Assembly Project

As Vladimir Lenin didn’t say, “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” In his book The Quiet Before (2022), the journalist and writer Gal Beckerman makes the case that revolutionary political and cultural movements have often been “incubated” by a period of quiet discussion beforehand:

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.

Beckerman follows eleven social movements or scenes that used many different communication methods and then grew into something bigger. Most but not all will have the readers’ sympathy. Six relied on methods from before the age of computers, from Europe’s Republic of Letters calculating longitude in the 17^th century to the handmade Riot Grrrl magazines in the early ‘90s. Five come after, starting with the WELL, perhaps the world’s first social network when it was founded in 1985.

The question of how radical movements – whether political or not – succeed and fail is an important one. It looks even more important now, after a decade of mostly failed protest movements and still no sign that the trend will relent, even as the world’s crises pile up. The result is a book that offers intriguing food for thought though it can also be frustrating.

Beckerman makes a good decision to discuss less well-known movements, rather than the famous political revolutions of past eras. He tells them from the perspective of a figure involved, while keeping sight of the big picture. A few more recent ones are informed by his own interviews with a few activists. Overall, they make for interesting reads.

Many stories end without explaining what happened next. You have to wait to the epilogue to find out what happened to the Russian dissident Natalya Gorbanevskaya after her imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital in 1970. It’s also not always clear what purpose many stories serve. The Chartist movement in Britain, though interesting to read about, was a mass movement from the beginning.

I’m also not quite sure how the story of the doctors who warned of Covid fits in either, as their findings gained an audience fairly quickly. But perhaps the lesson here is that the time a movement needs be incubated is not measured in years or months. It’s really about whether the movement is ready.

Out of nowhere?

What can we learn about bringing change to society? Certainly, it is believable that revolutions never truly come out of nowhere, even if they appear to. It is obvious that if a change that was previously impossible has become possible, something must have quietly changed to make it happen. And it is common sense to argue that if you want to bring change, you need a respectful, productive debate on what to do.

But that doesn’t mean it will happen. This appears to be the implication when he tracks the online alt-right discussions that laid the ground for the 2017 rally in Charlottesville. As Beckerman notes, this movement was more pragmatic than people realised and did achieve a victory of sorts when Donald Trump refused to condemn then. But nor did he endorse them; the alt-right bit off more than it could chew at Charlottesville, alienated the public and afterwards went into decline.

To cite an example that Beckerman doesn’t mention, anarchism has a long intellectual tradition. Yet it has had almost zero impact on politics, apart from a short-lived day in the sun during the Spanish Civil War. It has had a wider influence elsewhere, including on the arts and academia. From it came the visionary thinking of Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan, which has already influenced efforts by the Syrian Kurds and Cooperation Jackson to build a new society and has the potential to be felt elsewhere. Anarchism has contributed to society, but not in the way that its thinkers hoped.

Others lead more clearly to change but it’s also not what they expected; the Parisian coffee-houses in the Age of Enlightenment hardly knew that their debates would lead to the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, besides more positive developments that would take decades to become apparent.

The failure of social media

A stronger argument is that while we can’t predict when incubations will succeed, and while they can work on many different types of spoken and written media, they definitely don’t work on social media. To think there was a time when it was greeted with such optimism! Many, including me, thought it would usher in a new era of openness in the world. That appeared to play out at first in the early 2010s when the Arab Spring toppled dictators. Boy we were wrong.

As Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor who has studied Facebook, put it in his 2018 book Antisocial Media:

Social media, and Facebook in particular, do not foster conversation. They favor declaration. They do not allow for deep deliberation. They spark shallow reaction.

The problem with internet forums is that provocative posts attract the most attention. If this isn’t nipped in the bud, it very quickly turns into a death spiral. The provocative posts dominate the forum, creating an environment that discourages regular users and leaves the platform even more dominated by provocateurs.

This problem was apparent even in the days of a few thousand people using the WELL, and on the internet forums I visited in the 2000s. Keeping an online community healthy is tricky and exhausting. When you have a forum that differs in having a userbase that’s hundreds of times bigger, deals with politically charged subject matter and uses a platform like Facebook that deliberately boosts provocative posts, it becomes impossible.

Beckerman documents how this panned out on the Facebook groups for Egyptian activists, as they attempted to plan what to do next:

Instead of consensus building, infighting took over and something Ghonim came to think of as “mobocracy.” He described to me a dynamic […] in which a position had to be uncompromising or you would be “perceived as weak or neutral or irrelevant.

One interesting story follows a Miami activist group, one much like Black Lives Matter, who spent ten weeks having a “Blackout” from social media. They spent that time talking to the local people and it proved a valuable experience. For example, they realised that defunding the police was often at odds with what the locals wanted. This has borne out in opinion polling, though it depends how the proposal is presented.

Out of many places

If radical change requires a long discussion beforehand, on the face of it, that is hardly a comforting thought when we need urgent actions to tackle the crises of climate, democracy, economics and much more. It’s clear that our current economic and political models are becoming unfit for purpose, but it’s not outwardly obvious what the problem is, let alone how to solve it. As Roberto Mangabeira Unger puts it, we are living in a “dictatorship of no alternatives”.

But there’s also the possibility that there are places out there where ideas are already being incubated. I’ve seen several books like this one appearing in the book shop, discussing how the system is in need of change. There is a handy body of research papers into what citizens’ assemblies can achieve and how to get there (though often behind paywalls). As Roger Hallam has noted, research projects have revealed much about how to start people’s assemblies at a grassroots level.

Below the surface, there is a thriving scene of ideas, debates, studies and experiments. Just don’t look on social media.