For those that don’t know, Jason Kottke publishes an old-school blog, almost as old as mine.¹ He’s does a great job highlighting all sorts of interesting links and videos and it’s been one of my essential daily reads for a long, long time (I first mentioned him on my blog 18 years ago). I’m a monthly subscriber, happy to give my little bit.

He’s been experimenting with blogging communities all this time and there’s a lot of good innovation continuing lately. From the post:

The Rolodex is part of this “strategy” of relationship-building and strengthening of trusted sources of information. You readers are curious about what I read and pay attention to, I enjoy linking to things I like (duh), and I believe it’s more important than ever for those sites who traffic in knowledge & curiosity and care about humans to acknowledge and stand with each other. As I wrote last year, we are not competitors; we are collaborators

It feels like sites like his are reinventing the early 2000s. Social and search are failing us so we’re reinventing blog rolls (a blog author’s list of favorite sites). It was fun watching this build organically back in the day but I wonder if we can recapture the magic.

The comments thread on my personal blog used to be a lively back-and-forth, with a solid community of regulars and a few dozen-or-so active blogs that all linked to one another. Nowadays I’m lucky if I get a few comments all year. Comments are also dropping away in the niche-but-longstanding print/online publication I work for, especially worrisome as they’ve been basically powering our letters-to-the-editor column for the last dozen years. I wonder if people are just more reticent to share outside of established bulletin-board-esque websites (eg Facebook, Reddit, Substack). Glad to see it’s working on Kottke!

In reports, Trump is said to have decided on the Iran attack in part because he felt Israel was getting such “good press” for its attacks against Iran (not surprisingly, he fixates on Fox News coverage, which was all-in for Netanyahu’s attacks). U.S. military intelligence says the attacks on Fordo, Iran’s primary nuclear-enrichment site, only delayed a possible creation of a nuclear weapon by months. Why generate such ill-will for such a temporary advantage?

Of course, would we even be in this mess if Trump hadn’t scuttled the hard-won negotiations of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal framework. Even at the time it seemed like Trump was mostly acting out of jealousy that a long-term solution had been the result of his predecessor’s work. There doesn’t seem to be any overarching logic to any of this. It’s all for the TV coverage (the rest of the world’s leaders seem to have figured this out). Is there a really an end-game to Israel assassinating so much of Iranian leadership, including some of the very people who were negotiating deals? And in the midst of this, a real solution to the Palestinian—Israel conflict seems further away than ever.

Peaceful conduct is the best way to set up peaceful resolutions. Iran has always been a country with potential. Encouraging it to give up nuclear and terroristic ambitions, promising it lasting safety, and slowly integrating it back into the world economy is really a win-win for all sides. So why all this theater? What’s the end plan anyway? Or is that such a naive thing to even ask in 2025?

For years, a stinging criticism of nonviolence strategy has been that it’s rooted in comfortable elite communities and has spent too much time lecturing resistance movements that turn to violence. Chenoweth’s hard numbers and academic rigor gave us a bit of cover: See!, nonviolence works more often than not! Her more recent research makes that pragmatic argument more complicated.

Activists have also tried to apply the data to very different types of social action. Chenoweth’s data was looking at regime change–overthrowing dictators or an occupied territory. How it does and doesn’t apply to reform movements is an open question (hat tip Mackenzian for a great convo on this and this link).

The next part of the Times’ article references Zeynep Tufekci’s theory that the last decade’s era of social-media protests can create instant, large-scale challenges to government power that are dramatic but essentially leaderless and don’t come out of strategic, long-term visioning. These are more likely to fizzle out. I’m reminded of a 2010 blog post of mine, Gladwell and strong tie social media networks, where I talked about the organizing that needs to go on in the background of a social network to make it more effective.

While this article focuses on China, the elephant for nonviolence activists today is the war in Ukraine. People power wasn’t going to stop Russian tanks headed toward Kiev in February. The best one could hope for is Ukrainians gumming up the system–employing strategies like blowing up bridges during the invasion and slow-walking Russian orders afterwards. But without a military defense, there was almost certainly going to be a long (perhaps decades long) period of occupation and repression. Activists can still support relief work and conscientious objectors, etc., but I honestly don’t know what tools we had to offer in regards to the invasion itself.

Henry Cadbury believed the Jewish people should have appealed to the German sense of justice and national conscience. Then those Germans would have stood up for the Jewish people, and prevented the Nazis from acquiring power. The death camps would not have happened.

Many probably think that is naive and could not have worked. But that is what nonviolence is about, connecting with those you are hoping to change. Listening deeply and being willing to change yourself. This is also what faith is about, believing in the presence of God today. Believing that as you listen closely you will be guided by the Inner Light. Believing somehow God will find a way.

There’s a fine line between idealistic naiveté and realistic solidarity. I’m still of the mind that Cadbury should have harbored more cynicism of what was happening as the Nazi Party grew in Germany but I can see Jeff’s point: in 1934, was the future we know inevitable?

https://kislingjeff.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/resist-not-evil-today/

Correction: I got my Jeffs mixed up in the original version of this post. This was written by Jeff Kisling.

My choice, from an early age, has been to engage in social change from the ground up, using the power of organized nonviolence. A distrust of the political process was firmly in place by the time I was 15. As a daughter of Quakers I pledged my allegiance not to a flag or a nation state but to humankind, the two often having little to do with each other.

Malcolm Gladwell’s modus operandi is to make outrageously counter-intuitive claims that people will talk about enough that they’ll buy his boss’s magazine, books and bobble-head likenesses. I find him likable and diverting but don’t take his claims very seriously. He’s a lot like Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, his sometimes sparring partner, which isn’t surprising as they work for the same magazine empire, Conde Nast Publications.

