This article is a field manual for building the four essential narrative infrastructures needed to dismantle authoritarianism, arguing that movements must construct them urgently to survive and wield transformative power.
Crises are paradoxical. They are urgent and immediate and demand every tool at our disposal to survive, but a crisis does not happen in a single moment. Crises like the genocide of the Palestinian people, ICE kidnappings, the racial justice recession, climate-caused wildfires, and removal of the human right of bodily autonomy take years to produce. The crises that shape the narrative landscape we navigate each day were decades, if not centuries, in the making. Thinking about geology helps me here. There are deep narratives that run like fast rivers shaping the landscape. And there are deep narrative earthquakes too, pushing up mountains and knocking down cities. But geological timescales are only useful up to a point: deep narratives are handmade by people, and then intentionally propagated by powerful people and groups. Deep narratives are made.
To borrow Ruthie Wilson Gilmore’s phrase, we are living in an era of “organized abandonment” — of our planet, our communities, our values, and even ourselves. Powerful, harmful dominant narratives shout that we are on our own, we cannot count on each other, and we cannot change the systems that have harmed our communities and our planet. The antidote to organized abandonment is organized engagement.
Authoritarian fascism has arrived and those in power are advancing their agenda with the known toolkit of authoritarian fascism by:
- overwhelming the channels to create psychological shut-down;
- creating a constant crisis of threats;
- scapegoating a rotating roster of minorities; and
- narrating that the only solution is violent strongman leadership to which the population must surrender human rights.
Who receives benefits from those harmful dominant narratives? The tools that progressive movement folks have are not sufficient to get us through this crisis, we need to scale up and band together with greater strength. We urgently need to cultivate the deep, generative base of narrative power that can grow, iterate new ideas and messages, extend and repair bonds with communities, and collectively endure. We must hand build the infrastructure for our collective survival. We need to build it even as we are dismantling harmful deep narratives. The infrastructures we currently have in the nonprofit and philanthropic spaces are not sufficient. We need to build infrastructures that organize our collective narrative power. Narrative organizing is a key strategy, one that builds narrative power that is necessary in this time of authoritarian fascism.
Here, I’m going to get pretty nerdy. What is a narrative infrastructure, in general? Narrative infrastructure isn’t just one thing, just like transit infrastructure isn’t just buses. Let’s consider some of the narrative infrastructure definitions out there. In 15 years of working as a narrative organizer, I’ve come to organize my work into four main types of narrative infrastructures that I’ll describe here:
- Conceptual narrative infrastructures
- Social and technical narrative infrastructures
- Narrative distribution infrastructures
- Economic narrative infrastructures
Several narrative infrastructure definitions exist: Rashad Robinson (2019), ReFrame (2019) and Pop Culture Collab (2022).Building on the definitional work already done, I’ll offer some definitions of types of narrative infrastructures, with the hope of catalyzing more precise conversations in the field about what infrastructures we have (and must build on!) and what infrastructures we need to create and invest in. When I think about narrative infrastructures, I imagine intertwined, layered webs with the purpose of creating collective narrative power. We need to weave these webs more deeply, building on the advances of the distributed field in the past 10 years.
Conceptual narrative infrastructures fall into two categories:
- Frameworks for thinking about and structuring narrative organizing, methodologies for structuring narrative research, and metrics for measuring narrative change.
- The actual helpful narratives we’re creating and advancing.
We need conceptual narrative infrastructures to make sense of where we are together, to build a shared orientation, and to be able to imagine what a good future can be. How do we think about deep narratives together? When coalitions or networks follow a narrative alignment (like a Narrative House or a Narrative North Star) closely, they begin to engage in a generative practice of repair and collective movement that deepens bonds.
Frameworks for thinking about and structuring narrative organizing are necessary to both create disciplined approaches to the practice of narrative organizing, and to build shared language so narrative organizers can talk about the beautiful variation in approaches. Methodologies for structuring narrative research are necessary to enable rigorous research design and replicable results. This field guide to narrative research methodologies from 2019 is due for an update. Metrics for measuring narrative change are necessary for us all to stay motivated to do hard, long-term projects, and to let us know where we’re succeeding and where we need to improve. When we think about the practice of narrative organizing, the conceptual narrative infrastructures are easily overlooked, but vital to the overall success of applied practice.
