Julia Shaw on Bisexuality

 



There have been suspicions that bisexuality is probably just a trend for almost fifty years. Newsweek has even declared this boldly twice. In 1974 it published an article titled “Bisexual Chic: Anyone Goes.” Two decades later, in 1995, it ran a cover story with the headline “Bisexuality. Not gay. Not straight. A new sexual identity emerges.” New again?
 
These two articles have been widely mocked in bisexual forums. This is particularly true of the 1995 cover, which includes bright white lettering atop a photo of a woman with short hair wearing an oversized black suit and with her arms crossed. She has a guarded expression on her face and is positioned in front of two men in casual gray T-shirts who stare with emotionless expressions into the camera. The photo is so weird, and so over-the-top nineties that it seems almost satirical.
 
The article itself proclaims things like “bisexuality is the hidden wild card of our erotic culture,” suggests there is “an independent bisexual movement,” and allows a fifteen-year-old to debunk the myth of the hypersexual bisexual while simultaneously reinforcing it with the bizarre quote, “A bisexual… doesn’t have any more sex than the captain of the football team.”
 
Given that a key benefit of being the captain of the (American) football team is having lots of sex, I guess this kid is trying to make it clear that he is promiscuous, but not sexually excessive. The article also in various ways conflates polyamory, promiscuity, and gender fluidity with bisexuality. And it taps into the idea that bisexuality is on the rise with the sentence “Many college students, particularly women, talk about a new sexual ‘fluidity’ on campus,” and quotes a bisexual person saying, “It’s not us-versus-them anymore. There’s just more and more of us.”
 
What I find astonishing is that this article could have been written today, with the exact same misconceptions, uneasy feeling of change, and echoes of optimism. Particularly, this idea that there are just more and more bisexual people is still popular today. But is it true? Before I try to answer that, I need to define what bisexuality is. To do that we are going to head back in time to see where the term came from, and three men with alliterative names who were fundamental in establishing bisexuality as an academic and popular concept: Krafft-Ebing, Kinsey, and Klein.
 
It may surprise you that the use of the term bisexual to refer to human sexuality is almost as old as the term heterosexual. In his book The Invention of Heterosexuality, gay history pioneer and activist Jonathan Ned Katz argues that “the idea of heterosexuality is a modern invention, dating to the late nineteenth century.” The first recorded use of the term was in an anonymous pamphlet in 1869, of which it was later established that Karl-Maria Kertbeny was the author.
 
Kertbeny lived a colorful life. He spent time in many major European cities, where he hung out with celebrities like George Sand and the Grimm brothers, hid from authorities by living in a botanic garden in Leipzig, was briefly a police spy, and was in and out of debtors’ prisons because of a series of failed attempts at being a journalist. In his letters, pamphlets, and books he wrote extensively about his view that sodomy laws violated human rights, and that such consensual sexual acts in private should not be subject to criminal law.
 
While writing, Kertbeny, who was probably gay himself, found the need to label and define the sexual norm so that he could explain how same-sex desires and sexual behaviors contrasted with it. This is why he came up with the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” This means that a gay rights activist coined the word heterosexual as a by-product of creating the word homosexual.
 
In the etymology of Kertbeny’s “heterosexual,” “hetero” comes from the Greek heteros which means another, while homos means same, and both are melded with the Latin word sexus. Not long after this, bi, or two, started to be used to refer to people who had both homosexual and heterosexual desires. A way that bisexual researchers often talk about this is that the bi in bisexual means two, but the two are not men and women, they are same and other.

 
Before being adopted to describe human sexuality, the term bisexual was typically used to refer to creatures and plants which are hermaphroditic, so have both male and female reproductive parts. Even today, in the worlds of botany, entomology, and zoology the term bisexual is often used in this way. Roses are an example of a popular bisexual plant.
 
The first use of the word bisexual in English, in the sense of being sexually attracted to people of multiple genders, was probably in 1892 when American neurologist Charles Gilbert Chaddock translated Psychopathia Sexualis, an influential book by the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in which he detailed what he considered to be sexual disorders in male prisoners. The book was intended for clinical-forensic settings, and Krafft-Ebing wrote it in intentionally difficult language and with parts in Latin so that laypeople couldn’t read it. The book played an important and controversial role in the discussion among psychiatrists at the time who were trying to understand why people have homosexual desires.
 
