: it becomes, it’s again, it becomes an enabling space, right? It becomes a permission structure. Totally. For all those narratives, like those toxic narratives. When you look at, like, when I don’t I don’t have, I have an X account.

[00:35:45] Twitter account just to preserve my name. That’s it. Like I deleted everything. But, so every once in a while I’ll go to just see if somebody dmd me or I’ll just take a look and I’m like, my God, it has become it’s,

[00:35:56] Cayden Mak: It’s hellscape. It’s a hellscape. I’ll say it, 

[00:35:59] Lina Srivastava: my lord. Just so no, I don’t wanna engage there.

[00:36:02] And also my my colleague at the center, keith Mein, who’s a senior strategist with us we’ll often talk about we cannot rely on these, we can’t abandon these platforms. We cannot rely, right? ’cause they’ve got a, first of all, they’ve gotta kill switch, right? So you can you can just lose everything, right?

[00:36:18] You can just like you can put, invest your time and your data and all of that kind of stuff. And they can just. Sell it, delete it, whatever they wanna do. So you cannot rely on it. That’s why we need on the left to be building our own platforms. We have to like, and that’s the piece where I feel like for the last 10, 15 years, I’ve been enga engaged in some of those discussions.

[00:36:40] Like not Air America. I think they tried that like back in the nineties or something, right? With Janine Garo and folks. But we need our own. Platforms. It’s like we need to own the means of production and distribution. How do we do that? It’s never, since I’ve been doing this work for the last two decades, it hasn’t happened and all of our institutions have been crumbling and all of our access has been restricted.

[00:37:07] And so that’s why narrative infrastructure for narrative powers. A framework that’s really important to me alongside the collective leadership work and alongside the community engagement work, it’s really important to me. Yeah. 

[00:37:20] Cayden Mak: It just 

[00:37:21] Lina Srivastava: feels 

[00:37:21] Cayden Mak: like one of the things that you’re trying to do with this framework is also help advance our strategic thinking about narrative beyond like a single stream.

[00:37:32] ’cause I think that, yeah. Not to make it all about the far right, but I. I’m in my little research hole right now. But like when I think about their sort of like multimodal way of creating these echo chambers that then can make messages reach, escape velocity, right?

[00:37:50] Yeah. And slingshot them into the mainstream that like a lot of that is like. It happens below the surface of like public, general, public consciousness. But then you see the sort of like triumph of, for instance, like the triumph of the idea. Like basically what I would call like cultural neoliberalism.

[00:38:09] Like the idea that not just in terms of how our government operates, but how we operate as individuals and people who are making choices in the world that like we are responsible for only ourselves and that like we are. Everybody is a rational market actor and all of this stuff that’s like clearly just bs, right?

[00:38:27] Like it is not based in any reality. But the fact that it has become so central to the like fundamental logic that you see people repeating again and like everyday people, like I spend a lot of time on Reddit and like when people on Reddit say something is human nature, a lot of times what they’re actually repeating back is.

[00:38:47] Lines about that come from the sort of basically almost anarcho capitalist, like hyper libertarian school of thought. That’s not just about the Chicago School of Economics didn’t start there. Yeah. But came through there and then became popularized by political figures, by media commentators, whatever.

[00:39:05] But so much of that, like mannequin all versus all we are in constant market competition with one another. Bullshit has become so deeply ingrained in us because of that infrastructure that they have built. Yeah, and that is the thing that’s been tripping me out a lot. It’s just we just do not have, does it haunt your dreams?

[00:39:25] It haunts my, it literally haunts my dreams and like it haunts my internet, browsing it haunts my TV watching. I cannot do fun screen without thinking about this, but that’s, that’s why I’m here doing what I do. But, I think a lot about how that infrastructure is a deep infrastructure and the people who built that infrastructure we’re thinking about a long game.

[00:39:45] Yeah. Like the value I think of books like Democracy and Chains or Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is looking at how a lot of the architects of that infrastructure, were thinking about a multi-decade struggle. Yeah. To make those ideas the common sense of. Society, and that’s, it’s not a coincidence that a lot of the folks in office currently repeat a lot of that stuff and that those things are easy for people to repeat.

