How Did Radicals Change The World?

 

Consider the Black Lives Matter lawn sign.
 
I still see a few in my neighborhood, but these days, they appear vestigial, remnants of a moment. And every time I pass one, my feelings are mixed: There’s pride that a movement turned the country toward the festering truth of racism’s persistence, but then there’s another thought, about the ease with which that sign was planted and the similar ease with which it was then ignored.
 
So many social movements, from Occupy Wall Street to #MeToo, can feel like this now: They streak through, trailing fire and leaving an aura of heightened sensitivity in the places they burned before vanishing almost as suddenly as they appeared.
 
Visibility and attention, and even a lively cultural conversation, are one thing. Actually mustering the power to fundamentally rearrange society or politics — that is something else. And though activists are good at achieving the former, they often seem stuck when it comes to the latter.
 
Saul Alinsky, the famed community organizer who wrote “Rules for Radicals,” had a useful metaphor: For a revolution to be successful, he argued, it has to follow the three-act structure of a play. The first act establishes the characters and the plot, the second act sharpens the conflict, and in the third act, “good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution.” From women’s suffrage to the midcentury civil rights struggle, movements mastered this narrative, leaving a permanent mark on society. But by the early 1970s, Alinsky had started to worry that overeager revolutionaries were jumping straight to that third act — a losing proposition.
 
Those first acts matter because that’s where activists hammer out ideology, define goals, set strategy and build lasting identity and solidarity. It’s also where the essential work of organizing occurs.
 
If skipping over these steps seems especially tempting today, it’s because the tools are available to do so. Social media has given everyone extremely effective bullhorns that can call people to the streets for that presumed final battle. As a result, it has also set the metabolism of the movements that are supposed to reshape our world, making them quick and loud and full of emotional release.
 
The question is how to create the conditions those first two acts demand: the closeness and heat and passionate whispering. I’ve spent the past few years scavenging through the predigital past for the tools social movements used when they weren’t able to amplify their messages, when they had only their ideas and goals, and needed to both expand their reach and refine their strategy. History is not monolithic, of course, but I emerged from this search with a deeper understanding of what sort of medium helps a radical idea grow.
 
The seemingly boring pen-and-paper petition is a perfect example.
 
Almost 200 years ago, in England, the right to vote was the domain of property owners and the landed gentry — about one in six men. (No one was even talking about women yet.) At the same time, the working class was increasingly frustrated with the horrid living conditions brought on by industrialization. With no political recourse, workers built a movement that became known as Chartism and had a simple objective: using the right to petition the crown and Parliament to demand representation.
 
Chartism encouraged the working class to direct its energy toward gathering as many signatures as possible. This was a medium with almost zero cost. “Wherever there is a halfpenny sheet of paper, a pen and a few drops of ink, there are the materials for a petition,” wrote one Chartist. But the act of picking up these materials inspired solidarity — among those who worked with rulers to draw up the sheets by hand, went door to door to canvass, sneaked onto factory floors or set up tables in busy marketplaces.
 
When a Chartist activist had to argue his case, he was reinforcing his own beliefs, talking himself into deeper commitment while convincing others. And for the deliberating worker who finally signed, this was a pledge taken.
 

In the summer of 1839, more than 1.25 million signatures had been gathered on a scroll that stretched some three miles long and was delivered to the government, where the Chartists were quite literally laughed out the door. But by then, a new constituency had been born. A whole world of associations and a new politics spun out from the talking and signing. More petitions followed, until, 30 years later, working men were finally allowed to begin participating in democracy.
 
The history of social and political change is full of such analog but nevertheless interactive media, like petitions, that helped guide new ideas and identities into existence — from the letters that helped ferment the scientific revolution in the 17th century to samizdat in the Soviet underground, which kept alive a shadow civil society, to the staple-bound zines of the early 1990s, where the style and sentiment of third-wave feminism first flourished. A favorite story of mine comes from the British colony of the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana) in the 1930s.
 
Educated Africans living in the colony, incensed at their subjugated status, needed a place to express their desire for independence and to begin hashing out what a national identity freed of British rule might even look like. The African Morning Post became such a forum. This was more of a message board than the one-way conveyor of information we think of as a newspaper. The pages were mostly filled with contributions from readers. Nnamdi Azikiwe, a Nigerian recently returned to the continent who became its editor, imagined it as a place for conversation, where Accra’s literate population could come together.
 
At the center of the paper was “Grumblers’ Row,” letters from readers, intended for debate and complaint. The quality of the writing here was loose and unguarded. Almost all submissions were anonymous or pseudonymous (attributed to portentous names like A. Native or ridiculous ones like Lobster). This gave people a chance to speak their mind and to test out higher degrees of daring. The arguing allowed them to peek over the dividers of tribe and establish new allegiances — they expressed their difference but did so on the same page, creating a new sort of African public sphere and helping lay the groundwork for independence.
 
What connects these newspapers to petitions to samizdat to zines is the way each helped shape the movement that was incubating.
 
On first glance, these may seem to resemble pre-internet social media. But they were different in fundamental ways: These forms of communication demanded patience, took time to produce and time to transmit. They slowed things down, favoring an incremental accumulation of knowledge and connection. They also lent coherence, a way for scattered ideologies and feelings to be shaped into a single compellingly new perspective. They led to the sorts of conversations that strengthened identity and solidarity, that allowed for both imagining and arguing together, moving toward shared objectives. And, maybe most important, the activists and dissidents and thinkers who used these tools were in control of them. They created the platforms — and by creating them, they could set their parameters and make sure they served their ends.
  
Intensity and intimacy and privacy can, of course, be found online today. Just peek into a Signal group or a Discord chat room. But we need to recognize the importance of this sort of huddling rather than reflexively assuming it is always put to nefarious ends — imagining, as some do, that only pornographers and white supremacists would see value in seclusion.
 
There is no switching off the internet. But we can better appreciate, as we increasingly do in our personal lives, that where we talk can affect how we talk. This is doubly true for the making of change, which needs solid foundations to avoid eventual crumbling. For the vanguards of the present dreaming up new ways to fight global warming or Black Lives Matter activists seeking alternatives to policing as we know it, this is an essential point: that the shape and extent of the change they seek depend as much on what tools they use as it does on their own will and hunger.
 
These activists need spaces to come together in the quiet when revolutions are only impassioned conversations among the aggrieved and dreaming. Because without those spaces, we risk a future in which the possibility of new realities will remain just beyond our grasp.
 
Gal Beckerman (@galbeckerman) is the author of “The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas,” from which this essay is adapted.
 
Radical Ideas Need Quiet Spaces. By Gal Beckerman. The New York Times, February 10, 2022.