Why didn’t these terms exist earlier? As sexuality historian Hanne Blank has argued, people in English-speaking countries didn’t really think about sexuality as an identity before this. They didn’t consider they should be “differentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced.” There were words to describe the kinds of sexual behavior people engaged in, but sex was mostly something that people did, not part of who they were.
 
Once sexuality became a hotly political part of identity, people wanted ways to define these new sexual labels. The problem quickly became that what one person meant when they used a label like bisexual was very different from what someone else meant, which is a problem that continues to pose a major obstacle for researchers today.
 
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How many people do you think identify as bisexual today? Depending on who you ask, and how they spend their time, you will probably get very different answers. I need to regularly remind myself that fewer people are bi than I intuitively guess, because my social media feeds make it easy to forget that bisexuality is not the default. We all live in bubbles, and mine is an adorable bi bubble.
 
It is very difficult to get accurate or regular estimates of LGBT+ populations from most countries, especially from countries where homosexual behavior is criminalized. It’s even harder to get information specifically about bisexuality. Still, there are a few studies we can look at. In a summary of eleven studies conducted between 2004 and 2010, including samples from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Norway, between 0.5 percent and 3.1 percent of participants identified as bisexual. The summary found that among adults who identify as LGBT, bisexual people are the slight majority. It also found that far more people acknowledge at least some same-sex attraction, between 1.8 percent and 11 percent across the studies. This is one of few studies that gives us a sense of international comparison.
 
Other studies can give us some sense as to whether identifying as bi has increased over time. The Office for National Statistics in the UK estimated in 2017 that 2.3 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds identify as bisexual, while a national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US in 2016 placed the rate at 5.5 percent of women and 2 percent of men. Both of these surveys reported increases in the rates of people who identified as bisexual, and that in the youngest age groups more people identified as bisexual than gay or lesbian. The findings are also consistent with research which has found that more young women of color are identifying as bisexual today than in the past. However, these studies only capture people who identify as bisexual.
 
Studies have sought to address this shortcoming by asking people in the UK about their sexuality using the Kinsey Scale, and a series of follow-up questions. Using this scale is clever, because if we ask people directly if they are bisexual or homosexual, many say no either because they identify as heterosexual or because they identify outside of these labels (e.g., pansexual, fluid, or unlabeled).
 
According to the researchers of one study published by YouGov in 2015, “with each generation, people see their sexuality as less fixed in stone. The results for 18–24-year-olds are particularly striking, as 43 percent place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5… classed as bisexual in varying degrees by Kinsey.” Note that “non-binary” here means not entirely homosexual or heterosexual, rather than people whose gender identity is nonbinary. This change toward more flexible conceptualizations of sexuality is exemplified by a follow-up study of people who identify as bisexual conducted by YouGov in 2019.
 
In a summary of the results the researcher writes: “When we asked 18 to 24 year olds to choose what best described their sexuality in 2015 just one in fifty (2 percent) said they were bisexual. Our latest data . . . shows that one in six (16 percent) now choose this option—an eight-fold increase.” She continues, “More people than ever identify as somewhere between the extremes of the sexuality spectrum.”
 
Replications of the 2015 YouGov survey were conducted in Germany, Israel, and the US. In all three, at least a third of young people identified as neither exclusively homosexual nor exclusively heterosexual, landing them somewhere on the bisexual spectrum. In all three, young people were far more likely than older people to fall on the bi spectrum and to explicitly identify as bisexual. And, in all three, some of the people who placed themselves on a sexual spectrum denied that such a spectrum exists.
 