[00:40:13] Lina Srivastava: Yeah, because it’s been in the ether for a very long time and like trying to imagine or trying to create, a different reality is it’s hard, right? Because, people don’t necessarily see it. If you say, okay we need to think of, different systems beyond capitalism.

[00:40:29] People are like, what? What? Sure, but what, and because yeah. Didn’t 

[00:40:35] Cayden Mak: communism end when the Berlin Wall fell? 

[00:40:37] Lina Srivastava: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think people, I think this is what I was talking about, is like creating these enabling spaces and these permission structures to think of new ways of being and constructing society, like that’s so necessary and we can’t do it.

[00:40:57] We can’t do it unless we do it collectively. We can’t do it unless we’re thinking like you have to hurry up to slow down. You like, the, who, I can’t remember who said this to me. Someone was saying, this is a time of like deep urgency, so slow down. Yes.

[00:41:12] Because. You can’t do any of this work if you are in crisis mode, which is what we have been in for a very long time. And part of that is because we are so under-resourced and so underfunded. I remember talking to someone, a program officer about social justice storytelling, and I was like, you all are giving us teaspoons to fight an ocean, right? Where there are people on the far who get paid millions of dollars to follow around one. Lefty documentary filmmaker and try to figure out try to disrupt what they’re doing, et cetera. And you’re giving the documentary filmmaker 50,000 bucks and asking them to report on it four times, with this like hedge fund, what is your quarterly return on our investment?

[00:41:53] It’s very, it’s, I think people are, have reacted to. The need to like account for every dollar without the need to account to community. Yeah. That’s the problem. And that’s one of the problems. And I think that, the far when you do read things like, and you said, Jane Mayer’s dark money or things like that, like it’s been years and years of investment.

[00:42:19] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Know. 

[00:42:20] Lina Srivastava: Not, some of the money is not that dark. Like you can just see it. You just can’t just out there. Yeah. I know. Out there. Look at the Murdoch deal, the succession deal, that just came out. Not yesterday. It’s right there,

[00:42:30] Cayden Mak: yeah. Or Barry Weiss’s, free press getting acquired by CBS.

[00:42:35] Yeah. Like that happening after, the CBS Paramount thing, there’s just

[00:42:40] Lina Srivastava: yeah. You don’t, it’s happen in front. Don’t dig very deep. Yeah. To see where the money is flowing. And this, and it is it’s happening exponentially faster. But it’s been building for decades. As you say, you can trace it back to the, like the twenties and thirties or you can trace it back to the passage of the civil.

[00:42:57] Yeah, act right in 64 in the Immigration Act in 65, and then Roe v. Wade in 73, like the triumvirate of like right wing going, oh my God, what’s happening? So you know, all those wins, quote unquote wins that were built over decades of organizing. The Civil Rights Act didn’t happen just because, that was decades of organizing. The Immigration Act, decades of organizing. So I wanna give. If there are sides and we’re on a side like the side of the left or the side of the people or whoever we are, like, I do wanna give us some. Credit, right? Because I do think what, maybe not the Democratic party so much, but we do know how to be in community just as much as the right wing does.

[00:43:41] I don’t know if they’re in community. I think they’re imposing community, which is a very different thing. But I, so we are, we allow. When we do this well, we allow community to show up in its full self with this live experience and know individual people within it to say I agree or I disagree.

[00:43:57] I think when we do it it is that big tent kind of thing. So I do wanna give us some credit. It’s not like we are doing it wrong. I do think that the challenge now is that we have been fighting against. Without declaring a vision for what we’re for. That is very reductive. But I think overarching, I think that’s a lot of the case is what are the stories that are pointing us to the new.

[00:44:28] The new and, 

[00:44:29] The shared reality, the shared power, the shared justice, all those things. Like where are those stories? And you do see them like I’ve been over the last 20 years, I have seen them in the documentary space. I am not nor your Negro or, like Gasland or there’re just like, there, there are a number of different documentaries.

[00:44:47] There are a number of different media properties that are interesting. There’s like your magazine, there’s your coalition, right? The media, yeah. 

[00:44:53] Cayden Mak: Movement, media Alliance. 

