Why the fuck do you exist?

On manifestos and movements

Reading a high-conviction manifesto is a special kind of pleasure. When it’s good, it’s so good. Satisfying, even. But why? What makes this particular artifact different from any other piece of writing?

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of the Manifesto of Futurism.

A manifesto is the foundation of what you are building, whether you are a person, company, organization, or movement. It declares why you exist and what you believe, taking a stance for something and against something else. If you do it right, a manifesto doesn’t let you hide. It forces you to have clarity as it relates to who you are, and what you are manifesting.

In fact, the most effective manifestos are those who dare to linger on their enemy: What injustice do you see? What do you want to change? What world are you trying to kill so a new one can exist? Without identifying what you are fighting against, you’re just stating preferences (even the word preference makes me want to die of boredom). The conditions for a movement are created by being specific and opinionated. And the best manifestos in history have taken the risk of being wrong in the service of being clear.

Yvan Goll, Surréalisme, Manifeste du surréalisme, Volume 1, Number 1, October 1, 1924, cover by Robert Delaunay

Take The Communist Manifesto. The banger opening was “A spectre is haunting Europe — a spectre of communism”, not “workers deserve better compensation structures”. That would be accurate, but also boring. Instead, Marx delivered in dramatic effect, and named the bourgeoisie as the enemy so that you knew exactly who to be mad at. When Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurism in 1909, he took out a front-page ad in Le Figaro to declare war on museums, libraries, and “the past” itself. Very different to stating something like “contemporary art needs a refresh”. A few years later, Breton went after rationalism and said we’re all in prison while calling the people we’ve locked up the only free ones. With this, he started the surrealist movement that shaped how artists thought about consciousness, dreams, and creative constraint for decades.

What Marx, Marinetti, and Breton all did was make you pick a side. The manifesto only works if someone can read it and have an opinion about it, in either direction. Anything in between is just corporate speak with better formatting. It makes people feel nothing. It doesn’t call anyone to action.

This idea applies equally whether you’re starting a workers’ revolution or a company. Elon’s 2006 Tesla master plan had four steps: build an expensive sports car, use that money to build an affordable car, use that money to build an even more affordable car, provide solar power. It was simple and audacious. The enemy was the fossil fuel industry and the assumption that electric cars couldn’t scale. The vision was mass-market electric vehicles. Airbnb wanted us to “Belong Anywhere”, and fought against sterile hotels and the assumption that you can’t trust strangers with your home. Not uncontroversially, they set out to turn every city into a neighborhood you could belong to.

The first page of the English version of Manifesto of Futurism as it appeared in Poesia

Manifesting through a manifesto is almost even more interesting today. We live in a time where coding, designing, and fundraising is objectively not that hard. The other day, someone made a joke about how it’s easier for a fresh grad to raise $3M for building AI agents than it is to get a job, and they’re not entirely wrong. The barrier to entry is gone, so what matters more than ever is meaning: why the fuck do you exist?

Write it down. Not a mission statement that could apply to ten other companies, or using words like “empower” and “enable.” Write the thing that makes someone read it and immediately know whether they’re in or out. Name what you’re fighting against. Describe the world you’re trying to kill and the one you’re trying to birth. Be specific enough that you might be wrong. Be opinionated enough that someone might actually disagree. If your manifesto makes everyone nod politely, you haven’t written one. You’ve made a LinkedIn post.

So

Find your words

Set them loose

And let your manifesto…

Do what it’s supposed to do:

Call in your people

And make us feeling something.