This I find a particularly fascinating aspect of these studies. In a summary of the 2015 results the researchers wrote, “People of all generations now accept the idea that sexual orientation exists along a continuum rather than a binary choice,” because 60 percent of heterosexuals and 73 percent of homosexuals in their study supported the idea that sexuality is not binary. Although most of their 1,632 participants agreed that “sexuality is a scale—it is possible to be somewhere near the middle,” 12 percent of heterosexuals and 7 percent of homosexuals chose the “don’t know” option. There was also a third option: “There is no middle ground—you are either heterosexual or homosexual.” I know it shouldn’t shock me, but at least a fifth of people in both groups didn’t believe that bisexuality existed—28 percent of heterosexuals and 20 percent of homosexuals indicated that “there is no middle ground” for sexuality.
 
What’s even more amazing to me is that a substantial minority of these individuals were not entirely homosexual or heterosexual themselves: 11 percent of those who identified as a 3 on the Kinsey Scale, and 27 percent of those who identified as a 4 chose this third option. How do you put yourself in the middle of a sexuality scale, and simultaneously deny that people can be in the middle of a sexuality scale?
 
While I cannot tell you why these participants engaged in such dissonance, I can tell you who they were more likely to be. While 32 percent of those over 50 agreed with this statement, this fell to 22 percent of those aged 25 to 35, and 18 percent of those aged 18 to 24. It seems that younger generations are more likely to both identify as bi and to accept bisexuality as a thing.
 
Enjoyably, further supporting the idea that people are becoming more bi-supportive, the 2019 study found that “if the right person came along at the right time,” about 35 percent of those who identified as heterosexual indicated that they could be (i) attracted to a person of the same sex, (ii) have a sexual experience with them, and (iii) have a relationship with them. Many people today in the UK seem to be open to the idea that they could be attracted to people of multiple genders, which is a beautiful thing.
 
While it is unclear whether bisexual behavior is on the rise, more young people than ever are identifying as bisexual, and it seems that many people are open to falling in love with someone regardless of their gender. Bisexuality is not a fad, or “chic,” or “new”; rather this sexuality label appears to be more accessible and empowering today than it has been in the past.
 
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Excerpted from the new book Bi: The Hidden Culture, Science, and History of Bisexuality by Julia Shaw, PhD, Abrams Press,  2022.
 
  
Nope, Not a Trend: On the Modern Origins and Evolution of Bisexual Identity. By Julia Shaw. LitHub, June 29, 2022.

The number of people who identify as queer in the UK Census has increased over the past few years. This trend is in particular driven by the rising number of LGBT+ identities among people aged 16 to 24 years. The most popular sexual identity within this emerging group is bisexual – the romantic and/or sexual attraction to more than one gender. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows an increase from 0.7 per cent in 2015 to 1.1 per cent in 2019. Rather than a sudden new surge of bisexual desires, increased acceptance, legal protection and visibility are likely to be the cause of this increase.
 
But why should we count how many people are bi, or study what their experiences are? Research is young in this field, but we’re already seeing that tossing all queer identities into one research bucket renders the unique struggles of being bisexual invisible. For a start, it’s hard to even get an accurate sense of the exact number of British people who are bisexual. Many people who are attracted to people beyond one gender, shy away from the identity label ‘bisexual’. When it comes to research, this reluctance has led scientists to come up with alternative ways to capture and categorise sexuality.
 
One of the most common tools used is The Kinsey Scale. First published in 1948 by biologist Dr Alfred Kinsey, it is used to place people on a spectrum of sexual attraction between entirely heterosexual and entirely homosexual, using a scale from 0 to 6. It also includes ‘X’ for those who are asexual. It was so successful that it is still the single most popular scale for classifying sexuality. It’s often what people are indirectly referring to when they say, “Aren’t we all a bit bi?”
 
When YouGov surveys conducted in 2019 used questions that mimicked The Kinsey Scale, researchers found at least a third of people aged 18 to 24 say that they are attracted to multiple genders. A startling figure compared to the 1 per cent reporting to the ONS. Only with research can we cut through the reluctance people have to say “I am bisexual”, and find out whether those attracted to multiple genders need more support than those who aren’t.
 
Since social scientists and other researchers have started to analyse the B, we have begun to understand the struggles that uniquely endanger bi people. Research shows us that bi women are hypersexualised, and stereotypes that see bi women as promiscuous sexual playthings feed into people’s existing rape myths.
 
