The Quiet Before, page 30
But for Rachel, in Miami, the excitement of the summer only thinly covered a thrumming worry. A younger generation of protesters, who never experienced Ferguson or what came after—who missed the Blackout—suddenly entered the ranks of her organization with “burn-it-down energy,” she said, and she was concerned that the “shortcuts and the purism” that had once derailed the movement would return. Rachel herself had evolved, as she saw it, from someone who in 2016 voted for Jill Stein, the spoiler Green Party candidate (“I get it now, I was young”), to a pragmatic supporter of Joe Biden. The Democratic candidate was a bitter pill, for sure, but she understood just how devastating the alternative would be—a Trump win would upend all her organizing work. The Dream Defenders were now tactical in their approach. Before Floyd’s death, they had been busy working on the races of three Florida district attorneys, canvassing door-to-door for candidates like Monique Worrell in Orange County, who wanted to end mass incarceration, put more checks on the police, and rewrite bail policies. When the large protests began, Rachel tried to tune out the noise and keep the activists focused on these races, and they managed to help get Worrell elected.
The Dream Defenders also turned out hundreds of people to county commission meetings in the summer and fall to push the issue of policing, though here, too, there was an awareness of how far they had to go. “I think our communities aren’t fully behind it. I don’t think they understand it,” Rachel said. “We sit down even with some of the most progressive county commissioners, and their response is like, okay, I get it, you don’t want us to build this new jail. And what exactly are we supposed to be doing instead?” She wanted to workshop the language the activists used, emphasizing the investments that could be made with the money that would otherwise be spent on a police helicopter, as opposed to threatening to take something away. Defunding might not be the best articulation of this idea. “I’m honestly less committed to the words and more committed to the concept.”
Rachel fretted about preserving this work and its gains, especially as the hashtag spiked again. Other activists worried as well. 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.
In the summer of 2020, Rachel claimed she saw only small pockets of activists who seemed aware of this and were thinking long term. One of them, she said, was in Minneapolis. “That was the result of years of strategy,” Rachel said. “They stacked the county commission with people who were aligned with our movement. And that led to what happened when the protest erupted. But in general, overall, across the country, I think there’s a leadership gap. The movement needs to take a lot more responsibility for being on the ground, identifying leaders in the protests that are coming up, thinking through their demands. And that’s bigger than just writing ‘defund the police’ on social media.”
She knew the way attention could rise and fall, and in the end she felt it was a good thing for the newer protesters, filled with revolution, to experience both the energy of the summer and the heartache of its limits. “They’ve now lived through a movement moment, seeing that it is necessary, not sufficient.”
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BY THE FALL, the placards were still up, but something had shifted. The thirty-five-foot-tall yellow letters, spelling out “Black Lives Matter” in Washington, D.C., on a stretch of street in view of the White House and in front of the Trump Tower in Manhattan, still popped against the asphalt, though violent smears of black paint had defaced the words in New York many times over. The protests themselves had largely tapered off by the end of July, and where they did persist, they had taken on a more threatening tone, especially in cities like Portland and Seattle where mostly young white anarchists were running wild, marching menacingly through suburban streets. Even though an accounting of all the demonstrations from May 24 to August 22 by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project found that 93 percent of them were free from any violence or property damage, the meme, uncontrollable as a meme can be, began to signify for some people danger and chaos. Activists themselves seemed uncomfortable with certain mutations of the meme, like the strange afterlife of the victims. Breonna Taylor’s image appeared on T-shirts and mugs and the cover of glossy fashion magazines—there was even a “women’s empowerment event” in Louisville called BreonnaCon, which included a “Bre-B-Q.” But maybe most dispiriting of all was that when a Pew survey took the country’s temperature on Black Lives Matter in September, the unprecedented support seen in June had dropped precipitously, from 67 percent to 55 percent (among white people it had plunged from 60 percent to 45 percent). Even production of the show Cops was back on in September, three months after it was very publicly canceled.
And in Minneapolis, Miski’s story had taken a turn as well.
