Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg
14 min read
Not long after Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point was published, in the winter of 2000, it had a tipping point of its own. His first book took up residence on the New York Times best-seller list for an unbelievable eight years. More than 5 million copies were sold in North America alone, an epidemic that spread to the carry-on bags of many actual and aspiring CEOs.
Gladwell offered three “rules” for how any social contagion happens—how, say, a crime wave builds (and can be reversed), but also how a new kind of sneaker takes over the market. The rules turned out to explain his own book’s success as well. According to his “Law of the Few,” only a small number of Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are needed to discover and promote a new trend. (If this taxonomy sounds familiar, that’s just another sign of how deep this book has burrowed into the culture.) In the case of The Tipping Point, word of the book spread through corporate boardrooms and among the start-up denizens of Silicon Valley. As for the second rule, “The Stickiness Factor”—the somewhat self-evident notion that a fad needs to be particularly accessible or addictive to really catch on—Gladwell’s storytelling was the necessary glue. Many readers and fellow writers over the years have correctly noted, out of jealousy or respect, that he is a master at extracting vibrant social-science research and then arranging his tidbits in a pleasurably digestible way.
Gladwell’s third Tipping Point rule, “The Power of Context,” may have been the most crucial to his breaking out: the (again rather self-evident) notion that the environment into which an idea emerges affects its reception. He emphasizes this in the author’s note of his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, in which he revisits his popular concepts nearly 25 years later. His debut took off, he has concluded, because “it was a hopeful book that matched the mood of a hopeful time. The year 2000 was an optimistic time. The new millennium had arrived. Crime and social problems were in free fall. The Cold War was over.”
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of Historyand the Last Man, published in 1992, is a good counterpart; both books epitomize an era of confidence in which clear-cut laws could lead us, in steady progression, toward ideologies, economic systems, and sneakers that would conquer all others. “Look at the world around you,” Gladwell cheerily ends The Tipping Point. “It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.”
Besides the triumphalism—9/11 was a year away—the other context for Gladwell’s assured teachings about the tidy mechanics of change was this: The internet was still young. In 2000, the World Wide Web was in its dial-up AOL phase; Mark Zuckerberg was in high school. Gladwell could easily ignore the disruption that still seemed distant, and he did. All of the epidemics in The Tipping Point travel along analog pathways, whether the word of mouth of Paul Revere’s ride that warned of British soldiers on the move, or the televised images on Sesame Street that spread literacy, or the billboards that helped propel the Airwalk shoe brand. Unhinged virality as we now know it is absent from The Tipping Point. So are our dinging phones, the memes, the entire insane attention economy.
Today, talking about social contagion without taking these forces into account would be preposterous. We are not in the world of Paul Revere and Big Bird. So when I saw the title of Gladwell’s latest book, I was sure I knew what “revenge” he had in mind: a wildly unpredictable form of communication had made a hash of his simple rules. You don’t need to be a media theorist to recognize that over the past quarter century, the speed and scale and chaotic democratization of the digital revolution have turned straight lines of transmission into intersecting squiggles and curlicues. Yet Gladwell in 2024 mentions the internet once, in passing. The role of social media, not even once.
Gladwell writes that he wanted to be less Pollyannaish this time around, and to look at the “underside of the possibilities I explored so long ago.” This means scrutinizing not just the rules that govern epidemics of all sorts (he slides between biological and social ones), but also how those rules can be manipulated. Here he gathers “cases where people—either deliberately or inadvertently, virtuously or maliciously—made choices that altered the course and shape of a contagious phenomenon.” Revenge of the Tipping Point is bookended by the dark story of the opioid epidemic. We read about how the Sackler family and their company, Purdue Pharma, identified doctors who were super-spreader prescribers of OxyContin, keeping them well stocked with pills, and about the larger context that enabled the whole enterprise: The epidemic took off in states where, historically, the regulatory culture around opioids was comparatively lax.
The introduction of unsavory actors is one main difference in the new book, which otherwise confirms his earlier message—change requires only a very small number of people. The other big new concept is what he calls the Overstory. He borrows the term from ecology: “An overstory is the upper layer of foliage in a forest, and the size and density and height of the overstory affect the behavior and development of every species far below on the forest floor.” Gladwell acknowledges that a word already exists for the social version of this—zeitgeist, the set of collective assumptions and worldviews that can hover above an entire culture or country.
Overstory, if I’m following Gladwell, is meant to expand and complicate the Power of Context. In some examples, the Overstory provides the necessary conditions for a tipping point. Waldorf schools, one of Gladwell’s examples, have an Overstory that values independent thinking; this explains the disproportionate number of unvaccinated children at many of the schools. In other circumstances, a revised Overstory is the result of a tipping: As soon as a corporate board allocates at least a third of its seats to women, to take another of his examples, it will immediately become more open and collaborative. An Overstory can cover the United States as a whole. It can also encompass a particular city or state—Miami, say, which became a ripe environment for Medicare fraud, Gladwell argues, thanks to an Overstory featuring weak institutional oversight abetted by a virulent drug trade and shifting demographics. He doesn’t detail how various Overstories might interact, though he’s emphatic about their explanatory power. “Overstories matter,” Gladwell writes in his signature bold yet blurry style. “You can create them. They can spread. They are powerful. And they can endure for decades.”
