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

by Martin Gurri

With his eyes on this altered media space, Martin Gurri saw what was coming. He saw that the elites would be increasingly despised, as more of their mistakes and imperfections became exposed. He saw that the elites would respond to the public with defensiveness and contempt, but that this would only make the public more hostile and defiant toward authority. He saw that the public’s new-found power does not come with any worked-out program or plan, and as a result it poses the threat of nihilism. If the existing order is only torn down, not replaced, the outcome could be chaos and strife.

To avoid these extreme outcomes, both elites and the public have to change. Elites will have to cede authority and permit more local variation and experimentation. The public will have to be more tolerant. Imperfections and bad outcomes should not be taken as proof of conspiracy or evil intent.

old, entrenched social order is passing away even as I write these words—one rooted in the hierarchies and conventions of industrial life.

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

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.

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.

And suspicion cut both ways. Defenders of mass media accused their vanishing audience of cherry-picking sources in order to hide in a congenial information bubble, a “daily me.”

Pretty early in the game, the wave of fresh information exposed the poverty and artificiality of established arrangements. Public discussion, for example, was limited to a very ...

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.

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. It was at this level that the vast majority of new information was now produced and circulated.

Communities of interest reflected the true and abiding tastes of the public. The docile mass audience, so easily persuaded by advertisers and politicians, had been a monopolist’s fantasy which disintegrated at first contact with alternatives.

I have touched on the manner of the reaction: not worry or regret over lost influence, but moral outrage and condemnation, sometimes accompanied by calls for repression.

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.

slow-motion collision of two modes of organizing life: one hierarchical, industrial, and top-down, the other networked, egalitarian, bottom-up.

the grinding struggle of negation which I believe is the central feature of our time.

Bloggers, and in general all dabblers in digital communication, are often accused of insulting sacred things: presidents, religion, property rights, even the prerogatives of a democratic majority.

The idea is not that some forbidden opinion or other has been spoken. It is the speaking that is taboo. It’s the alien voice of the amateur, of the ordinary person, of the public, that is an abomination to the ears of established authority.

This visceral repugnance, amounting almost to nausea, toward the intrusion of the public into the domain of authority, is by no means restricted to government. I noted that people in the news business have converted the economic failure of the daily newspaper into a danger not just to their own livelihoods, but to the fabric of democratic life.

What is usually referred to as new media really means the triumph of the image over the printed word.

“Critical mass” occurs at between 10 and 20 percent of adoption—the

It’s simply false to say that the public can’t make the leap between virtual and real politics.

I’m also not asserting the primacy of the internet, even under the conditions created by the tsunami of new information. 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.

The reality of the new environment is that the global information sphere, rather than any one medium or platform, erupts into nearly every political conflict, and not infrequently helps determine the outcome. Unlike, say, TV or Facebook, the information sphere can’t be blocked by government. It’s too redundant. Information leaks into the conflict anyhow.

Starting with the octogenarian Mubarak, the people who ran the regime had come to power during the industrial age of information. They had been lords and masters of what could and could not be said in newsprint, what could and could not be shown on television. And they dimly comprehended the irreparable erosion of this monopoly, the loss of control over the story Egyptians told about their rulers.

My guess is that Al Jazeera was instrumental in framing the event to the world as a struggle between idealistic youth and a vicious thugocracy. It led Western public opinion—including, it may be, in the White House—to a tipping point favoring the end of Mubarak’s reign, despite real fears about the consequences of instability in the cradle of the Muslim Brotherhood.

YouTube amplified this sentiment, re-hosting video from Al Jazeera and other broadcasters,

Virtually all YouTube videos favored the protesters. In the aggregate, the result was a brilliant exercise in geopolitical persuasion, wholly uncoordinated, but the more authentic and effective because of that.

The public never lost its mighty voice.

Together, they blew away our Rock–Scissors–Paper theory, with its naïve faith in the supremacy of hard politics, and reaffirmed how information interacts with power in ways that are open, unpredictable, mysterious. Every step of Ghonim’s progress through the labyrinth of the Egyptian uprising would have been impossible when his antithesis, Mubarak, first assumed the presidency 30 years before.

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.

Famous landmarks of the old regime, like the daily newspaper and the political party, have begun to disintegrate under the pressure of this slow-motion collision. Many features we prized about the old world are also threatened: for example, liberal democracy and economic stability. Some of them will emerge permanently distorted by the stress. Others will just disappear. Many attributes of the new dispensation, like a vastly larger sphere for public discussion, may also warp or break from the immoveable resistance of the established order. In this war of the worlds, my concern is that we not end up with the worst of all possible worlds.

Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that has dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for t...

They have arrayed themselves in contrary modes of organization which require mutually hostile ideals of right behavior.

The perturbing agent between authority and the public is information.

Irreconcilable differences between old and new can be found in something as seemingly trivial as naming conventions.

The incumbent structure is hierarchy, and it represents established and accredited authority—government first and foremost, but also corporations, universities, the whole roster of institutions from the industrial age. Hierarchy has ruled the world since the human race attained meaningful numbers. The industrial mind just made it bigger, steeper, and more efficient. From the era of Rameses to that of Hosni Mubarak, it has exhibited predictable patterns of behavior: top-down, centralizing, painfully deliberate in action, process-obsessed, mesmerized by grand strategies and five-year plans, respectful of rank and order but contemptuous of the outsider, the amateur.

Against this citadel of the status quo, the Fifth Wave has raised the network: that is, the public in revolt, those despised amateurs now connected to one another by means of digital devices. Nothing within the bounds of human nature could be less like a hierarchy. Where the latter is slow and plodding, networked action is lightning quick but unsteady in purpose. Where hierarchy has evolved a hard exoskeleton to keep every part in place, the network is loose and pliable—it can swell into millions or dissipate in an instant. Digital networks are egalitarian to the brink of dysfunction.

Networks succeed when held together by a single powerful point of reference—an issue, person, or event—which acts as center of gravity and organizing principle for action. Typically, this has meant being against. If hierarchy worships the established order, the network nurtures a streak of nihilism.

Another way to characterize the collision of the two worlds is as an episode in the primordial contest between the Center and the Border.

The Center, Douglas and Wildavsky write, is dominated by large, hierarchical organizations.

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.

Hoder, Wael Ghonim, and Shawn Fanning emerged as sectarian heroes of the digital Border, striking at the forces of monopoly and centralization. Ahmadinejad, Mubarak, and Jack Valenti each represented a mighty hierarchy of the traditional Center, slow-turning yet implacable, perfectly willing to smash the individual to preserve the system.

Since power wasn’t a file that could be copied or shared, the political battleground has tilted more in favor of hierarchy.

The Center held the advantage in the political domain, but not absolutely—not as scissors forever cutting paper. Networks exploited their speed, near-invisibility, and command of the information sphere to inflict pain and confusion on the Center.

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 deeper pattern of the conflict. The programs of the Center have failed, and have been seen to fail,