Gesellschaftliche Verhaltensmuster ändern sich nicht von alleine. Will man aber einen nachhaltigen Wandel anstoßen, ist Kritik an den vorherrschenden Umgangsweisen nicht genug – es braucht eine «appealing alternative», wie Cal Newport in Slow Productivity auf den Punkt bringt.
Damit der Umstieg auf eine solche Alternative leichtfällt, könnte es jedoch schlau sein, auf keiner radikal disruptiven Idee aufzubauen, sondern an vorhandenen Traditionen und Werten anzusetzen, die bereits ein gewisses Identifikationspotential besitzen. Wie das funktionieren kann, beschreibt Michael Pollan im Artikel «Cruising The Ark of Taste» (2003) für einer Ausgabe des Magazins Mother Jones am Beispiel des Slow-Food-Movements im Piemont:
[The Slow Food Movement] took shape 17 years ago in the brain of Carlo Petrini, a left-wing Italian journalist dismayed by the opening of a McDonald’s on the Piazza di Spagna in Rome and perhaps equally dismayed by the hangdog dourness of his comrades on the left. After years of activism he had come to the conclusion that «those who suffer for others do more damage to humanity than those who enjoy themselves,» as he recently told a group of journalists. «Pleasure is a way of being at one with yourself and others.» So rather than picket McDonald’s’ new outpost in the heart of Rome, or drive a tractor through it á la José Bové, Petrini organized a group of like-minded activist-cum-sybarites to simply celebrate all those qualities that McDonald’s’ inexorable drive toward the homogenization of world taste threatens: the staunchly local, the irreplaceably unique, the leisurely and communal. His (so-very-Italian) idea was to launch a political movement conceived under the signs of pleasure and irony: Dionysus meets Dario Fo. […] He underst[ood] that the glamour that attaches to lavishly advertised global brands like McDonald’s can be effectively countered only by creating a rival form of glamour.