Penguin

Gal Beckerman on Looking to the Past to Help Us Imagine a Different Future.
 
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.
In this episode, Andrew is joined by Gal Beckerman, the author of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas.
 
LitHub, February 17, 2022

Real change takes time. "People don't just cut off the king's head," Gal Beckerman begins "The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Rise of Radical Ideas." Released this month by Crown, Beckerman's new book notes that while the public is riveted by images of a newly ignited social movement — "the adrenaline, the tear gas… a man standing up to a tank" — that's only the third act in a much longer play, most of which has already taken place offstage.
 
Throughout history, movements that have transformed societies, overthrown governments and beheaded kings, Beckerman writes, started with a lot of talk. It just was not the sort of talk we have today.
 
"The Quiet Before" — which befittingly starts quietly, with the tale of a 17th century French astronomer using an exhaustive letter-writing campaign to stage a scientific experiment in the days before capital-S science — at first seems like a Big Idea book, threading together obscure parcels of history into a grand theory of today. But what distinguishes Beckerman's latest (he's also the author of the lauded 2010 history "When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry") is that it has heart and purpose.
 
It's a book born out of disappointment. The promise of liberatory movements like Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter —mass movements capable of taking immediate action thanks to the unprecedented outreach of social media — was undermined by the very tool that enabled their rise. Compared to slow-cooked, pre-internet movements, both good and evil — the smuggled samizdat writings through which Soviet dissidents imagined a post-authoritarian world into being, or the obscure Italian Futurist journals in which a band of proto-fascists laid the groundwork for Mussolini — today's revolutionary movements are starving amid plenty, able to talk to the whole world, but not, or at least not effectively, with each other.
 
Beckerman has worked on this book, off and on, for a decade, including a years-long pause to pursue a PhD in media studies to inform his suspicion that, in medium-is-the-message fashion, the way we talk online today is making it hard to make real change. The book that's resulted is sweeping in its scope —divided into two clear sections — and in its diagnosis.
 
There's the sort of movement that happened before the internet, with the French astronomer using the medium of letters to help birth the scientific revolution, an Irish activist using mass petition-canvassing to raise class consciousness, a Ghanaian newspaperman whose open op-ed pages helped engender anti-colonialist African nationalism, and the American teens with glue sticks whose zines sparked Third Wave feminism. Then there's the after, with the ecstatic rise and tragic undoing of the Arab Spring, the stymied potential of the first iteration of Black Lives Matter, and the frightening fact that, in a world where effective progressive movement-building is often hindered more than helped by social media, the exile of white supremacists and neo-Nazis from many mainstream platforms unintentionally provided them with exactly the incubator they needed to plan their own real change. 
 
It's not all hopeless, but it is serious.
 
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
 
KJ : When I started reading, "The Quiet Before" seemed like a "Big Ideas" book. By the end, it seemed more a manifesto on organizing. How did this book come about?
 
GB : In terms of origin, I trace it back to two things that happened concurrently. One was observing the Arab Spring and the greater moment of revolutions in the early 2010s and all the triumphalism that came with this assumption that we'd been given this new form of communication with revolutionary potential and that all activists or dissidents needed was a connection to the internet to make change. It occurred to me even back then — when there was some success and people were able to go gather in the streets at larger numbers and with greater speed than ever before — that there was definitely a downside to this. And then a lot of these revolutions just sort of petered out, once that that initial rush of attention and visibility went away.
 
I was thinking about that, along with the fact that my first book was partly about Soviet dissidents. I got really curious about their use of samizdat, which was this underground, self-published writing, and what it was able to do for them in terms of sustaining a community of dissidents over many, many years. It gave them a forum for developing their ideas, talking with one another, arguing for and imagining different realities for themselves. The contrast of having spent that much time with samizdat, and then seeing how limited the use was of social media for modern-day revolutions, came together to spark my interest in thinking about this, about media and change in general.
 
KJ : It was fascinating to read the chapter on samizdat considering what's happening now with Russia and Ukraine. Is there anything from that history that's applicable to what's going on now?
 
GB : The situation in Russia over the last 15 years makes me think about the nature of change and how it's often three steps forward, two steps back. It almost usually is. The dissidents in the Soviet Union wanted Western, democratic, liberal values to infuse their societies, and were beginning to create that through samizdat. They experienced moments in the '90s where they saw that seep into their societies. And then, under Putin, it's seeped back out. It should make anyone understand the nature of change and how it happens over time.
 

The other thing to be said is that samizdat came out of a world where there wasn't any other way for them to communicate with one another. They needed that underground channel because they literally couldn't use typewriters most of the time, let alone publish in any formal way. And there was something generative in what that provided for them, that kind of secluded, huddled space. These days, in Russia and everywhere else, most people, unless their ideas are so noxious that they get shoved off the big platforms, they don't look for those spaces anymore. And there's some harm that comes from that.
 
KJ : How did you find the case studies you use to illustrate the tools that are necessary for successful mobilizing, like the story of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Periesc?
 
GB : I wanted to find the footnotes I could explode out into bigger stories. And Periesc was one of those footnotes: quite literally just a mention of him and of this experiment he carried out — to use a contemporary word, this kind of crowdsourcing where he coordinated an observation of an eclipse in 1635 among dozens of observers who all sent back their data to him. And through that, he was able to figure out the correct longitude of the Mediterranean Sea, which was a sort of a subversive act at the time, when church doctrine still was pretty firm and didn't look lightly on people who were carrying out science.
 
I started to scratch the surface and found that there is this incredible store of letters that Periesc left behind — 100,000 pieces of paper and thousands and thousands of letters. He never wrote a book, but his legacy was in these letters, because they were the connective tissue among these great minds in the early 17th century who were building to the scientific revolution. Essentially, these are people who were all trying to rediscover a new relationship with nature and the power of the scientific method. I was able to go through them and the whole world opened up, of the letter as a form of communication and the role it played in the slow accretion of knowledge and of recruiting these people who he would need for this experiment, most of whom were missionaries, not inclined to carry on science, and how letters allowed him to move them towards a new way of engaging with nature. 
 
KJ : In thinking about how the medium influences the potential for organizing, your second example — of Feargus O'Connor petitioning the English government for voting rights, not just as a demonstration of mass public support but also as a means of consciousness-raising among the working class — was fascinating on its own, but also in terms of how signing petitions today is usually considered activism's cheap grace.
 
GB :
 
Like "slacktivism," yeah.
 
