The Daily Beast Podcast - What Made ‘Abolish the Police’ Activists Change Course

Episode Date: February 20, 2022

Gal Beckerman, editor at The Atlantic, explains why places like Twitter are no longer cutting it when it comes to social movements and makes the case with a story from the Black Lives Matter movement. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Okay, on to this episode. Today we have an extra special guest with Gall Beckerman, who's the senior editor for Books of the Atlantic and was formerly that editor at the New York Times Books. And he's author of The Quiet Before on the unexpected origins of radical ideas, and we're going to talk to him all about that today. Welcome to the new abnormal, Gall Beckerman. Thank you so much for having me. One of my trademarks is that I butcher everyone.

name. It's really good. It's really good in a host. People really appreciate it. So the quiet before the storm, the quiet before, I got to butcher the title too. Explain to us the unexpected origins of radical ideas go. So this is a book that generally speaking is about how political and social change is made. And more specifically, I was responding to what I'd seen in the last 10, 15 years of social movements. That is, movements that seem to grab our attention in very big, dramatic ways, sometimes even change a cultural conversation, and then seem to kind of fizzle out and not be able to fulfill the promises that they had sort of made or the desires that they themselves had to really change structurally something about the foundations of society or

politics. And so I wanted to kind of figure out if there was a step that was maybe being missed. And, you know, the fact that so many of these movements were born on social media, developed on social media, sort of gave me a hint in that they seemed to follow a kind of a similar metabolism. You know, this, this energy of being able to sort of pull people to look at you and then to move on, a incentive structure where you're trying to kind of gain followers or likes, and then you kind of move on to the next thing that grabs attention. And the thing that was missing was the quiet before, was this space where people could talk amongst themselves, imagine, debate one another, refine ideology or strategy, and build a more solid base of identity as being part of a sort of an

oppositional group. All of that kind of, there's no space for it, obviously, on social media. I don't even need to make that argument. We know that Twitter is just not a place to do that. And the fact that it was missing from movements really struck me and worried me. And so part of the book was sort of looking historically pre-digital to understand where other movements, you know, in the hundreds of years before the internet, where they found the quiet before. What media did they use to sort of talk amongst themselves? And then to sort of then look at the last decade or so, and understand the way that the internet has affected how movements developed now. And what did you find with these pre-internet movements? Oh, it was, first of all, it was fascinating.

I mean, I loved doing that kind of archival historical work, which is what I had to do for that part of the book. And I was essentially seeking out stories. I wanted to tell stories of vanguard, of groups of people that had come together, again, in a sort of mediated way to make change. And so I started. back before the scientific revolution in the 17th century and look at letters and the role that letters played and sort of fermenting a new relationship with nature, a new way of observing and looking at reality. And I take it up through petitions in the 19th century in England, early 19th century in England, and the role they played in developing a working class sensibility through the Chartist movement. Go to the Soviet Union and look at Sami's dot, which was this underground sort of passed hand-to-hand

self-published writing that allowed a shadow civil society to exist, really in the middle of a totalitarian society, all the way to zines in the 90s and the riot girl. Yeah. So I look at how third-way feminism and sort of the voice of third-way feminism developed through zines. And what I learned sort of in a nutshell is that the sort of spaces that these forms of communication provided were intimate, allowed for a back and forth, gave people a chance to test out ideas and to egg one another on. We think of kind of the word safe space, the expression of safe space is a really sort of negative thing because people associated with not wanting to have your ideas challenge. But there's sort of a flip side to that, which is like a kind of medium that creates a safe space also gives people

an opportunity to come together and really refine and test out their ideas as a group, you know, before they're really ready to launch them out. It's interesting that you were talking about this because I was thinking about how much reporting, even like reporting, not even analysis or opinion, how much reporting is shaped by the kind of ideas that keep being batted around. And like Twitter obviously has a negative connotation for being sort of shaping the narrative around situations and ideas. But you really see how much that's true with almost all of everything you see.

So this is really interesting because you really can be wrong back then. Yeah. It seems so obvious, but we've sort of lost this sense that, you know, there has to be a place where you fail a little bit. You know, where you try out things, you know, where you obviously, you know, we live in this culture right now. We're shaming is such a big part of how we sort of publicly communicate with one another. And there's not really a lot of room to try out ideas. I'll give you sort of a negative example from the book. I actually looked at groups of white supremacists who came together before Charlottesville.

