How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions

Rebecca sits down with law professor and former tenants’ rights organizer Ray Brescia, to discuss his new book “The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions.” Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

The most successful social movements in U.S. history — from New Deal labor reforms to the civil rights movement — used new technologies like radio and TV to create broad national movements powered by grassroots organizations. Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic lays bare massive cracks in America’s health, labor, and economic systems, a new book argues that these earlier movements provide a valuable and timely road map for essential workers, gig workers, tenants, immigrants, people with disabilities, and other groups that are mobilizing in this moment to demand long-overdue rights, protections, and reforms.

So, as Off-Kilter continues our series looking at poverty & inequality in the era of COVID19… Rebecca sat down with Albany Law School professor, former tenants’ rights lawyer, and author Ray Brescia, whose new book is called “The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions.”

This episode’s guest:

• Ray Brescia, author of “The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions” (@rbrescia)

TRANSCRIPT:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

The most successful social movements in U.S. history from New Deal labor reforms to the Civil Rights Movement used new technologies like radio and television to create broad national movements powered by grassroots organizations. Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic lays bare massive cracks in America’s health, labor, and economic systems, a new book argues that these earlier movements provide a valuable and timely roadmap for essential workers, gig workers, tenants, immigrants, people with disabilities, and other groups that are mobilizing in this moment to demand long overdue rights, protections, and reforms. So, as Off-Kilter continues our series looking at poverty and inequality in the era of COVID-19, I’m thrilled to sit down virtually, of course, with Albany Law School professor, former tenants’ rights lawyer, and author Ray Brescia, whose new book is called The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions. Ray, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show, and congratulations on the book.

RAY BRESCIA: Oh, well, thank you on both counts. Thanks for having me, and thanks for the kind words about the book.

VALLAS: So, before we get into the book, as a former legal aid lawyer, sort of a forever legal aid lawyer, part of what most attracted me to your book is actually your background as not just an organizer but a tenants’ rights lawyer specifically. I would love for you to sort of start with your professional background and how that got you to the place of wanting to research and write this book.

BRESCIA: Well, thanks for the question. I started out, after graduating law school in the early ’90s, as a housing rights lawyer in New York City, mostly representing tenants in Harlem and Washington Heights, which are low-income communities of color. Both are changing dramatically with gentrification now, but at the time, New York City was in the middle of a pretty bad recession itself that hit the housing market pretty dramatically. And so, tenants struggled then with abandonment and landlord abuse, overcharging, discrimination. And so, really, as a young lawyer and complemented that with a fair amount of organizing, I had the great fortune to work with tenant associations in trying to combat the economic inequality and the racial inequality that manifest itself in housing policy in New York City at the time. But those forces are at play and have been in play in many communities across the country for decades. And we’re seeing sort of the worst of those forces really bearing down in communities like San Francisco and New York, where economic inequality’s having dramatic impacts on housing. And so, what I try to do in the book, sort of to bring it back to that, is really, those experiences were sort of galvanizing and helped to sort of plant the seeds, if you would, for some of the thoughts in the book.

VALLAS: And so, your book, sort of the top-line kind of thumbnail summary of what it looks to do, it looks at a range of what you describe as social innovation moments, kind of big change moments where campaigns around certain social change issues were really successful kind of throughout history, going back to the G.I. Bill. And that’s where I’m going to want to go next. And you look specifically at where social change was accomplished in the wake of the development of some kind of new technology that allowed for real change and creativity in how communications and organizing happen. And your book opens with the story of the G.I. Bill, how its passage was the result, in many ways, of really, the creative use of technology, including in a way that I was not aware until reading your book, really, at the 11th hour in a critical way. So, I’d love to start where your book starts. Take us to the G.I. Bill. Tell a little of that story. And how did technology come into play in such a determinative way in that successful campaign?