There were many petitions in the Chartist movement that they came up with to make their point and try to build political power. But the first one, in 1839, managed to gather just over 1.25 million signatures of working men and women whose living conditions amid industrialization were just horrid. But they had no political leverage, no political representation whatsoever. They literally couldn't vote. Only about one in six men were able to vote in England at the time. And so their recourse, which took the form of this enormous petition, was really the only thing they had. They took advantage of this loophole in British law that went back to the 14th century, that any citizen could petition the king and Parliament for a grievance. Usually, it was used for things like land disputes, but under the leadership of Feargus O'Connor, who is this charismatic, bombastic character who traveled the country rallying people, they concentrated as a class on this task of accumulating signatures. And the difference between the way we think of petitions today and then, is this was hard work—to go door to door, convince people, try to gather more and more signatures. It was risky too because there were stories of people exiled from the country for signing allegiance to a union. So all of it was dangerous, hard work.
 
 
But something that spun out of that hard work was a real sense of solidarity, community and allegiance to a cause and an actual constituency. I mean, the petition created the constituency because the work of doing it, this whole world of associations and allegiances, spun out of that.
 
That first petition failed. They brought it to Parliament in the summer of 1839 and were literally laughed out the door. But it laid the groundwork for what would be another 30 years of activism.
 
KJ : In reading the book, I was reminded of a line from a Garret Keizer essay, after the 2004 election: "Reactionary politics work well with electronic media because reaction is electric," while "Revolutionary politics have always been tied to a dogged willingness to teach." Your book seemed to echo that, but also perhaps offer an update?
 
GB : I think that theory is correct, but I think it's something that people have managed to ignore or be distracted from. It's a truth that people have been distracted from because social media provides a tool for organizers, activists and dissidents that we've never seen in human history, which is this extraordinary bullhorn, this ability to call out everybody in the streets right away at mass numbers. That's incredible. There's no denying that how useful that is. The problem is that it's so good at doing that, it kind of leads one to believe that that's all that's needed. 

 
The Arab Spring chapter, to me, is the greatest cautionary tale in this regard. Here was a coalition of people that came together through the internet, through Facebook, who eventually were able, because of that bullhorn, to take their gathering to the center of Cairo. And their sheer physical presence—a presence that the internet facilitated—brought down a dictator. But they also were so enamored with this tool they had been given that they didn't quite understand it was going to be utterly useless for them in creating the kind of political opposition they would need to build in order to really confront real political power. And in fact, it was going to have the opposite effect, which is the tearing-down aspect of social media we all know so well, to completely undermine their efforts to find consensus, to learn, to teach each other, to do all that work I think progressive causes really, really need and want to be able to do.
 
That quote still remains a truth. But it's one that progressives have not fully understood when it comes to the tools they're actually using to make change.
 
 
KJ : Whereas the right has?
 
GB : The right kind of has!
 
The interesting thing about the right is that, in the extreme right, they have been forced into smaller and smaller holes, because so much of what they're doing is seen as not legitimate in the greater public sphere of Facebook and Twitter. So they have to find smaller and smaller holes, and in those holes are able to actually do some of the work that I wish that the progressive causes would get a chance to do. They're strategizing. They're refining their ideas. They're thinking about how best to bring them out into the world.
 
KJ : In your chapter about the Italian Futurists, you describe how their culture of in-fighting helped build a proto-fascist revolutionary movement. How does that compare to the jockeying on social media today, which you see as a lot more damaging to movements?
 
GB : I think the element we have today is it's so public and performative. There is always the worry of shame. I'm not going to put out my most interesting idea or one that is not fully developed yet because I might be laughed at somehow or thought not worthy of participating. Among the Futurists there was this role of egging one another on, arguing with each other and debating, and that is clearly an essential role that a movement needs, especially as it's nascent, as it's trying to figure out what it wants and what it is. There has to be some space where people can argue among themselves — and among themselves being a critical part, because you want a degree of allegiance or solidarity before you enter. But once in the room, you want to allow for the push-and-pull that actually creates more solid movements and ideas, that can actually move out into the world and start recruiting more and more adherents.
 
KJ : Related to that, how does today's news cycle, and its intensification on social media, affect movement building? I'm thinking in particular of how "movement moments" — whether BLM, #MeToo, or others — quickly lead to a secondary news cycle of accusations that they've "gone too far."
 
GB : The outside glare definitely plays a role in limiting the capacity of movements because everything is so performative and it's all towards the purpose of gaining followers or visibility. Then you're trapped in this loop of needing to see that continue. The saddest example I have of this is in talking with the Black Lives Matter activists who I profiled in the book, from the 2015-2016 iteration of BLM around Ferguson. The movement had some visibility and then somehow they got trapped in this need for extremely brutal videos of police violence on Black men. The media began to depend on those videos, too, as a way of keeping any attention on this movement. And all the work that needed to happen to actually figure out how to turn that visibility into concrete change on the ground was kind of swept away once Donald Trump came to power in 2016. It sucked all the oxygen out of social media. They lost their only means to get their message out. So there can be real harm when you're depending on those cycles, on those booms and busts, as the lifeblood of your movements.
 
KJ : How should we think about these questions in the so-called post-truth era, when a lot of people on the right are developing fleshed-out theories, built in small movement communities, but which amount to QAnon or antisemitic conspiracy theories about "Cultural Marxism"?
 
GB : It's quite challenging, what's happening in our public sphere today. I'm trying to make an argument that we can't cede the ground to the people coming up with false, antisocial narratives. We need the spaces and the opportunities to counter those. The tools out there need to be seen as neutral, and we need the variety of them to be picked up not just by these forces. But if people look at the internet and say all I need to do to make progressive change is have a hashtag go viral, and against that you have groups of people figuring out how to allow their dark conspiratorial visions to ferment more fully in other places? From my perspective, we need that ferment to happen for the voices that will counter them. 
 
KJ : What prospects do you see for returning to a more productive form of organizing, and is there a role for social media within that?
 
GB : I don't really see the book as a cyber-pessimistic, "we should turn off the internet" book. My point is more about activists' sense of self-awareness to know when the bullhorn is the appropriate tool to use and to understand that there are other means of communication.
 
I am actually hopeful. People have become aware of the negative impacts of social media on their personal lives — how they make us distracted and frazzled and limit the kinds of conversations we can have or push them in certain directions — or even when it comes to thinking about democracy, and how we've become so much more divided and outrage has been exacerbated through those forms of communication. There's much more awareness of it now than when I started working on this project. The problem is that often doesn't extend to the way we think about social and political change. We still have this weirdly romantic idea about what that hashtag-gone-viral can achieve. That's where I want people to stop and understand how they are contorting themselves to fit the metabolism of social media when it comes to movement and building towards new ideas.
 
