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

by Martin Gurri

Early in the new millennium it became apparent to anyone with eyes to see that we had entered an informational order unprecedented in the experience of the human race. I can quantify that last statement. Several of us—analysts of events—were transfixed by the magnitude of the new information landscape, and wondered whether anyone had thought to measure it. My friend and colleague, Tony Olcott, came upon (on the web, of course) a study conducted by some very clever researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. In brief, these clever people sought to measure, in data bits, the amount of information produced in 2001 and 2002, and compare the result with the information accumulated from earlier times. Their findings were astonishing. 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. Poetic minds have tried to conjure a fitting metaphor for this strange transformation. Explosion conveys the violent suddenness of the change. Overload speaks to our dazed mental reaction. Then there are the trivially obvious flood and the most unattractive firehose. But a glimpse at the chart above should suggest to us an apt metaphor. It’s a stupendous wav...

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.

No matter what I believe to be true, there always seems to be another side to the question. If you were to put me to the torture, I’d probably confess that this is my analytic ideal: to consider the question from as many relevant perspectives as the mind can hold.

But it turns out that fascination with surface glitter has obscured our view to what is transpiring in the depths. There, human beings interact with platforms and information, and are changed by the interaction, and the accumulated changes have shaken and battered established institutions from companies and universities to governments and religions. The view from the depths is of a colossal many-sided conflict, the outcome of which, for good or evil, remains uncertain. In fact, the outcome will largely depend on us. And because we still think in categories forged during the industrial age—liberal and conservative, for example, or professional and amateur—our minds are blind to many of the clashes and casualties of this underground struggle.

In this conflict, my concern as an analyst is to pay attention to the right subject at the right level of description. I was trained, as even the youngest of us were, to think in terms of the old categories: to think, for example, that the direction of American politics depended on the balance between Democrats and Republicans. Yet both parties are, in form and spirit, organizations of the Center. Both are heavily invested in the established order, offering the public minor differences in perspective on the same small set of questions. Surprises in America’s political trajectory are unlikely to come from the alternation of Democrat and Republican. The

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. For this to be the case, I need to show how the perturbing agent, information, can influence power arrangements. Information must be seen to have real-life effects, and those effects must be meaningful enough to account for a crisis of authority. A century of research on media and information effects has delivered confusing if not contradictory findings. The problem for the analyst is again one of complexity and nonlinearity. Intuitively, it should be a simple matter to establish the effects of information. I see a truck bearing down on me, for example: that’s information. I move out of the way: that’s behavior caused by information. Or I watch television news of the US invasion of Iraq: that’s information. I form an opinion for or against, and agitate politically accordingly: that’s behavior caused by media information.

Politics in modern countries, however, takes place beyond the immediate perception of the public. Political information is thus mediated rather than direct—almost always resembling the Iraq war example rather than the truck I can see with my own eyes. This sets up a large number of variables in the interaction between an individual, the mediator, and the information.

As analysis, the exhortations of the pessimists hover somewhere between pointless and trivially true. Of course dictatorships wish to spy on dissidents, just as dissidents seek to avoid detection—a game made vastly more difficult for those in power by the proliferation of digital hiding-places. Of course dictatorships wish to manipulate media of all kinds to influence opinion. In the industrial age, however, they did so boldly and officially, from authority, while under the new dispensation despots must try to impersonate the public to have any hope of influencing it. Instead of injecting slogans into the brains of the masses by means of banner headlines on People’s Daily or a televised speech of the lider maximo, they are now forced to ride the tiger of real opinion, and face the consequences should it turn against them. Pessimism tends to be the province of the disillusioned idealist and the false sophisticate. That seems to be very much the case when it comes to the loudest voices of cyber-pessimism. I have noted their cautions. Let’s move on.

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.

Today we know both partners in this political minuet were correct. Digital media can be exploited by self-assembled networks to muster their forces and propagandize for their causes, against the resistance of those who command the levers of power. But this understates the distance between the old and the new. A churning, highly redundant information sphere has taken shape near at hand to ordinary persons yet beyond the reach of modern government. In the tectonic depths of social and political life, the balance of power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage. That is the non-utopian thesis of this book. And it was arrived at, in part, by pursuing threads of analysis about the nature and consequences of new media first spun by Clay Shirky.

Governments of every stripe have had trouble grasping the sudden reversal in the information balance of power. Proud in hierarchy and accreditation, but deprived of feedback channels, the regime is literally blind to much global content. It behaves as if nothing has changed except for attempts by alien ideals—pornography, irreligion, Americanization—to seduce the public. Most significantly, the regime in its blindness fails to adjust its story of legitimacy to make it plausible in a crowded, fiercely competitive environment. 3.7 Overwhelmed: The incredible shrinking state media An accurate representation based on volume would show state media to be microscopic, invisible, when compared to the global information sphere. This is how H. informaticus experiences the changed environment: as an Amazonian flood of irreverent, controversy-ridden, anti-authority content, including direct criticism of the regime. The consequences are predictable and irreversible. The regime accumulates pain points: police brutality, economic mismanagement, foreign policy failures, botched responses to disasters. These problems can no longer be concealed or explained away. Instead, they are seized on by the newly-empowered public, and placed front-and-center in open discussions. In essence, government failure now sets the agenda.

