Analytic Activism, ten years later (Part 1: Mise-en-scène)

My second book, Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy, was published ten years ago. It has been a very long decade.

One of my projects this summer is to revisit the book and do some serious thinking about what has changed in the intervening years. I did the same thing with my first book, The MoveOn Effect, back in 2022.

I reread the book this week. I now have a large pile of notes and just a handful of authorial regrets. Today I just want to set the stage a bit for the essays to come.

Let’s start with the regrets. Analytic Activism is a good book. It could have been a better one.

The research for this book spanned the years 2013-2015. It is very much a late-Obama-era book. It is also a book from what we now know was the peak of digital media’s platform era. It was written at a time when online petitions were very popular and (in certain contexts) quite effective. It was a time when the ascendance of Facebook and Twitter was more opportunity than problem.

There is, as a result, a certain quaintness to the book. Reading the first few chapters feels a bit like reading about the politics of Pompeii, just prior to the volcano. It’s not that I was wrong about the politics of petition platforms — it’s just that those politics were about to be rendered irrelevant by much larger social forces.

Chapters three (digital petitions) and four (Upworthy/platform virality) are simultaneously the book’s strongest chapters and its most dated chapters. I handed in the full revised manuscript in March 2016. Back then, it still seemed like someone would beat Donald Trump in the Republican primary. The book was published in December 2016, just a month after he was elected. The middle chapters of the book were, in a sense, immediately outdated. If you want to know what reformist/progressive digital politics was like in 2013-2014, these chapters are an excellent time capsule. But if you want to understand digital politics over the decade that follows, they offer far less relevant insight.

Another regret is the title. In all my early files, I called it “Analytics-based activism.” That seemed unwieldy, so I went with “Analytic activism” instead. I wish I hadn’t. The book isn’t delineating a distinct form of activism that is more analytical than the rest. The book describes how netroots activist organizations make use of data analytics (digital listening) and testing to develop new tactics and strategies. The title was a misstep.

Rereading the book, I can quite tell the stage of my career in which it was written. It’s a second book, but also a pre-tenure book. It is very much a sequel to The MoveOn Effect, revisiting the same set of organizations and digging deeper into how they operate. It tries to simultaneously speak to political practitioners and the research community. And that’s fine, but it also bogs down the writing. At times it feels like every alternating paragraph is meant for a different audience, delivered in a different register. I can tell, in hindsight, that I hadn’t yet worked out what kind of writer I wanted to be.¹

But those are all just notes for my younger self.² The real point of this rereading exercise is to generate some new ideas — either about things I got wrong then, or unexpected developments over the intervening decade. I have five such ideas, each of which will become an essay in this series:

(1) Revisiting and updating the media theory of movement power. This was the big idea in chapter 1 of the book. It probably should have been the central concept running through the entire book. And I think it still holds up quite well. I’d like to think through how both the political change and the media change of the past decade affects what political activists do and where/when they succeed.

(2) What do we talk about when we talk about (digital) organizing? This is going to be more of a historically-focused essay, looking at the differences between how Saul Alinsky and Ralph Nader approached power-building in the 20th century. The Naderite approach has dominated among reformist-progressive U.S. organizations for several decades, which (I believe) has major implications for how present-day organizations have approached digital tools, listening, and tactics.

(3) Under what circumstances do people in fact prefer empowerment to convenience. One of the bits from chapter 5 that I found most interesting in retrospect was the AFL-CIOs experiment in “governance gamification.” This never made it past the pilot stage. I think it’s worth thinking through the reasons why.

(4) Does generative AI ruin the entire tactical repertoire of analytic activism, or just most of it? The most powerful activist organizations circa 2013 were generating big online numbers at a fast pace. Generative AI has made it easy to fake a lot of that. I want to spend some time thinking about what that means for tactical repertoires. (This essay is probably going to be the big bummer of the series.)

(5) Research note: Organzations are assemblages. It’s really-damn-hard to keep the whole thing in view. This last one will be pretty much entirely for the research community. Both Analytic Activism and The MoveOn Effect took a particular approach to how we study social movements/political advocacy/civil society/political engagement. I have long advocated for focusing on the “organizational layer” of politics. It’s been a decade, and I find I have a bit more to say on the subject.

Each of these essays will be a significant undertaking. My hunch is that I’ll write one per month, mixed in with the usual essays on technology, politics, and power. I’m looking forward to writing them. Let’s see how this goes…