Accordingly, studies have found that bisexual women are significantly more likely to be raped, repeatedly sexually assaulted, and to be the victims of intimate partner abuse than lesbian and heterosexual women. Had this research homogenised all women into one group, we might never have known that the stereotypes affecting bi women specifically place them at far greater risk of sexual victimisation.
 
A different cluster of toxic assumptions awaits bi men. Bisexual men are seen as lying, to themselves and others, because they are thought to be gay. And, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, bi men were also seen as murderers in disguise, catching AIDS when having sex with men and giving it their female partners. This left many bisexual men isolated and alone, failed by educational campaigns that rarely moved beyond gay spaces.
 
We need to acknowledge the unique needs of bi people, including a specific focus on bi men. If we don’t, we fail a huge amount of the population. Armed with bi-specific research, we stand a better chance of winning the fight back against the societal biases and misconceptions that hold bisexual people down.
 
As a young researcher, I didn’t know anyone else who was bisexual in my field, or, for that matter, in any field. It was rarely mentioned, not even in lectures specifically on sex and sexuality. When I graduated with my PhD in 2012, I had no idea how useful my background in criminal psychology would come to be when I turned my gaze to studying bisexuality. For my new book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History And Science Of Bisexuality, I have found and spoken to researchers across the globe and in various disciplines who are all fighting for change.
 
I want the world to be a safer place for people like me. The best way that we can achieve that is to visibly support bi people. Let’s not allow the ‘B’ slip into the shadows of its colourful siblings.
 
 
Why does researching bisexuality matter? By Julia Shaw. Science Focus, May 20, 2022.

Julia Shaw is a psychologist at University College London and part of Queer Politics at Princeton University, a thinktank engaged in the research of LGBTQ+ equality and rights. Her new book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality, draws on her experiences of being bisexual and her background in the psychological sciences to explore and celebrate a sexual identity she says remains marginalised and forgotten.
 
What led you to begin researching bisexuality and write this book?
I was writing my second book, Making Evil, which is about criminal psychology and what we associate with the word “evil”. I was writing about the villainisation of LGBTQ+ individuals as evil around the world and how important visibility is. I realised I was still invisible myself, so I came out as bi in that book, because I felt like a hypocrite for telling other people to be out and not being out myself in public.
 
I had so many questions about bisexuality. I figured I’d read a couple of books and I’d be done. But those books with the answers that I wanted didn’t exist, so I decided to write a book instead. I figured if I was struggling to find those answers, other people were as well.
 
Your book discusses one of the first measures of bisexuality, the Kinsey scale, first published in 1948 by the biologist Dr Alfred Kinsey. How did that tool change the field of study?
 
 
The Kinsey scale is a way to see sexuality on a spectrum from 100% heterosexual desires to 100% homosexual desires. Kinsey found that about half of men and about a quarter of women allocated themselves as not 100% heterosexual, which effectively meant that a lot of people were queer. When people talk about sexuality as a spectrum, they’re usually indirectly referencing the Kinsey scale.
 
The book refers to the invisibility of bi people in research on sexuality; why is that?
 
The default is still to ask people their identity, which is a problem for bisexual people. Most people who would fall in the middle of the Kinsey scale aren’t captured by labels – they often refer to themselves as gay or straight. Asking questions about how people behave, and who they find attractive, is going to get you a much more accurate picture than asking people what their labels are most of the time. Research, for some reason, is really reluctant to accept that. Probably because it introduces complexity and complexity is bad for data analysis.
 
 
A fascinating section of the book examines bisexuality in the animal kingdom and the struggle of evolutionary biologists to explain the “Darwinian paradox”: why animals engage in homosexual behaviour if it doesn’t lead to reproduction. You propose the idea that bisexuality is perhaps “the originary state in the evolution of sexuality” – how did you reach this conclusion?
 