But there are places. It's not much of a mystery — communicating through an email chain or a DM group that only has 10 or 12 people or through an encrypted app like Signal or Telegram — those can be very productive spaces and they need to work in concert with the big, public attention-grabbing ones. But my worry is the next time public attention turns towards something like the question of police reform, I want to make sure that those more refined, strategic, pinpointed, even wonky local ideas, for how to turn that attention into real concrete change, that that's happened. That there has been a kind of quiet before.
 
Less than social media: How hashtags have hindered progressive movements — and fueled the right. By Kathryn Joyce. Salon, February 23, 2022. 

Its title notwithstanding, “The Quiet Before” crackles with noise: Chartist orators whipping up support for suffrage in early-Victorian Britain; competing Futurist manifesto-shouters in a Florence theater in 1913, the evening concluding with a light bulb smashing against the side of Filippo Marinetti’s face “as he tried to read out a political statement”; white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville in August 2017. But Gal Beckerman’s elegantly argued and exuberantly narrated book also features quieter groups whose conversations, he demonstrates, eat away at the underpinnings of established authority: micro-commonwealths of letter-writing scientific observers in the 17th century; a West African newspaper in the 1930s constituted almost entirely from readers’ contributions; Deadheads dialing in to an early chat group lodged on a VAX computer in mid-1980s California. Great sea changes in politics and culture, Beckerman claims, would never have happened but for the creation of these kinds of collaborative communities operating under the radar of establishment scrutiny.

 
The idea that webs of allegiance, bonded by the conviction that one day their minority will become a majority, have brought about epochal change is not a new insight. Studies of the “Republic of Letters,” populated by enemies of religious and state absolutism in the late 17th century, go back at least to Paul Hazard’s “The Crisis of the European Mind,” and Franco Venturi’s 1960 “Roots of Revolution” mapped the perfervid world of 19th-century Russian populists. Robert Darnton, acknowledged by Beckerman, has done a lifetime’s brilliant work on the sociability of prerevolutionary French writers. More recently, the power of “horizontal” networks to disrupt “vertical” hierarchies is the core of Niall Ferguson’s excellent “The Square and the Tower.” What gives Beckerman’s book its appealing freshness is his focus on the vehicles of communication themselves: the letter chains of the 17th century (though, oddly, not the arguably more decisive circulation of printed texts); mass petitioning in 19th-century Britain; the manifesto fetish of the modernist avant-gardes; and, in a particularly gripping chapter, the underground samizdat The Chronicle of Current Events in the late-1960s Soviet Union. Informed by our obsession with social media, Beckerman’s book is a lot more than a trip through the genealogy of Twitter and Facebook.
 
This is not least because his episodes are humanized by vivid biographical vignettes of the founders, each framed at a critical moment in their outreach to the potentially like-minded. Some of their efforts are winningly, naïvely ambitious, as when the natural philosopher Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc recruits a chain of experimental collaborators, scattered in locations as far apart as Syria and Quebec, to observe, on the same night, the phases of lunar eclipse, thus helping him to establish longitude; or when Natalya Gorbanevskaya, of The Chronicle of Current Events, blows the oxygen of reported truth into the fog of official lies; or when Wael Ghonim, a marketing director for Google, horrified by the savage police murder of a computer programmer, founds the “We Are All Khaled Said” web page, bringing hundreds of thousands of followers into indignant and then insurrectionary connection.
 
As brilliant as Beckerman often is on the makers and sustainers of these networks, he is less satisfying on (or perhaps just less interested in) the eventual upshot of their efforts, doubtless because so many of them ended in frustration, co-optation or defeat. Tahrir Square begat an elected government of the Muslim Brotherhood that in turn triggered the same military dictatorship from which the demonstrators sought to liberate Egypt. The great Chartist petition of 1839 for household suffrage, compromised by a violent insurrection in Wales, saw its leaders convicted of high treason and either executed or transported to Australia. Feargus O’Connor, the fiery Chartist tribune (beautifully brought to life by Beckerman), remained to fight on, but in 1848, with the ancient Duke of Wellington massing troops in the British capital should London rise in revolt, the great Chartist assembly on Kenington Common fizzled out in anticlimax. While the rest of Europe had revolutions, Britain had the class placebo of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
 
Bathos or tragedy often extinguished the bright hopes of brother- and sisterhood. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, urging Italians to rouse themselves from pasta-induced torpor (his Futurist Cookbook is magnificently preposterous — raw salami bathed in coffee and eau de cologne, anyone?) and commit themselves to the virile rush of war, morphs unsurprisingly into his Fascist Manifesto of 1919. Gorbanevskaya’s stirringly brave and creatively elusive defiance of state censorship ended up with her locked away in a monstrous psychiatric hospital. In the 1930s, when he edited The African Morning Post, Nnamdi Azikiwe sketched out a Pan-African solidarity meant to transcend tribal divisions that he believed were cynically perpetuated by British colonialism. But the Nigeria to which he returned, as president, would collapse into atrocious civil war when his own people, the Igbo, seceded to form the Republic of Biafra.
 
None of this is surprising, since almost all of the networkers have been trapped in a contradiction integral to their modus operandi. In their formative years they needed a degree of invisibility. They needed, at least, to be inaudible to the listening posts of the establishment. On the other hand, what was the entire point of the exercise if they were to stay that way? Their mission, ultimately, was to bring about an irreversible alteration; to turn a half-hidden counterculture into the accepted norm. Inevitably, then, there came a moment when the networkers held their breath, crossed their fingers, bugle-called the troops and stepped into the glare of the public arena. Which was also the moment when authority pounced or exploited divisions between militant activists and pragmatic strategists, managing to peel away some of the following.
 
There have been happy exceptions. The scientific revolution, grounded in empirical observation liberated from dogma or any authority derived from purported revelation, would eventually prevail, although a daily dose of Fox News and the social media ravings of conspiracy theorists might give one pause to wonder how secure that victory has been. Reasonably, Beckerman (an editor at The New York Times Book Review until earlier this year) rejects the notion that his subjects should be judged by any immediate and permanent change in state and society; instead he characterizes them as relay runners, handing on the baton to the next cohort. And in any case, his book (white supremacists aside) is full of genuinely moving scenes of prelapsarian innocence, catching the networkers in the bright dawn of their community-making. Of course it’s easy to raise a knowing eyebrow at the faith that John Coate, the hippie hired in 1986 to manage the chat exchange called WELL, had that “communication itself could be redemptive … the key to self-government,” as Beckerman puts it, and marvel at the optimism with which the site moderated its conversations through a “host.” But cynicism can be misplaced. Hyperventilated shrieking and venomous trolling get noticed as their mad projectors fully intend. But out of deafened earshot, there is indeed, as Beckerman’s title implies, a realm of relative quiet, where millions of connections are daily wired together, and which offer to conversationalists thoughtful rather than thoughtless provocations, solid sources of knowledge rather than fathomless wells of ignorance, and even, every so often, shots of pleasurable illumination.
 