A few weeks after their pledge, the city council voted unanimously to draft a referendum that would decide the fate of the police department. But before the question could be put on November’s ballot, a group of city volunteers appointed by the chief district judge weighed in. It was their task, as the Minneapolis Charter Commission, to assess any alteration to the charter, which was essentially the city’s constitution. And they had problems with abolition. Crime was increasing in Minneapolis, and there were plenty of voices calling for more police on the street, not fewer. For the commissioners, it all felt too rushed. And then the Minneapolis Star Tribune released a poll that found strong support for the idea of shifting money away from the police budget and toward social services but clear opposition to dissolving the police—a position held by 50 percent of Black people. In early September, the commission voted to override the city council. There would be no referendum.
It was maddening to Miski that a handful of unelected, mostly white people who would seem to have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo had undermined their work. It felt like an undemocratic trump card played just as they were sure all their organizing was paying off, a system designed with a fail-safe to keep them from succeeding. But Miski also faced an uncomfortable reality as well, the same one Rachel had come to terms with in Miami: once the high of responding to George Floyd’s murder subsided, most people did not understand or like the notion of abolishing the police. The commission was far from alone in its skepticism of a world without cops.
Miski was not deterred. They understood this as simply the next phase in a cycle that had now become very familiar. “There’s a time after Ferguson, there’s a time after Mike Brown, after Sandra Bland, after Jamar Clark, when attention starts to fade, and that’s when organizers still have to dig in,” Miski said. “This is when we still have to talk to the community; this is when we still have to work on our narrative strategy. We need to continue to organize. So I don’t feel defeated.” Black Visions meanwhile had raised an extraordinary thirty million dollars by the fall and was figuring out how to transform itself into a multimillion-dollar organization without losing its soul. Miski said the sudden lull was welcome. The group needed time to gather together and take a breath after the tumultuous summer, to assess their disappointments and achievements, to figure out how to best and most fairly use their new resources. They also understood what venues would work for this part—the corner conversations, their private Signal groups. Miski even fantasized about a Blackout of their own. “I’ve talked to Rachel about that,” Miski said. “We’ve been thinking about what a Blackout looks like for us.”
As far as the referendum on abolishing the police went, Miski was intent on getting it in front of the people of Minneapolis the following year, on the ballot in 2021. To this end, Black Visions built a campaign around what Miski called a “people’s agenda, a people’s budget, and a people’s charter.” The group planned to head out into the streets and get as many citizens as possible to sign a petition asking the city to give them a voice in the matter. And collecting signatures would serve another purpose. “We’re going to talk to thousands and thousands of people in Minneapolis about what safety looks like,” Miski said. “Because if we do that, and we get folks to give us their signatures and say they want this on the ballot next year, there’s no way the charter commission or anybody else can stop it from being on the ballot.” The canvassing would also try to shift the framing of the issue from “abolition” to what they were calling “community-led safety.” When Miski told me about how they envisioned the petition not just reaching people and pulling the movement together but also creating small moments of communication that could build a constituency for a cause nobody could have imagined only ten years earlier, it brought to mind the working men and women in 1830s England who were pushing a people’s charter of their own.
The more immediate fight Miski was gearing up for when we spoke at the end of 2020 was over the city’s budget, how to funnel more money away from the police and toward the Office of Violence Prevention that the group had helped create in 2018. Ever since it was established, the city had offered no more than a million dollars every year toward its operation. But in early December, largely as a result of Black Visions and their growing political influence—members of the city council now felt they owed the group something—4.5 percent of the police budget, nearly eight million dollars, was diverted to the new office to pay for a team of mental health professionals who could respond to situations that had previously been left to the police. “That felt like a win,” Miski said. The group had earned it—by applying pressure, making late-night phone calls, and always showing up in force to those community meetings. They were drawing on a different metabolism and, even if slow, it was working.
Epilogue
TABLES
IN THE HUMAN CONDITION, her 1958 philosophical treatise, Hannah Arendt fretted about the eventual disappearance of what she called “the common world.” What exactly she meant by this phrase was always a little vague, but it seemed to signify for her all the concrete and stable elements—the institutions and artifacts, from schools to street signs—that constitute our shared reality. Her book was a response to what was the then-accelerating space race and push for automation that Arendt felt, presciently, would cause people to decouple from this common world (to, literally, escape the bounds of Earth) and move toward synthetic and virtual versions of reality in which the very definition of what it meant to be human would be utterly changed.
I am drawn to this idea that what saves us all from being atomized and adrift is a set of binding elements. For Arendt these elements were the prerequisite to politics, to maintaining society and culture, and, also, to living a meaningful life. At one point in the book she uses an extended metaphor to describe what it would be like if we lost them: “The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.”