 
There’s this assumption that heterosexuality is the norm, because heterosexual sex results in offspring. But looking at the literature on animal behaviour and sexual interactions, I found there are a number of researchers, including in the evolutionary sciences, saying we’ve misinterpreted animal behaviour for a very long time by imposing our sense of decency and our heterosexual bias on to animals, rather than observing and describing what animals actually do.
 
Research has found there’s a lot of sexual behaviour between animals of multiple sexes in the animal kingdom. The explanation for that is: as long as you’re also at least occasionally having sex with the other sex and you’re able to reproduce, then it doesn’t really matter if you also have sex with the same sex. I found it really interesting, because I assumed that I was a deviation, rather than that most animals seem to behave this way.
 
 
You contrast this positive reading of the “original state” of sexuality with Freud’s negative view that everyone starts off bisexual as a child and matures into monosexuality as an adult. Why do associations between bisexuality and immaturity persist?
I get told a lot that Freud thought everyone was bi and I have to correct this so often. Freud did say that, but he didn’t mean it in a good way. He very much saw it as a negative thing to be bisexual as an adult.
 
There are a couple of assumptions that are thrown at you when you say you’re bisexual. One is that you’re greedy; the other is that you want to be the centre of attention, that it’s some sort of performance, especially as a woman, the expectation is that it’s performative for men. Then there’s the idea that it’s a phase. This idea isn’t just held by heterosexual people; it’s also very much held by homosexual and queer people and that is a huge problem. It has led to many bi people feeling excluded or pushed out of queer spaces.
 
We’ve seen people become more comfortable talking about a range of sexual identities in recent years, with the word “queer” gaining particular prominence. You’re saying that due to negative connotations, the term “bisexual” hasn’t been embraced in the same way?
 
 
It hasn’t. People cringe when they say it, or don’t say it, about themselves, because they’re worried about the reaction, including me. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the word “queer” instead of “bi”, because I don’t want the reaction that comes with saying “bi” and “queer” is a bit more vague, frankly. It’s fascinating that because of internalised biphobia in so many people, we shy away from that word. I mean, it’s LGBT and it has been since the 90s. Yet the “B” has been invisible or berated. Lesbian and gay people, I think, need to make space and be more inclusive and conscious of bi people.
 
You discuss how bisexual people are more likely to experience sexual violence, poor mental health and substance abuse than other sexual minorities. What explains this?
 
Bisexual women, compared with lesbian and heterosexual women, are the most likely to be raped and to experience various forms of sexual assault. There’s a layering of stigma that happens with bi women in particular, where there’s the sexualisation of women and the hypersexualisation of bisexuality on top. It makes people take more liberties with how they touch you, how they talk to you, how they sexualise you and whether they’re likely to assault you. This is something we see in research on the treatment of bisexual kids in schools and universities. Until we break down the stereotypes about bisexuality, we are not going to tackle this problem.

 
What can the study of history tell us about the evolution of attitudes towards sexuality?
 
Sexual desires and behaviours have only really been seen as identities since the 1800s. The idea that it’s something you are rather than something you do – that is a relatively new concept. If you look at how historians try to make queer people visible in history, they often jump too far. If there’s any evidence of homosexual attractions, they say: “Look, there’s a gay person.” I can see why that’s something people want to do. But what it does, in effect, is erase bi people. Because most of those people will also have had wives, or husbands, and heterosexual interactions. That makes it really hard, and often inaccurate, to say that they are exclusively homosexual.
 
 
You discuss the relationship between “compulsory heterosexuality” and “compulsory monogamy”. How could more acceptance and understanding of bisexuality help challenge norms around both?
 
One of the most toxic stereotypes is that bisexual people can’t be monogamous and that bisexual people can’t be trusted in relationships. If you think about it for more than 10 seconds, you understand why that’s an absurd thing to say. I wanted to end the book on the relationship between bisexuality and consensual non-monogamy, because it’s something a lot of bisexual people think about a lot and they get asked about often. If heterosexual people and monosexual people ask themselves the questions they often put to bi people – “How can you be monogamous? Why is one person enough for you?” – the world would be a better place. Having that conversation in a way that is more about deconstructing heterosexual norms and expectations is a really useful thing to do.
 
