"Gal Beckerman, in his new book, The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, would like those of us who care about making social and political change to take a break from our scrolling and posting and consider what our social media are doing to us, what we may be losing. But rather than write yet another cyber-pessimist jeremiad, Beckerman gives us a series of richly detailed historical narratives, deeply researched and reported, ranging from France during the 17th-century Scientific Revolution to the working-class Chartist movement of 1830s Britain, from the anticolonial stirrings in Accra in the 1930s to the Soviet samizdat dissidents of the 1960s, and from the riot grrrl zines of the early 1990s on up to the Arab Spring, the alt-right, and the Black Lives Matter uprisings of recent years. In each case, it becomes clear that the means of communication, the media through which radical thinkers and movement builders interact, can be as important as the ideas being developed and shared.

"A book like this isn’t meant so much to inform our present fights for survival, democratic and social and planetary, as to help us step back and think about where the next radical ideas will come from, the ones we’ll need if we’re going to get through a catastrophic century. The question is whether — if we fail to get our heads out of our corporate-serving, profit-fueling feeds — these ideas will come at all." - Wen Stephenson

Author Interview: “We’re Not Really Listening to One Another”: A Conversation with Gal Beckerman