Sticker Nation
by Mark Derewicz
Stamp out hunger. God is other people. We are connected.
These are memes.
Curb your hypocrisy. We shall overcome. Angst is lame.
Memes are ideas that are transmitted by repetition.
Smash patriarchy. Understand the homeless. Abandon anger.
And if these ideas strike the right chord…
Follow your heart. Feel the oneness. Start today. They can kick-start creativity and change the world — at least someone’s world. That’s the hope of Srini Kumar, an affable Carolina MBA student, entrepreneur, and former punk rocker who’s been putting ideas on stickers and selling them at www.stickernation.com since 1994. He’s also the author of Sticker Nation, a new book of peel-off stickers and somewhat philosophical explanations.
The sticker: Cynics go to hell. Kumar’s explanation: The poison of cynicism is an anesthetic. There are always alternatives and oblique strategies.
Kumar sold more than fifteen thousand copies in three months, landing Sticker Nation at number nine on the Los Angeles Times nonfiction bestsellers list in July 2006. The book was also a featured prop in the new NBC drama Kidnapped last fall.
“And I haven’t even been trying to market it yet,” he says, laughing. “I’ve been in grad school.”
Kumar published Sticker Nation in the name of fun. But many of his stickers are quite serious, or should be considered so if readers dare to be smart and go beyond slogans.
He believes that memes work like genes.
“Ideas can spread as if they have a biological process, leaping through minds and media like a gene in an ecosystem,” he says.
Kumar fell in love with stickers as a teenage musician when he realized that a good sticker was like a Ramones song — to the point and catchy. Then, while his sticker design company was just getting off the ground, he watched the Got milk? meme rescue milk sales from a twenty-year slump. He figured that deeper memes transmitted via stickers might trigger meaningful conversation, and even mutate or create change.
“A sticker book ideally gets used up, and then those stickers start seeping into your mental world and maybe even affecting your behavior and attitude,” he says. “These are the kinds of things that I believe activists ought to be thinking more about — not just feeling good about holding a sign at a protest, but actually shaping attitudes.”
He says that advertisers, mass media, and politicians don’t hesitate to shape attitudes. Why should the rest of us? Especially the creative class.
“We’re not working hard enough,” he says of artists, including himself. “We’re maybe too elitist or just not thinking about how art and grassroots communication can shape people’s attitudes. Stickers are a way to cut through that because everyone likes them even if they’re totally insane.” Admit that Goth is ridiculous. I am the best artist.
Kumar wants his book to inspire young adults to declare independence from mass media while using art not apathy to reboot America. That’s why his stickers plead for people to ask questions frequently, defeat boredom, incite cooperation, accelerate the positive, discover the earth, and pledge allegiance to the entire world.
Kumar says, “Most good art and music just up the level of general intensity in the mind and push you a little closer to saying, ‘Hey, I want to do my thing now.’ Promoting my own ideas doesn’t matter as much to me as inspiring teenagers to do something with their creativity instead of just tabling it.”
Srini Kumar is a second-year MBA student at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. Visitors to www.stickernation.com can create their own stickers or buy Kumar’s creations.
