The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

by Martin Gurri

A curious thing happens to sources of information under conditions of scarcity. They become authoritative.

Information had effects. And the first significant effect I perceived related to the sources: as the amount of information available to the public increased, the authoritativeness of any one source decreased.

More information was generated in 2001 than in all the previous existence of our species on earth. In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total.

I couldn’t restrict my search for evidence to the familiar authoritative sources without ignoring a near-infinite number of new sources, any one of which might provide material decisive to my conclusions. Yet, despite the arrival of Google and algorithmic search, I found it humanly impossible to explore that near-infinite set of new sources in any but the most superficial way. However I conducted my research, whatever sources I chose, I was left in a state of uncertainty—a permanent condition for analysis under the new dispensation.

Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment.

Importance measured by public attention reflected elite tastes. As newcomers from the digital frontiers began to crowd out the elites, our sense of what is important fractured along the edges of countless niche interests.

The magisterial tones of Walter Cronkite, America’s rich uncle, are lost to history, replaced by the ex-cheerleader mom style of Katie Couric.

One reason the notion of “citizen journalism” never got off the ground was the fundamental confusion about what the professional journalist is expected to do, other than squeeze out content like a milk cow.

“All the news that’s fit to print” really meant “All the content that fits a predetermined chunk of pages.”

the fatal flaw was the bundling, because it became clear that we had entered on a great unraveling, that the tide of the digital revolution boiled and churned against such artificial bundles of information and “disaggregated”: that is, tore them apart.

That passive mass audience on which so many political and economic institutions depended had itself unbundled, disaggregated, fragmented into what I call vital communities: groups of wildly disparate size gathered organically around a shared interest or theme.

The voice of the vital communities was a new voice: that of the amateur, of the educated non-elites, of a disaffected and unruly public.

Understanding 9/11 from the point of view of Al Qaeda incurs, for the analyst, the risk of “going native” and losing his moral equilibrium.

he despaired of the ability of ordinary people to connect with the realities of the world beyond their immediate circle of perception. Such people made decisions based on “pictures in their heads”—crude stereotypes absorbed from politicians, advertisers, and the media—yet in a democracy were expected to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.”

The phenomenal expansion of Iran’s blogosphere was a nonlinear event, possible only under the conditions of the Fifth Wave. A space abruptly opened for expression that was not under the absolute control of the censor. Vital communities formed online, splintered along the usual divergence of interests but sharing a common wish to defend and expand that virtual public space against the predations of the regime.

For security reasons, dictators must control and restrict communications to a minimum. To make their rule legitimate, however, they need prosperity, which can only be attained by the open exchange of information. Choose.

Few incidents better illustrate the pervasiveness of authority as a belief system which anoints the chosen few, or the implacable fury of the anointed against a trespassing public. If Jack Valenti had had the power to convict Shawn Fanning to 19½ years in a Federal penitentiary, I’m fairly certain he would have done so.

The best information available, however, suggested that relatively few Twitter users could be found inside Iran—the immense spike in traffic during the protests was generated by émigrés and others outside the country. The Green Movement was almost certainly not a Twitter revolution or reliant on social media, although it was certainly a digitally-assisted revolt: protesters used cell phone texts and videos to powerful effect.

Within such systems, teasing out a single episode and proclaiming it the prime mover makes as much sense as to pick a grain of sand and calling it “the beach.”

This tangle of causation is why analysts who get paid big bucks to play the part of prophet invariably get the future wrong—or at least, whenever tomorrow fails to resemble yesterday.

Nine months before his fatal moment, another street vendor called Abdesslem Trimech, from the provincial town of Monastir, set himself on fire over his mistreatment by the government, and later died. No protests ensued. In fact, nothing at all happened. Trimech, I imagine, was mourned by family and friends, but otherwise remained obscure and inconsequential.

another significant difference leaps out, if we wish to understand why these two similar deaths had such dissimilar effects. Bouazizi burned to death in front of a camera. For

The industrial age depended on chunky blocks of text to influence government and opinion. The new digital world has preferred the power of the visual. What is usually referred to as new media really means the triumph of the image over the printed word.

human beings aren’t billiard balls, the application of Newtonian mechanics to political events invariably ends in confusion, and often in error.

Primacy goes to that massively redundant information sphere, which has absorbed new and old media alike. Within the information sphere, in the age of the image, I’d imagine that the most popular and persuasive medium is still television.

In the aggregate, the result was a brilliant exercise in geopolitical persuasion, wholly uncoordinated, but the more authentic and effective because of that.

