Culture Hack Labs

Culture Hacks Lab (CHL) is a non-profit consultancy supporting organisations, social movements and activists in the creation of cultural interventions for systems change. The Lab operates as a decentralised network of researchers, movement leaders, social scientists, strategists, artists, communications and political strategists. 

The CHL process is based on an integrated set of tools and techniques to track, research and intervene in cultural narratives. In their own words, ‘We capture and map large volumes of social data using the Culture Hack Platform. We then analyse the networks, language and deep logics to develop insights and content to evolve culture…We come together to create narrative interventions that cut to the heart of the dominant culture.’ 

So how do they do this? 

Working with land defenders who form part of the Diaspora and Ancestral Nations of Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Turtle Island and Milpanérica (Alaska, Canada, US, México, Guatemala, Salvador and Honduras) the Lab gathered activists to ‘hack the narrative of land ownership’ in pursuit of a transition that will liberate people and ‘Mother Earth’. An agreed set of principles designed for the ‘land ownership’ hack include: 

- We return to the land and the land returns to us: Structural inequalities, social injustice, climate, social and spiritual polycrises have at their foundation the separation between people and the network of life – between communities and their territories, between our being and the earth. Can we think of ourselves beyond an individualistic and human-centric identity? Returning to relationships of interdependence with the land and all beings that exist on it, is the root of any cultural change. Case Study  

- The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth: we invite you to free yourself from the prison of private property, we must tear down the fences so that life can move freely again. Governments, corporations, churches, armies, the rich who have monopolized the land and created violent laws to privatize it, must return what was stolen. Can we reimagine the management and organisation of life and territory beyond property? Can we create collective identities that recover our belonging to the earth? 

The Lab has organised a self-directed curriculum or learning journey with a view to democratising its approach, methodology and tools. The eight-module educational tool supports narrative practitioners in their understanding of the ontological shift that will be necessary to disrupt the core assumptions that underpin capitalist modernity and equip prac- titioners with the tools to transform the critical narrative landscapes of our times. 

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Key words: ‘Culture hack’; narrative methodologies; capitalist modernity; culture; narrative frames; ethics; neolib- eralism; non-dualism; ontology and epistemology; pluralism; post-human. 

Wellbeing Economy Links: Narrative methodologies, neoliberalism, the post-human.