@jalcine it’s really great! But also probably sort of weird to read now? The core argument is roughly “it is hard to make lasting change based on the very weak ties made on social media”.
Unfortunately current reality tells us something more like “it is hard for (numerous, poor) people to make (positive) change”.
Small groups of people who are already rich, powerful, and thickly connected seem to be doing destruction via group chat and social perfectly well.
@luis_in_brief @jalcine I thought it was more like: social media protests tend to fizzle out in a way that specifically leads to counterrevolutionary change.
Anyway, when I later read If We Burn (which definitely makes the latter argument), I remember thinking it was superfluous because Twitter and Tear Gas had already sort of covered that dynamic
@scott @jalcine it’s been a while? But I don’t think she’d necessarily make the second part of the claim, or at least it’s not the main focus; it’s more on why they get initial broad success and then fizzle, than what happens after the fizzle.
(I’d say once revolutions with any real traction fizzle counter-revolution of some sort is nearly inevitable, so maybe if she discussed that I sort of skimmed it as not additive?)
@jalcine and to be clear, I don’t think that invalidates the book; her experience and focus are on things like bottom-up revolution, and I think nothing since she wrote it has disproved her thesis *for that use case*.
But for small, connected groups of the wealthy, SVB, Trump-pilling, and probably more we don’t even know about yet suggest her argument was somewhat incomplete.
@luis_in_brief @jalcine Yes, I have been reading this book closely with my grad students for years now but am wondering if it is time to move on.
It crystallized very powerfully what I saw in Occupy and related movements, and the motivation for my latest book, Governable Spaces—the hope that online self-governance could address the limits she points to.
@luis_in_brief @jalcine On the Trump-pilling, I really appreciate this one on the intersections of left and right:https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/meme-wars-9781635578638/
And now this is on my reading list, which I'm told is excellent and seems deeply related to Tufekci: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn
@ntnsndr @luis_in_brief @jalcine I imagine you're familiar with it already but Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion (2011) seems like it would be an interesting companion read.