## Metadata - Author: [[Gal Beckerman]] - Full Title: The Quiet Before - Category: #books ## Highlights - We are gripped by the moment when the crowd coalesces on the street—the adrenaline, the tear gas, the deafening chants, a policeman on horseback chasing down a lone protester or a man standing up to a tank. But if we rewind to the instant when a solid block of shared reality is first cracked, it’s usually a group of people talking. To be more specific (and to reclaim a word that Silicon Valley has turned into meaningless jargon), they are incubating. And the incubation of radical new ideas is a very distinct process with certain conditions: a tight space, lots of heat, passionate whispering, and a degree of freedom to argue and work toward a common, focused aim. ([Location 112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=112)) - The medium we use for conversation molds the kinds of conversations we can have, and even sets the boundaries of our thinking. This was Marshall McLuhan’s great insight: the transition from oral to written to electronic culture brought along a shift in the way human beings processed reality, and it changed them. In the 1980s, Neil Postman, in his Amusing Ourselves to Death, picked up the baton from McLuhan and turned his ire on television, which he felt was adversely affecting the public discourse. ([Location 195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=195)) - Born to a family of magistrates and minor landowners in southeast France, Peiresc had spent his life collecting correspondents. First as a law student and in his travels to England, the Netherlands, and Italy (where he met Galileo after a mathematics lecture in Padua), and then even after he returned to Aix-en-Provence to take up a position in the parliament of Provence, he never stopped expanding his web of connections. He had linked up and become, over time, a leading citizen of the self-proclaimed Republic of Letters, the network of dozens and dozens of university scholars, learned aristocrats, and clergy spread throughout Europe. Together, they were exploring the era’s newfound mysteries—astronomical, microscopic, and geographic. The Republic was a collaborative venture that resembled the editorial board of a scientific journal (before such publications, and the notion of science as we know it, really existed) and was maintained through a patchwork of letters. The correspondents wrote to one another about their various tinkerings, floated theories, and sealed relationships by sharing fossils or anatomical drawings. Certain qualities of what would come to characterize the scientific community first took shape through these missives. It was “a laboratory in which ideas about civility were elaborated and lived,” wrote Peter Miller, one of the few academics who has studied Peiresc’s letters. And each individual letter, as another historian described it, was “a substitute for gentlemanly conversation,” which enabled the writer “to produce intimacy and immediacy at a distance, without alienating the correspondent with argument.” The letter writers embarked together on a project of seeking objective truth, and they acted as clearinghouses for one another, checking theories and exchanging information. The letter as a conveyor of voice, calibrated to express politeness and friendship, proved a particularly useful form for this joint research. And Peiresc always got the tone right. He was charming and generous, and he evinced a genuine curiosity about the discoveries of others. ([Location 334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=334)) - A Republic of Letters had existed in some form since the Renaissance, a revival of a classical concept that originated with Cicero. But it really took off during the Reformation and the resulting religious wars that convulsed Europe from 1500 to 1700. Travel during these conflicts became dangerous for scholars. And with most universities co-opted by one warring sect or another, the Republic became a secular institution of learning, above the fray. ([Location 349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=349)) - Peiresc and others treated it almost like a cult, excited by the sense that they were producing knowledge in a kind of relay and passing it from one generation to the next. As René Descartes, the French philosopher and contemporary of Peiresc’s, wrote, “With the later persons beginning where the earlier ones left off, and thereby linking the lives and the work of many people, we can all go forward together much further than each person individually would be able to do.” A glimpse into Peiresc’s study in Aix would show just how much energy existed in the Republic and how eclectic its interests. The letters arrived at his town house in a constant flow, often multiple times a day, with the envelopes sometimes emanating the sickly sweet smell of vinegar, a disinfectant against… ([Location 352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=352)) - A quality of gift giving characterized the enterprise. At his feet and lazying about amid all this ephemera were the fluffy white-furred and blue-eyed Angora kittens that he loved to breed but was willing to part with if it meant he might add a precious piece to his cabinet (“If it were useful to promise one of the… ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=364)) - The medium was a conduit for slow thinking. Letters acted like oil in the gears of idea production: the throat-clearing pleasantries, the lines upon lines where a mind could wander, an informality that didn’t demand definitiveness yet gave space for argument to build lightly. These were the qualities that made letters so critical to the community of proto-scientists. But they also worked well for introducing a new worldview. The ruminative aspect of letters, the embedded patience