Consider the Black Lives Matter lawn sign.
I still see a few in my neighborhood, but these days, they appear vestigial, a remnant 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 have 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, 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 did emerge 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 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. Nnamidi 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 are 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 assume 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 depends 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.
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