17 February 22
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A new book argues that what we say, and how we say it, affects whether radical ideas can change the world.
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.
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