From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Wed Jun 27 2001 - 10:45:14 MDT
Natasha Vita-More wrote:
>
> To update those of you scratching your heads and wondering what Pro-Act is,
> let me include the following statement below:
>
> Progress Action Coalition
Outstanding, Natasha. As many are aware, I've been rather outspoken
about the need for counter-luddite activism of this sort for quite a
while, and am quite encouraged to see the ExI leadership organizing
this.
Here are some of my own ideas on this:
Campus activism: college students make up the bulk of the manpower of
activist groups, and they can get funding from student activity fees to
pay the costs of organizing their chapters. This is how the Sierra Club
was able to increase its membership by 2 million through the student
organization work of a young man who is now the head of the organization
as a whole. The anti-globalists and anti-technology types have ongoing
programs on most campuses, under the banners of Greenpeace, PETA, and
other organizations.
To help seed a similar grassroots campaign, we need extropes across the
country to become their state or regional rep for Pro-Act. These people
should be the point of contact for Pro-Act chapters to the national
organization, and help with locating resources and sharing information.
They should organize introductory organizing talks on campuses, deal
with advertising these talks, while the national organization helps
provide entertaining speakers like Ray Kurzweil, Max More, Natasha, etc.
to attract an audience.
The national organization should rent mail lists to compile a
fundraising mail list. From my experience in this sort of business, I
suggest you rent lists from high tech magazines AND from left wing green
magazines and right wing fundamentalist magazines. What you do is purge
from the high tech lists any names found on the left wing green and
right wing fundie lists to eliminate people who are not likely to
support our agenda. This results in a high value list rich in
technophiles. The cost for such lists, rented and purged, should not be
more than $10-20 per thousand names. You can apply additional criteria
as well: income, occupation, etc.
Another way to go about it is to rent lists from high tech mail order
companies and new age/religious/green mail order companies. This helps
better determine who has got money to spend.
Corporate giving: first contact high tech lobbying groups in Washington
DC. They will typically rent donor lists.
Target high-tech beneficiaries: Who benefits from stem cell and other
genetics research? Moms? The elderly? For example, the subscribers to
Longevity Magazine should be a rich resource of donors.
All of this also costs money to start up, obviously. We need to contact
a core group of angels to fund the startup. For example, the owner of
100X Ventures, the company Sasha was working for when he died, told
Sasha and myself that he was an early extropian but wasn't involved with
the group much now. He is now worth a rather huge chunk of money from
his Firefly work.
Every extrope on this list should be asking themselves: Who do I know
who has a chunk????? Are they technophiles?
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