BRESCIA: Oh, thank you. That’s a fun story, and that’s kind of why I start the book with it. Is the sort of galloping events surrounding a critical moment in the passage of the G.I. Bill, which was when a congressman who was critical, served a critical role on a committee that was working between the House and the Senate to reconcile different versions of the bill. The bill itself, or the bills, had virtually unanimous support in both houses. But there were subtle differences, and they were trying to reconcile those differences. And there was one congressman who was sort of M.I.A. literally. And so, he was from Georgia, and he was away from Congress because he was sick. But apparently, he wasn’t so sick that he couldn’t go out on a hunting trip. But his vote was needed, and he couldn’t be found. And so, the American Legion, which was central to passage of the G.I. Bill, used all forms of communication to track him down. There were these sort of all points bulletins on the police scanners and the radio broadcasts. This was happening literally as the invasion of Normandy was ongoing. And there was a telephone operator whose husband was literally charging the beaches of Normandy, and she’s calling all around Georgia to try to find this congressman. So, they finally track him down. They whisk him away in the middle of the night by plane back to Washington, where he could be in place to cast his deciding vote.

But I sort of use that story as a metaphor for the role that communications technologies play and can play and have played in social movements, and then sort of take that to show what the American Legion did specifically, you know, a years-long campaign to get the G.I. Bill passed. And I’ll pause there, if you want to sort of follow up on that one little vignette. But I can go into, in greater depth, the more serious analysis of what the American Legion did, if you’d like to do that.

VALLAS: Yeah, that’s exactly where I want to go. And I want to note that I think when I started to read your book, and when I had kind of seen the title and a blurb of your book, I went in with the expectation that it was really going to focus singularly on technology and on developments in technology that had given rise to certain developments in social movements. And that is a part of your book. But I wasn’t prepared for, and part of what I find really compelling about your analysis, is you draw several lessons, not just from the story of the G.I. Bill. That is kind of where I think we should go next to continue that story. You also look at other successful social movements throughout American history. But you look not just at the technology. You also argue that technological innovation wasn’t, on its own, enough to bring about the G.I. Bill’s passage or other similarly successful campaigns. But you actually identify three kind of key features of successful social change movements. And I will confess, I’m often skeptical of somewhat kind of polished sounding terms that purport to explain complex phenomena like this. But I actually, I find the way that you break this down to be really, really compelling. You talk about not just the technology aspect, but also what you call network and message. So, talk a little bit about how you analyze the G.I. Bill and how that helps you kind of have a framework for how to think about the success of social movements that have these three things.

BRESCIA: Well, thank you for such a close reading of the book. And I definitely know that sort of at first blush, a reading of the title of the book would say, oh, you know, another book about technology. And really, it’s sort of a response to the thought that social movements are driven by technology. And what I try to show in the book is that the most successful social movements, the great social movements of American history have used technology, but they’ve also done other things really, really well. And the American Legion’s effort to pass the G.I. Bill sort of helps to show this, what I call matrix, as you reference, the social change matrix. Really puts it in high relief.

So, certainly the American Legion used technology. They used advanced forms of communications technology. They used everything under the sun at the time. They communicated with their local chapters through telegrams and the radio and telephone, obviously. They had little movie clips that they played in movie theaters to get people excited and supportive of the G.I. Bill. But more importantly, what they did was they organized through their 12,000 local chapters to garner local support for the bill. And those local chapters were mobilized to gather stories about veterans who had come home from the war without any economic support, to lobby their local legislators, to work with local editorial boards to support the passage of the bill. So, that’s sort of the second critical component to what I call this social change matrix. You know, it’s the technology, but it’s also this idea of a network, what I call a trans-local network that includes, you know, it’s a national network, but it’s connected to local nodes and hubs where people can meet face to face, like a American Legion hall or a VFW hall or a union hall or a church basement. You know, the list goes on and on. But that’s, so critical component number two is this trans-local network.

And then the third piece is the, what I call, message you’ve referred to. And the most, some of the most successful social movements that I focus on in the book, going all the way back to [chuckles] the American revolutionaries, and the American Legion is a perfect example of this. They embraced an inclusive message that stressed people’s shared humanity and that works to combat inequality. And how that translated in the American Legion’s effort to pass the G.I. Bill is they fought for an extremely inclusive and generous benefits package, one that would benefit virtually every veteran, no matter how long he or she served, whether or not that veteran saw combat, and the benefits that those veterans could tap into, including educational benefits and homeownership benefits, you know, they were very generous. And the point that the American Legion tried to make was, this didn’t just benefit veterans, and we didn’t just have an inclusive package of benefits for veterans.

