What is Many Mini Manifestos

And how does it work?

Welcome to Many Mini Manifestos — a place on Medium for you to outline your plans for world governance or guide civilization to the perfect etiquette for eating a sandwich. We welcome manifestos that are serious, comic, and everywhere in between welcomed — but do try not to leave it too fuzzy as regards which is which.

You can write your manifesto about or for anything. A Manifesto for Improving Call Center Working Standards. A Manifesto for Art Galleries. A Manifesto for true Beliebers. Not all of these should be taken seriously, but all of them are potential manifestos. Looking at Merriam-Webster, it says a manifesto is “a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer”. Some historical manifestos include Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream speech, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s The Communist Manifesto, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. In the art world, one can think of Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto, or of August Strindberg’s Preface to Miss Julie, as well as many more. You can even look at the opening speech from Trainspotting as an example — ‘Choose Life’. Think along any of those lines, and go wild!

Ours is not to sit in judgment of what is a good or a bad manifesto, but we do have some rules: 1. Be a decent human being — see if you can stir us as a species to be a better one than we are now 2. No invocations to doing harm that appear to be serious will be accepted — if it is clearly satire or parody, discretion will be used. Similarly, baiting folks is not welcomed or allowed 3. If your manifesto takes aim at folks, aim upwards not down. If you can only aim downwards, well you probably don’t need a manifesto. 4. Religious and political manifestos from all perspectives are also welcome, but on the condition that it isn’t saying that your way is the only way, or that those who disagree must be put to the sword. Do note that if you are going to hit a hot button topic, like abortion for instance, absolutes are not the way to go, and will be more carefully curated. 5. A manifesto is not simply a list — it needs some teasing out in some places, and should all go to support a cogent world view or plan. 6. Keep it roughly between 250 and 1250 words — a few words either way will do no harm 7. Submit it for publication, and we will get back to you soon!

* We will update these rules as we realise what we failed to put in first time, so please don’t get all upset that the thing you wrote was “acceptable” under the old rules, because it probably wasn’t