Julia Shaw: ‘I had so many questions about bisexuality’ By  Laurie Clarke. The Guardian June 4, 2022. 

Discover the hidden culture, history, and science of bisexuality.   Dr Julia Shaw and Ben Hunte discuss her new book “Bi” at the British Library.  June 7, 2022.  Dr. Julia Shaw  BiBook

The hidden science of bisexuality with Julia Shaw – podcast
 
Presented and produced by Madeleine Finlay, additional production by Anand Jagatia, sound design by Tony Onuchukwu, the executive producer was Isabelle Roughol
 
Bisexuality is the largest sexual minority in the world – but according to psychologist Dr Julia Shaw, it’s the least well understood. She talks to Madeleine Finlay about her new book, Bi, which challenges us to think more deeply about who we are and how we love. She discusses the history of trying to define and measure bisexuality, sexual behaviour in the animal kingdom, and how we can improve health outcomes for bi people.
 
The Guardian, June 2, 2022.

For over a century, society has struggled to understand who, why, what and how bisexual and pansexual people are what they are. We’ve tried Venn diagrams, adopted animal mascots, developed TV tropes and launched awareness campaigns. But even now, more than a century after the terms “bisexual” and “pansexual” were coined, people are still confused.
 
Through my years running the Bi Pan Library, a U.S.-based private queer literature archive, I’ve read stacks of nonfiction about fluid sexuality from the past century, and it’s no wonder we can’t get out of this cycle of confusion. If you’re looking for dusty old books by psychiatrists who believed bisexual people are not quite right in the head, you’ll be spoiled for choice. But if you’re looking for something positive, a Bisexual 101 perhaps, your options are limited to just a handful of titles that are still in print. There is certainly supportive, world-shifting bisexual and pansexual writing available if you know where to look, but it has not landed on the shelf without a fight.
 
In the introduction to her hotly anticipated upcoming book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, Dr. Julia Shaw shares the story of a publisher rejecting the pitch for her book because “we’ve already had that conversation,” despite that same publishing house never having signed a single book about bisexuality, much less anything like Shaw’s unique spin. While Bi does touch on all three things the title suggests—culture, history and science—at its core what Shaw has created is a whirlwind tour of bisexual research, from Alfred Kinsey’s notorious scale, to the life-or-death legal struggles of queer asylum seekers today. (Disclosure: Shaw has made donations toward the resources of Bi Pan Library, which I founded.)
 
That publisher isn’t completely wrong: we’ve certainly had conversations about bisexual identity. But who was speaking during those conversations? And were they enough?
 
Attraction beyond gender is not new, but the first books to focus on the subject didn’t come around until the 1920s, when psychological texts first cast plural attraction as deviant behaviour in need of curing. In Bi, Shaw (whose previous works include 2019’s Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side and 2017’s The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting and the Science of False Memory), profiles several psychologists and researchers involved in the early evolution of science’s narrative about bisexuality, a problematic cast entirely made up of white men. Physician Havelock Ellis, author of Sexual Inversion, enjoyed an open marriage with his queer wife—and was also an outspoken eugenicist. Sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s work forever changed how the Western world perceives sexuality, but his methods may have blurred ethical lines. Beyond-famous neurologist Sigmund Freud believed children start out with a hazy mingled sexuality—until they grow out of it (and let’s be clear, there’s a long list of other Freudian trash to take out).
 
These white-and-Western ideas trickled down to the English-speaking public through news coverage, and very quickly into pornography (of course). Erotic bisexual novels from the 1960s and ’70s were often thinly veiled as nonfiction case studies of “depraved” sexual fluidity. The back cover of 1966 pulp release Confessions of a Married Man claimed “the secret world of the bisexual has never before been revealed with such stark detail—its deceptions and duplicities, its anguish and its furtive pleasures.” The graphically sexual text presents a “true story” complete with an introduction written by a psychoanalyst. But if you flip to the title page you’ll find a bolded-caps disclaimer: “All of the characters in this book are fictitious …”
 
You can draw a clear line between these early salacious visions of plural attraction in literature and the ugly stereotypes Shaw explores in later chapters of Bi: bisexual people are “slutty,” homewreckers and dangerous, but somehow, at the same time, we don’t exist at all. Although English-speaking bi and pan people in the ’60s were already beginning to gather through the sexual liberation movement and queer organizing, our own perspectives weren’t broadly published or accepted. The story of who we were was still being written by others.
 