And I got access through some lefty hackers, a group called Unicorn Riot, gave me access to thousands and thousands of messages that they had inside of a closed chat room on a platform called Discord. Yes. Maybe people know what I'm saying as if nobody knows what it is. I didn't, because it's mostly for gamer. I think. Well, now it's more popular. But yes, yes, yes, early on it was. So they thought they were having sort of private, quiet space. This is not Reddit. There's no upvoting. It's definitely not Twitter or any of these other places that are sort of outward facing. You have to join. It's moderated. And what was interesting to me is because there's no features that sort of push up or

allow you to like or favorite things, it is really a conversation. And it was a conversation amongst themselves. And that I found fascinating because in some ways this was the testing ground of what I was proposing, which is that it's important to have that sort of space. And it was really fascinating because, you know, in these months before Charlottesville, you know, what they were trying to do was bring together all these different strands of the right, right? It was unite the right. But they were kind of in their world, a deep ideological differences. Like, how anti-Semitic are you, Do the juice go into the gas chamber or do we just not talk to them? And so they needed to work all of it out.

And they really did in this space. And the way that they talked to each other was filled with so much more kind of earnestness. And like listening to each other and working out in optics. Optics was a big thing for them because the whole notion of what they were trying to do is to gain some respectability among certain demographics in America that they felt might be amenable to their ideas if they, didn't, weren't turned off by like the Nazi, you know, neck tattoo. So how do we actually get to a place where we can figure out what our outward facing look is going to be? And it was down to like the, you know, do we wear white khakis or, you know, like, and then, you know, they were

trying to bring the proud boys along, you know, and the proud boys were sort of on the, on, on, on the cusp of at that time of being sort of having a, not being quite as marginalized. You know, they were trying to present themselves as not being white supremacist. And so, but they thought these would be good allies. And so there was a lot of strategizing and talking about sort of how do we approach them. How do we bring them along? What do we have to sacrifice and give up in terms of our ideology to sort of bring them in? So all of this was really fascinating because it gave me a vision of what it means to have that kind of space. And it really is one in which you have a lot more freedom in a strange way to let ideas sort of flourish on their own terms. Yeah, but they were still Nazis. They were still Nazis. There was no point where they were like, hey, what about Jews? They're not great.

You know, maybe we should give them another chance. No, but what they wanted to achieve ultimately with that was some degree of respectability in their sense of what respectability meant. And they had the president tell them that they were very fine people, you know. So that's, that was, they achieved something then for themselves. You know, it was obviously then pushed back in a big way and they were sort of sent into deeper and deeper holes and kind of lost even the spaces that they had to communicate. But in that brief moment, it was really interesting to see what they did with a sort of, I mean,

they'd hate the term, but with a safe space, you know. Yeah. Explain to me what industrialization and the internet did to these ideas. You're talking about how the origin of these ideas, radical ideas. How did the internet change the way we come up with radical ideas? At first, you know, there was a lot of dreaminess about what the internet could actually provide for small groups of people who wanted to come up with new ways of arranging reality, let's say. And I have a chapter there that for me was kind of a pivotal chapter, which is, you know, cyberspace. You know, this moment in the 80s and the 90s where people began to speak online.

And even before the internet, the chapter I look at was before there was an actual internet, just on all. on sort of message boards that they would dial into. And it was the first time that people were speaking in a disembodied way and practically in real time. And a whole sort of philosophy or ideology emerged from the sense that, oh, this is a revolutionary tool. This is something that's going to bring people together around ideas and allow like-minded people to find each other

and to sort of incubate new things in a way, in a much more, in a way that would kind of add scale and speed to it. So we don't need the coffee shops or the petitions or the Sami Stott or the letters. We can just, we can do it so simply. And I think that dream still exists in the recesses of a lot of Silicon Valley, you know, mogul's minds. That's what they're doing. But the problem is that kind of capitalism happened, you know, and everything became so, as we well know, so consolidated. and the places where we come to have communication online are now dominated by a few companies,

as we know, and they have incentive structures in which they want a certain kind of speech and they don't want another kind of speech. It's funny, I thought a lot about sort of what the term social meant or means and the different kinds of meanings it can have and the way that shifted when the Internet came along. And there is the kind of social that I feel on social media is the social of like a cocktail party, you know, like I think about it as you go and you're just like, you know, you're chatting with lots of different people and it's noisy and you sort of half hear everything. And then somebody makes a joke and everyone turns in their direction, like a glass breaks the other side of the room and everyone kind of, you know, looks to see what happened over