 
Radicals Used to Make Change. Then Social Media Happened. By Simon Schama. The New YorkTimes, February 12, 2022.

If you’ve been exposed to any political-theory nerds recently—at your local used bookstore, or in an adjunct-faculty lounge, or, more likely, on the Internet—then you might recognize the words of the Italian Marxist dissident Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” At least, that was how Pete Buttigieg’s dad translated it. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek rendered it more loosely, and more memorably: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

 
This sentence appears on T-shirts; it makes for a handy epigraph; it is invoked in the title of at least one book and at least one Substack, and in too many Twitter bios to count. And no wonder. Gramsci was writing in 1930—his monster was Mussolini, whose regime had put him in prison—but the concept hardly sounds dated. An interregnum, for Gramsci, is a “crisis of authority,” a volatile period when “the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe.” If you doubt that we’re in such a period now, you should spend a few hours watching YouTube. We’re a divided nation, but pretty much everyone acknowledges the morbid symptoms. There is less agreement on what sort of ideological paradigm will be born next, or how. Gestational metaphors are only so useful. We know where babies come from. We’re less clear on what changes the world.
 
In his wide-ranging, subtly ambitious new book, “The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas,” Gal Beckerman submits that the answer, or one of them, is “a group of people talking.” The people he has in mind are not party grandees in smoke-filled rooms. They’re vanguardists, visionaries, fanatics, riot grrrls—some of them political dissidents, some of them revolutionaries in the realms of art or thought. In particular, Beckerman is concerned with how these people talk—through public manifestos, through onionskin samizdat, through telegrams, through Telegram—and how the medium affects the efficacy of the message.
 
By day, Beckerman is an editor at The Atlantic. On nights and weekends, he’s a student of communication theory, and not a casual one—at some point during the years that he spent researching this book, he also got a Ph.D. in the subject. He wears his expertise lightly, relying on brisk narratives interspersed with mostly familiar citations (Marshall McLuhan, a passing allusion to Habermas), presumably saving the heavier stuff (Friedrich Kittler, a more-than-passing analysis of Habermas) for his dissertation. Like Gramsci, Beckerman uses his share of reproductive metaphors (“the birth of the scientific revolution,” “seeding a resistance”) as he considers how old paradigms give way to new ones. He leads us on a magical history tour—Aix-en-Provence in 1635, Moscow in 1968, Sausalito in 1985—showing but not telling, patiently piling up details.
 
A chapter about the alt-right bears the dateline “Charlottesville, 2017,” but it mostly recounts the run-up to the Charlottesville rally—the motley process, by turns pathetic and menacing, by which the event was organized, on the semi-private chat service Discord. A chapter about the early days of covid-19 focusses on a group of public-health experts who formed an ad hoc e-mail chain, half-jokingly using the subject line “Red Dawn,” as they ran numbers, gut-checked hypotheses, and freaked out when the federal government ignored their warnings. These vignettes don’t always yield generalizable principles. Would there have been fewer white-supremacist rallies if Discord had never existed? The next time there’s a global pandemic, should we encourage our shrewdest researchers to communicate via Slack rather than e-mail? “The Quiet Before” doesn’t aim to provide us with one weird trick that explains all of history. It identifies a few notable discursive communities and brings us inside them, deriving its impact not from categorical takeaways but from the more ambiguous power of narrative.
 
According to Beckerman, change “happens slowly at first. People don’t just cut off the king’s head. For years and even decades they gossip about him, imagine him naked and ridiculous, demote him from deity to fallible mortal (with a head, which can be cut).” He doesn’t deny the importance of the pitchforks and the guillotine; rather, as his book’s title indicates, he assumes that we already pay enough attention to the loud stuff. Better to begin at the beginning, and in the beginning was the word. Following the ur-community organizer Saul Alinsky, he likens a revolution to a three-act play. The climax happens in the third act, but you won’t really understand it if you’ve just wandered into the theatre after the second intermission. “It’s in those first two acts,” Beckerman writes, “where incubation occurs.”
 
In 1934, when Nnamdi Azikiwe’s ship came into Accra harbor, the city was the capital of the Gold Coast, a British colony. Azikiwe, known as Zik, was not yet thirty, but he had already dedicated his life to the cause of eradicating imperialism from the continent. He had a long way to go. There was no landing dock at the harbor, so passengers were taken to shore in little surfboats and made to disembark in hierarchical order: European “masters” first, Africans last. When Zik protested, a boatman, a member of the Ga ethnic group, shot him a look. It wasn’t a look of solidarity.
 
Nigerian by birth, Zik had just spent nine years in the United States, where he had studied under Ralph Bunche and Alain Locke at Howard, befriended Langston Hughes, learned to play American football, and become an outspoken African nationalist. “I am not returning to stir my people blindly to mutiny,” he wrote in a letter to a political mentor in Nigeria. “I am returning semi-Gandhic, semi-Garveyistic, non-chauvinistic, semi-ethnocentric, with a love for everyone.” Even for an exceptionally dynamic young man, that was a lot of “semi”s. What do you do when you’re eager to promulgate a set of ideas that seem urgently necessary to you but impractical to most everyone else? One thing you can do, if it’s 1934, is start a newspaper.

 
Azikiwe’s paper was named the African Morning Post. Its slogan was “Independent in all things and neutral in nothing affecting the destiny of Africa.” He wrote a daily column called “Inside Stuff,” using Zik as his byline. “African society,” he wrote, “must be made democratic. It must consist of Africans and human beings, not just Fanti or Ga, Temne or Mende, Yoruba or Ibo.” He also edited the paper, running international stories from the Reuters wire, and reserving the middle of the paper for a motley section he called “Grumblers’ Row.” The grumblers were the paper’s readers, who wrote in with letters to the editor, personal announcements, and short opinion pieces, often using pseudonyms (Lobster, Gump, A. Native), debating topics as mundane as whether to invest in life insurance and as weighty as “What Is Civilization?” Opening up the paper in this way—making it “more a message board than a one-way conveyor of information,” as Beckerman puts it—served an immediate economic purpose: the old Tom Sawyer trick, later adopted by Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, of turning consumers into unpaid content producers. It also advanced Zik’s larger mission, Beckerman argues: “Zik clearly chose submissions to bolster his own project of raising up a New African.” Zik once wrote that “it took a Mazzini to revolutionize the thinking of the Italians, and a Cavour to plan the future of the Italian nationalism, before a Garibaldi came on to the scene as a man of action.” Mazzini, too, founded a publication.
 