of them, avoided what might otherwise feel like the locked-horn confrontation of one system of truth trying to overtake another. ([Location 401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=401)) - Though Europe had experienced the Renaissance and Reformation, both of which elevated subjectivity and individual will, this was a church that demanded deference to doctrine, with Saint Augustine’s fifth-century dictum still standing: “It is not necessary to probe into the nature of things as was done by the Greeks….It is enough for the Christian to believe that the only cause of all created things, whether heavenly or earthly, whether visible or invisible, is the goodness of the Creator, the one true God.” ([Location 426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=426)) - Peiresc had always looked to Galileo with awe and no small measure of envy, and he learned of his persecution with sadness. “Poor Galileo had to declare solemnly that he did not support the opinion that the earth moved, yet in his dialogue he used strong reasons to support it,” he wrote in one letter following the verdict. But the main lesson he took away from this episode, coming after a lifetime in which both men had pursued very different paths toward the same ends, was that it was better to work incrementally and quietly. ([Location 437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=437)) - By early 1636, he had begun using third parties to badger those who had still not sent all their notes to him. Some of the missionaries hesitated for fear that their work had not been exact enough. Peiresc assured them he wanted to see everything and begged them to send what they had. He dispatched a friendly merchant to Michelange de Nantes with the hope of “knocking some sense” into him, conveying that he shouldn’t be inhibited by any worries about incompleteness. Peiresc hoped to see “the whole ‘tissue’ of his observation” because “even the faults and equivocations very often also serve.” He wanted these missionaries, steeped as they were in infallible doctrines, to understand that arriving at knowledge often meant collecting broken shards. ([Location 536](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=536)) - When he died on June 24, 1637, at the age of fifty-six, less than two years after the eclipse, it was in medias res. Almost all of his many projects were left incomplete. To others in the Republic, his death was a sudden void where there had been a flurry of activity. Tributes came from all over the Continent, from the learned community of men who had been his intellectual partners all those years, from merchants and sailors on the docks of Marseille, and from the intrepid explorers who had found a patron in Peiresc. Cardinal Barberini organized a memory book that lamented his death in all the known tongues of the world, elegiac poems in forty languages, including Quechua, Coptic, and Japanese—a “complaint of the human race.” More than anything else, those 100,000 pieces of paper that form his vast archive were his greatest contribution. They were remnants of communication, of the hours and hours he had committed every day to writing to his correspondents, collecting fragments of information, new objects, new theories, passing them along, swapping them with others, for decades. When his friend Gassendi wrote his biography, it was partly to capture the character of a man who was so influential and yet left no clear monument to himself. The book, one of the first major accounts of the life of a scholar, honored in Peiresc what he himself most valued: conversation as a conduit to knowledge. ([Location 565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=565)) - O’Connor was deployed by the convention to persuade the reluctant, and it was while on these trips in the spring of 1839 that he saw with his own eyes the purpose the petition served, what it could do for working people despite its current difficulties. It 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, snuck 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, a contract entered into, an act more official and solemn than almost any other in these impoverished people’s lives. The petition arrived at a moment when a largely oral culture was becoming more literate. The petition lay at this intersection. Half the job was to convince neighbors and friends and fellow citizens with words; the other half was to get them to sign their names. It was through signing that they felt consecrated in the cause. ([Location 708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=708)) - If Chartists gained from petitions the ability to cohere as a movement, manifestos provided the Futurists with a place to articulate their fantasies, always the first step to making them come true. The manifestos were part of an iterative process, each one instigating another that would build on the boldness of the previous one, expanding and sometimes correcting the vision and the tone they were determining together. ([Location 998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=998)) - The medium, by design, trafficked in yearning. The Futurists were a bunch of struggling artists and, as such, were in no position to impose their prescriptions beyond their small circle. “Manifestos frequently overcompensate for the actual powerlessness of [the writers’] position with theatrical exaggerations, and their confidence is often feigned rather than grounded in real authority,” wrote the literary critic Martin Puchner. But it is in the crafting of these texts, with their wild visions, that manifesto writers come to believe in their own ability to “create points of no return; to make history; to fashion the future.” ([Location 1048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=1048)) - Maybe the most distinctive feature of the WELL