The Quiet Before Read online

  Praise for The Quiet Before

  “The Quiet Before is a splendid and singular history—great storytelling, elegant prose, spanning centuries but extremely timely, connecting dots in fresh and illuminating ways, surprising in its twists and turns, inspiring without trying too hard to inspire.”

  —Kurt Andersen, author of Evil Geniuses

  “The Quiet Before is that rare book: arresting in its premise, supported by historical examples, and relevant to right now. Beckerman takes a close look at the media that led to the ‘changed minds’ of past revolutions, then challenges us to approach today’s media with new eyes. How can we make it serve our urgent human purposes—among these the rethinking of human equality and the possibility of democracy? I loved it.”

  —Sherry Turkle, author of The Empathy Diaries

  “All the myriad events fashioned by humans to create the world’s history—be they wars or revolutions, artistic movements or responses to pandemics—have their points of origin in discussions, in discourses, in polemics, in simple statements nailed to church doors, in furtive comments uttered in basement bars, or in realizations made while waiting for traffic lights to change. In this wonderfully original and captivating book, Gal Beckerman reminds us that while natural events are so often announced with an unanticipated bang, human-made happenstances can more commonly trace their beginnings to little more than a cascade of gentle whispers.”

  —Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman

  “What a beautiful and humane book. The Quiet Before is a tour de force page-turner of an intellectual adventure story, one that hopscotches from medieval Provence to pre-fascist Florence to twenty-first-century Charlottesville, with stops in Moscow, Cairo, and many other exquisitely rendered settings in between. Beckerman is an infectious guide, wearing his learning lightly as he reveals some of the places and personalities that have incubated the ‘common world’ we now cohabit.”

  —Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Self-Portrait in Black and White

  “We can’t imagine a better future because we can’t imagine anything much. Creativity will arise not from still greater frenzy, but from reflection on where we are and how we got here. Gal Beckerman shows the way.”

  —Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

  “The Quiet Before is a remarkable, entirely engrossing account of the subterranean routes by which historical change takes place, from the adoption of universal (male) suffrage to #MeToo, and an examination of the limitations of social media in achieving real social transformation. Gal Beckerman writes with lucidity and grace, folding a formidable amount of research and original reflection into a compulsively readable narrative. This is a riveting and timely book, one that should provoke heated Zoom conversations nationwide.”

  —Daphne Merkin, author of 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love

  “Both deep and urgent, Beckerman revisits past revolutions from the perspective of the communication tools that enabled them, providing insight into how we can better navigate the promise and peril of the technologies shaping our current moment.”

  —Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism

  “Gal Beckerman’s engrossing book only masquerades as a study of media and social change. It’s really a series of irresistibly readable nonfiction novellas about unwitting revolutionaries who used new communications technologies to remake the world.”

  —Judith Shulevitz, author of The Sabbath World

  “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, but how do ideas ever get to the point where their time has come? Ideas have to be conceived, improved, and accepted by people, and we know little about how this happens. The Quiet Before is a fascinating and important exploration of how ideas that change the world incubate and spread.”

  —Steven Pinker, author of Rationality

  “How does true social change occur? In this brilliant book filled with insightful analysis and colorful storytelling, Gal Beckerman shows that new ideas need to incubate through thoughtful discussions in order to create sustained movements. Today’s social media hothouses, unfortunately, tend to produce flash mobs that flame out. We need to regain intimate forms of communication if we want to nurture real transformation. Rarely does a book give you a new way of looking at social change. This one does.”

  —Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker

  “In this penetrating feat of the intellect, Gal Beckerman explains the long and complicated relationship between the envisioning of new principles and the realization of such principles in the form of social transformation. Deploying a stunningly diverse set of narratives, he builds up evidence that the process is long and slow and nuanced. We tend to vest our admiration for—or dismay about—the work of activists who turn ideas into actions, but, in fact, it is those who conceive those ideas and those who gradually disseminate them who may be the greatest heroes. This book should be read by anyone interested in thinking.”

  —Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

  Copyright © 2022 by Gal Beckerman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf and Harold Ober Associates for permission to reprint an excerpt of “Azikiwe in Jail” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor. Copyright © 1951 and 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Harold Ober Associates.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Beckerman, Gal, author.

  Title: The quiet before / Gal Beckerman.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Crown, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021044410 (print) | LCCN 2021044411 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524759186 (hardcover) | ebook ISBN 9781524759209

  Subjects: LCSH: Protest movements. | Social change. | Civil society.

