Book review: The revolution will not be tweeted / Jeffrey Lawrence: Who Owns Your Academic Community?

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, Gal Beckerman

Reviewed by Kit Wilson

Radical change, as any good historian will tell you, never just comes out of nowhere. Even the most seemingly unexpected shifts in history can, with hindsight, be traced back to specific material, intellectual and political preconditions - even if, often, we only notice the accumulated pile of tinder once it’s finally been set alight.

Why, though, do some moments in history produce no more than a wisp of smoke, while others erupt into revolution? In The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, Gal Beckerman, the Atlantic’s senior books editor, attempts to give an answer. Telling the lesser-known backstories of ten pivotal moments from the last four hundred years, Beckerman pays particular attention to the specific media that were, he believes, in each case crucial to effecting change: chartist petitions in Victorian Britain, anti-colonial newspapers in pre-independent Ghana, samizdat literature in Soviet Russia and the cut-paste-and-photocopy feminist zines of 1990s America.

Beckerman is a deft storyteller, and his anecdotes skip along. We follow the eccentric 17th century astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc as he tries to coordinate, months in advance, simultaneous observations of the eclipse around the world in order to calculate the earth’s longitude. We watch as the modernist poet and painter Mina Loy attempts to forge a feminist manifesto from the crucible of the highly misogynistic Futurist movement of the 1910s. And we peek behind the scenes at the private WhatsApp groups and email threads that circulated among panicked doctors as the coronavirus started to spread in early 2020.

Beckerman presents these stories as a warning. In recent years, he believes, we’ve been duped into thinking that the internet, and social media in particular - with its hashtags and emojis - provide us some new, quick shortcut to radical change. As the Arab Spring made painfully clear, this is an illusion. Truly sustainable movements, Beckerman argues, require a period of slow, careful incubation. If we want genuine, lasting change, we’ll need to rediscover or create anew the slower rhythms of older, pre-digital forms of communication…

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-revolution-will-not-be-tweeted/


Jeffrey Lawrence: Who Owns Your Academic Community?

Overwhelming evidence has shown that the primary purpose of the technological platforms currently dominating the digital world is to gain access to our personal data in order to sell it to advertisers. The worst thing about the machine-generated algorithms that fuel these platforms is not that they are arbitrary, or skewed, but that they are explicitly designed to keep us addicted. And it turns out that what most addicts us (or what Big Tech has decided most addicts us) is not that which is true or endearing or insightful. It’s what is most outrageous -  both in the etymological sense of “excessive” and in the literal sense of producing and sustaining outrage. As Zuboff put it in a 2021 interview with Time:  “Algorithms are engineered to amplify the most extreme, angry, toxic content, drawing people in to maximize data extraction.”

Although academics have been at the forefront of diagnosing the ills of our platform-dominated digital economy, they have had comparatively little to say about how platforms have affected academe itself….

https://www.chronicle.com/article/who-owns-your-academic-community


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