from our perspective today was the role of the host—“fair witness” was the original title as dictated by the creator of PicoSpan, and coincidentally the same term used on the Farm for people who brokered peace when interpersonal matters got messy. “Host” was ultimately chosen in order to stick with the model of a French salon that Brand imagined. He had George Sand in mind. ([Location 2606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=2606)) - Tex’s job, he learned, was to oversee it all, provide the guardrails so the conversation could keep moving forward without interruption or bad feeling. It demanded a near-constant gauging of civility. ([Location 2626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=2626)) - Communicating in cyberspace, she wrote a few years later, “wasn’t going to bring peace and understanding throughout the world, tra-la-la-la. Cyberspace does not have the power to make us anything other than what we already are….It is a revealing, not a transforming, medium.” ([Location 2673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=2673)) - MARSHALL MCLUHAN, the media theorist, had a useful shorthand for describing what people tend to do when confronted with a new technology: “rear-view mirror thinking.” Faced with novelty, “we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” ([Location 2675](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=2675)) - In just one short article from 1988, Tex pointed to a number of different ways the WELL was imagined: as a “neighborhood pub,” “an electronic Greenwich Village,” “the electronic equivalent of the French salons during the Enlightenment period,” and “the kind of things coffee shops were supposed to be about.” But in the same way that a car was never really just a faster horse, talking online was not just a virtual café. ([Location 2679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=2679)) - On the third day of the standoff, Mubarak pulled the plug on the internet, and from then on it was just the insistent physical presence of a mass of people refusing to leave until Mubarak stepped down. In retrospect this goal would appear too narrow, cutting the head off a body that didn’t intend to stop moving, but it brought solidarity and quieted, for the moment, any debate about what would come next. ([Location 2895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=2895)) - Social media never made it easier. It was only ever able to point them back to Tahrir Square, the tried-and-true method. When the moment clearly called for protest—when they demanded Mubarak be put on trial, or when the Justice Ministry proposed a law banning all demonstrations—they knew what to do. They could zero in on a point of outrage and motivate people to gather around it. It was as if social media had replaced their revolutionary project with a single instinct. Their greatest strength was the ability to resuscitate the magic and power of Tahrir, to pull off a millionya, a million-man march. But it was becoming a limited tool, a lever turned crutch. ([Location 2976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=2976)) - What social media gave the revolution, the aspect that it seemed stuck on and could never outgrow, was “a spirit for destruction.” It was an incessant rejectionism. No one seemed interested in building, he said. ([Location 3009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=3009)) - On the WELL, even when the conversation involved only a couple thousand people and the stakes were much, much lower than replacing an entrenched regime, a great many guardrails were needed to keep it a productive space, a home for talk that could build and not just destroy. What happened when you scaled those numbers up into the millions, removed those guardrails, the guiding moderators, and then introduced algorithms that kept people on the platform longer by elevating the loudest, most emotional voices? What you got was an incredible amplification system that also proved extremely ineffective at allowing people to focus, to organize their thoughts, to become ideologically coherent, to strategize, to pick leaders, and to refine a message. ([Location 3058](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=3058)) - What people wanted in those first months was a binary certainty. Is it dangerous or not? Will I get sick or not? Should schools stay open or closed? And scientists do not work like this. The scientific method is about being wrong so that adjustments can be made. It’s about tweaking a hypothesis by a few degrees. And the only way, many of these experts told me, to respect that process, while also providing useful information to the public, was to come together, like the ER doctors in their DM groups, in a closed network with people they trusted. ([Location 3742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=3742)) - Starting in the 1990s, in the field of physics, researchers in an increasing number of fields had been posting their papers to special online servers before they went through the peer-review process, which could take months. The pressures of a pandemic and the need to rapidly share new information made it even more necessary for research to get out before undergoing the strict vetting of a top-tier journal. And prestige publications like Science and Nature didn’t want to look as if they were holding back important findings, so even they began asking their contributors to post on these online repositories first to give the public and other scientists immediate access. And still it didn’t seem quick enough—there could be a week’s lag time after submitting—so some scientists were just sharing their papers directly on Twitter. This is how, on February 29, the first sequencing of a COVID-19 genome in the United States came to be presented to the world: as a tweet. ([Location 