The point that the American Legion was trying to make was, this would help everybody. This would help rebuild our economy after World War 11, that this would help build human capital by allowing people to go to school. And the sort of dark side of the message that they even carried was, you don’t want people coming back from the war who are scarred, literally and figuratively from their experiences, trained in using weapons, you don’t want this group of people coming home with nothing to do! [laughs] The American Legion literally said that. So, you, who are not veterans, your average American, it is in your interest to have the veterans coming back and having something to do and a way to improve themselves.

Now, the benefits had an unbelievable economic impact on the United States. And roughly 50, percent in 1947, roughly 50 percent of all people attending institutions of higher education in 1947 were veterans. And that human capital that they were able to build helped supercharge the American economy for the next 20 years. And going back to economic inequality, which I know is a theme of your podcast, and it’s a theme of the book, that period from 1947 through the late ’60s was what economists sometimes call the Great Compression, when we had the lowest economic inequality on record in the United States probably for 150 years because of that: The power that the G.I. Bill had to expand human capital and give people the tools they needed to excel in the economy. And I think that there’s some pretty significant lessons that we can learn from that experience today.

VALLAS: And your book, it opens with the G.I. Bill, but it really follows a whole range of different historical examples. And just to kind of name a few because — I mean, I wish I had like a day worth of programing to do with you because each of them is a fascinating story — but just to give people a sense of kind of the types of technological innovations that you’re looking at here, we’re talking about things like the printing press, the Post Office, the telegraph, the transcontinental railroad, the telephone, the radio, the television, right? These are the types of developments that maybe it’s somewhat common sense that obviously they’ve disrupted and completely changed society. But social movements in turn, as well, have followed different trajectories in large part because of those developments. I want to take us to slightly more recent history. You also look at a few recent, particularly significant, successful campaigns in the social change space that are a lot closer to present day, one of which is marriage equality. Talk a little bit about that particular campaign and how kind of that social change matrix applies there in why that campaign was successful like the G.I. Bill campaign.

BRESCIA: Thanks again, for such a careful reading of the book. Yes, I do focus on a few contemporary campaigns that sort of show how the social change matrix translates to what I believe is the current social innovation moment: A time when new technology has come on the scene, and grassroots groups are able to leverage it to effectuate change. And so, what we see with the marriage equality movement, you know, we can look to the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges and say, oh, look. Lawyers won the day again. And actually, that is not what happened in the marriage equality movement. And I start the story about marriage equality really back in the 1980s with a law student by the name of Evan Wolfson, who I interview in the book. And he wrote a paper for a class in law school where he laid out an argument for same-sex marriage based on the equal protection clause. And one of the arguments he made was that those people who were seeking same-sex marriage weren’t looking for something different, something special. They just wanted to have access to the institution of marriage. And, again, that sort of inclusiveness. You know, we’re not looking for special treatment. We’re looking for the same treatment as everybody else.

And slowly, the campaign for marriage equality — and it wasn’t really a campaign. It was sort of a series of campaigns — through fits and starts over the next 20 years, won victories here and there, won things like recognition of same-sex couples, but not marriage. And then I really sort of dig down on the loss of the campaign in 2008 in California, in Proposition 8, where a law banning same-sex couples, or a ballot referendum, I should say, passed narrowly. The same night when Barack Obama is elected by a landslide in California, Proposition 8 passes narrowly. And so, the marriage equality campaign sort of did this 360 review and said, what are we doing wrong? Why did we lose in a state like California? And one of the things they found was the impression that at least some voters had was, the advocates for same-sex marriage were looking for something different. They were looking for something special. They were looking for special treatment. And that was a critical sort of inflection point for the campaign. And they said, you know, we’re not. There’s a misunderstanding out there. And that’s when they really started to embrace the notion and the term “marriage equality,” that they wanted equal recognition of same-sex couples.