there. And then you get home at the end of the night after two or three hours, you're taking off your shoes and you're like, did I connect with anybody? Did I really talk to anybody? And we all know that feeling. That's a kind of social. But then there's the social of, you know, five people sitting around a table or huddling together really intensely talking about something, you know. And overthrowing the government. Right. Right. Overthrowing the government or even just imagining, say, you know, how could policing look different or, you know. And that is a kind of social also. But I feel. like the internet sort of shifted one model of that sociability that was sort of the dream of the internet into another. So basically you're saying it made everything much more superficial, which is why I like it. It made it superficial, but look, the platforms need us to sort of communicate in a certain way, right? They need us to kind of keep pinging, ponging around, around, and interacting

in sort of ways that are sticky, right? And they don't want, they don't want focus. You know, They don't want a focused conversation about one thing. I think that's not something that they would even deny. It's just not what it's built for. And the problem in a way, it's not just with them. It's also with us. It's our confusion of what it means to be social, you know, that we think that going on those platforms is the same thing as sitting around the table

talking with five people. And it's not. And I think for activists, and you know what, I'd want to amend that to say that we kind of understand that now when it comes to our personal lives, right? Like, there's no illusions about what's happening for most of us who are sort of self-aware on social media. We know that there's a performance quality to it. We know that we're sort of having conversations through bullhorns, right? But I think that when it comes to social movements, there is still this kind of fantasy of, you know, all we need to make change in the world is for a,

hashtag to go viral. And I'm being a little like facile about it, but I do think that I do think that there's people who really feel like that, and a lot of activists to spend their energy focused in that direction. And brands too. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm curious what you're prescriptive is for this. I mean, I think ultimately what I came out of the historical journey feeling is that people need to find a way to recreate those tables, you know, those spaces where they can come together and have conversation. And, you know, that might seem like a simple answer, but it's actually not considering how attracted we are to the virality to going viral. You know, and I spent a lot of time, one of the chapters was about these Black Lives Matter groups,

It was two of them that I sort of got very close to and was looking at one in Florida and one in Minneapolis. And the one in Florida called the Dream Defenders, they had actually, in the middle of the sort of height of Black Lives Matter in 2015, 16, they decided to just go offline completely. They did what they called a blackout. They did like three or four months where everybody in the group deleted their, you know, their apps. And it was a pretty dramatic move at a moment when, you know, they told me, you know, you would open up magazines and they would have. lists of the most influential activists, and it was Twitter accounts that they were looking, follower accounts that they were looking at. So that was the kind of currency at the time. And they were saying, no, we're kind of losing our bearings here. We're so focused on gaining popularity

on the platforms that we don't even know what's going on in our communities. And so, for example, they believed in abolishing the police, right? They were part of that sort of kind of ideological framework. Once they did this blackout, they started going out to the neighborhoods that they were supposedly organizing and working in and knocking on doors and talking with people, having kind of small conversations. And they began to quickly realize that the people that they were sort of arguing, you know, in favor of abolishing the police for didn't want to get rid of the police. And this was kind of a shocking thing for them to learn. And they realized that they needed to redirect their work. They needed to focus it more on sensitizing people to the different ways that policing can happen, that the community safety can happen, and sort of introducing some of their own thoughts in a conversation.

And it was, but the important first step for them was sort of, you know, unlatching themselves from this kind of boom and bust, you know, that we feel all day long on social media, that that was really important. and finding other communications tools. I guess that's the takeaway is there are other ways to do this online. I'm not suggesting that we unplug the internet. This is not a kind of a cyber pessimist book in that way. It's more about having a kind of self-awareness about the tools that we're using to talk to one another, especially when we're talking about activists in these movements

or in nascent movements that there has to be, in addition to the megaphone that you can pick up, there also has to be that quieter sort of space where you can huddle and figure things out. Because the truth is, you know, and this was very true of the Black Lives Matter actor as I talked to, is that when those moments of heightened attention happened, and we know when the whole country was turning their direction, they felt like they had not had that time before to really prepare to take full advantage of it. And so a lot of them felt like that the winds of that moment were sort of the symbolic wins, the winds of attention. And yes, it's true. There were concepts suddenly thrown into the American bloodstream that hadn't been there before, you know, that were important. But they didn't feel that they had a chance to sort of build the foundation. And that needs to happen sort of more locally and sort of off the grid. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. That was great. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

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