Gladwell’s methodology has taken a lot of punches: that he cherry-picks, that he is reductive, that he is Captain Obvious. I have been irritated by these habits, even when I find his books playful and stimulating. But the Overstory concept presents a unique, and revealing, problem. Unlike Gladwell’s usual love of easy formulas, this one’s vagueness would actually seem to enhance its usefulness, especially in 2024, when we consider how swiftly and fluidly cultural and social change occurs. But in Gladwell’s hands, I was disappointed to discover, the Overstory proves as blunt an instrument as any of his other rules and laws.
In one of the book’s examples, Gladwell draws on research by Anna S. Mueller and Seth Abrutyn, two sociologists who did fieldwork in an affluent American suburb from 2013 to 2016, trying to uncover the sources of a teen-suicide cluster centered in the local high school. In their book, Life Under Pressure, they concluded that the community (they gave it the pseudonym Poplar Grove) was dominated by a culture of high achievement that weighed the children down and contributed to their choice of suicide when they succumbed to the intensity. Gladwell has his Overstory. But he goes even further, calling Poplar Grove a “monoculture” in which students had zero opportunities to stand apart, to opt out of its meritocracy. Thus the first suicide became a sort of “infection,” and “once the infection is inside the walls, there is nothing to stop it.”
The idea that an American suburb in the 2010s could have its own hermetically sealed culture didn’t sit right with me—maybe because I have teenage daughters and they have phones. Think about all the other influences that might have been pummeling these children, aside from what they were hearing from their peers at school and their parents and teachers. Examining a suicide cluster in northeastern Ohio in 2017–18 similar to Poplar Grove’s, a 2021 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health called attention to the strength of virtual forces. Data showed nearly double the risk of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts among the students posting “suicide cluster-related social media content.” Or consider the controversial 2017 Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, which told the story of a girl’s suicide. Another study found a 28.9 percent uptick, nationwide, in the suicide rate for 10-to-17-year-olds in the month after it started streaming. Abrutyn himself, one of the Poplar Grove researchers, said in an interview that social media “probably plays a role in accelerating or amplifying some of the underlying things that were happening prior.”
Gladwell doesn’t consider any of this, or the possibility that other online activities—video games, YouTube channels, chat rooms—may have provided the teenagers with an escape from the hothouse of Poplar Grove or possibly heightened the appeal of suicide, scrambling any clear sense of just what constitutes a context. Surely the sociologists are right about the culture of high achievement they found, but perhaps it was one of many factors—a case not of a single Overstory, but of many competing or reinforcing Overstories. This would also make solving the problem of Poplar Grove not simply a matter of getting adults—the parents and the school—to chill out, as Gladwell suggests.
Gladwell has long insisted that change happens neatly, and he’s sticking to it. Epidemics, he writes in the new book, are “not wild and out of control.” They have a single source, and anyone can follow Ariadne’s thread back to it. He’s also sticking to a career-long dismissal and devaluation of digital communication and its possible effects—which do indeed feel wild and out of control. Back in 2002, in an afterword for the paperback edition of The Tipping Point, Gladwell wrote that he’d been asked a lot about “the effect of the Internet—in particular, email”—on his ideas. Excitement was running high about all the avenues the internet had opened up, and his answer was counterintuitive. The spike in email use was actually going to make its power more diffuse, he thought—and he again reached for the epidemic analogy. “Once you’ve had a particular strain of the flu, or the measles, you develop an immunity to it, and when too many people get immunity to a particular virus, the epidemic comes to an end,” he wrote. In other words, our online networks would become so ubiquitous that they would lose their effectiveness as tools of persuasion.
Almost a decade later, he followed this hunch even further in a much-discussed New Yorker article, “Small Change.” He was responding to the growing notion that social media would prove to be a revolutionary weapon for enabling political transformation. Gladwell dissented, presciently in some ways. He contrasted the 1960s civil-rights movement with online activism, drawing on the sociologist Mark Granovetter’s study of what he called “weak ties.” The work of desegregating lunch counters and securing voting rights in the South demanded “strong ties,” or personal, face-to-face relationships; what Gladwell saw on social media were networks based on weak ties, or casual, virtual acquaintances—too scattered for the sort of “military campaign” needed to upend the status quo. The Arab Spring’s unfolding bore out this view, as have fruitless bouts of online activism since then.
But in discounting the ways that the internet has transformed American society and politics, and not acknowledging the sort of change that weak ties can bring about, Gladwell has handicapped his analysis. Struggling to describe these online networks, he landed on “messy.” Like Wikipedia, he explained, they are subject to a “ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate.”