[00:44:54] Lina Srivastava: Exactly. Like those kinds of things. Those are examples of narrative infrastructure that can. Point a different way that point a new way, that are like that, that are diagnosing the current problem that are re addressing the injustices of the past and trying to create, repair around that. And also projecting into a future that can be shared. 

[00:45:15] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:45:16] Lina Srivastava: So that is happening. It is just not happening. In a big enough measure, like we need those four things that I talked about.

[00:45:26] We need those things to be, working in tandem, the story, the advocacy, the resources, the platforms. We need those and we need to be, controlling them in a much bigger way. 

[00:45:37] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And I think that the other thing that’s really helpful about frameworks in general is like.

[00:45:42] Building a structure that people can see themselves and their work inside of, which I think is like a really, to me, that is the utility of a framework, right? Is it’s oh, like we don’t have to be doing the same thing, but if we have a shared understanding. Then our work can be legible to one another.

[00:46:00] Yeah. As being on the same side. And I do think that there is a, there’s a gap right now. Like we need to be thinking about what are new frameworks in which we can locate ourselves, but also locate one another. As we engage in Tructure. And 

[00:46:11] Lina Srivastava: also I like frameworks because they also help me.

[00:46:13] Like they help me create a gut check, right? It’s okay, where am I doing right now? Okay, great. So I’m working with storytellers, but nah, we’re not very well resourced or we’re not using our platforms really well. What if you’re talking about just this framework? Or where are we doing well, it’s okay, good.

[00:46:29] We, we can do this and we can build community around this. We can build partnerships around this. Yeah. We can talk about this and we can educate each other about how we are doing it. That is working. Totally. So I think that’s why I like frameworks whenever I have.

[00:46:41] Thoughts that bubble up and keep bubbling up for me over like at least a year or two years. I’m like, framework, so yeah. So we have a number of different frameworks that help. Guide, different discussions. I just did a fellowship in Australia for, I was there for four weeks at the Museum of Discovery in Adelaide.

[00:47:00] And they wanted me to be there around the collective leadership work. And so I have a framework around that. And it was really interesting because that framework we released that in 2018, so it’s seven years old now, and we’re gonna we’re changing it now so that it meets.

[00:47:14] The current moment. So we’re writing about new stories, et cetera. It’s a story-based framework as well, but I was like running people through it. And there are a number of people, they’re mostly from the cultural sector in Australia and I’ve not connected with that. And it was really interesting to see how people were like, yeah, using a framework to think about where they sit right now in this geopolitical moment.

[00:47:35] Their, where are they doing well, where do they need to build? Where can they work together to build up? And I was like, this is really great because this is a sector I haven’t necessarily connected with. And this is the power of like actually writing it out in a framework instead of just like thinking it and using it yourself.

[00:47:51] Yeah, I’m, yeah, I like frameworks 

[00:47:54] Cayden Mak: Speaking of which I, I feel like we could talk about this for the rest of the day. Where can folks find your framework on narrative power and learn more about the stuff that you all do at the Center for Transformational Change? 

[00:48:07] Lina Srivastava: Yeah at the, our website is transformational change.co.

[00:48:12] We have frameworks for download there. I haven’t ne I haven’t put up the narrative framework one yet, but you have given me the excuse to do so I’ll upload there, or I’ll put it on our medium page and circulate it, on social media and such. So I’ll put that out alongside and I’ll send it to you so you can put it up too.

[00:48:33] Cayden Mak: Fantastic. Sounds great. Lena, it’s always a delight to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us today. And I hope to talk to you again soon. I hope to talk to you again soon as well. My thanks again to Srivastava for joining me for this interview. There’ll be a link to connect with Lina’s work at the Center for Transformational Change in the show notes.

[00:48:50] This show is published by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. I’m Caden Mock, and our producer is Josh Stro. Kim David designed our cover art. If you have something to say, please drop me a line. You can send me an email that will consider running on an upcoming mailbag episode at [email protected].

[00:49:07] And if you’d like to support the work that we do at Convergence, bringing our movements together to strategize, struggle, and win in this crucial historical moment, you can become a [email protected] slash donate. Even a few bucks a month goes a long way to making sure our independent small team can continue to build a map for our movements.

[00:49:24] I hope this helps.