In his article, Gladwell takes a lot of potshots at social media. It’s easy to do. He picks Clay Shirky, another New York “Big Idea” guy as his rhetorical strawman now, claiming Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” is the “bible of social-media movement.” Reading Gladwell, you kind of wish he’d get out of the echo box of circle-jerk New York Big Talkers (just getting out of the Conde Nast building’s cafeteria would be a good start).

Gladwell’s certainly right in that most of what passes for activism on Twitter and Facebook is ridiculous. Clicking a “Like” button or changing your profile image green doesn’t do much. He makes an important distinction between “weak ties” (Facebook “friends” who aren’t friends; Twitter campaigns that are risk-free) and “strong ties.” He cites the Civil Rights movement as a strong-tie phenomenon: the people who put themselves on the line tended to be those with close friends also putting themselves on the line.

What Gladwell misses is strong-tie organizing going on in social media. A lot of what’s happening over on QuakerQuaker is pretty strong-tie–it’s translating to workshops, articles, and is just one of a number of important networks that are forming. People are finding each other and making real connections that spill out into the real world. It’s not that online organizes creates real world changes, or even the reverse. Instead, under the right circumstances they can feed into each other, with each component magnifying the other’s reach.

One example of non-hierarchical involved social media is how Quaker bloggers came together to explain Tom Fox’s motives after his kidnapping. It didn’t have any effect on the kidnappers, obviously, but we did reach a lot of people who were curious why a Friend might choose such a personally dangerous form of Christian witness. This was all done by inter-related groups of people with no budget and no organizational chart. But these things don’t have to be quite so life-and-death.

A more recent example I’ve been able to see up close is the way my wife’s church has organized against diocesan attempts to shut it down: a core group of leaders have emerged; they share power, divide up roles and have been waging an organized campaign for about 2.5 years now. One element of this work has been the Savestmarys.org blog. The website’s only important because it’s been part of a real-world social network but it’s had an influence that’s gone far beyond the handful of people who write for it. One of the more surprising audiences have been the many staff at the Diocesan headquarters who visit every day–a small group has taken over quite a bit of mental space over there!

It’s been interesting for me to compare QuakerQuaker with an earlier peace project of mine, Nonviolence.org, which ran for thirteen years starting in 1995. In many ways it was the bigger site: a larger audience, with a wider base of interest. It was a popular site, with many visits and a fairly active bulletin board for much of it’s life. But it didn’t spawn workshop or conferences. There’s no “movement” associated with it. Donations were minimal and I never felt the support structure that I have now with my Quaker work.

Nonviolence.org was a good idea, but it was a “weak tie” network. QuakerQuaker’s network is stronger for two reasons that I can identify. The obvious one is that it’s built atop the organizing identity of a social group (Friends). But it also speaks more directly to its participants, asking them to share their lives and offering real-world opportunities for interaction. So much of my blogging on Nonviolence.org was Big Idea thoughts pieces about the situation in Bosnia–that just doesn’t provide the same kind of immediate personal entre.

Malcolm Gladwell minimizes the leadership structure of activist organizations, where leadership and power is in constant flux. He likewise minimizes the leadership of social media networks. Yes, anyone can publish but we all have different levels of visibility and influence and there is a filtering effect. I have twenty-five years of organized activism under my belt and fifteen years of online organizing and while the technology is very different, a lot of the social dynamics are remarkably similar.

Gladwell is an hired employee in one of the largest media companies in the world. It’s a very structured life: he’s got editors, publishers, copyeditors, proofreaders. He’s a cog in a company with $5 billion in annual revenue. It’s not really surprising that he doesn’t have much direct experience with effective social networks. It’s hard to see how social media is complementing real world grassroots networks from the 40th floor of a mid-town Manhattan skyscraper.

Related Reading:

• What Malcolm Gladwell Doesn’t Understand About Activism and Social Networks over on StudentActivism.net, via @public_historian.
• Friends and Hierarchy and Social Change. Jeanne Burns on QuakerQuaker.
• Make the Revolution from Anil Dash: “People who want to see marches in the streets are often unwilling to admit that those marches just don’t produce much in the way of results in America in 2010.”
• Social Media for Good and Evil, Strong and Weak Ties, Online/Offline,and Orgs and Networks from Beth Kantor

If you missed the leaks at the time, you can watch them at CollateralMurder.com. They are videos taken from the gun-sights of US helicopters, complete with the commentary from military personnel firing down into the Iraqi neighborhoods below them. The videos capture the killing of civilians, including two Reuters journalists. They show just how impersonal murder has become. This is a video game war and there’s no real consequence to shooting the wrong target from thousands of feet away.

Strategic changes can change the tide of a military conflict but Afghanistan is now an eight-year-old war. We’re not battling some other empire for control of territory. The fighters shooting at American soldiers are Afghani. They will still be there when we leave, whenever we leave. They are Afghanistan’s future whether we like it or not. The only real question is whether we’ll leave as friends or as enemies. Thirty thousand additional U.S. troops will be 30,000 additional U.S. rifles aimed at 30,000 more Afghanis who simply don’t want us there. Eighteen months will be eighteen more months of Afghan seething over the corrupt U.S.-backed Karzai government.

I’m no fan of the Taliban. But it’s hard to imagine being the country being ruled by anyone else when the U.S. troops eventually do pull out. Ten years of war will have insured another generation of radicalized Aghani youth. And what about America? A whole generation got interested in politics because of a bright young president promising change, yet here we have the same tired quagmire playbook. It’s a shame.