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

by Martin Gurri

At the same time, the fracturing of the public along niche interests has unleashed swarms of networks against every sacred precinct of authority.

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 Center can’t bring back the industrial age. The networks can’t engender an alternative.

The closest historical parallel to our time may have been the wars of religion of the seventeenth century.

because every principle was...

“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 oc...

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the procedures of representative democracy reflected a distrust of centralized power and the faith that wealth and land ownership conferred personal independence. In the industrial age, procedures became tightly centralized, top-down, rule-bound, and oriented toward the masses rather than the individual. That democracy became hierarchical, organizational, an institution of the Center, is less a paradox or a conspiracy theory than a historical accident.

The consequences are beyond dispute. Many aspects of representative democracy have become less democratic, and are so perceived by the public. The defection of citizens from the voting booth and party membership give evidence to a souring mood with the established structures.

It too is a battleground, like the daily newspaper. It may survive, but that is not a given, and it almost certainly will be changed.

For a public to exist it had to achieve self-consciousness—some irritation or dissatisfaction was needed to pry it apart from the elites. For the public to voice its thoughts and opinions, and thus transform itself, potentially, into a political actor, required a means of communication. This became a possibility only after the spread of the printing press. 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.

To stand for change now means to be anti-system, anti-program, anti-ideolology.

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.

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.

This anxiety to control information in those who already controlled the guns should alert us that political power may be less “hard,” and more intangible, than supposed.

Power, from our perspective, is a particular alignment between the will of the elites and the actions and opinions of the public: a matter of trust, faith, and fear, apportioned variously but involving both

the potential influence of information over political power flows more from its fit into stories of legitimacy

for the regime to communicate and interact with Unmediated Man in terms advantageous to its story of legitimacy, it needed only to control the community—which, of course, it did in many ways.

Unmediated Man lacked the means to conceive of an alternative story to the one which justified his present way of life.

he could never seek to overthrow the political system.

Feedback from below was extremely limited under s...

This meant the government could (and in fact must) behave as if the public didn’t exist.

Homo informaticus is a differently-endowed member of the public: he’s literate, and has access to newspapers, radio, movies, TV. He has been exposed to a larger world beyond the immediate community. His arrival confronts the regime with a new threat: the public with a longer reach may gain access to information which subverts its story of legitimacy.

To cover the threat, the regime must deploy a costly and elaborate state media apparatus.

In many ways, the structure of mass media fits smoothly into regime schemes of control: it is top-down, one-to-many, monopolistic, and it demands an undifferentiated, passive mass audience.

However, sheer volume makes the reconstruction of the small world impossible.

As more intermediaries are used, it becomes progressively more likely that dissonance will be introduced into the information stream.

The decisive transformation of H. informaticus’s mental universe arrives with the introduction of independent channels of information.

That single independent channel of information

shatters the illusion that his way of life is inevitable and preordained,

As this evolutionary fable approaches the present moment, content proliferates. A vast global information sphere, churning with controversies, points of view, and rival claims on every subject, becomes accessible to our hero. Its volume and variety exceed that of the controlled media by many levels of magnitude.

freedom to choose its channels of information, the public breaks the power of the mediator class created by mass media, and, under authoritarian rule, controlled by the regime.

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

Governments of every stripe have had trouble grasping the sudden reversal in the info...

Most significantly, the regime in its blindness fails to adjust its story of legitimacy to make it plausible in a crowded, fiercely competitive environment.

An accurate representation based on volume would show state media to be microscopic, invisible, when compared to the global information sphere.

how H. informaticus experiences the changed environment: as an Amazonian flood of irreverent, controversy-ridden, anti-authority content, including direct criticism of the regime.

government failure now sets the agenda.

As the regime’s story of legitimacy becomes less and less persuasive, Homo informaticus adjusts his story of the world in opposition to that of the regime. He joins the ranks of similarly disaffected members of the public, who are hostile to the status quo, eager to pick fights with authority, and seek the means to broadcast their opinions and turn the tables on their rulers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Representative democracies have instituted procedures such as elections and jury trials, in which the public, conventionally speaking, may be said to embody the people. But it is precisely the overflow of the public’s activity beyond the channels of democratic procedures—sometimes, as in Egypt, in revolt against them—that represents the great imponderable of our time.

Lippmann

We cannot, then, think of public opinion as a conserving or creating force directing society to clearly conceived ends,

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 own.

The ideal of the “sovereign and omnicompetent citizen” was unattainable. 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.