The revolution will not be tweeted?

In a sense, journalist Gal Beckerman ‘reveals’ to us in The Quiet Before what we perhaps already knew, that change comes slow. A deliberate churn of ideas precedes any uprising that succeeds, that the French Revolution had long begun before the Third Estate claimed formation of the National Assembly at the Estates General of 1789.

But, The Quiet Before is an important read for a different reason. Beckerman devotes a great length of the book to convince us on what most definitely won’t work, despite seeming that it does. In chapters that bemoan the futility of Twitter ‘revolutions’ and Facebook ‘protests’, the author is certain, no matter the degree of virality a cause assumes, spontaneous outpouring of any demand for change will not sustain. The ideas that keep a movement breathing and kicking are debated and chiselled—or ‘incubated’—far from the spotlight and platforms that offer fleeting engagement. The Quiet Before, however, doesn’t leave one feeling as sure.

It is hard to fault Beckerman on the need for deliberation to build cogency from an ideological standpoint when pushing for a specific change or change in general. One would also agree that it has to be under the establishment’s radar, so that the compulsion for change is fully-formed and ripe for the masses to taste and digest. But is this gestation really most effective outside the modern means of communication and connecting?

The book’s initial chapters try to build a case for slow-cooked radicalism. From the samidzat (the clandestine spread of banned literature) of Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the Soviet dissident, that was one of the ushers for glasnost, to Nicholas Claude Fabri de Peiresc’s network of letters in the 17th century that became the foundation of the modern understanding of the difference between longitudes, there are some very persuasive examples discussed. But what is hard to reconcile is the central argument of the book and the Arab Spring, to use one example from the book itself. The Arab Spring, reams of published pages from academics, strategists, politicians, columnists, and even B-school teachers tell us, was one mid-wived by social media, chiefly Facebook.

Sure, not all the political geographies where the revolt of the masses played out in the early 2010s have seen the change that the people so romantically had committed themselves to. But, there have been clear positives in Tunisia. And it is too early to tell if what the Arab Spring has birthed won’t lead the remaining countries down the path that Tunisia has taken. After all, the 1857 revolt against the raj surely sowed the ground for the freedom movement of the late 19th and early 20th century in India. One isn’t hazarding any manner of prediction here, but to downplay, like Beckerman, the fruits of Facebook organising is rather infructuous. Similarly, how do we reconcile what The Quiet Before is telling us with the Hong Kong protests? Sure, China has been able to crush it for now, but it isn’t dead yet. It has relied on modern media in the past, and if it rises in the future, it surely will again.

Besides, The Quiet Before doesn’t challenge itself with the case of how the capture of multiple modern media—and, through these, of coffee-house/parlor/living room/chaupal/panvaari deliberations—has nurtured radicalism, but not of the progressive kind. The Alt Right in America and the Hindu right in India—and from America and other Western geo-tags—have used internet media to organise and act. The Unite for Right, the march to the Capitol, all have umbilicals with the internet—the mainstream and the recesses of it. And in the case of the Hindu right of India, social media and television have become amplifiers of each other, and the change on the ground this has wrought is there for all to see.

Beckerman isn’t entirely wrong in backing platforms less performative than social media to simmer social change; one would like to see some opposition leaders in India stop being Twitter warriors. But, it is also increasingly true that the first and the second Acts of revolution—in Saul Alinsky’s famous comparison of revolution to a play that Beckerman references in the early pages, to explain ‘incubation’ of radical movements—would find it difficult to get staged in private for a long churn. Because, Big Brother might just have got the stamp of electoral approval.