Josh Allan Dykstra
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Josh Allan Dykstra

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Future Of Work
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Brand Burning, Cancel Culture, & More DEI

Brand Burning, Cancel Culture, & More DEI

Could I possibly choose a more incendiary title?!

I don’t think this article is going to be as inflammatory as the title makes it sound (famous last words)…

Today I want to suggest a new phrase for our collective lexicon: “Brand Burning.”

I did a bit of Google searching on this phrase and couldn’t find much.

To me, “Brand Burning” is the perfect phrase to describe what’s currently happening with “DEI.”

Like you, perhaps, I’ve been watching this burgeoning conflagration around the phrase “DEI” for awhile. Now I’m seeing clear “battle lines” being drawn, as lists begin to appear on my social feeds that show companies who support versus companies who oppose.

If I zoom out, it seems clear we’re being guided into another turf war, where a Label becomes an Identity — pick your Team: Chiefs/Eagles, Montague/Capulet, Red/Blue — and we line up like dutiful soldiers behind our Label and go to war with “those others.”

When this happens, we stop seeing the other side as people… they are now only their Team — the Team I do NOT like. Civility grinds to a halt, and we start to feel incredibly justified in our behaviors, because we are just “supporting My Team.”

So, “Brand Burning” is basically the act of My Team trying to torch Your Team.

We’ve witnessed “cancel culture” that goes after individuals — I want to suggest that “Brand Burning” is basically a type of cancel culture for brands/labels/ideas.

And to me, right now it feels like the label “DEI” is being targeted for Brand Burning — one “side” is trying to burn this label to the ground.

Now, what’s particularly convenient about a Brand Burning war is that brands and labels and ideas are quite flexible, and in the heat of battle they can expand to contain a whole bunch of things that don’t actually, upon deeper thought or reflection, go under that label.

In a Brand Burning war, whatever the one side doesn’t like can get generalized and gathered under the label they don’t like, and all those things become part of the amorphous idea-villain. I’m sure you see this all the time — it’s related to “whataboutism” and we personally just saw this happening in the comment section of the very last article I posted.

When a brand/label/idea like “DEI” gets targeted for burning, it can be very tempting to fight back, to attempt to “reclaim” the brand/label/idea.

Believe me, I get it. I’m an Enneagram 8: internally wired for challenge. And I know I have, in a recent post, even made a case for the attempted reclamation of another flammable word (“politics”), but over the last couple weeks I have started to feel a shift in my thinking about the “DEI” label.

Here’s my thought for today…

If it’s time for the “DEI” label to burn, maybe we should let it go.

I know that might sound like cowardly capitulation, but I don’t think it is.

Or at least, it doesn’t need to be.

I think it could be jiu-jitsu, where we use the weight and leverage of the other party to the advantage of the kind of future we want to build.

In other words…

What would happen if we simply didn’t allow the firestorm of nonsense around DEI to rattle us… and then just got on with the real work of the revolution we’re already doing? Would doing that move actually take some of the “oxygen out of the fire?” And at the same time, might it also give US more energy to continue the “human expansion” work that is so deeply necessary — the work that WILL continue no matter what label we put on it??

At the end of the day, I think this might be a question of “choosing one’s battles” — knowing which are worth fighting and which are not.

In this particular case, maybe it’s a time for burning.

I’m absolutely not talking about the kind of burning that happened in Los Angeles of course, but a metaphorical kind of “prescribed fire” for the idea-landscape.

I’m also not talking about ending human expansion work, of course. This work can, and must, and will, continue. 

But the “DEI” label…

I tend to think everything can be reclaimed eventually, but again it’s ultimately a question of time horizons. Because of our relatively short human lifespans, we have a hard time seeing in long arcs. Like ground that has been burned, these brands/labels can return. They could be reinvigorated and rebuilt. 

But how long will this take…?

More than months. Years likely. Decades, probably.

I’m not sure we have that kind of time when it comes to what’s happening right now.

As much as I hate to give in to this strange subset of cancel culture, I am starting to think that at certain points it’s more constructive to let the blows be glancing and start fresh with some new language. Maybe it’s not worth it to spend our limited time and energy fighting so hard to insist on old labels.

Maybe we pull a kind of “Bucky Fuller” move and spend our time creating new brands/labels/ideas instead.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller

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