The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions

By Ray Brescia

In The Future of Change, Ray Brescia identifies a series of "social innovation moments" in American history. Through these moments—during which social movements have embraced advances in communications technologies—he illuminates the complicated, dangerous, innovative, and exciting relationship between these technologies, social movements, and social change. Brescia shows that, almost without fail, developments in how we communicate shape social movements, just as those movements change the very technologies themselves.

From the printing press to the television, social movements have leveraged communications technologies to advance change. In this moment of rapidly evolving communications, it's imperative to assess the role that the Internet, mobile devices, and social media can play in promoting social justice. But first we must look to the past, to examples of movements throughout American history that successfully harnessed communications technology, thus facilitating positive social change. Such movements embraced new communications technologies to help organize their communities; to form grassroots networks in order to facilitate face-to-face interactions; and to promote positive, inclusive messaging that stressed their participants' shared dignity and humanity. Using the past as prologue, The Future of Change provides effective lessons in the use of communications technology so that we can have the best communicative tools at our disposal—both now and in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501748127

Book preview

THE FUTURE OF CHANGE

How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions

Ray Brescia

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

To Amy and Leo

My Love and My Life

Thus the most democratic country on earth is found to be, above all, the one where men in our day have most perfected the art of pursuing the object of their common desires in common and have applied this new science to the most objects. Does this result from an accident or could it be that there in fact exists a necessary relation between associations and equality?

Alexis de Tocqueville

Contents

Preface

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1.  Medium

2.  Network

3.  Message

4.  The Great Divide

5.  Digital Organizing

6.  Amending the Violence Against Women Act

7.  Marriage Equality in Maine

8.  A Living Wage in Long Beach

9.  Putting the Matrix to Work

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

In many ways, the ideas in this book began to emerge in my early days as a lawyer for tenant organizing groups in Harlem and Washington Heights in New York City, while I was working at the Legal Aid Society of New York in the early 1990s. During my years there, the leaders of the tenant associations I represented—Daryl Edwards, Byron Utley, Reina Lendor, Gyreain Privette, Frankie Clark, and countless others—taught me almost everything I know about community organizing and social change. Later, community leaders like Wing Lam and Mary Dailey helped educate me even further. I have had the distinct pleasure and honor to work with a large number of community leaders over the years, but there are simply too many to name here. I also have the good fortune to call many colleagues my friends, mentors, and allies. Although I regret I cannot name them all here either, I want to mention Molly Biklen, Harvey Epstein, April Herms, Carmen Huertas-Noble, Doug Lasdon, Megan Lewis, Tony Lu, Andrew Kashyap, Gowri Krishna, Annie Lai, Serge Martinez, Laine Romero-Alston, Anika Singh Lemar, Saba Waheed, David Weinraub, John Whitlow, John Wright, and Haeyoung Yoon. This book is a reflection of and testament to much of our work together.

The support I received from Albany Law School was central to this project. The law school’s president and dean, Alicia Ouellette, has been supportive both professionally and personally. In addition, treasured colleagues offered helpful guidance by reading drafts of excerpts, including Andrew Ayers, Ted DeBarbieri, Steve Gottlieb, Keith Hirokawa, and Sarah Rogerson. My former colleague and law school classmate Tim Lytton offered an incredible degree of support and guidance, from the earliest days of the writing process and even after leaving the school to join the faculty at Georgia State University School of Law. His friendship and advice were critical to the book’s creation. In addition, research assistants Lindsey Dodd, Heather Hage, Mary Ann Krisa, and Lauren McCluskey provided significant help in countless ways, for which I am grateful. My legal assistant at Albany Law, Sherri Meyer, was tireless and always of good cheer, no matter how much work I threw her way. The leadership and staff of the Albany Law School library, especially David Walker and Pegeen Lorusso and students Alex-Marie Baez, Claire Burke, and Victoria Soracco, were all tremendously helpful throughout this process, providing support and assistance whenever it was needed. Similarly, the school's Department of Information Technology Services met my technological needs with good cheer and tremendous patience. The staff at the New York State Library also offered critical assistance in locating some of the nineteenth-century materials scattered throughout the work.

Others outside of Albany Law School were also deeply helpful, including the members of the Clinical Theory Workshop organized at New York Law School, especially Jason Parkin, David Reiss, Ian Weinstein, and the late Stephen Ellmann, whose early scholarship on representing grassroots organizations in a mindful and client-focused way continues to inspire generations of lawyers and scholars.