You are all there together, sharing a table, eating lunch on it, getting angry, and slamming your fist down or seeing your spit fly over it or shaking hands over its grainy wood. And then it’s gone, and you are nothing to one another, just people sitting around awkwardly. Arendt was saying that it was the existence of the table itself that connected us, that made a group, a community. And I think her use of a table as a metaphor was intentional: the context for this coming together was a human-made thing, something sawed and carved with thought, an object whose primary purpose was to draw individuals into deliberation, their faces turned toward one another.
This is what I’ve been searching for in our pre-digital past, these tables, and I found them in letters and samizdat and zines. For Arendt, the common world was more generally about what made humans human, but her thinking would also seem to apply to any group of people whose aspirations sit outside society’s norms, who need a means to relate to each other, separate from everyone else. It’s the tables that allow for new identities and possibilities to form.
When the internet began to colonize every corner of our lives, the promise was an infinitely vast room filled with such tables. But I didn’t find very many of them when I began searching in the mid-2010s. Only destinations we all called “social.” Much of the problem, I realized, was a semantic one. 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. We’ve seen what this did to the activists of the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter who had arrived with the best intentions, to pull up a chair, and found themselves knocked flat on their faces.
By the end of the decade, though, this misreading of what “social” signified was pretty well cleared up, and very few people had any illusions anymore about what it meant to interact on Facebook—including Mark Zuckerberg himself. In an extraordinary post in March 2019 in which he announced a new direction for his company, Zuckerberg acknowledged the category confusion. “Over the last 15 years,” he wrote, his platform had helped people “connect with friends, communities, and interests in the digital equivalent of a town square.” But it turns out that Facebook’s users, woken up to the bustle and noise of the street vendors, the town criers, and the endless gossip, wanted a different sort of social sphere. “People increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room.”
This “living room” sounds a lot like our table. As Zuckerberg described it, “People should have simple, intimate places where they have clear control over who can communicate with them and confidence that no one else can access what they share.” In their seclusion and focus, these living rooms would be a break from what he said his site’s objective had always been, to “accumulate friends or followers.” It goes without saying that Arendt would be appalled by the notion of accumulation as the raison d’être of any social environment. And it’s certainly not the way to nurture radical ideas.
In recent years, both degenerates and dissidents have come to this conclusion on their own, finding ways to repurpose new platforms like Discord, or older technologies like email chains, to provide them with what they needed. The desire for tables is human and has never gone away, and it’s particularly strong when you wake up and realize that your own interests and concerns might skew sideways. For those early digital pioneers, this is what the internet was all about. They imagined they were building communes, off the grid and among their own, a pixelated reconstitution of the tribe. We have strayed from this original vision, and in truth it was always essentially a fantasy, a mescaline trip in the desert. But if we now understand just how necessary tables are, where can we find them today, and where might they be located in the future? Radical change can’t wait for Zuckerberg to start constructing living rooms.
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WHAT IF WE CONCEIVE of social media more broadly, as any digital platform that allows people to communicate with each other? This was what Ethan Zuckerman did as a visiting research scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute in 2020 when he began a project to map the full breadth of social media. Zuckerman was intent on capturing not just the large landmasses, like Facebook, but also the tiny islands and peninsulas that jutted off the mainland. The former head of the MIT Center for Civic Media, Zuckerman has become something of a Buddha of digital activism, responsible early in his career for creating the pop-up ad, that bane of our online existence, for which he seems to have been atoning ever since. His tendency as a thinker is not to look outside the box necessarily, but to rummage around in it to make sure there aren’t any unused tools. That was the impetus for this project. Rather than dream about regulations that might break up Facebook, critics need to look further afield, “identifying platforms that depart from the status quo.” As he put it, “There is a diverse space of social media outside of the shadow of the major platforms and we believe it’s there where the key to a different future lies.”
To begin this search, he pinpointed the elements that make up any social network’s character, among them its governance model (what speech is acceptable and who decides), its ideology as a platform (Facebook’s, he said, was “connect everyone and maximize shareholder value”), and, most interestingly, what he called its “affordances,” what it enables a user to do (share a post, “upvote” a comment, show off a number of “likes”). He believed these were the features that shaped a conversation, and he started using them to build his map, first dividing the full range of social media into broad regions, separate continents, each driven by a different “logic.”