“Correction and revision, amendment and debate”—and all the ways such interactions can exhilarate and inform as well as overwhelm us: That sounds truer to our reality than the notion of a monoculture that can only be muscled out by another monoculture.
I wish Marshall McLuhan would step up at this point and give me a hand. As he argued, the media we use mold us, train our impulses. If the dominant forms of communication today are fast and loud and reactive—messy—then our culture and politics, and the paths of social contagions, will also be fast and loud and reactive. This can’t be ignored. And Gladwell should understand why.
In the last third of the book, he focuses on how Overstories come about and turns to two examples that depend on the medium of television. The first involves the hugely popular 1978 miniseries Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep. Gladwell contends that after four nights of graphic television, the idea of the Holocaust as a historical event coalesced in the public’s mind in a way that it never had before. He rhapsodizes about the influence wielded by a broadcast medium of this sort, one that reached so many people simultaneously—120 million viewers (half the country) in this case: “The stories told on television shaped the kinds of things people thought about, the conversations they had, the things they valued, the things they dismissed.”
The second example features the sitcom Will & Grace, which first aired from 1998 to 2006, and which Gladwell singles out as pivotal in laying the psychological groundwork for legalizing gay marriage. (As in his Holocaust example, Gladwell leaps over a great deal of contested history to make this big claim.) Television offered a new narrative about a gay man: Not closeted or tortured, he was in community with other gay men yet not wholly defined by his sexual identity. This was all transmitted subtly and with a laugh track, but, Gladwell writes, multiple “seasons of Will just being … a normal guy” altered the zeitgeist enough to open the country up to the possibility of gay marriage.
Television did effect change in the monocultural way that Gladwell imagines. It is a medium that maintains our attention through visual stimuli—drawing us in and shocking us with spectacles like that of naked men being lined up and shot in Holocaust, or of Will and Jack kissing in Season 2 of Will & Grace. Television is also a passive medium, and particularly effective at this kind of cultural inculcation. But network television is not the dominant medium anymore. As Gladwell himself puts it, in the one and only mention of digital communication’s impact in Revenge of the Tipping Point : “It is hard today, I realize, to accept the idea that the world could be changed by a television show. Audiences have been sliced up a hundred ways among cable, streaming services, and video games.”
What does social contagion look like today, when images and stories emerge out of the great sea of information and are just as quickly submerged? Interactivity and fierce feedback loops are constantly in play. Attention drives everything. And we are all in one another’s business. Even the notion of separate blue and red Americas, living under distinct Overstories, does not tell us much, because these seemingly separate realities are built in reaction to each other. Their narratives ping-pong back and forth hourly.
Consider a couple of recent examples. By now, the late-July virality of Tim Walz’s use of the word weird is campaign lore—the turbocharged meme began as a television clip and then proliferated on social media and rapidly entered the vocabulary of many other politicians. It also seemingly catapulted Walz to vice-presidential running mate, and redefined the Democrats as the normative party, in step with the national majority, unlike the bizarre Republicans.
The pro-Palestinian protests this past spring offer another glimpse into how new ideas now flow. When the protests began roiling college campuses, their emotional force was hard for me to understand at first—until someone showed me the short videos of war-zone horrors that were circulating by the thousands on TikTok, most made by Gazans themselves. Each clip was a gut punch: a woman emerging from a collapsed apartment building with a dead baby in her arms; burned children in a hospital; a man collapsing in grief over bodies wrapped in white shrouds. The images motivating these students were channeled directly across the world to their phones, unfiltered. The students then uploaded footage of their own protests, especially as they were suppressed, adding another layer of instigating feedback. The global exchange of self-generated videos led to clashes with the police, to rifts within the Democratic Party, all while the reason for the passion and the tension remained mostly invisible to those not scrolling certain platforms.
Even a biological epidemic, Gladwell’s central metaphor, doesn’t really lend itself to an easy story of transmission, or of consolidated immunity, either. We’re now all too familiar with COVID and its endless mutations, the mystery of long COVID, the way mask wearing was shaped by politics and culture and not merely science.
This is, indeed, all very messy, all wild and unruly. It is also the air we now breathe. The strangest thing about Gladwell’s decision to simply ignore the new pathways of social contagion is that he has the right vocabulary for understanding them. Small groups of people are usually the instigators, but these can be Trumpers hanging out in a closed Discord chat room, getting one another riled up about a stolen election, or a few influential teenage BookTokers all gushing about the same romance novel and turning it into a best seller. And Overstories do matter, but they do not have the stability and the unanimity that Gladwell imagines. Every day, dozens upon dozens of such narratives compete to define our politics, our culture; to bring issues to the fore, dragging attention one way or another.
Gladwell ends his new Tipping Point on the same note of certainty as his original. “Epidemics have rules,” he writes. “They have boundaries.” The tools to alter their course “are sitting on the table, right in front of us.” I envy his confidence. But I’ve lived through the past 25 years too, and that’s not my takeaway. We exist in gloriously, dangerously unpredictable times, and understanding how social change works surely requires one thing above all: humility.
This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg.”
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