And so, then I trace the story. I go to another ballot referendum in 2012 in Maine, where I think the campaign led by Freedom to Marry, which is Evan Wolfson’s group, really did on-the-ground face-to-face organizing in Maine: Door-to-door, canvassing, talking to people, having long, in-depth conversations with people to convince them and see what would convince them to support marriage equality. And so, I trace the use of inclusive language — you know, the concept of marriage equality — the use of modern technology, which the campaign did, but then also the grassroots organizing that they did, that door-to-door organizing. And I show how, using those lessons from the past, the marriage equality campaign was ultimately able to win that landmark decision in Obergefell. But it wasn’t just lawyers swooping in and saying, “Oh, we’ve got an idea.” Rather, it was painstaking, decades-long efforts building incrementally state by state where they ultimately would get to the point where they could win at the Supreme Court. And so, that’s one of the more contemporary examples I use to show how groups are using contemporary technologies to activate the social change matrix and bring about social change.

VALLAS: And one more that’s even more recent and feels like it’s a million miles away, now that we’re in the middle of the coronavirus era, but really is kind of just such a recent and timely example of kind of successful organizing using the most contemporary tools, is the West Virginia teacher strikes of 2018 and into 2019. Talk a little bit about West Virginia.

BRESCIA: Oh, those folks there so inspiring and so remarkable. And interestingly, the sort of uprising, if you would, of West Virginia teachers really was started with technology. They were told by their employer that they were going to have to wear essentially Fitbits, and if they didn’t walk enough steps each day, they might see effects in their health insurance program. They might have co-pays go up and things like that. And for teachers who sort of constantly saw their purchasing power go down as they weren’t getting raises or they’re getting these small raises that weren’t adjusting with inflation, it was sort of the last straw. And so, the rank and file individual members of two different teachers unions that operate in West Virginia, they started organizing themselves. They started monitoring this administrative agency that set some policies with respect to their benefits. And then they simply used Facebook and created a Facebook group to communicate, to share information. They thought that they might get 1,000 members. Well, in a matter of weeks, they had over 20,000 members. They were using it to organize protests, share information.

They explicitly, you know, they would have conversations in the teachers’ lounge, and they said, “You know, look. We’re not getting involved in national politics. This is just about improving our benefits, improving our pay.” And they organized quite effectively school by school, community by community. They held rallies. They shared funny memes that would then make their way onto signs and things. They would attend rallies at the state house. But it was really organized sort of separate, independent from the formal union. In fact, they were able to push the union to get a better deal for the teachers, and the teachers union leaders had cut a deal with the elected officials. And before, the rally was being held outside the statehouse while these negotiations were happening. When rumor came of a deal being struck, before the union leaders even got to the rally outside, the news had gotten to the rank and file members. They’re like, “No, that’s not good enough.” And they were able to share support through their networks, through this Facebook group, and get people to reject the first deal that was struck and get the leadership to go back and get a better deal for the workers. So, they used this new technology of Facebook and communicated effectively internally, organizing at the local super-grassroots level.

And we see these sorts of patterns repeating themselves not only with teachers, as the West Virginia teachers strike, as you know, set off strikes throughout the country, movements throughout the country. But we also see a similar pattern surrounding the, you know, in the wake of the Parkland shooting. Groups, clusters of young people fighting for gun control measures, creating local Facebook groups, connecting to national networks. So, this new technology is really effective at helping local organizing that’s extremely flat, that you don’t need formal leaders. A lot of people are able to communicate effectively and rise organically within those networks.

VALLAS: So, I have to confess, Ray, that one of the parts of your book, that I found most personally fascinating and instructive, but also most resonant and somewhat sort of damningly so, as someone who’s done advocacy within various non-profits for the past 10 to 15 years, is you have a whole kind of section where you talk about what you refer to as the exception that proves the rule. So, instead of looking at successful change movements that have brought about wins, you actually look at a shift that you observed that took place kind of post-Civil Rights era and stretched up to the early 2000s as you set the parameters for it, wherein there was this kind of confluence of lots of new technology, but not a lot of success because the other parts of the social change matrix weren’t there. Talk a little bit about that shift and your critique of kind of some of the trends that we’ve seen in social change movements that’ve maybe been a little bit too reliant on just the technology.

