In recent years, political movements and trends have come (and sometimes
gone) with unprecedented speed. To name just a few examples: the
indignados, the gilets jaunes, the Corbyn surge, QAnon, 5G
conspiracists, and Extinction Rebellion. The diffusion of these trends
has followed the classic pattern of the sigmoid curve, much like H1N1,
or TikTok. Their rapid, exponential uptake has given rise to a certain
giddy voluntarism among adherents, only to be followed by crushing
disappointment when diffusion reaches its ‘natural’ limits and becomes
slower than the rate of decay.
What’s telling is that Black Lives Matter /hasn’t/ worked out like that.
A few months ago, at the peak of BLM riots, I was asked to write
something about whether the protests were being driven by social media.
I couldn’t write this at the time, but I was sceptical. Don’t get me
wrong. BLM has clearly prioritised online mobilisation. And it has
something in common with other online-based movements, in that its civil
society infrastructure is weak, localised and cellular. It has no
federated national organisation with clout, and much of the money and
clout that exists is tied to politically cautious NGOs. Even so, BLM
isn’t behaving like most internet-based protest phenomena. This is no
meatspace shitstorm. If it was just a sequence of transient protest
events, punctually _precipitated_
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/BFA2E74F4BCB25C3C222807E8B1111D4/core-reader>
by _police violence_
<https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/05/17/new-data-show-that-police-violence-predicts-black-lives-matter-protests/>,
Trump would probably have crushed the latest uprising by now. The
friends and family of Jacob Blake would be frightened, isolated and
facing an utterly bleak environment. Instead, Kenosha is up in flames.
More to the point, if BLM behaved like other internet-based protests, it
would be hard to account for its growth, its demographic breadth and
_geographical spread_ <https://www.creosotemaps.com/blm2020/>. The
latest protest wave constituted the _biggest series of protests in US
history_
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html>,
much bigger than the black uprisings in 1968. It has exposed divisions
in the ruling class and fractures in the state apparatus: the strategic
milestones of a social movement that is winning.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/contagious-idea-40877450?utm_medium=post_notification_email
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