  Classification: LCC HM883 .B43 2022 (print) | LCC HM883 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/4—dc23/eng/20211102

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021044410

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021044411

  crownpublishing.com

  Book design by Edwin Vazquez, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Cardon Webb

  ep_prh_6.0_139149577_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Patience—Aix-En-Provence, 1635

  Chapter 2: Coherence—Manchester, 1839

  Chapter 3: Imagination—Florence, 1913

  Chapter 4: Debate—Accra, 1935

  Chapter 5: Focus—Moscow, 1968

  Chapter 6: Control—Washington, 1992

  Interlude: Cyberspace

  Chapter 7: The Square—Cairo, 2011

  Chapter 8: The Torches—Charlottesville, 2017

  Chapter 9: The Virus—New York City, 2020

  Chapter 10: The Names—Minneapolis, 2020

  Epilogue: Tables

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

&nbsp
; Notes

  Index

  By Gal Beckerman

  About the Author

  Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.

  —Neil Postman

  You can’t just keep on yelling.

  —Barack Obama

  Introduction

  CHANGE—THE KIND THAT topples social norms and uproots orthodoxies—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). This is true for revolutions of all sorts. Slavery exists. And then a small group of people begin worrying among themselves about the moral blight of humans owning other humans, weighing what might be done. Their talking transforms them into a group with a purpose, abolition, and discussion eventually bubbles up into action and then into the changing of minds and, eventually, laws.

  We are gripped by the moment when the crowd coalesces on the street—the adrenaline, the tear gas, the deafening chants, a policeman on horseback chasing down a lone protester or a man standing up to a tank. But if we rewind to the instant when a solid block of shared reality is first cracked, it’s usually a group of people talking. To be more specific (and to reclaim a word that Silicon Valley has turned into meaningless jargon), they are incubating. And the incubation of radical new ideas is a very distinct process with certain conditions: a tight space, lots of heat, passionate whispering, and a degree of freedom to argue and work toward a common, focused aim.

  Saul Alinsky, the community organizer whose Rules for Radicals became a bible for activists, wrote that successful revolutions follow the three-act structure of a play. “The first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the play strives to hold the audience’s attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution.” The problem with the generation of revolutionaries that Alinsky was observing from his perch at the end of the 1960s was that they were impatient. They rushed to the third act, desiring the “revelation” that comes from good defeating evil. But this shortcut was not actually a shortcut; it was “confrontation for confrontation’s sake—a flare-up and back to darkness.”

  It’s in those first two acts where incubation occurs. Without the conjuring, the planning, the debating, the convincing, Alinsky knew, you might have a fantastic protest that leaves you slack-jawed but empty-handed.

  Where does this kind of incubation happen today? Could it be on social media? On sites like Twitter and Facebook where a hashtag gone viral is still seen to possess subversive potential?

  In our personal lives, we’ve become aware, mostly, that the platforms are good for some things and not for others. They are hyperactive. They are social in the way a loud cocktail party is, where you flit from conversation to conversation, drawn for a few minutes to someone’s crazy story or funny joke, but leave drained by the end of the evening. These are spaces built, first, to make a profit. About this, we are no longer naïve. And as hosts of our conversations, the companies who created them have privileged a certain kind of talk and limited the potential of other kinds. This is by design. And though we still see these tools as a means for connection, we know—intuitively, at this point—what forms of expression attract the likes and thumbs-ups that are the dopamine reward for taking part. We need to produce the content that triggers big feelings (and “trigger” is the word): outrage, sadness, disgust.

  If social media has made us distractible, dragging us through endless streams of photos and bombastic comments, the implications for social movements shouldn’t be too hard to grasp. From the Arab Spring uprising that began in 2010 to #MeToo at the end of the decade, movements that were made on social media also shaped themselves to fit the form of these amplifiers—full-throated blasts of information meant to grab attention and emotionally satisfy but hardly built to last. Our digital conversations often feel like they are happening through megaphones—a performance devoid of any true intimacy. Our movements, those crucibles of radical change, now have this same quality.