Beckerman, to his credit, resists interrupting Zik’s coming-of-age tale with overbroad, underbaked maxims about the laws of social progress. But he did choose Zik’s story, ostensibly as a representative one, which raises the question of precisely what it represents. In the nineteen-thirties, an intellectual community of proto-nationalists formed around the African Morning Post. More than two decades later, an independence movement forced the British to leave the Gold Coast, which became the free nation of Ghana. Those things happened, in that order. Yet chronology doesn’t even prove correlation, much less causation. You could tell a story that makes the African Morning Post look marginal: in 1936, the paper had only ten thousand subscribers, and most residents of the Gold Coast couldn’t read English anyway. Or you could make it look essential: after publishing a particularly inflammatory anti-colonialist article, Zik was tried for sedition and miraculously acquitted, cementing his status as a folk hero and galvanizing the next generation of independence activists (among them Kwame Nkrumah, who would become Ghana’s first head of state). You could emphasize the material conditions that prepared the ground for revolution, or you could emphasize the discursive conditions. Beckerman, a believer in the power of ideas, tells the latter kind of story.
 
And not only about Ghanaian independence. Recounting the halting, muddled progress of the Chartists, a movement promoting near-universal male suffrage in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, he focusses on the movement’s petitions and pamphlets, not on the surrounding political economy. His account of the interplay between Futurism and Fascism in early-twentieth-century Italy is primarily about poems and manifestos and counter-manifestos, as opposed to, say, the March on Rome or the Triple Alliance. Some readers might wish that Beckerman had spilled less ink on ink and more on structural factors—guns, germs, steel, labor laws, the price of butter. Others may want more comparative history. We follow the Chartists as they collect millions of signatures and nevertheless fail to achieve their goals. We hear nothing about, say, Prussia, which, during the same period, began converting itself from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional republic—the result of violent uprisings, not petitions. In 1960, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and fourteen other African countries won their independence. They all had their own political dynamics and radical ideas, but they did not all have a Grumblers’ Row.
 
Beckerman defines both “incubation” and “radical ideas” broadly, allowing himself a degree of narrative freedom that can be both thrilling and unmooring. We notice wisps of implicit connection everywhere, across vast expanses of time and space—between, say, Mina Loy, a feminist poet in nineteen-tens Florence, and the riot grrrls, young feminist punks in early-nineties Washington State. Was Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” a source of inspiration for such homemade zines as Riot Grrrl and Jigsaw and Fuck Me Blind and I 🖤 Amy Carter? Or, given that Loy’s manifesto remained unpublished until 1982, is Beckerman positing a more indirect course of transmission? “This is how it moves, a radical idea incubated in one place and time revealed nearly a hundred years later,” he writes. The scholar Rachel Greenwald Smith, in her incisive new book “On Compromise,” pores over the Riot Grrrl archive and concludes, provocatively, that the subculture could have left a bigger mark on history if not for its “residual you do you liberalism.” If Beckerman takes a similarly stark view—for example, that there would never have been a riot-grrrl subculture if there hadn’t been a Mina Loy—he doesn’t come out and say so.
 
What we lose in conclusiveness we gain in cinematic momentum. We leave Zik as we found him, in Accra harbor. One hopes that he’s got a bigger boat this time, because we learn that he’s departing with “a printing press on board.” Next comes an audacious flash-forward, spanning three decades in two sentences: “He was headed to Lagos, where he would start a new newspaper, the West African Pilot, hoping to continue what he’d begun. It would take another quarter century before Nigeria would declare its independence from Britain, and when it did, Nnamdi Azikiwe was sworn in as the republic’s first president.” Not too shabby, as third acts go. Azikiwe would go on to have a fourth act, and a fifth—he was ousted by a violent coup in 1966, earned a lot of enemies by switching allegiances during the Biafran War, and then ran for office a few more times, unsuccessfully—but most of this takes place offstage. What lights the revolutionary spark is one matter; what happens after the flame catches is quite another.
 
“The Quiet Before” is arranged chronologically, which means that about halfway through, we’re introduced to a new main character: the Internet. The question now becomes why the same qualities that seemed romantic and liberatory in an underground zine or a small newspaper might strike us as frivolous, or even sinister, when applied to a WhatsApp thread or a Discord server. Surely part of the explanation is that, these days, we tend to associate the former with outcomes we like (say, the end of British imperialism) and the latter with potential developments we find unsettling (say, the beginning of the end of American democracy). But that’s a vibe, not an argument. It can’t be that simple. Can it?
 
This part of the book begins in Egypt, in 2010, by now a familiar starting point for cautionary tales about the promise and peril of online organizing. Hosni Mubarak has ruled as an autocrat for almost three decades, but embers of change are starting to glow, especially on the Internet. Security forces in Alexandria have accosted a young man named Khaled Said, pulling him out of a cybercafé and beating him to death in the street. In the past, given Mubarak’s grip on state media, this is the sort of outrage that would have faded quickly. This time, though, gory pictures of Said’s mangled body start to circulate online, and an anonymous dissident starts a Facebook page called We Are All Khaled Said. The page gains twenty thousand subscribers, then two hundred and fifty thousand. Anonymous posters use the page to organize in-person demonstrations, such as silent vigils. Soon people start calling for more radical tactics. Others worry that brash, uncoördinated demonstrations could become targets for state repression, but, given the mechanics of social media, this argument doesn’t stand a chance. The Facebook page, like all Facebook pages, is geared toward growth, momentum, escalation—“a restless place,” Beckerman writes, where a “desire for intensity and action could be satisfied.” In January, 2011, the administrator gives in, scheduling a more confrontational event, to take place later that month in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. He calls it “January 25: Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption, and Unemployment.”
 
Everyone knows what happened next: incredibly, the demonstration succeeded. With shocking speed, and without planting any bombs, the Tahrir Square protesters got the dictator to leave town. The administrator of the Facebook page was revealed to be Wael Ghonim, a twenty-nine-year-old marketing director at Google. Within a few months, he was jailed, released, elevated to international fame, granted a Profile in Courage Award, and nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
 
If this all seemed too good to be true—the Easy-Bake Oven version of regime change—most people still went along with it, at least for a time. Several democratic uprisings—in Tunis, in Cairo, in Kyiv—were sometimes referred to as “Facebook revolutions,” even though there was also a surprisingly successful democracy movement in Myanmar, where almost no one had Internet access, and a failed one in Russia, where more than half of the population did. During the Cairo uprising, President Barack Obama reportedly told one of his aides, “What I want is for the kids on the street to win and for the Google guy to become President. What I think is that this is going to be long and hard.” After the uprising succeeded, Obama stopped emphasizing the second half of the sentiment. “It’s no coincidence that one of the leaders of Tahrir Square was an executive for Google,” he said, in a May, 2011, speech at the State Department. He pledged to “support open access to the Internet,” reasoning that, “in the twenty-first century, information is power, the truth cannot be hidden, and the legitimacy of governments will ultimately depend on active and informed citizens.”
 