BRESCIA: Sure. Thanks. This is the section that’s going to get me in the most trouble with my friends. So, what I try to trace in the book is this sort of shift in the shape of community organizations and advocacy organizations. And it’s a trend that many others have highlighted. Dana Scott’s poll from Harvard has talked about the sort of shift of organizations going from these grassroots networks to more what’s sometimes referred to as bodiless heads. So, groups that don’t have a real membership, or they have a paper membership, and they’re very professionalized. They’re very often lawyer-driven. They’re driven by professionals. And many of them formed in the wake of some of the greatest successes of the Civil Rights Movement, which was absolutely organized in this trans-local way. But a new technology was available to these groups, and many of them utilized it at the time that they were forming, which is a pattern I try and trace throughout the book: That social movements often use the most available, the latest available communications technology. And these groups did the same. But unfortunately, that technology was something that sort of disconnected them from this trans-local model of organizing.

And that technology was something simple, like the commute to a computerized mailing list. And so, when groups were able to communicate directly with their members or supporters, send the mailings once a year or once a month or once a week, as we sometimes get in the mail, and ask little more of them that they write a check once in a while, maybe call an elected official. We lose something when we divorce advocacy from trans-local organizing. And that’s what I try to talk about in the book. And I’m not trying to denigrate any of these groups, some of which have achieved significant successes. But I think we would all agree that the landmark work of the Civil Rights Movement in achieving things like the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act and the Voting Rights Act, you know, we don’t have those sort of significant victories for the progressive agenda during this period when groups are focused on this sort of centralized mode of organizing, if we can even call it that. I’d call it advocacy and other sociologists just call it sort of activist organizations. They’re not organizing organizations. And I think we lose something and we lost something during that period when that model seemed to be sort of front and center for many advocacy organizations.

But the idea of focusing on the contemporary groups that are using that sort of trans-local model, which I do in the book is to say, look, another future is possible, one that we go back to trans-local organizing, and groups are really starting to do that. And even the national organizing groups are. They are connecting to local on-the-ground advocacy efforts. And I think that that’s, you know, we’re going to see an opportunity to do a lot more of that in the coming months and years. Even if we must do so at a distance, we still can organize. There could be millions of people, there already are millions of people, seeking unemployment insurance. We’re going to see healthcare workers who need support.

So, I think if we can look to the past for these lessons about effective broad-based yet trans-local organizing, we stand the best chance of bringing about the types of societal, economic changes that are needed to sort of rebalance what we’re doing in the United States. And my goodness, you know, COVID-19 is really exposing the cracks in not just our safety net, but our entire economy. And you know, if people use this book to help get a playbook for how we might bring about this sort of change that we need, I will die a happy man.

VALLAS: Well, and that’s exactly where I’d love to go in the last few minutes that we have, right, is to really kind of apply this to present day. Everyone is — Well, let me scratch that. A lot of people, and generally people who see the world, I think, the way that you and I do, our talking about this moment as not just a crisis, but a crisis that could and should bring about widespread transformative change in a lot of the different sectors you were just naming broadly, whether that’s inequality in the way that our economy is built, whether it’s workers’ rights, whether it’s our social insurance system. People could take different spins on this. But taking that as sort of the premise of my next question, when you think about the sort of technology, how it connects to network, but then importantly — and this is one that I’d really love to hear you talk more about — how it connects to message. I’m just, I’m so struck that it feels that we focus a lot more on the first two as Progressives and really at the movement level. And even though people may feel like they’re thinking and talking about sort of strategic message, your articulation of kind of unifying messages, of messages that break down silos, that bring people from all walks of life together — I’m sort of borrowing your phraseology here — I’m just so struck that even in this moment when it’s all hands on deck and we’re in the middle of a crisis, there’s just so much siloing happening with people talking on the one hand about housing, talking on the other about workers’ rights, talking on the other about child care and paid leave or nutrition over there, and maybe it’s wages over there. And they’re all separate conversations. What is your advice for Progressive change leaders in this moment and people who want to be part of a movement when it comes to how we start to build and think about a unity message in the era of COVID, given that there’s so much that needs to change?

