Speaking of coolness, this may be a very obscure thing, but I remember there was a series of Japanese light novels called Durarara that got turned into an anime. In the story, there’s a group of online do-gooder vigilantes known as “The Dollars” who basically are weaponized 4chan (sorta like Anonymous but sillier and doing things offline) except for good instead of evil. The Dollars would secretly help people and coordinate to fight these IRL gangs in the story, using their numbers and anonymity (unlike the other gangs with colours, The Dollars were “colourless”).
Interestingly, the relative success of the anime led several fans to create copycat websites including this one (password is: baccano), based on the chat website in the story, and fans coalesced around some of them and attempted to mimick The Dollars for a while (mostly while the anime was still airing). Basically, this consisted of mostly idealistic, half-hearted, and not very effective attempts at anonymous acts of kindness called “missions” that would be posted on the Dollars forum. But the fact that this even happened at all, and that the website forum was frequented by fans from all over the world was, to me at least, quite interesting.
I think, in some ways, the EA movement resembles this in the sense of being sorta united around a forum, and consisting of people all over the world trying to do good. The difference is that rather than being an emotional, fun thing based on a silly pop culture reference, EA is very, very serious and focused on real world effectiveness (and is also more top-down).
Perhaps, having some of the stylish fun of “The Dollars” group could help EA reach a crowd that we’d normally never touch. I don’t really know how we’d go about this, but it’s an idea anyway.
Like, I could imagine something along the lines of there being some kind of work of fiction (i.e. a novel, a TV show, maybe a web serial?) that has a bunch of EA characters doing cool things that save the world, that if done well, could be a great recruitment tool of sorts.
Speaking of coolness, this may be a very obscure thing, but I remember there was a series of Japanese light novels called Durarara that got turned into an anime. In the story, there’s a group of online do-gooder vigilantes known as “The Dollars” who basically are weaponized 4chan (sorta like Anonymous but sillier and doing things offline) except for good instead of evil. The Dollars would secretly help people and coordinate to fight these IRL gangs in the story, using their numbers and anonymity (unlike the other gangs with colours, The Dollars were “colourless”).
Interestingly, the relative success of the anime led several fans to create copycat websites including this one (password is: baccano), based on the chat website in the story, and fans coalesced around some of them and attempted to mimick The Dollars for a while (mostly while the anime was still airing). Basically, this consisted of mostly idealistic, half-hearted, and not very effective attempts at anonymous acts of kindness called “missions” that would be posted on the Dollars forum. But the fact that this even happened at all, and that the website forum was frequented by fans from all over the world was, to me at least, quite interesting.
I think, in some ways, the EA movement resembles this in the sense of being sorta united around a forum, and consisting of people all over the world trying to do good. The difference is that rather than being an emotional, fun thing based on a silly pop culture reference, EA is very, very serious and focused on real world effectiveness (and is also more top-down).
Perhaps, having some of the stylish fun of “The Dollars” group could help EA reach a crowd that we’d normally never touch. I don’t really know how we’d go about this, but it’s an idea anyway.
Like, I could imagine something along the lines of there being some kind of work of fiction (i.e. a novel, a TV show, maybe a web serial?) that has a bunch of EA characters doing cool things that save the world, that if done well, could be a great recruitment tool of sorts.