Countless friends offered a great deal of guidance and support, including Mike Wishnie, Graham Boyd, Harold Hongju Koh, Paul Sonn, Susan Plum, Rosemary Queenan, Gates Garrity-Rokous, Beth Garrity-Rokous, Brandt Goldstein, Mark Napier, Nicole Theodosiou, Cynthia Fox, Bob Solomon, Joyce Gelb, Richard Pinner, Adam Bramwell, Charles Chesnut, Chris Coons, Kurt Peterson, and James Esseks. One of my friends and mentors, Michael Ratner, who did not live to see this book in print, contributed to my development as a lawyer for grassroots groups as much as anyone. He continues to be an inspiration to many, myself included.

The journalist and author Jonathan Rosen provided early editorial guidance. I am also grateful to Kate Babbitt for her editorial assistance and insightful research ideas that made the book better and more focused.

I also thank everyone I interviewed for the book: Ady Barkan, Emily Comer, Rosie Hidalgo, Alan Jenkins, Loraina Lopez Masoumi, Amy Mello, Jay O’Neal, Jeanine Pearce, Pat Reuss, Sharon Stapel, Leigh Shelton, Richard Viguerie, and Evan Wolfson. I am grateful to several others who provided insights, though their interviews did not make it into the book (because of space limits), including Ben Berkowitz, Cory Booker, Brad Lander, Alexa Kasden, Andrew Kennedy, and Kam Lasater. Their thoughts and ideas certainly animate this work as much as those whose words appear in it.

No one is more responsible for this work coming to fruition than Emily Andrew from Cornell University Press. She identified many problems in earlier drafts, and yet she believed I just might be on to something. Her patience, guidance, support, and constructive criticism were invaluable. She is everything an author could want in an editor, and I am grateful to have had her in my corner. The comments and criticisms of anonymous reviewers strengthened the book immeasurably. I have done my best to respond to all of their critiques.

My immediate and extended family provided great moral—and editorial—support. My brother-in-law, Richard Marsico, read multiple drafts and provided lots of useful and constructive criticism to help improve the manuscript.

My son, Leo, continues to be an inspiration. My hope is that the world this book envisions is one in which he will live.

My spouse, Amy Barasch, put up with me for the eight long years it has taken to bring these ideas and this book into the world. We celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary in 2019 and have been together since 1996. No one knows more about my thoughts on social change and community organizing than she does. It was our work serving low-income communities of color that brought us together in the first place. She’s a great lawyer, advocate, leader, and writer, and her thoughtful reviews of earlier drafts made them stronger. More important, she has made me feel truly loved throughout, and nothing is possible without love.

While many have contributed to this book, any omissions or flaws are solely my responsibility. I hope those who read it will do so with generosity and receive it in the spirit with which it was written: as a humble effort to present a hopeful vision for a more democratic, more participatory, more progressive, more human, and more humane future.

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

Making Social Change Happen

The American Legion faced its toughest battle yet. For several years, as the Second World War continued to rage in the European and Pacific theaters, the Legion had worked to convince the U.S. Congress to pass what would come to be known as the G.I. Bill, a package of benefits for service men and women returning from the war. To accomplish this, it activated members from its network of over ten thousand local chapters spread throughout the country. It used that network to mobilize public sentiment to support the initiative, encourage the Roosevelt administration to back it, and pressure Congress to approve it. Returning veterans stood to benefit from the groundbreaking program because it would open the doors to college and vocational training and offer many the opportunity to own homes. The Legion harnessed modern communications technologies to promote its message, using radio addresses and short film clips shown in movie theaters. It embarked on letter-writing campaigns and engaged in advocacy with newspaper editorial boards in its efforts to garner public support for the bill. It communicated with its members spread throughout the nation using all manner of communication: the mail, the telegraph, and the telephone. But despite all of these modern means of communication that enabled the Legion to build and coordinate a far-flung network of supporters, its efforts might have been for naught, all because of a hunting trip that occurred mostly beyond the reach of these technologies.

Even though the legislation enjoyed unanimous support in Congress, it still faced the very real possibility of defeat. Despite its efforts managing tens of thousands of volunteers in a network that spanned the nation, the outcome of the legislation in its then-current and generous form hung in the balance because of one person. The Legion had lost track of a single congressman: a swing vote on a crucial committee that controlled the fate of the legislation.

Years of painstaking work came to a head in June 1944, just days after the invasion of Normandy by Allied troops. Members of a select congressional committee in charge of the legislation gathered for an up-or-down vote on the benefits package. After different versions of the bill passed unanimously in the House of Representatives and Senate, Congress convened a joint conference of senators and representatives to reconcile the differences between the two chambers’ versions of the bill. In order to pass a single version of the legislation, a majority of each of the chambers’ representatives on the committee had to approve it. The members of the committee from the House were deadlocked over a few critical issues. One congressman, a Democrat from Georgia named John Gibson, could decide the outcome. Without his vote, the legislation would stall in Congress. Gibson supported the legislation, but he was not in Washington on the eve of the critical vote. Making matters worse, he could not be found. He was supposed to be at home recuperating from an illness. Even though he was needed in Washington the next day, he had apparently felt good enough to go on a hunting trip in his home state and was unreachable.