Again, we know what happened after that, although here’s where the popular recollection starts to grow dimmer, and grimmer. The legitimacy of the post-Mubarak state disintegrated quickly. Egypt’s first freely elected President was not the Google guy. It was Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was deposed, about a year later, in a military coup. The leader of that coup, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has held office ever since, and his reign has been even more ruthless than Mubarak’s. Social media is still a potent force in Egypt, only these days it’s used not to plan mass protests but to entrap dissidents and send them to jail. In 2019, the cybersecurity firm Check Point analyzed an “extremely sophisticated” phishing scheme that involved using Google, Microsoft Outlook, and Facebook to surveil Egyptian activists. The scheme was apparently carried out by Sisi’s government.
 
If an idea is an egg that can take a century to hatch, like something out of “Jurassic Park,” then it’s hard to know what to make of anything that has emerged in the past few decades, including the Internet. Some of it has been bad (e.g., the white-supremacist demonstrations in 2017), some of it has been good (e.g., the anti-police-brutality demonstrations in the summer of 2020), and it’s hard to say, with any systematic confidence, what makes good outcomes more likely to emerge than bad ones. Should we just throw up our hands and conclude, as Zhou Enlai didn’t quite say when Henry Kissinger asked him to assess the effects of the French Revolution, that it’s still too early to tell?
 
A contemporary version of Margaret Thatcher’s quip about society might be that there is no such thing as the Internet, only individual sites and services. As much as we might long for a universal theory that can explain, once and for all, what “social media” is doing to “the discourse,” we tend to learn more by sticking to specifics. “The Quiet Before” is at its best when it gives us glimpses into discursive communities without imputing to them more than it is possible to know. Beckerman’s most direct piece of advice to digital activists is an appropriately narrow one: to look closely at the various tools on offer, and to “be thoughtful about which one they pick up.”
 
Maybe a Facebook revolution really is like an Easy-Bake Oven—an impressively quick and inexpensive way to generate heat, but one that often churns out brittle, empty calories. Zeynep Tufekci, in her 2017 book “Twitter and Tear Gas,” also tells the story of Tahrir Square and its aftermath, alongside those of other movements that came together in similar ways (the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, Occupy Wall Street). In each case, she argues, the strengths of distributed online organizing are impossible to disentangle from the weaknesses. Tufekci, a journalist and sociologist (and a member of Beckerman’s dissertation committee), reaches her conclusion by drawing on “peer-reviewed quantitative analyses of a survey of more than a thousand participants in Cairo’s Tahrir Square protests,” among other pieces of empirical data. Beckerman takes the opposite approach, finding a representative face in the crowd and zooming in.

 
Tufekci tracks Ghonim until a few years after the uprising, then lets him go; Beckerman stays with him. In 2014, Ghonim and two friends launched a startup, Parlio, with the goal of building a social-media platform that would incentivize “thoughtfulness and civility and substance.” It didn’t take. The following year, Ghonim gave a ted Talk, in Geneva, in which he disavowed his techno-utopian zeal. “I was wrong,” he said. “The Arab Spring revealed social media’s greatest potential, but it also exposed its greatest shortcomings.” By 2019, Ghonim had launched a personal YouTube channel, where he posted “dozens of increasingly bizarre clips” daily—confessing to marital infidelity, shaving off his eyebrows, “laughing maniacally or dancing.” His friends feared that he was losing it. Beckerman, who had interviewed Ghonim several times in the past, tried to get in touch, but Ghonim lashed out at him: “Do you think I’m an attention whore, like the attention whores who are always driving for any kind of attention?”
 
If anyone personifies the Egyptian resistance these days, Beckerman contends, it is not Ghonim but another dissident, Alaa Abd El Fattah, who is less Internet famous, in part because he has been incarcerated for much of the past decade. In 2019, while he was briefly out of prison, El Fattah sat for a long video interview in an apartment, reclining against a row of colorful pillows while a shaft of sunlight slowly receded on a white wall behind him. The democracy movement in Egypt had experienced “a regression,” he said. “It’s not the fault of Egyptians; it’s the medium they are using. You’re just swallowed up by Facebook. You have emotional discussions with your friends, because Facebook is made for that. This is a trap.”
 
A Facebook post is not an emergent property of the will of the people or the spirit of history. It’s a piece of content, subject to a set of contingent and carefully crafted attentional incentives, and those incentives were designed primarily with one thing in mind: the continued expansion of Facebook. “It just gets you very emotional,” Wael Ghonim said during a “Frontline” interview about Facebook, in 2018. “It basically hacks into your human emotional self.” There’s nothing inherently pernicious about an online movement, just as there’s nothing inherently noble about a small newspaper. The motto of the African Morning Post (“Independent in all things and neutral in nothing affecting the destiny of Africa”) echoed another motto (“Independent in Everything, Neutral in Nothing”) that had been used by several nineteenth-century American newspapers, including the Countryman, a Confederate paper published in Georgia during the Civil War. A newspaper, like any other entity, can be on the right side of history or the wrong side. But at least Zik’s paper was actually Zik’s paper. Ghonim’s Facebook page seemed to belong to him, but in truth it always belonged to Mark Zuckerberg.
 
 
From Conversation to Revolution. By  Andrew Marantz. The New Yorker, February 16, 2022. 

Gal Beckerman has written a book about process as if process were an end in itself. Because it usually is.

 
“The Quiet Before” is a quirky, delightful mix of a book that explores the intellectual impulses behind a series of cultural shifts and political revolts occurring across continents and centuries. Beckerman scours scientific correspondence from Europe’s Republic of Letters, parses Twitter debates by Black Lives Matter Twitter activists, tracks Soviet-era samizdat writings and revels in 1990s Riot Grrrl zines, to name just a few of the movements and moments he considers, delving into the principles and grievances behind them all. However, his focus is on how these movements communicated — the ways that writers and intellectuals shared, argued and refined ideas before inflicting them on the world. “If we rewind to the instant when a solid block of shared reality is first cracked,” Beckerman writes, “it’s usually a group of people talking.” Talking does not just reflect thinking, but shapes it, too, or — to use a favorite Beckerman word — incubates it. He is like a guy who pokes his head out of the car window not to feel the breeze through his hair, but to look down and examine the traffic lines.
 
