La calma abans de la tempesta

Why do some radical ideas go down in history and others fail? We tend to think of revolutions as noisy: frustrations and demands shouted in the streets. But the ideas that fuel them have traditionally been conceived in much quieter spaces, in out-of-the-way corners where an avant-garde can imagine alternate realities and deliberate how to get there. This extraordinary book is a search for those spaces, across centuries and continents, and a warning that -in a world dominated by social media- they could soon become extinct. Before the Storm is a grand overview that opens with the 17th-century correspondence that launched the scientific revolution and moves forward in time to examine the drivers of social change: the petitions that secured voting rights in Britain for 1830s, the zines that gave voice to women's discontent in the early 1990s, and even the encrypted messaging apps used by epidemiologists fighting the pandemic in the shadow of an inept administration. In each case, Beckerman shows that our most defining social movements -from decolonization to feminism- thrive when given the time and space to gestate before spreading widely. But Facebook and Twitter are replacing these private, productive spaces, to the detriment of activists around the world, with public, interconnected, monolithic platforms. Why did the Arab spring fail? Why did Occupy Wall Street never catch on? Has Black Lives Matter tapped into its full potential? Beckerman reveals what this new social media ecosystem lacks -from patience to focus- and offers a recipe for radical ideas to grow again. Lyrical and profound, Before the Storm he looks to the past to help us imagine a different future.