The Legion harnessed all means available to track Gibson down. Telephone calls to his home revealed his absence. By one account, when the telephone operator learned of the Legion’s efforts, she disclosed that her husband was fighting in northern France and promised to call Gibson’s home every five minutes until she found him. The Legion enlisted the support of local radio stations in Georgia, which asked their audiences for anyone with knowledge of the congressman’s whereabouts to call Washington. Police officers stopped cars on highways in their search for the missing lawmaker. Reporters at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called throughout the state to find him.

Through this statewide manhunt, the Legion finally located Gibson, and he was whisked back to the nation’s capital by plane in the dead of night to cast his critical vote the next morning. Evoking Paul Revere’s mythic exploits on the eve of the events at Lexington and Concord, Gibson’s trip was dubbed the Midnight Ride.¹ Once Gibson appeared in time to register his support for the bill, passage was assured.

The story of the passage of the G.I. Bill reveals how an adaptive grassroots network utilized all the media technologies available to it at the time in creative ways—from the mail and the telegraph to the radio and the cinema—to promote a positive, inclusive message and bring about social change. Innovation in communications technologies created an opportunity for the American Legion; it had at its disposal a vast array of tools to not just communicate with but also coordinate the efforts of its vast network of local chapters to promote adoption of the program. This connection between communications technology and a social movement is not accidental. U.S. history reveals the deep relationship between social change and innovation in the means of communication. When new ways of communicating have emerged, new social movements seem to have risen up in their wake. The rapid spread of the printing press in the New World in the mid-eighteenth century helped spawn a revolution, just as it had a century before in England. The growth of the postal service after the creation of the new American republic helped facilitate the emergence of the Second Great Awakening and other social movements in the early nineteenth century. The steam printing press supercharged the capacities of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s. The telegraph spread the word of the birth of the women’s movement. The introduction of the telephone and transcontinental railroad helped launch the suffragettes and the Progressive Era. The radio helped garner support for the New Deal. The television advanced the cause of civil rights in the 1960s. Today, mobile technologies have exposed police brutality in new ways that helped launch the Black Lives Matter Movement.

It might be tempting to say that this apparent connection between new communications technologies and new social movements suggests that technology causes social change to happen. Some today might argue that social media launched the Arab Spring, the Tea Party Movement, and other grassroots efforts that have emerged in recent years. But social change is far more complicated than that, as is its relationship to advances in technology. In this book I examine the link between, on the one hand, innovations in communications technology and methods and, on the other, social movements that appear to have emerged in their wake. I strive not just to understand the many ways in which communications and social movements are connected, but also to identify the components of the successes and failures of these same movements that seem to have a symbiotic relationship to the technology that fuels them.

Today, there is a growing dissatisfaction with the state of the world and the United States. This is evidenced in not just the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, swept in on a tide of resentment and a flurry of tweets, but also in the growing opposition that has arisen as a result of his victory in the election of 2016. These uprisings are being fueled by a desire to spark change in the status quo, regardless of where on the political spectrum a movement’s leaders may fall. Whether it is seeking to promote gun control or expand gun rights, improve working conditions of low-wage workers, or reduce deaths from opioid addiction, many are looking for strategies for bringing about social change. Those who wish to create such change today—a time when the ability to communicate and connect with others has improved dramatically—can learn from successful social movements of the past, particularly those that succeeded in times that have experienced similar advances in the means of communication.

Throughout U.S. history, technological and other changes to the means of communication have helped fuel social change. But technology alone does not bring about such change. A review of social movement successes at times when the means of communications changed throughout U.S. history also reveals the following: these social movements share other common features. An understanding of such features might generate a formula for social change in these periods following technological change. In order to understand what makes a social movement successful in moments when the means of communications change, I explore whether there are common elements of successful social movements in such moments in the past and those movements that are emerging today. In this work, I call such eras—when innovations and changes in the means of communication have helped spark social change—social innovation moments: when groups have harnessed these new means of communication to help bring new social arrangements into the world. In constitutional theory, the legal scholar Bruce Ackerman has identified what he describes as constitutional moments: times when both leaders and popular movements brought about transformations of our understanding of the U.S. Constitution.² Is it possible that technological change creates a similar social innovation moment, when advances in the means of communication capture the imagination of activists and nonactivists alike and encourage the growth and spread of social movements? Changes in the ability to communicate seem to create an environment in which social movements can emerge, embrace the new technology, and use it to advance the change they wish to see in the world. If we are indeed in such a moment today—as citizens have new tools at their disposal to communicate and coordinate their actions at lightning speed—could the history of and experiences in previous social innovation moments, and the successes of social movements in such moments, help reveal the ways in which advocates can advance social change today and tomorrow? It is the goal of this book to explore this question.