3753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=3753)) - Four hundred years after Peiresc had deployed his letters to nurture the development of the scientific method, there was still a need for a private space where this work could happen, where the pursuit of observable truth could proceed safely away from the centrifugal force of politicization and demagoguery. ([Location 3895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=3895)) - Standing at the epicenter, Miski saw it all rippling further and further out. And rather than exhilaration—though there was that as well—there was an anxiety: How to grab hold of this moment, this great burst of visibility, and direct it in a way that would bring about something more than the sugar rush of symbolic wins? ([Location 3967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=3967)) - There was nothing symbolic about what Miski and many of the other activists wanted. They believed that American policing, born as an institution in the nineteenth century in part—at least in the South—to catch runaway slaves, could never overcome this original sin simply through reform. Policing, in their eyes, was a tool of social control meant to route Black people into prison. Full stop. ([Location 3978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=3978)) - The maximal position on the question of what to do about this reality was called abolition, eliminating police departments completely and replacing them with a new model for public safety guided by the community’s needs. A tactic on the way to abolition was defund, which meant moving money away from the police and toward other social services. These were real demands. Activists wanted to shift the thoughtless and automatic way that funds were doled out to the eighteen thousand police departments in the country. ([Location 3982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=3982)) - Every movement needs such moments. They provoke and then produce action. We don’t live our lives with constant awareness of these issues—even those most potentially affected by them avert their gaze. It’s the moments that force a visceral reckoning with the violence. It was the shattered face of Emmett Till that helped launch the struggle for civil rights in 1955. But there was a danger, which the activists began to feel, in their dependence on these instances of sadness and rage to keep the movement aloft. ([Location 4027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=4027)) - Allen Kwabena Frimpong, an experienced organizer and an artist who had worked with the Black Lives Matter chapter in New York City, told me that there were moments during the summer of 2020 that reminded him of what he’d heard about the mass protests and riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, when for all the expressed pain the Black part of every city got an MLK Jr. Boulevard and not much else. That came to mind as he saw people thrill to the sight of the words Black Lives Matter printed on the wood of NBA basketball courts. “Those of us who have been organizing for quite some time could see this coming,” he told me. “Those symbolic actions actually end up entrenching the status quo even further, because it creates the illusion that the work of addressing all these intractable issues is done.” The symbols, he said, become pats on the head. ([Location 4242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=4242)) - What had “social” become? We could join Facebook or Twitter and enter the rat’s maze of rewards and punishment that made these sites’ business models run and end up feeling quite alone, distracted, and confused. ([Location 4331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=4331)) - It goes without saying that Arendt would be appalled by the notion of accumulation as the raison d’être of any social environment. ([Location 4344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=4344)) - Megill sees social movements—the drivers of change—as limited in their actions and their ability to evolve and adapt because they rely on tools that only deal in binaries. When you can discern shades of difference, new strategies and alliances open up. “We live along one political dimension because our categories for expressing ourselves and our tools for thinking about ourselves and others are one-dimensional,” he said. ([Location 4421](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=4421)) - “If I’m dissatisfied with this world—and I think that I might be—a problem is that you can only desire based on what you know,” Marlinspike said. “You have certain experiences in this world, they produce certain desires, those desires reproduce the world. Our reality today just keeps reproducing itself. If you can create different experiences that manifest different desires, then it’s possible that those will lead to the production of different worlds.” ([Location 4439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=4439)) - Perhaps pining in this way, for a perfect, magic medium for social and political change, is in itself misguided. Hope for the future might come instead from a changed mindset, cutting through the dreaminess that has colored so much of our thinking about online communication for so long and finally ingesting this fact, that the platforms are not neutral. ([Location 4471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=4471)) - Radical change—change that strips off the stucco and gets to the girders, that offers a chance to see ourselves and our relationship to nature or to others in new ways—doesn’t start with yelling. It starts with deliberation, a tempo that increases, a volume set first at a whisper. How else can you begin to picture what doesn’t yet exist? ([Location 4510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0951PCX8L&location=4510))