Beckerman prefers “slow thinking” — the steady accumulation and dissemination of knowledge that begins with “the friction of two people trading ideas” — and worries that modern social causes, driven by hyperactive social-media channels, move too fast to last. Activists using Facebook propelled the Arab Spring protests that toppled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, for instance, but the medium “proved useless when it came to organizing themselves into a true opposition.” The notion is not novel — Zeynep Tufekci’s outstanding 2017 book, “Twitter and Tear Gas,” which Beckerman cites, developed similar arguments — but Beckerman’s historically expansive case studies and engaging storytelling make “The Quiet Before” distinct and worthwhile. Of course, the quiet isn’t always so hushed, the before and after life of an idea are not always clearly marked, and the thinking rarely seems leisurely to those engaged in it.
 
Beckerman, a senior editor at the Atlantic magazine, identifies slow thinking in the missives of 17th-century French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peirsec, whose library of 100,000 letters attests to his side hustle as a “connector of Europe’s greatest minds.” He communicated with inventors, clergy and thinkers across the continent, collaborating on scientific projects (including a logistically insane initiative to calculate the length and width of the Mediterranean Sea by viewing an eclipse from multiple locations), instilling a sensibility of scientific inquiry and rigor among the correspondents. Letters did not simply constitute one-on-one exchanges, Beckerman emphasizes. They were “oil in the gears of idea production” or “messages carried along a stream with many tributaries.” Yes, Beckerman has a weakness for metaphors, but he shows how Peirsec’s writings circulated well beyond their original audiences, multiplying the power of his ideas.
 
Such letters are not that different, then, from the email chains ricocheting among infectious disease specialists, emergency doctors and public health officials in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Beckerman explores one chain in particular, dubbed “Red Dawn” by its creators, that offered sanctuary for experts overwhelmed by their battles with illness, misinformation and uncertainty. It was “a closed network with people they trusted,” Beckerman writes, and it allowed the participants to develop recommendations that gained favor with local officials, especially once the national guidance proved confusing. “Four hundred years after Peirsec had deployed his letters to nurture the development of the scientific method,” Beckerman observes, “there was still a need for a private space where this work could happen, where the pursuit of observable truth could proceed safely away from the centrifugal force of politicization and demagoguery.”
 
In the political space, communication has tended to be far more public and volatile. The massive petitions for expanded male suffrage by the Chartist movement in mid-19th-century Britain led to violent uprisings, while the manifestos authored by Futurist activists in pre-Fascist Italy relished the notion of a war so brutal that “it would purify the country and allow them to start from zero.” (They soon got their wish when the Great War began in 1914, and the Futurists became advocates for intervention.) Beckerman’s descriptions of the major players are memorable — Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor was “all Irish brogue and ginger muttonchops,” while Futurist ringleader Filippo Marinetti, with his handlebar mustache and bowler hat, resembled “a silent movie villain about to tie a woman to the railroad tracks.” But the author always returns to the mechanisms for transmitting ideas. For O’Connor, the value of garnering support for a petition was less about achieving its specific demands than about the work of gathering signatories, “the need to go door-to-door, to convince others, to mark in ink one’s allegiance to a cause.” And the Futurist manifestos, as outlandish as they could be (one was immodestly dubbed “The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”), offered the movement’s adherents “a place to articulate their fantasies” and to experience that “swaggering feeling that the world could be dragged, kicking and bloody, into the future.”
 
The most compelling of Beckerman’s case studies did drag the world to a new place. He lingers on the early years of Nnamdi Azikiwe — who decades later would become the first president of an independent Nigeria — when he was the daring young editor of Accra’s African Morning Post, a stridently anti-colonial newspaper powered by the written contributions of its readers. British colonial authorities arrested Azikiwe in 1935 and tried him for sedition, and his exoneration affirmed local newspapers’ “right to their public space, the small freedom to debate among themselves,” Beckerman writes. In the paper’s pages, readers and writers questioned their colonial status and their tribal divisions, igniting what Beckerman calls “those first flickers of a national identity, born of opinions rubbing against each other in ways they never had before.”
 
Similarly, Beckerman revisits the story of dissident poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the force behind the Chronicle, an underground journal detailing Soviet abuses against artists and writers. Pieced together in hiding, by word of mouth, the publication described conditions in prison camps and psychiatric institutions — of the kind in which Gorbanevskaya would be confined for periods on bogus mental-health diagnoses — and detailed the arbitrariness of Soviet courts. In their attempt at radical transparency about Soviet life, the poet and her collaborators were forerunners of the glasnost that would upend the Soviet system years later. “They were interested,” Beckerman explains, “in shattering the distinctly Soviet feeling of having two selves — one that whispered truths in private and another that was regularly called on to deny reality out loud.”
 
Beckerman is not the only one obsessed with process; his characters are, too. Tobi Vail was thinking about it when she used scissors and a glue stick to create Jigsaw, an early version of the zines that exploded into the Riot Grrrl scene of the early 1990s, in which young women explored punk and power and anger over sex and body image and assault. “JIGSAW IS NOT A CONSUMER PRODUCT,” Vail wrote. “It is not a product at all. It is more of a process. A method. I’m starting to see that process is the key.” Pandemic-era health experts stressed to Beckerman that upholding the scientific method was a priority in their private email exchanges. Even the white nationalists organizing the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville were pleased with their process, meeting on the online gaming platform Discord to debate matters such as the optics of displaying swastikas and the safety features of different torches. “I think it’s a fantastic sign that we can have these disagreements now, and still stand together when it counts,” one participant wrote.
 
This title, “The Quiet Before,” may refer to the reflection preceding the movements Beckerman explores, or it may suggest that radicalism was incubated more deliberately before the cacophony of the Internet and social media. Unsurprisingly, Beckerman is pessimistic about the impact of modern technology on social activism. He argues that reliance on platforms like Twitter have left movements such as Black Lives Matter too dependent on bursts of sadness and rage to sustain interest in policing reform. “The performance, the race for followers, even the reflex to always make their actions public” can backfire when engaging in the arduous task of advancing specific policy positions, he writes. This is an issue with many of the movements this book chronicles. Their immediate impact is not always clear, or their true sway materializes only decades later. Beckerman occasionally seems frustrated by that, and sometimes resigned to it.
 
Hey, it’s a process. And it’s driven not just by the tools in hand but by the sensibility in mind. “Radical change. . . doesn’t start with yelling,” Beckerman concludes. “It starts with deliberation, a tempo that increases, a volume set first at a whisper. How else can you begin to picture what doesn’t yet exist?”
 
 
What’s the right process for changing the world? By Carlos Lozada. The Washington Post, February 18, 2022.