Free Premium Post: Most Social Movements Get This Wrong
Many social movements can bring activists together to demand change, but the successful ones have a policy layer in addition to its activists.
The moment a video goes viral, a movement can coalesce around it. Anyone who’s accessed the internet will recognize how quickly a new outrage can move people to protest on an issue that had never been important to them before.
However, the movements that only exist on social media tend to flame out without creating lasting change. Once online outrage moves on, the activists pushing for policy changes often move on too.
Gal Beckerman found the missing ingredients to many social movements in his book The Quiet Before. It’s a look at successful social movements in the past, from using astronomy to rewrite naval charts to modern protest movements like Black Lives Matter.
The successful social movements before and after the internet’s creation were the ones that had an “incubation” layer. They allowed a group to come together around a set of ideas and which compromises they were willing to make to implement them.
This was a layer to the social movement that could do politics while activists maintained public support and pressure on government officials while backroom work was done.
Why Incubation is so Important
Terrible ideas get passed around the secret corners of the internet. However, these secret spaces can also be used for good. Some of the questions that Black Lives Matter had to answer at the height of its influence in the summer of 2020 was what to do now that their movement was supported by a majority of Americans:
“There is narrative, and then there is the slow gathering of power,” Beckerman wrote. “And Black Lives Matter activists themselves came to sense how social media hindered the latter. Where could they work out their common goals? Where could they formulate strategy and move from emotion to ideology (which in this movement spanned reform to revolution)?”
Years after the height of the protests, many Black Lives Matter chapters saw streets renamed for their movements, but few police department budgets were reallocated much less defunded. An ABC News report found that 83% of the cities and counties the team studied increased police budgets by at least 2% from 2019 to 2022.
The activist groups that got closest to passing meaningful legislation were the ones that moved offline. Minneapolis’ Black Visions got the closest. Not only did members knock on doors to learn what their communities wanted. They also spent time working the backchannels:
“Miski and their friends got to know city council members and their aides, inundated them with research material, visited their offices, and, maybe most important, brought people out to hearings when the budget was being discussed, arguing in forum after forum against the belief that all the police needed were a few more bodycams. All this happened without much fanfare and largely off-line.”
These quiet organizational efforts led to elections of new city council members and a small reallocation of the police budget. The leadership in this group “tended toward privacy among themselves.” Carefully keeping a small group of people to make decisions together gave the Black Visions successes that few other popular groups around the country replicated.
What Happens without the Incubation Layer
In 2010, a picture of Khaled Said went viral in Egypt. His face was bloody and broken after police took him away. Another Egyptian, Wael Ghonim, was living in Dubai and built a Facebook page to organize a protest movement in Egypt. His success surprised him. “Within a week, it would eclipse all of Egyptian Facebook,” Beckerman wrote.
Ghonim’s Facebook page would post fresh atrocities against Egyptian citizens. The outrage led to protests, and the page grew.
“But as the months went by and summer turned to fall,” Beckman wrote, “he [Ghonim] also came to recognize the trap of organizing on Facebook. It demanded a fresh event, a novel focal point around which to rally the page’s followers.”
Ghonim’s organizing culminated in the Tahrir Square occupation. It was the site of a series of protests that resulted in Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, stepping down. It was a great victory against a corrupt government. Ghonim even managed to bring protesters to clean the square after the movement.
That’s where Ghonim’s successes ended. After a coup in 2013, Egypt’s military retook power. The Khaled Said Facebook page succeeded in mobilizing Egyptians. However, no one in the movement built an incubation or political layer:
“The closest Tahrir ever had to a governing body was the Revolutionary Youth Coalition,” Beckman wrote. He went on to explain the unanswered questions that sunk the revolutionary movement. “…they struggled from teh start with the ideological work of transforming what was a criticism of dictatorship into an articulation of the rights and responsibliities they wanted for tehmsevels and tehir fellow Egyptians.”
“What kind of compromise could be found between Islamist and secular Egypt? What freedoms were nonnegotiable for liberals like themselves? How could they sway fellow citizens who had never known voting rights and had long abandoned any expectation of transparency or accountability from theier leaders? They couldn’t arrive at answers.”
Change Requires Many. Politics Requires a Powerful Few.
It’s not difficult to make short-term changes. Moral panics are a dime a dozen in the social media age. Lasting change, on the other hand, is more difficult to achieve. It demands long-term strategic thinking, relationship building, and compromising that social media does not have room for.
Mass demonstrations are still crucial parts of social movements. They’re just one half of what’s needed. The other is an exclusive group of strategic thinkers who decide how to use mass support and who can work backroom channels.
Many people seem to aspire to be revolutionaries. Fewer aspire to be the quiet leaders in the background. Maybe some of the aspirations should finally be directed at the strategic layer of movements rather than the activist layer alone.