The golden record

Largely because of their intangibility, publics exist largely in the imaginations of those who are reaching out to them, as the unknown recipients and arbiters of appeals to justice. They are in good measure whatever a spokesperson imagines their audience to be when they stand in front of a microphone and/or a camera. Because of this, outreach to publics is almost always in some way like sending a message in a bottle, oriented toward a future audience of unknown provenance and uncertain sympathies.

The “message in a bottle” quality of social justice lobbying can be heuristically demonstrated with the example of the “time capsule” phonograph record on the Voyager 1 space probe launched in 1977 and now hurtling somewhere in the interstellar void, containing, among many other items, messages of peace from humanity on the part of then US president Jimmy Carter and UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim. The golden record is eventually to be discovered, its designers hoped, by an extraterrestrial public elsewhere in the universe, or perhaps by an equally alien species of future humans traveling far from earth, their planet of origin. Carter addressed this possible audience with the following statement:

The space probe message is an exaggerated instance of the anonymous nature of publics, which nevertheless reveals a more common quality to be found in outreach to those who are distant in time and space: representations to publics of all kinds consist not only of hoped for, relatively immediate responses to a crisis of injustice, but also of messages to a more distant futurity, with often implicit aspirations for human betterment.