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

by Martin Gurri

As an analyst of global events, my source material came from parsing the world’s newspapers and television reports. That was what I considered information. I also held the belief that information of the sort found in newspapers and television reports was identical to knowledge—so the more information, the better.

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. And 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001, adding around 23 “exabytes” of new information—roughly the equivalent of 140,000 Library of Congress collections.1 Growth in information had been historically slow and additive. It was now exponential.

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.

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.

I’d been enthralled by the astronomical growth in the volume of information, but the truly epochal change, it turned out, was the revolution in the relationship between the public and authority in almost every domain of human activity.

pretending that there is only one point of view aborts even the possibility of analysis.

There will be a scarcity of saints but an abundance of martyrs.

The public, as I see it [he wrote], is not a fixed body of individuals. It is merely the persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only by supporting or opposing the actors.

Persons in authority have had to jump through hoops of fire to achieve their lofty posts—and feel disinclined to pay attention to anyone who has not done the same.

Lasting authority, however, resides in institutions rather than in the persons who act and speak on their behalf.

the ruling class confronted what has come to be called “the dictator’s dilemma”—a frequent affliction of authority in the new environment. The dilemma works this way. 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.

repression aimed at internet dissidents has become so commonplace that it hardly excites attention.

he stood for the loss of monopoly over information, the loss of an absolute control over public communications.

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.

there is now massive redundancy in the transmission of information.

You can shut down the internet—as Egyptian authorities did when they faced their own uprising—but you can’t shut down the information sphere.

the autobiographical Revolution 2.0, I recommend to anyone who wants to understand, from a very human perspective, the destructive effects of new information on a fossilized political system.

the modes of organizing a mass movement prevalent since the French Revolution would be superseded—and attacking power and authority could become the work of amateurs, ordinary people, the untutored public.

Not long ago, a revolutionary was a dedicated professional. To achieve his goal, he needed an organization to conduct command and control, a published program to explain the need for radical change, resting on an ideology which persuaded and attracted large numbers of the public—who would then be formed into a mass movement by means of command and control.

Roland Schatz, a brilliant commercial practitioner of agenda-setting theory, has identified a level of media diffusion below which a message sinks without notice, but above which it quickly rises to public attention. Schatz calls this boundary the awareness threshold, and has estimated the tipping point at 15 percent of diffusion.

“Critical mass” occurs at between 10 and 20 percent of adoption—the level at which enough diffusion networks become “infected” by the virus of change to make the latter self-sustaining.

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.”

To maintain unity, the sectarian requires “an image of threatening evil on a cosmic scale”: the future is always doomsday. The Border somehow reconciles a faith in human perfectibility with the calm certainty that annihilation is just around the corner.

Sects resolve internal disputes by splintering. Their numbers must remain small. This may be the one strategic difference between the face-to-face sect, as described by Douglas and Wildavsky, and the digital network: the latter can inflate into millions literally at the speed of light.

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.

My thesis holds that a revolution in the nature and content of communication—the Fifth Wave of information—has ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age.

Information influences politics because it is indigestible by a government’s justifying story. The greater the diffusion of information to the public, the more illegitimate any political status quo will appear. Homo informaticus, networked builder and wielder of the information sphere, poses an existential challenge to the legitimacy of every government he encounters.

There is no single body of the public. There are many publics, each of them embedded in a particular culture and circumstance. Nor is the public organized to endure as a permanent fixture of social life. If the interest in an affair which has brought a public into being somehow dissipates, the public itself, like the Marxist hope for the state, will wither away.

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.

The public can never be the people because the people are an abstraction of political philosophy. The people, strictly speaking, don’t exist.

The famous “We, the people” of the preamble to the Constitution was a rejection by the framers of the ultimate authority of state governments. The people themselves were eternally absent.

Because the public was clueless, the political weight of its opinion was likely to be misguided or manipulated by cunning insiders.

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. In principle no less than in fact, this mutable entity could not be identified with the people.

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

the tectonic collision between a public which will not rule and institutions of authority progressively less able to do so.

Social and political arrangements tend to accumulate noise. The internal and external forces holding them together inevitably shift in ways that drive the system ever farther out from equilibrium. Such pressures work silently and invisibly, beneath the surface. They are cumulative, slow to take effect. But when change comes, it is sudden and dramatic. Pushed beyond disequilibrium to turbulence, the system disintegrates and must be reconstituted on a different basis.

If the indignados somehow managed to destroy the system they so deeply despised, they will have extinguished themselves and their movement by eliminating the conditions that made both possible. This is not a riddle or a paradox, but a political pathology frequently encountered in the wake of the Fifth Wave.

the Occupiers lived virtually. They organized on the web so they could occupy a physical space, and they occupied a physical space so they could talk about it online.

Revolution, in 2011, meant denunciation. Actual change was left for someone else.

The mortal riddle posed by the nihilist is that he’s a child of privilege. He’s healthy, fit, long-lived, university-educated, articulate, fashionably attired, widely traveled, well-informed. He lives in his own place or at worst in his parents’ home, never in a cave. He probably has a good job and he certainly has money in his pocket. In sum, he’s the pampered poster boy of a system that labors desperately to make him happy, yet his feelings about his life, his country, democracy—the system—seethe with a virulent unhappiness.