He coined the term ‘tipping point’ – then COVID superspreaders made him reconsider
As the pace of technological change accelerates, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell predicts ever more frequent disruption.
No one can say exactly when the term “tipping point” was coined, but if there’s one person we can blame squarely for its abundant, throwaway use today – to signify everything from melting Antarctic ice sheets to decider states in the US presidential election, to the Middle East being on a knife edge and the push for transgender equality – it’s Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell.
Back in 2000, Gladwell, a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine, was sitting in a small bookstore in Los Angeles reading a few paragraphs from his first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, to an audience of two. His despondent feeling as the session wrapped up: “Well, that’s it then.”
Malcolm Gladwell says a small group of super-influencers on social media can play a profound role in ushering in social change.Credit: NYT
Gladwell couldn’t believe what happened in the following months, as the book attracted more publicity and sales began to soar. “No one was taken more by surprise than I was,” reflects the slight, wiry-haired 61-year-old, resting his head with one hand as he talks to me via video call from his home in New York’s picturesque Hudson Valley. “I was just trying to describe something that interested me personally. I had no idea it would lead to the cultural reverberations it did.”
The barrier-breaking moment when a small change, which may have been nibbling on the edges of society for a while, barely noticed, can push an entire system into significant or even seismic change, was the key concept of The Tipping Point. The book spent more than eight years on The New York Times bestseller list and went on to sell millions. “By the time the paperback came out,” he writes in his newly published sequel, Revenge of the Tipping Point, “it was part of the zeitgeist.”
It was a kind of meteoric success that happens very rarely in the literary world, even less so in today’s fractured and increasingly niche publishing landscape. Since then, Gladwell has rolled out a series of bestsellers, among them Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Outliers: The Story of Success (2008) and Talking to Strangers (2019). If there is a single “meta” thread in all Gladwell’s books, it’s his exploration of why some ideas, behaviours and trends take over like viruses, while others remain dormant. In fact, epidemic is one of his favourite words, neatly encompassing his claim that a small number of “super-spreaders” can upend the social equilibrium or status quo.
Revenge of the Tipping Point is the sequel to Gladwell’s bestselling 2000 debut book.
“I don’t understand why, when we talk about epidemics, we confine our conversation to viruses,” he tells me. (I resist interrupting him with the reminder that we use the word “viral” all the time to describe ideas or things that are trending on social media and the internet generally.)
Gladwell continues: “At the beginning of COVID-19, we assumed that everyone could be infected, with everyone having an equal chance of infecting someone else. But we found that the work of spreading the virus was actually carried out by a small section of the population, the super-spreaders.” Similarly, on social media, a small group of super-influencers can play a profound role in ushering in significant change.
Context and timing play an integral role in success: genius depends on a happy set of circumstances to be able to express itself.
Gladwell’s works have morphed into their own memes. Eagle-eyed viewers of the first season of hit HBO series The White Lotus would have spotted one of its principal characters, the rich and entitled Shane (Jake Lacy), reading Blink in multiple scenes, in between complaining to the hotel manager that he’d not got the suite his mother booked and trying to persuade his wife to give up her career as a lifestyle journalist. Blink explores how instinctive, snap judgments – the type we make every day – are often wiser than the ones we mull over and spend hours researching.
Self-mythology is also a theme in his work. In Outliers, Gladwell explodes the myth of the self-made man, writing that “the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work”. What all this self-congratulation ignores is the integral role context – geography, family, culture – plays in success, as well as timing: having exactly the right thing at the right time.
Gladwell tells me the only person he interviewed for the book who acknowledged this was Bill Gates, who said if he’d been born a decade earlier, he would have wound up as a professor of computing or mathematics at a US college rather than the multibillionaire co-developer of a software system that would change the world. Reason: he was given access to a very early computer in his high school in Seattle in 1968 when he was just 13 and began writing code; he founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975 and within five years was asked by IBM to create an operating system for its new personal computer. In short, he was perfectly positioned to take advantage of a technology still in its infancy. One era’s wunderkind is another era’s also-ran.
Gladwell’s references spur me to think of some local examples of “context is king”. Could Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee franchise be launched today? Probably not, as comedy styles – and perceptions of Australia – have changed so much since the first film in 1986. Would Harry Seidler, if he were starting out today, be able to achieve starchitect status with soaring concrete monoliths like Sydney’s MLC Centre (now 25 Martin Place) and Australia Square, given that concrete is now regarded as one of the most destructive materials for greenhouse emissions? Perhaps not. We bandy the word genius around to describe mega-talented or successful people, Gladwell notes, but even genius depends on a happy set of circumstances to be able to express itself.
For Gladwell, it’s about context, context, context.
“There is something that I’ve come to understand is an important role for a journalist,” he reflects. “Our job is to make connections because we are in a unique position to take the time to talk to people, to do research, to put things in a larger frame.”
During the pandemic, Gladwell – who grew up in a small community in Ontario as the son of a Jamaican mother (a psychotherapist) and a British father (a mathematician) – hunkered down with his wife and children in his Hudson River Valley home. “I was enormously productive during COVID, with the removal of all kinds of social distractions,” he says. “It’s perfect here. I’m just two hours from New York, but it’s very English here, really peaceful.”
In Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell writes that marriage equality in the US seemed to come out of nowhere for many Americans (in 2015, the Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage in all 50 states). The legalisation even took some veteran LGBTQ activists by surprise, he notes. “If you’re in the midst of a ground game, it’s difficult to pay attention to what’s going on in the ether,” he adds, again suggesting that the cumulative force of lots
of small changes in thinking can lead to a major shift in attitudes.
The speed of technological change is hastening the occurrence of tipping points, Gladwell believes, fuelled by the expanse of social media, which despite its many benefits is both fracturing society and increasing polarisation. The truly disruptive nature of tech companies’ algorithms, designed to capture advertising dollars via our diminishing attention spans, can feed extremist and untruthful content, which overall leads to widening social divides and a less informed population.
But Gladwell insists he’s by nature an optimist. While he won’t be drawn on how he sees things playing out during and immediately after the impending US presidential election, Gladwell acknowledges that testing times are ahead. Certainly, the world feels darker, more unstable and unpredictable than it did 25 years ago when he was penning The Tipping Point. “I just hope there isn’t chaos or too much disruption,” he says of November 5, when the democratic world will be holding its breath.
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