In this exploration, I draw from historical and theoretical research, primary research on several contemporary social movements, and personal experience as a lawyer and former community organizer to identify the essential elements of social movement success in moments of technological change. A social movement is traditionally defined as an organized effort to bring about social change.³ Similarly, a social revolution occurs when there is a significant shift in the social structure.⁴ Social movements often create social revolutions. For my purposes here, I will consider a successful social movement primarily one that leads to some significant shift in the legal infrastructure that governs the social problem the movement was attempting to solve; in other words, I will focus on social movements that have led to social revolutions. For example, the colonial revolt against the British Crown led to a monumental shift in the legal infrastructure governing the colonies. In addition, I consider other changes as successes: e.g., winning the right to vote for women in the U.S. and making de jure segregation by race illegal. I also look at the small wins secured by low-income people operating at the grassroots to try to tease out larger lessons from their victories, challenges, and defeats.

While identifying a significant shift in the legal infrastructure is one way to measure social change, there are also more subtle ways in which social movements can achieve success, and a change in social norms—which often comes with a shift in the legal infrastructure but by no means has to—can be no less important; in fact, such change is often more important than legal change. Nevertheless, such shifts in social norms are hard to measure, and even polling data on shifts in social norms are often suspect, as poll respondents may be less willing to admit that they have not adopted new norms as they evolve. I will thus draw from the measurable achievements of a number of social movements that emerged in social innovation moments throughout U.S. history to attempt to identify common themes, strategies, and tactics of such movements. Measuring social change is hard, in the end, and I will attempt to identify what appear as clear examples of social movement victories to help identify the components of those victories as a way to unlock the secrets of making social change happen in social innovation moments.

Yet there are some things this book does not do. It is not an analysis of the ethics of technology, the rise of the surveillance state, or a diatribe about the risks of social media.⁵ It is also not a love letter to technology. My goals are far less ambitious. What I hope to do in this book is provide a realistic assessment of contemporary communications technologies and the promise they may hold for those interested in bringing about social change. I borrow from both the past and the present, from theory and lived experience, to try to make sense of the social innovation moment we are in today and the moments to come, to understand the relationship between communications technology and social change so that those looking to advance change have a clear-eyed view of the capacities, and potential risks, of harnessing technology to bring about such change. I strive to draw from the past while looking forward to the future, taking lessons from the experiences of social movements that have taken shape at similar times when new communications technologies have emerged in U.S. history to inform approaches to organizing in a new, digital age. It is my hope that a review of the successes of past social movements that have deployed communications technology in effective ways will help uncover not just the components of those successes but also the reasons for them. The lessons will then help those looking to bring about social change with those communications tools currently available to them and those that will inevitably emerge in the future.

Another thing I will mostly avoid is an exploration of the successes of what some would label conservative social movements. The main goal of this work is to test and assess the components of successful progressive social change movements, from the abolition of slavery to the contemporary campaign to promote marriage equality. While not all social movements are progressive, the ones I will mostly explore in this book are those that sought to promote liberal or progressive causes simply because these are the types of causes that often seem to appear to emerge in the wake of advances in the means of communication. Moreover, I will also admit that they are the ones that are of greater interest to me. While the successes of social movements generally might help unlock the secrets of social change, I will only refer to the successes or failures of those movements when they might help illuminate some point about successful tactics in social innovation moments. Instead, I will mostly train my focus on efforts to bring about progressive social change. The insights I discuss here might also serve nonprogressive causes; nevertheless, those are not the main focus of this work.

An in-depth look into how the American Legion secured passage of the G.I. Bill uncovers some of these lessons that emerge about this interplay between technology and social change. With the American Legion, the national network it had developed took advantage of the best available technologies at the time to promote and ultimately secure passage of the G.I. Bill. But the Legion’s leaders did not just use technology in creative ways. More important than the technology they used to advance this change was what they did with that technology.