  In the weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, I found myself at protests nearly every weekend. Those were days when everyone I knew felt they wanted to do something, to channel the shock of his win—it wasn’t even full-on indignation yet, just shock—into some kind of civic action. I’ve never been one for demonstrations, but I was out there with my wife and daughters (who made their own signs; one said in dripping red paint, “Love Not Hate Makes America Great”). It was good to be with other people, marching through midtown Manhattan. But it also occurred to me, in a moment of cynicism or clarity, that everyone around me was incessantly posing for their camera phones. I did it too; the photos were of course meant to be shared online. I didn’t go to any more protests after those first few weeks, but the images of my daughters and their signs still live on Facebook. I had experienced Alinsky’s third act.

  For all the power social media has lent to movements, allowing them to mobilize with tremendous speed and unprecedented scale—getting everyone to the square or midtown Manhattan in a matter of hours—it has also stunted them. The paradox, as Zeynep Tufekci described it in her book, Twitter and Tear Gas, is that the megaphone can bring “a full-blown moment of attention” to activists “when they have little or no shared history of facing challenges together.” The hard work of hammering out ideology and organizational structure, the building of a strong identity and the setting of goals, all of it can be leaped over, creating movements with all the depth and solidity of a raised-fist emoji.

  What ends up getting lost—because a Twitter or Facebook really has no room for it—is incubation.

  It’s not that it can’t happen on the internet. Donald Trump’s election was proof, in part, of the successful brewing of the white supremacist and misogynist underworld of the alt-right. Their views were too toxic for the mainstream, so they created their own self-enclosed universes or were forced into them, first on sites like Reddit that preserved the old intense chat room structure of the early internet and then on 4chan or 8chan or more obscure platforms like Gab. They kept jumping into deeper holes where, among themselves, they could egg one another on, entertain conspiracy theories, argue about the best way to bring their perspectives to a wider public, try out memes, and vie for leadership. Many of the story lines that were nurtured there—about invasions across borders, nefarious forces controlling wealth and the media, grievances about the emasculating effects of feminism—would eventually find their way into the culture through the president’s mouth.

  This was incubation by necessity, when ideas are so noxious that we push them out of sight and then worry about how they might be fermenting unobserved. We’ve seen it with child pornography on the Dark Web and ISIS recruiting efforts, and these are the sorts of examples that jump to mind when we consider closed spaces these days. This is a shame, because in associating these secluded corners only with what is most destructive and abhorrent, we ignore their value, especially for those pro-social forces who badly need such places.

  Consider Black Lives Matter, by all accounts one of the most successful movements of the past ten years. It started as a hashtag, literally, in 2013, and was followed by booms and busts—its visibility peaking after brutal (and often videotaped) instances of police violence, as it did, fiercely, in 2020.

  Social media allowed activists to introduce and then reinforce for an enormous audience a narrative—the shockingly obvious one that the humanity of Black people should be taken seriously. The potential of a medium that yields such virality, that can set an agenda, cannot be overstated. It made inescapable the parts of our collective story that had been shunted away. In
that summer of 2020, it was a fever, a good one, and it led people to demonstrate en masse, to put up lawn signs with the hashtag, to think and talk about race. Some symbols thought inviolable, like the stars and bars of the Confederate flag, came to be regarded as vile, almost instantaneously, by many more Americans. And then the summer ended.

  There is narrative, and then there is the slow gathering of power. And Black Lives Matter activists themselves came to sense how social media hindered the latter. Where could they work out their common goals? Where could they formulate strategy and move from emotion to ideology (which in this movement spanned reform to revolution)? Where could they build to policy wins, organize to elect sympathetic lawmakers, or target protests to achieve specific, local, even wonky ends? Where could they meet for that harder task of reconfiguring and rearranging the structures that undergirded those torn-down symbols?

  My first encounter with incubation came while I was researching the dissidents of the Soviet Union. Like the alt-right—and yet, of course, so unlike them—they were forced to create their own, more private spaces for communicating with one another. The state literally controlled all the means of publication, even down to registering every typewriter so a keystroke could be traced back to its owner. Samizdat was their solution. Composed on onionskin paper (sometimes up to ten or fifteen sheets typed at the same time) and passed from hand to hand, this became the dissidents’ way of building and maintaining opposition to a totalitarian state. They wrote about what they were witnessing, compiling lists of human and civil rights violations. They produced essays about what they should do and then other essays countering those points. Writing from the West was translated and circulated as well. The network formed and strengthened around this writing. It was dangerous to produce—getting caught with samizdat could frequently get you sent somewhere far to the east—but this only increased the dissidents’ level of commitment.