Glimmers of hope appeared in the ’70s, with books such as Janet Bode’s View from Another Closet, which allowed queer women to describe their experiences using whatever words they felt comfortable with (including words many people mistakenly think are internet-age inventions, like pansexual and omnisexual). In Bi, Shaw profiles sex researcher Fritz Klein, a bisexual man who in 1978 released his iconic book The Bisexual Option: A Concept of One Hundred Percent Intimacy. If you’ve ever googled “am I bisexual?” you may have come across the Klein Grid, which he presented in The Bisexual Option as a more three-dimensional response to Kinsey’s one-to-six scale. By bringing his personal experiences into his work (much like Shaw has) Klein called for a new generation of scientific research that he hoped would investigate the true challenges and needs of his community without treating us as diseased, or focusing entirely on our sex lives.
 
But speaking of disease—the world’s growing curiosity turned poisonous in the 1980s as HIV/AIDS sunk its teeth in. As Shaw put it, “bi men were seen as a threatening connection between the dirty and the clean … a threat to heterosexuals everywhere.” The literature was nasty. Authors like Ivan Hill profiled bisexual people with straight partners, whipping up fear of inevitable illicit affairs or “unhealthy” open relationships. Hill frames his interviews in The Bisexual Spouse with a nationwide survey measuring psychiatrists’ opinions on sexual orientation; the study asked questions like “can homosexuality be modified toward heterosexuality, and if so, what therapy do you most often prescribe?” It’s nauseating stuff, but when I read my own yellowing copy of The Bisexual Spouse, I was struck by how sadly relatable the stories of his interviewees felt. These were queer people born between the 1920s and 1940s who didn’t have words for themselves, who were afraid they wouldn’t be believed, who faced prejudice in straight and gay communities alike, who felt there were very few resources to help them build a happy, balanced life.
 
It was amidst the fear and judgment of the ’80s that bisexual and pansexual people fighting for control over our own narrative developed a new strategy. The Off Pink Collective in the U.K. independently published Bisexual Lives, a slim book of essays and personal accounts written by and for bisexual people. As far as I know, Bisexual Lives marked the first time a group of bisexual people were able to tell their own stories in a book without being filtered through the lens of psychiatric analysis or pop-nonfiction appeal. Personal essay collections have since become a grand bisexual tradition in resistance to the idea that there is only one way to be bisexual, or even a single definition or word we all agree on. Instead, these writers described bisexuality as our stories, together.
 
Shaw follows this tradition in Bi, illustrating cold, hard, queer statistics with her personal stories of realization, heartbreak and joy. In Chapter five, titled “Invisi-bi-lity,” she describes how she was worried that looking bi would be problematic for her career as an academic. “I was already so used to being sexualized as a young woman that I was worried that the label bisexual would lead to me being hypersexualized and that no one would take me seriously.” She contextualizes this raw vulnerability with sexuality researcher Julie Hartman’s study of what—if anything—it means to “look bi,” and how bisexual people often combat their invisibility with clothing, hairstyles and body language.
 
As bisexuals were increasingly acknowledged in broader queer activism and pop culture in the 1990s, more critical books also sprung up to address the unease many people felt toward “strict” labels. Feminist psychologist Lisa M. Diamond argued in Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire that sexuality could not be measured or described without acknowledging how self-perception can change across a lifetime, praising Klein’s incorporation of past, present and future self-concept in the development of the Klein grid, even though according to Diamond, it “did not take hold.”
 
Speaking of Klein, our researcher friend kept himself extraordinarily busy in the ’90s. He released two more books, founded the American Institute of Bisexuality and in the early 2000s headed up the Journal of Bisexuality, the first academic journal to specialize in bisexual and fluid issues. Many of the queer researchers Shaw references in Bi first presented their work in the Journal of Bisexuality, climbing through the window Klein had propped open for them. At last, scientific research and literature about bisexuality was being wrestled into our custody.
 