And now with state sponsored algos and content click farms this can be manufactured as a product . Let alonws what owners of the medium can do.

My thesis is a simple one. We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born. Given the character of the forces of change, we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture. You who are young today may not live to see its resolution.

The Center envisions the future to be a continuation of the status quo, and churns out program after program to protect this vision. The Border, in contrast, is composed of “sects”—we would say “networks”—which are voluntary associations of equals. Sects exist to oppose the Center: they stand firmly against.

They have, however, “no intention of governing,” and develop “no capacity for exercising power.” Rank means inequality, hierarchy means conspiracy to the Border. Rather than articulate programs as alternatives to those of the Center, sects aim to model the behaviors demanded from the “godly or good society.”

the future is always doomsday.

The confrontation has followed a predictable pattern. Whenever a Center organization thought it owned a document or file or domain of information, the networks of the Border swarmed in and took over, leaving the landscape littered with casualties from such guerrilla raids. Thus the music business collapsed, newspapers shed subscribers and advertisers, political parties shrank in numbers.

Yet in the next stage sectarian advances have been reversed. My suspicion is that they must be reversed, if sects—the public in revolt—truly have no interest in governing and possess no capacity for exercising power.

The result is paralysis by distrust. The Border, it is already clear, can neutralize but not replace the Center. Networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern. Bureaucratic inertia confronts digital nihilism. The sum is zero.

The closest historical parallel to our time may have been the wars of religion of the seventeenth century. I say this not necessarily because of the chaos and bloodshed of the period, but because every principle was contested.

If an educated person of that era were transported to the present, his first question would be, “Who won—Catholics or Protestants?” For us the question has no meaning. Both sides endured. Neither won. Something different evolved. Much the same, I suspect, will occur with the dispute of hierarchy and network.

The fall of the mediators, all things being equal, means the end of the regime’s ability to rule by persuasion.

The wealth and brute strength of the modern state are counterbalanced by the vast communicative powers of the public. Filters are placed on web access, police agents monitor suspect websites, foreign newscasters are blocked, domestic bloggers are harassed and thrown in jail—but every incident which tears away at the legitimacy of the regime is seized on by a rebellious public, and is then broadcast and magnified until criticism goes viral.

But democratic legitimacy doesn’t reside in numbers, and the political authority of the public can be determined independently of the question whether the July events in Egypt were a revolution or a coup.

The public is not, and never can be, identical to the people: this is true in all circumstances, everywhere. Since, on any given question, the public is composed of those self-selected persons interested in the affair, it possesses no legitimate authority whatever, and lacks the structure to enforce any authority that might fall its way. The public has no executive, no law, no jails. It can only express an opinion, in words and in actions—in its own flesh and blood. That was what transpired in Egypt. The roar of public opinion precipitated political change, but it was the Egyptian military, not the public, who compelled Mubarak and Morsi to step down.

The public can never be the people because the people are an abstraction o...

The people, strictly speaking, don’t exist. Thinkers like Locke and Jefferson who affirmed the sovereignty of the people were preoccupied with protecting the freedom of action of the individual citizen against the crushing embrace of the state. The famous “We, the people” of the preamble to the Constitution was a rejection by the framers of...

The public, in Egypt and elsewhere, was thus not sovereign. Its authority has always been based o...

We cannot, then, think of public opinion as a conserving or creating force directing society to clearly conceived ends, making deliberately toward socialism or away from it, toward nationalism or empire, a league of nations or any other doctrinal goal.

The public was born of expediency among private citizens who shared an interest—civic or selfish—in an affair, and would be aligned differently, or simply vanish, phantom-like, on other issues.

when everyone is king, power must be divorced from legitimacy.

the Republic of Letters, in the end, was an elite club, an intellectual Olympus far removed from the sight of Ortega’s particularized humanity. Whereas the networked public today is composed of ordinary persons. It spends more time on images of cute cats and pornography than on revolution or political philosophy. The new public, in fact, closely corresponds to the old masses, now escaped from Taylorist control and returning, in vital communities, to its particular interests and tastes.

By what historical acrobatics did the machine-like masses, so totally in the grip of elites with scientific pretensions, emerge as the anti-authority public of today? Why were Lippmann and Dewey—brilliant men—so wrong about the future?

mass movements were defeated in war and outcompeted economically and at the ballot box. They lost their hold on ordinary persons. By the time the Soviet Union went out of business in 1991, the mass movement, in the eyes of its potential followers, had become a dead relic from a forgotten time. Desiccated specimens which clung to places like Cuba and North Korea served as illustrations of its utter failure.