BRESCIA: Well, you put your finger right on the key issue here. I wish I had the silver bullet. But let me use as an example the story that I tell about the work of a union in Long Beach, California. And they fought a few years ago for a ballot referendum there that was to increase the minimum wage for hotel workers. And what they did, they didn’t just advocate with sort of likely allies. They didn’t just work through their union. They didn’t just try and mobilize their union to vote in favor of this ballot referendum. Because their union, though quite strong and robust in Long Beach, they didn’t have the votes to carry a ballot referendum that was citywide. So, what they did was they looked for ways to partner with what others might see as unlikely allies. You know, sure, OK, the environmental groups, they might support such an effort. So, that’s a potential likely Progressive ally. But they also worked with small business owners, and they worked with homeowners associations.

And the message they carried to those groups was, you want our workers to have more money in their pockets because they will spend those dollars in the local small businesses. Most of the union members were local residents, lived in Long Beach, and they shopped locally. And so, they got the small business owners on their side. There’s not a lot of small business support often for minimum wage campaigns, but this one was different. Certainly, it talked about hotels, and it didn’t include small business owners. But you would think that a small business owner would be afraid, like OK, I’m next. But no, they were able to convince the small business owners that this was in their interest, right? They went to the homeowners associations. You like a vibrant downtown. You don’t want businesses to shutter. So, wouldn’t you want these hotel workers to have more money in their pockets to spend in local businesses? This is good for our community.

So, they looked at this, if you would — and I don’t mean to denigrate it — but they looked at the self-interest of those groups and said, like you want to support this. And in the book, I borrow a lot from a French aristocrat, which may sound funny, but Alexis de Tocqueville, who came to the United States in the late 1820s and wrote a remarkable work, Democracy in America. And he talked about how Americans constantly unite. And he talked about, you know, they form associations. And he talked about people exhibiting and promoting their self-interest. But he said, their self-interest rightly understood. And that means there’s self-interest in a community. There’re long term goals. And that’s what the folks at Unite did in looking for unlikely allies whose self-interest might be aligned with the goals of the union. And that’s what we have to look for. Whenever we’re looking to promote broad-based progressive change, we have to look at, well, who would be benefited from such an initiative?

And I think that it’s hard to say that everyone wouldn’t be benefited from a stronger healthcare system, a more robust health insurance program, whether it’s Medicare for all or anything that supported people to ensure they could get the healthcare they need when they need it. Income supports to make sure people had enough money to put food on their tables, at their kitchen table, pay rent. We all would benefit from a stronger safety net. And I think that people will start to see how deeply connected everyone is in the economy. Now, you know, the .01 percent, they can fly away to their homes in wherever to escape the virus, but most Americans don’t have that ability. And even those people are not complete, unless they’re like long-term doomsday preppers, they still need people at the grocery store. They still need people in the hospitals. And I think we’re going to see that we are so deeply connected, and a stronger safety net would support everyone. So, again, I don’t have the silver bullet, but I think if we start thinking — don’t feel sad — think about self-interest rightly understood, we get to see where interests align.

VALLAS: Self-interest rightly understood. I can’t think of a better note to end on, given that as we’ve all started to understand from a public health perspective that we’re all in this together, it is long past time that we started to understand that we’re all in this together when it comes to the economy as well and the protections that aren’t in place and need to be in place in meaningful ways.

I’ve been speaking with Ray Brescia. His new book is called The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions. You can find more about it and also a summary on our nerdy syllabus page. Ray, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and for this book. Congratulations. It really is just a phenomenal read.

BRESCIA: Oh, thank you so much, Rebecca. Thank you for having me. It’s been a real pleasure.

VALLAS: And that does it for this episode of Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart. Transcripts are courtesy of Cheryl Green. Find us on the airwaves on the We Act Radio Network and the Progressive Voices Network, and say hi and send us your show pitches on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And of course, find us anytime on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.