Under authoritarian governments, vital communities will tend to coalesce in political opposition as they bump into regime surveillance and control. The regime still controls the apparatus of repression. It can deny service, physically attack, imprison, or even kill H. informaticus—but it can’t silence his message, because this message is constantly amplified and propagated by the opposition community. Since the opposition commands the means of communication and is embedded in the global information sphere, its voice carries beyond the reach of any national government. This was the situation in Egypt before the uprising of January 25, 2011. This is the situation in China today. 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. The tug of war pits hierarchy against network, power against persuasion, government against the governed: under such conditions of alienation, every inch of political space is contested, and turbulence becomes a permanent feature of political life.

But the rise of Homo informaticus places governments on a razor’s edge, where any mistake, any untoward event, can draw a networked public into the streets, calling for blood. This is the situation today for authoritarian governments and liberal democracies alike. The crisis in the world that I seek to depict concerns loss of trust in government, writ large. The mass extinction of stories of legitimacy leaves no margin for error, no residual store of public good will. Any spark can blow up any political system at any time, anywhere. I began by posing a question about how something as abstract as information can influence something as real as political power. Let me end the chapter by proposing an answer, in the form of three claims or hypotheses.

The most promising way forward, it seems to me, is to follow N. N. Taleb’s “subtractive knowledge” method of analyzing complex questions. Rather than assert what the public is, I explain what the public is not. This resembles the sculptor’s approach of chipping away at the stone until a likeness emerged, or the bond trader’s formula of identifying safe investments by subtracting risk.1 Since the public is an unstable and undetermined entity—a complex system—this negative mode of characterizing its behavior is least likely to fall into the fallacy of personification, of inventing some new Marxian-style “class” with a single consciousness and will. Taleb’s method is also helpful because the term in question, “the public,” has been made to stand for so many things that it had become obscured under layers of confusion and special pleading. So one last metaphor: my task resembles that of the archaeologist, who brushes away foreign matter until the object is restored to its original identity.

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.

Lippmann’s pessimism rested on two shrewd observations and a questionable assumption. He observed, presciently, that even in the industrial age public opinion influenced matters of policy and government. Always the elitist, he believed that the public “will not possess an insider’s knowledge of events,” and “can watch only for coarse signs indicating where their sympathies ought to turn.” Because the public was clueless, the political weight of its opinion was likely to be misguided or manipulated by cunning insiders. This led Lippmann to a conclusion that remains largely accurate today: 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.5 Programmatic goals, we have seen, are the business of the Center, and will be rejected by a public which has clung to Border ideals from Lippmann’s day to our

I also believe 2011 first exposed the gulf of distrust between the public and elected governments in many democratic countries. Liberal democracy itself came under attack. Since no alternatives were proposed, the events of 2011 may be said to have launched a fundamental predicament of life under the Fifth Wave: the question of nihilism.

The two perspectives, I fear, are not mutually exclusive, and may well be complementary. It is perfectly possible for the elites to lapse into paralysis while the public staggers into nihilism. Indeed, this could be our future.

But our answer also depends on the government’s claims of competence over whole domains of activity—whether such claims are sincere and true, wishful thinking but false, or purely fraudulent. Once the public accepts the claims, an expectation will have been formed, and failure to perform will appear like a breach of the social contract.

I don’t believe it would be an exercise in phrase-making to say that liberal democracy and capitalism created the class out of which the indignados and their protest emerged. For all their deeply-felt sense of grievance, the protesters were well read, highly educated, mobile, affluent enough to have access to laptops and cell phones, and extremely adept at mobilizing the online social networks where the movement in fact began. They took democratic protections and freedoms for granted, as they did the air they breathed.

Identifying the “causes” of the riots became a growth industry for months after. Two cosmic narratives eventually crystallized and confronted one another. The first told a story of social oppression and deprivation: it blamed the riots on government cutbacks and the ensuing loss of services, and on unemployment, inequality, racism. The second narrative condemned the moral collapse of the British: the rioters, on this account, had been the product of an entitlement culture which tolerated misbehavior while demanding nothing in the way of responsibility or self-restraint.

The 2011 London riots were in truth a massively complex set of human interactions. I have no idea how to go about proving that a single reason or a few were responsible for the event. The search for such cosmic causes, I suspect, has been driven more by political and ideological enthusiasm than by analytic curiosity.

Assume that the Occupiers’ long roster of negations accurately described social and political reality in liberal democracies. Elected government isn’t accountable to the people, but is, in effect, a dictatorship of the corporations. While banks and businesses exploit workers and poison nature, the government they control represses freedom of expression, and murders and tortures innocents overseas. The rules of the democratic game are a trick, a ruse to conceal the oppression of women by men, of people of color by whites, of the bottom 99 by the top one percent. If that truly described life under capitalistic representative democracy, what would be a rational response? The political rebels of 2011 waffled on the question. Most were the children of the comfortable middle class, too interested in the drama of the moment to accept the implications of their own rhetoric. So they occupied a public space and they protested against the status quo, hoping that some external force—presumably, the government they so despised—would bring about change.

The rioters existed in a world of effects without causes. However dimly, they envisioned a desirable mode of living—one weighed down with mobile phones, video games, plasma TVs—but they vandalized the processes which made that life possible. They behaved as if desirable things were part of the natural order, like the grass under their feet. Detestable systems of authority only stood in the way.

compared the British government’s stumbling response to the riots with that of the Mubarak regime in a parallel circumstance. At a certain point, the mandates of Center and hierarchy appear to matter more than democracy or authoritarianism: that was the complaint of the protesters in democratic countries. But, equally, there is a point at which negation and repudiation by the public must pose the question of nihilism. The criminal public in Britain most closely resembled the political public elsewhere in its blindness to that boundary. What Guy