First, the supporters of the G.I. Bill used technology to activate a diverse and widespread network of volunteer civic groups that could promote the cause of securing these broad, generous, and inclusive benefits. This network is what is sometimes called translocal, consisting of small, local chapters tied together in a nation-spanning web that crosses the geographic boundaries of cities and states. Such networks would bind supporters together in a way that not only facilitates cooperation at the local level, but also enables leadership at all levels of the network to activate those local members to engage in advocacy in furtherance of the national cause. In the case of the American Legion, its members met face-to-face in local Legion halls to converse, strategize, and offer mutual aid to one another as they sought to garner support for the effort to pass the G.I. Bill. They also fed information to the leadership about the needs of local returning service members and lobbied their local elected officials, newspaper editors, and community leaders to support the program. This responsive network was essential to the creation of the bonds of trust, support, and cooperation that any grassroots movement needs to bring about social change. What is more, using all manner of communications technologies at their disposal, the leadership of the Legion facilitated the flow of information and the guidance needed to help coordinate efforts organized around a central theme: pass the G.I. Bill. Thus the communications technology available to the Legion made it possible to connect a diverse, nation-spanning network of local cells that helped build trust and mutual support at the grassroots level. The Legion leveraged this translocal network to carry out a broad, national campaign. That translocal network of trust, facilitated by the most advanced communication technologies available at the time, is ultimately what helped the Legion accomplish its goal of passing the G.I. Bill, and it was an indispensable component of that success.

A deeper understanding of the substance of the bill helps uncover an additional core component of the American Legion’s strategy and tactics for getting it passed. The Legion did not just build a network and use technology to do so. As a part of this national, grassroots effort, the Legion also rallied support for passage of the benefits program by stressing its near-universal and inclusive components that ignited the passions of avid supporters and sparked broad-based support. The message they conveyed because of these characteristics of the bill was that those involved in the war effort, no matter for how long and whether they saw combat, should have support from the nation they served once they returned from fulfilling their military duties.

The primary goal of the G.I. Bill was to prevent returning service members from falling on economic hard times on their return to civilian life. But it had additional benefits as well. The bill’s success would create an engine of economic growth that would transform the nation and lead to a postwar era that saw a steady decline in economic inequality, an increase in civic activism, and the rise of the civil rights movement. The ripple effects of the G.I. Bill were felt for generations and helped transform a nation. Future historians, as Peter Drucker once said, may well consider [the passage of the G.I. Bill] the most important event of the twentieth century.⁶

This experience of the American Legion highlights the central insights of this book. Placing tools at the disposal of grassroots groups has helped shape and strengthen efforts designed to promote social change. It has also led to innovation and adaptation as to how those tools can be used and wielded. The first component of successful social change in these social innovation moments appears to be that successful social movements have embraced the most modern means of communication available to them at the time as a tool for organizing and movement building. Indeed, the leaders of and participants in social movements have both adopted and adapted to the tools at their disposal to serve their strategic ends in new and creative ways. Early American movements delivered petitions to Congress seeking all manner of policy reform, just as online petitions are deployed—albeit with lightning speed—today. Pamphleteers urged their supporters to attend rallies and form local chapters of national organizations. In carrying out these tactics, they used printing presses, the mails, and the railroads to fight slavery and child labor, just as activists across the world now use Twitter and Facebook to connect, organize, and mobilize for collective action. Yet social movements are not only about the tools available to such movements to communicate.

In certain, distinct moments, advances in the ability to communicate do appear to correspond to the rise of new social movements. What the American Legion’s experience shows, and what the other social movements I will assess in this book also make clear, is that innovations in communications technology can help bring about social change when they are deployed to foster the growth and proliferation of translocal networks: again, small, local groups that are embedded in a broad-based collection of similar organizations. Further, as with the American Legion, movements made up of such networks tend to have success in achieving social change when those translocal groups promote a unifying message that is designed to combat social inequality in one or more of its many forms. The examples of the passage of the G.I. Bill and other similarly successful social movements help illuminate this interplay between technology, social movements, and social inequality. Like the American Legion, groups that do three things well tend to be those that are able to bring about social change.

First, the movements that arose in social innovation moments that I will look at throughout this work harnessed the newest means of communication at their disposal to further their social change goals. In fact, new advances in communications technologies do not just appear to spur social movements. In some ways, they also tend to help shape them: groups in the early nineteenth century mimicked the postal network, and the organizations in the first decades of the twenty-first century are built on the bits and bytes of digital networks.

Second, these groups have often organized translocal, grassroots networks. These networks are made up of cells, or nodes connected to a larger organization that often spans the nation. This network, rooted in local components but connected to a larger enterprise, encourages face-to-face interactions between participants in the movement. These face-to-face interactions help build trust and feelings of mutual support. The bonds these interactions create help foster cooperation and a willingness to partner with other members of the group to advance social change. Once these local bonds are created, the linkages between