The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman

This is a book that starts in the past in order to ask us to imagine a different future. It’s about how social movements form as new ideas that percolate in small, quiet spaces, unlike today’s high-speed, social media explosion that prevents deep ideas from unfolding over time. Beckerman, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, takes us on a journey from letters in 17th century France to social media today (a forum for scientist’s early discussions about Covid, identity politics leading up to Charlottesville, and the ups and downs of the Black Lives Matter movement). According to Beckerman, the incubation of radical new ideas needs certain conditions: a tight space, passionate dialogue, and freedom to work toward a common aim. His book is well-written and a delight to read. I found that I was learning about events in my own lifetime that I didn’t even know about.

I found the book relevant considering the social disconnection we’ve experienced lately with the pandemic. The medium we use for conversation (letter-writing, petitions, manifestos, newspapers, zines) molds the kinds of conversations we can have, and even sets the boundaries of our thinking. Transitioning from oral to written to electronic culture “brought along a shift in the way human beings processed reality.” We have moved toward the internet and social media, with online mediums (Facebook, Discord, twitter DM’s, email chains, and hashtags) that hinder authentic transformational movements.

He begins with a profile of a man in 1635 France who connected Europe’s greatest minds through letters (“thoughts in process”) in order to document an eclipse from various locations on earth. He also attempted to calculate longitude and the length of the Mediterranean by having many people stare up at the sky on the same night. “For Peiresc, letters were unites of intellectual exchange. Sitting in his study like a contented spider in the middle of an expansive web, he wrote and dictated about ten a day. They were also his only legacy… when he died, he left behind 100,000 pieces of paper in the form of dispatches, memoranda, and reading notes, which represented his life’s work.” Ultimately, the very slow movement of letters at the time led to many unsuccessful attempts at scientific breakthroughs.

“Letters turned out to be quite useful in this conversion process. The medium was a conduit for slow thinking. Letters acted like oil in the gears of idea production: the throat-clearing pleasantries, the lines upon lines where a mind could wander, an informality that didn’t demand definitiveness yet gave space for argument to build lightly. These were the qualities that made letters so critical to the community of proto-scientists. But they also worked well for introducing a new worldview. The ruminative aspect of letters, the embedded patience of them, avoided what might otherwise feel like the locked-horn confrontation of one system of truth trying to overtake another.”

Beckerman then takes us to 1839 Manchester and the very first petition circulated to give commoners more rights, ultimately uniting the populace and leading to many more petitions and reform bills granting rights to the working class.

Chapter 4 describes an African independent newspaper writer and eventual owner whose ideas sparked radical change over 25 years, leading up to Nigeria’s independence from Britain. Chapter 6 is about independent zines in the 1990s that caused cohesion for several women’s rights issues.

There’s a chapter on the first use of cyberspace to form a citizen community called the WELL. Managing this new community is a challenge in itself (“how they were built and how they were managed would determine how useful they could actually be and for what“) and it was ultimately overtaken by one of its users, who began a profitable version called America Online.

“Their ability to converse in this way mesmerized them as they watched the flickering green letters on a black screen accumulate, expressing personality, wit, genuine friendship, affinity for the same eccentric hobbies. It led to some big dreaming about what this space that was no real physical space at all—cyberspace—could be for, what it could achieve, what capacities it could offer its users, whether it had the ability as a medium to improve on all those petitions and local newspapers and manifestos of the past.”

“… in the same way that a car was never really just a faster horse, talking online was not just a virtual café. No metaphor could really grasp what it was. And yet metaphor is perhaps the WELL’s greatest legacy.”

Chapter 7: Cairo in 2011 and the Arab Spring:

“Social media never made it easier. It was only ever able to point them back to Tahrir Square, the tried-and-true method. When the moment clearly called for protest—when they demanded Mubarak be put on trial, or when the Justice Ministry proposed a law banning all demonstrations—they knew what to do. They could zero in on a point of outrage and motivate people to gather around it. It was as if social media had replaced their revolutionary project with a single instinct. Their greatest strength was the ability to resuscitate the magic and power of Tahrir, to pull off a millionya, a million-man march. But it was becoming a limited tool, a lever turned crutch. And while the activists did regularly return to the square, enamored with their own ability to quiet all the voices on Facebook for a day or two, the more politically savvy and deeply connected forces in the country, like the Muslim Brotherhood, did what they had long known how to do: set an agenda and impose order in their ranks. The revolutionaries never got quite organized enough.”

“But Ghonim (Wael Ghonimn, author of 2012 book Revolution 2.0) now treated Facebook like a spurned lover. “The Arab Spring revealed social media’s greatest potential, but it also exposed its greatest shortcomings,” he said from the stage in Geneva. Facebook, he saw, was indeed a tool, but it was designed with a specific purpose, one that hadn’t suited the needs of his vanguard. On the WELL, even when the conversation involved only a couple thousand people and the stakes were much, much lower than replacing an entrenched regime, a great many guardrails were needed to keep it a productive space, a home for talk that could build and not just destroy. What happened when you scaled those numbers up into the millions, removed those guardrails, the guiding moderators, and then introduced algorithms that kept people on the platform longer by elevating the loudest, most emotional voices? What you got was an incredible amplification system that also proved extremely ineffective at allowing people to focus, to organize their thoughts, to become ideologically coherent, to strategize, to pick leaders, and to refine a message.”

