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

by Martin Gurri

when, as is the case today, the public rejects history and longs to start again from zero, its relationship to the institutions that sustain it will be one of radical ingratitude. Once privilege is felt to be natural, a matter of birth rather than previous effort, the phantom that is the nihilist becomes flesh in the rebellious public—and any failure, any fall from perfection, will ignite a firestorm of discontent.

representative democracy. I worry that it, too, may be passing away.

body without a soul.

an institution that clings to life and still wields power, but has been bled dry of legitimacy.

long-standing stories of legitimacy. They are dying out in droves.

The public’s conquest of the information sphere has meant the overthrow of the gatekeepers—often accompanied by the collapse of the stories which imbued their institutions with authority and prestige.

To the extent that the institutions of democracy remain lashed to the industrial mode of organization, they risk becoming part of an immense cultural extinction event.

I am persuaded by Paul Ormerod’s argument: even the colossal machinery of modern government has been unable to ordain the future.

In the reality interpreted by Ormerod, most things must fail, including ambitious government projects, because the world is too unpredictable and nonlinear.

in what social and political environment could personal choices make a difference?

If the revolt of the public at times has resembled the struggle of the personal against the official and categorical, it is equally true that the industrial age often seemed intent on bulldozing every personal, local, or historical feature out of the landscape. Government in the twentieth century looked into the personal sphere, found it illegible to its purposes, and sought to impose on it symmetry and uniformity.

Only a generation ago, structural necessity dictated that hierarchy must grow steeper, more controlling, more efficient.

Fifth Wave. The public has options,

They crave latte without milk—not just from Starbucks, but from their government.

a new crowding of the personal into the political.

The analytic question is whether democracy must remain industrialized to endure.

The failure of government isn’t a failure of democracy, but a consequence of the heroic claims of modern government, and of the constantly frustrated expectations these claims have aroused.

Industrial organization, with its cult of the expert and top-down interventionism, stands far removed from the democratic spirit, and has proven disastrous to the actual practice of representative democracy. It has failed in its own terms, and has been seen to fail, and it has infected democratic governments with a paralyzing fear of the public and with the despair of decadence.

The most effective alternative to the steep pyramid of industrialized democracy isn’t direct democracy on the Athenian model or cyber-democracy in the style of Wael Ghonim’s Facebook page. It’s the personal sphere: the place where information and decisions move along the shortest causal links.

the present trajectory is heading mostly in the opposite direction.

The public wishes to impose the personal on the political, in the same manner that it has imposed a personalized mode of doing business on capitalism.

for all its disdain of politicians, the public has often behaved as if happiness were indeed a ...

The public, I mean to say, has been fully complicit in the failure of government. And the question of alternatives must extend beyond the formal organization of democracy to our expectations of what democratic government can deliver.

The alternative I wish to consider comes in two parts. The first has to do with honesty in our expectations.

When it comes to economic questions, politicians should be rewarded for the modesty of their claims rather than the heroic ambition of their rhetoric.

every member of the public, can bend our political demands to reality,

There is a second part to this choice. The standards used to evaluate government projects are also inventions of the industrial age.

Politics is nothing like baseball. In the end, the most persuasive story wins, not the highest score.

Much of the negation poisoning the democratic process has stemmed from a confusion of the personal and the statistical.

I can control my political expectations of it: I can choose to align them with reality. To seize this alternative, I must redirect the demands I make on the world from the telescopic to the personal, because actionable reality resides in the personal sphere. I can do something about losing my job, for example, but I have no clue what could or should be done about the unemployment rate.

Control, however tenuous, and satisfaction, however fleeting, can only be found in the personal sphere, not in telescopic numbers reported by government.

In a non-perfect world, which happens to be the one we actually live in, hierarchical government, democratic government, must find ways to regain legitimacy without yielding on every point to the negations of a networked public. The decisive choices, I believe, concern the handling of that perturbing agent, information.

The government has no idea of how to interact with the public other than from the top down.

government has arrived at a fundamental choice. It can continue to squeeze a top-down framework on a networked culture,

The terms of government’s increasing proximity to the public will then be dictated by forces external to government, and, it may be, indifferent or hostile to democracy.

Alternatively, government can opt to participate in its historical realignment with the public, and retain a measure of control by moving information online in ways that are legible to the bottom of the pyramid.

official language must be radically altered in style and length.

The reason to push information out to the public isn’t primarily so it can participate in making law or policy.

The point isn’t to pull the public up to the top of the pyramid in some sort of king-for-a-day “e-government” exercise, but to push the output of the elites to the personal sphere, where the public lives and makes decisions.

A supporter of democracy would argue, purely on principle, that information should flow from government out to the public, where it can be plugged into the matrix of everyday decisions.

By placing before the public the early drafts of government business, elected officials and their expert-bureaucrats will bring themselves down to earth. They will allow the public to catch them in the act of making assumptions, trade-offs, best guesses. Government will be demystified, as nature was after the scientific revolution. This will temper the public’s expectations of the outcome.

Tremendous energies have been released by people from nowhere, networked, self-assembled, from below. That is the structural destiny of the Fifth Wave—the central theme of my story. Democratic government in societies of distrust can choose to ride the tsunami or to be swamped by it. The latter choice will leave government mired in failure and drained of legitimacy. It will leave democracy, I fear, at the mercy of the first persuasive political alternative.

My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age.

If my thesis is true, we have entered a historical period of revolutionary change that cannot achieve consummation. Institutions are drained of trust and legitimacy, but survive in a zombie-like state. Governments get toppled or voted out, but are replaced by their mirror images. Hierarchies are brought low, but refuse to yield the illusion of top-down control. Hence the worship of the heroic past, the psychology of decadence—the sense, so remarkable in a time of radical impermanence, that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Failure has bred frustration, frustration has justified negation, and negation has paved the way for the nihilist, who acts, quite sincerely, on the principle that destruction of the system is a step forward, regardless of alternatives.

A number of contingencies flow from my thesis,

I can choose to orient my demands on life toward the personal instead of the political. This will shift meaningful decisions to the relative freedom of the personal sphere, away from remote institutions lost in the Wonderland of complexity.

Government can choose to push out the drafts of its business into the open, online, where they can be scrutinized by any who care to do so. This will provide early warning of official interventions at the personal level, and explode the myth of command and control—thus aligning the public’s expectations with reality.

Under such conditions, I would expect democratic governments to intervene ever more thinly and erratically over the surface of society, to give the appearance of doing something, of being in charge.

the indirect effects of my thesis