Research and academic writing about plural attraction has become increasingly queer-led and destigmatized ever since. Because of this, we’ve begun to better understand the specific challenges our community experiences. Shaw explores much of this new ground in Bi, walking through very recent research into the harrassment bisexual people face in the workplace, our disturbingly high rates of mental illness and intimate partner violence and how sexually fluid asylum seekers slip through inhumane cracks in the legal system. Thanks to queer researchers, being studied may finally begin to work toward our benefit.
 
The 2010–2020 section of the Bi Pan Library collection glows as a bold and unapologetic era of fluid literature; it gave us Shiri Eisner’s radical modern classic (perhaps the most recognizable bisexual book ever published) Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, a masterful balance of actionable bisexual theory and accessible writing that welcomes people who are new to the ideas. Kate Harrad’s anthology Claiming the B in LGBT: Illuminating the Bisexual Narrative covered vast ground with chapters on race, disability, gender and non-monogomy. Books that enthusiastically embraced the variety of words people use for plural attraction also began cropping up more frequently, like Karen Morgaine’s artful Pansexuality: A Panoply of Co-Constructed Narratives and Faith Beauchemin’s very tiny anthology with a very large name, How Queer! Personal Narratives from Bisexual, Pansexual, Polysexual, Sexually-Fluid, and Other Non-Monosexual Perspectives. The diversity of language Janet Bode first spotlighted in the ’70s blossomed with the ability to connect with like-minded people and to learn about a universe of queer language via the internet.
 
This is an aspect of Shaw’s Bi that may not age well, in the way many books about sexuality, gender and identity naturally fade in relevance over time. Shaw commits to using the term “bisexual” or “behaviorally-bisexual” through the whole book, simplifying the language of plural attraction in the way of a researcher establishing clear vocabulary for a study. But condensing queer language can come at the cost of erasure. In nearly all the books I’ve mentioned so far, people who use words like pansexual, omnisexual, fluid, etc., have had their experiences included in research or storytelling, but their identities painted over, in the end, with the word bisexual. In the future, we might look back on concepts like “the bisexual umbrella” or “bi+” the same way we look back on titles like Bisexuality and Transgenderism, which was the first book about fluid sexuality in the trans community. The phrasing made sense to us at the time, but give it another decade and it would never go to print. Queer language is an ongoing process of building and balancing; rebuilding and rebalancing.
 
We are gearing up for an exciting new decade of sexually fluid literature in the 2020s. Just last year, psychologist Ritch C. Savin-Williams published the first book to focus on bisexual, pansexual and fluid youth, and fellow U.K. author and bisexual activist Lo Shearing released Bi the Way: The Bisexual Guide to Life. At first, Bi the Way looks like it might cover the same ground as Bi, but between the two pink-purple-and-blue covers are very different books. Shaw’s book lays out the story of how fluid sexuality has been perceived scientifically and socially, with a bit of personal storytelling for flair, while Shearing filled Bi the Way with advice about the everyday ins and outs of being bisexual, with a bit of history and social science woven in between. These are complimentary conversations that serve different purposes. Shearing also announced in 2021 they are editing a bisexual anthology with fellow bisexual activist Vaneet Mehta, ensuring the tradition of bisexual storytelling will live on.
 
What the publishers who rejected Bi didn’t understand is that sexuality and gender are ever-shifting, ever-expanding topics. We will never be done talking about being bisexual, or pansexual, or omnisexual, or fluid or whatever brand-new words we embrace in the future. When Bi hits bookstores (June 2 in the U.K., June 28 in the U.S.), it will provide a Bisexual Research 101 course for a fresh audience of international readers (her book is already making publishing history in Germany, where it was published in translation in May) and my library shelves will be one book richer.
 
Julia Shaw’s new book continues the conversation about bisexuality, but is it the one we need right now? By Bren Frederick. Xtra Magazine,  June 2, 2022. 

Abrams Books

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.