Vincent Bevins on Protest, Politics and a World Where Everyone Is a Broadcaster

a.k.a. An interview with the journalist and writer about the overlap between activism and music culture, the effectiveness of various protest tactics and the troubles faced by the modern media.

Many of you are probably scratching your heads already. “Who is Vincent Bevins?,” some readers are surely asking themselves, and even those who are familiar with his work are likely thinking, “Why in the hell is he being interviewed in First Floor?”

To answer the first question, Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist and writer whose sizable body of work has largely focused on international politics and global culture. A native Californian currently based in London, he’s previously lived in cities like Caracas, São Paulo and Jakarta, and aside from working for many years as a foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, he’s contributed to a litany of esteemed publications, including The New York Times, The Economist, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Guardian and several other outlets. (A full rundown of his past writing is here.) In 2020, he released his first book, The Jakarta Method, and last year he followed it up with another title, If We Burn. Both are excellent, as is Bevins’ newsletter, North South Notes, which has ramped up significantly in recent months.

Vincent Bevins in São Paulo. Photo by Best Wishes.

Although I’ve read Bevins’ writing for years, and have even linked the occasional article of his here in the newsletter, it was his second book that made me think he might be interesting to interview for First Floor. The full title is If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, and it focuses on the 2010s, a decade when he asserts that “more people than ever before in human history took to the streets to try to transform society.” Examining mass protests that took place in Tunisia, Egypt, Chile, Brazil, Turkey, Hong Kong, Ukraine and other locales, including the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, he describes not only the unique conditions that enabled them to take place, but why so many of these “apparently spontaneous, leaderless, digitally coordinated, horizontally organized” movements were ultimately unsuccessful in their aims. (In the end, some of the protests actually wound up leading to the opposite of what activists were originally asking for.)

What does this have to do with electronic music? Maybe nothing, but anyone who’s been following electronic music culture in recent years has surely noticed the increasing politicization of its discourse, and the growing demands for its artists, institutions, journalists and fans to be not just politically aware, but politically active. A similar phenomenon has occurred in many subcultures, but given dance music’s historical (and often overlooked) roots in Black, brown and queer communities, it’s perhaps no surprise that the volume of its political discourse can sometimes feel particularly loud. Moreover, much like the protests of the 2010s, the political currents of contemporary electronic music are often leaderless, horizontally organized (if they’re organized at all) and fueled by social media.

Bevins, having spent years observing and researching modern protest movements and political tactics, seemed like someone who could lend some big-picture perspective to what’s going on, and when I reached out to him, he said that he’d be up for a chat. Our conversation, which took place on a call last week, only tangentially touched on electronic music—though, for what it’s worth, he has logged time in and around various independent music scenes over the years—but the political and cultural dynamics he discussed will likely ring familiar to readers of any persuasion. We talked about the changing nature of protest and political discourse, along with what tactics are (and are not) effective. Bevins also commented on the roles of both the traditional media and social media in all of this, shared his thoughts on the current state of journalism and explained why he still feels optimistic about the future.