Social and technical narrative infrastructures are the relational aspect of narrative organizing. They are coalitions, networks, gatherings, working groups, formations, organizations and the many (harder to map) 1:1 relationships held by narrative organizers. Social narrative infrastructures are based on trust, but also based in purpose. What are the shared goals held within relationships? How much momentum can we build and maintain together. Narrative alignments line BLIS’s Narrative House and Narrative Initiative’s Narrative North Stars are collectively built and collectively held points of narrative orientation.
ReFrame offers a people and technology-oriented narrative infrastructure definition in their Creating an Ecosystem for Narrative Power:
“Infrastructure is the connective tissue necessary to bridge the grassroots with other sectors. These other sectors include academia, government, entertainment, and more. Infrastructure is also the shared technology to conduct narrative research, the protocols around equitable access to this technology and research, and new formations for bold but grounded narrative experimentation, learning and evaluation.”
Rashad Robinson writes that narrative infrastructure is about the ability of networked groups to wield power and powerful ideas:
“Narrative infrastructure is singularly about equipping a tight network of people organizing on the ground and working within various sectors to develop strategic and powerful narrative ideas, and then, against the odds of the imbalanced resources stacked against us, immerse people in a sustained series of narrative experiences required to enduringly change hearts, minds, behaviors, and relationships.”
As ReFrame and Robinson suggest, we need social narrative infrastructures: what are the processes needed to generate and move narrative change strategies? How do we construct the social forms that go beyond a single campaign, direct action, policy statement? Beyond a single organization or issue? What’s the social narrative infrastructure necessary to stand up to the massive, decades-long scale of the social infrastructure that invented and propagated harmful dominant narratives?
I group technical infrastructures with social because technology often helps us measure social changes, stay in social communication, and generally supports the relational aspects of social narrative infrastructures.
Distribution narrative infrastructures require careful planning in narrative organizing. What’s the specific path from narrative creation to narrative wins? Because, for the most part, narrative organizers do not own media platforms, the path often looks like: narrative landscape baseline observation, narrative creation, translation of the narrative into many voices and stories for specific audiences, narrative deployment, and observing the narrative landscape again to test for changes. There are a lot of steps, each a place where the ball can be dropped and narrative fidelity can be compromised and momentum lost. The right has spent decades honing narratives in think tanks, buying up and consolidating media like rural radio stations and local newspapers, and building distribution platforms like Prager U. Narrative distribution systems are frequently — and insufficiently — described to be mass media channels, often in the same breath as a lamentation that the left owns no mass media platforms. Mass media is part of the distribution equation, but as technology and social ties radically shift all narrative distribution systems, narrative organizers need to think deeply about what distribution narrative infrastructures are needed now. What does people-powered narrative distribution infrastructure look like in ten years? It requires discipline and planning, investments by both organizers and philanthropy. People-powered narrative distribution infrastructure is an area of serious underinvestment, we have work to do.
Economic narrative infrastructures are the investments, grants, jobs, institutions, and (often nonprofit) businesses that give narrative organizers enough resources to move narrative change in the world. Narrative organizing takes economic infrastructures to ensure that organizing labor is fairly compensated. The economic narrative infrastructures allow organizing projects to reach a scale that isn’t possible on volunteer labor and volunteer structures alone. Vitally, this type of infrastructure allows justice-driven narratives to compete with very well-resourced efforts to steer dominant narratives towards making authoritarian fascism make sense to more people. How does money flow into the practice of narrative organizing? How is narrative organizing labor sustained? What are the business entities that allow for disciplined, sustained collaboration to take place?
Every bit of narrative infrastructure built on the left is vitally needed, and just as vital to sustain. The goal of these teams in building narrative infrastructures is to help build out the field of narrative organizing, and to reduce the number of times we and other practitioners need to reinvent the wheel. What are our missing narrative infrastructures? What are the ones in need of deeper investment to sustain and grow? I’m always excited to talk more about this nerdy side of narrative organizing practice, and in deep gratitude to all the many contributors building the necessary scaffolding of shared practice together.