Now we come to Charlottesville in 2017, where alt-right white supremacists rebranded themselves on the online platform Discord. Their private discussions there they debated their differences and worked them out and get stronger. A group that infiltrated their chats from June to August revealed that their talk resembled the WELL more than a social media platform since it was about huddling together and coming to consensus.

My favorite chapter of this book was about the early scientific community’s discussions about monitoring and analyzing data from Covid in February and March of 2020, before the US had a single case. This took place via emails among public health officials and scientists, a group they called Red Dawn. “…doing it together, in addition to making them more productive, allowed them to feel as though they weren’t alone in their total commitment to science. The email chain provided the conditions for this feeling, for this work.”

“Red Dawn was a sanctuary at a moment of confusion and dread—a place to talk honestly and away from the public, to prepare a strategy, a battle plan… Other similar groups formed and became a place to talk honestly and away from the public, to prepare a strategy, a battle plan… In the absence of much official guidance or a national plan, these private networks activated like new radio frequencies, suddenly crackling with concern and advice… The quiet felt necessary and useful because, just as for the Red Dawn participants, so much was unsure and they needed a way to develop their thinking.”

A network of New York City doctors formed a private group “to band together even more tightly so they could coordinate their messaging.” One group was called the Brain Trust. “This is where we would develop a strategy for all the prime-time cable news programs so that we could tell people the truth at a time when the government was downplaying the virus.”

“The scientific method is about being wrong so that adjustments can be made. It’s about tweaking a hypothesis by a few degrees. And the only way, many of these experts told me, to respect that process, while also providing useful information to the public, was to come together, like the ER doctors in their DM groups, in a closed network with people they trusted.

“In those first months of the pandemic, science was happening very publicly. Starting in the 1990s, in the field of physics, researchers in an increasing number of fields had been posting their papers to special online servers before they went through the peer-review process, which could take months. The pressures of a pandemic and the need to rapidly share new information made it even more necessary for research to get out before undergoing the strict vetting of a top-tier journal. And prestige publications like Science and Nature didn’t want to look as if they were holding back important findings, so even they began asking their contributors to post on these online repositories first to give the public and other scientists immediate access. And still it didn’t seem quick enough—there could be a week’s lag time after submitting—so some scientists were just sharing their papers directly on Twitter. This is how, on February 29, the first sequencing of a COVID-19 genome in the United States came to be presented to the world: as a tweet.“

The final chapter of this book is about the Black Lives Matter movement. After many years of failing to get the hashtag to take off, the three founders realized that they were operating from crisis point to crisis point. Two years of nonstop protesting in Minneapolis had led to very little change; activism would swell and then subside, and in spite of all this expended energy, their objectives would come to seem too small in the face of more foundational problems.

A group called the Dream Defenders began to really connect with their community. They decided to disconnect from online interactions for several months. “They started listening. And what they heard surprised them. For one thing, as Rachel went door-to-door to talk to people in the poorer neighborhoods of Miami, she quickly found that the dream of defunding or abolishing the police was not a shared one.the work would have to be local and would have to start with showing people there was another way. They had to actively collect and build a constituency, as opposed to waiting for a moment of outrage.

“Phillip, the Dream Defenders founder, had a similar insight. For him, the experience of the Blackout had been a lesson in the varieties of power. Borrowing a concept from Joseph Nye, the political scientist, he now came to understand social media as a form of ‘soft power,”’a force that shapes culture through argument and story. But there was also ‘hard power,’ which Nye, in assessing the capacity of different nation-states, characterized as military and economic might. For movements, hard power was the ability to lobby for legislation, elect sympathetic political leaders, get resources allocated toward your cause. Social media, Phillip now saw more clearly, was good at building soft power. But when it came to hard power, it could do very little.

“Phillip, once he emerged from the Blackout in early 2016, even saw the advantage of cultivating a more secluded space for conversation and planning. Social media was about ‘followship and diffusion of responsibility.’ Real leadership would come off-line.”

* * *

We need a table where we can come together and share ideas.

Social movements are ultimately “limited in their actions and their ability to evolve and adapt because they rely on tools that only deal in binaries. When you can discern shades of difference, new strategies and alliances open up.”

“You have certain experiences in this world, they produce certain desires, those desires reproduce the world. Our reality today just keeps reproducing itself. If you can create different experiences that manifest different desires, then it’s possible that those will lead to the production of different worlds.”

“Radical change—change that strips off the stucco and gets to the girders, that offers a chance to see ourselves and our relationship to nature or to others in new ways—doesn’t start with yelling. 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?

“… the internet, this network of networks, is where we live our lives in the twenty-first century. It has almost completely annihilated all those other modes of communication. So we need to ensure the possibility of those spaces apart, especially in a flattened, too-loud world that perceives dark corners only as dangerous. They are where the first inflections of progress can—and almost always do—occur. Change seems hard to conceive of otherwise. Because it is the act of entering into those closed or semi-closed circles that alters identity in a fundamental way. Facing that gray unending slab of reality seems less lonely, and chipping away at it less foolish. You become something else: a person at a table.”