The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
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A curious thing happens to sources of information under conditions of scarcity. They become authoritative.
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as the amount of information available to the public increased, the authoritativeness of any one source decreased.
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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.
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Importance measured by public attention reflected elite tastes. 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.
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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.
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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 newly articulate public meanwhile tramped with muddy boots into the sacred precincts of the elites, overturning this or that precious heirloom. The ensuing conflict has toppled dictators and destroyed great corporations, yet it has scarcely begun.
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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.
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But pretending that there is only one point of view aborts even the possibility of analysis. For that, all you need is an original prejudice and a sufficiently narrow mind.
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“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.
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In a very nonlinear but, I believe, real way, all of these contortions had been forced on the brutal authoritarians of Iran by an insignificant young man tinkering with code in Toronto, Canada.
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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.
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You will note that I wrote “catalyst” rather than “cause”: even the simplest human events constitute complex systems ruled by nonlinearities. Within such systems, teasing out a single episode and proclaiming it the prime mover makes as much sense as to pick a grain of sand and calling it “the beach.”
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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.
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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. Scholars have charted a similar trajectory for the adoption of every kind of innovation, including new political beliefs. “Critical mass” occurs at between 10 and 20 percent of adoption—the level at which enough diffusion networks become “infected” by the virus of ...more
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Wael Ghonim, the Google marketing man turned Facebook agitator, and Hosni Mubarak, the air force pilot turned hard authoritarian. 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.
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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.
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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.
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Do I, in my condition as a member of the public, accept all the mediators’ information, and act accordingly? This has been proposed, originally by thinkers like Walter Lippmann, who were intellectually imprinted by their experience in World War I.
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Or do I accept none of the mediators’ information, because my moral and political beliefs were formed by “strong” social bonds, like church and family, rather than “weak” links like reading a newspaper? That also has been proposed, most recently by Malcolm Gladwell to disparage the possibility of social media “revolutions.”
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Or do I engage in a “two-step” process, in which I first absorb the opinions of a strong personal connection, like a trusted friend or minister, and only then accept certain mediated information? That was proposed way back in the 1940s, and has been found applicable to the manner in which Twitter users “follow” information.
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Or is it the case that mediators have no power to control how I think or act, but can command my attention to those public issues and events I think about?
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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.
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The greater the diffusion of information to the public, the more illegitimate any political status quo will appear.
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Homo informaticus, networked builder and wielder of the information sphere, poses an existential challenge to the legitimacy of every government he encounters.
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“The public, as I see it, 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.”
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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.
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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 ...more
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when everyone is king, power must be divorced from legitimacy.
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Propaganda was the totalitarian’s admission that his power wasn’t total. Unlike democratic politicians, leaders of mass movements lacked feedback mechanisms: they had no idea what the masses were thinking, and could only hope to inject the desired opinions directly into the brains of their followers.
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The public, we know, is composed of private persons welded together by a shared point of reference: what Lippmann called an interest in an affair, which can mean a love of computer games or a political disposition. Members of the public tend to be dispersed, and typically influence events from a distance only, by means of “soft” persuasion: by voicing and communicating an opinion.
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The organization scripted the crowd with Taylorist care. This was done in the first instance by providing it with slogans, placards, and appropriate settings, but also symbolically, by proclaiming an event’s meaning before it occurred. Such events were mere tests of strength for the organizations involved: industrial era facsimiles of true public opinion.
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In the new millenium, the public returned with a vengeance, and its command of the information sphere permitted much greater intimacy with the crowd than had been structurally possible before. The public could invite itself to a protest on Facebook, comment from the streets on Twitter, and reflect on the larger meaning of the event on blogs, Tumblr, Reddit, and other open platforms. For the first time in history, public opinion could fuse, moment by moment, with the actions of the crowd. Such intimacy with the public enabled the crowd to escape predictable scripts and communicate itself ...more
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My story—I repeat—concerns the tectonic collision between a public which will not rule and institutions of authority progressively less able to do so. My misgiving is that democracy will be ground to pieces under the stress. An immense psychological distance separates the two sides, even as they come together in conflict. This gulf is filled with dark matter: distrust.
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The elites who control the institutions have never really trusted the public, which they considered animalistic and prone to bouts of destructiveness.
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What has changed, then, is the public’s distrust for authority—and its increased power, in the age of the Fifth Wave, to translate that distrust into action.
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At some moment of 2011, the script went awry. Toxic levels of distrust sickened democratic politics. People began to mobilize for “real democracy,” and denied that their elected representatives represented them. They were citizens of liberal democracies, but they demanded something different. They wanted radical change: and the great mystery, casting a shadow beyond 2011, was what this change away from current democratic practices might look like.
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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.
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Opinion surveys showed strong levels of support for the movement. This was extraordinary, since the only clear position taken by the indignados was their rejection of Spain’s existing political and economic systems. The youngsters who had come from nowhere wanted social life to start again from nothing.
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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.
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The protests also demonstrated that the powerful current of negation beneath the inscrutable surface of the public required little provocation to break into large-scale political action. The Egyptian public had endured 30 years of Hosni Mubarak. The indignados at Puerta del Sol had suffered a loss of future prospects because of the severity of the economic crisis. In Israel, the public’s existential challenge to the established order came because Leef had found it unendurable to lengthen her commute.
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I have not hesitated to include the Occupiers as part of the 2011 phase change. Let me offer up three reasons why. One: I found strong demographic and behavioral affinities between Occupy Wall Street participants and the public that took to the streets in Egypt, Spain, and Israel. They were the same people, in different countries: young, middle class, university educated—and, in the case of OWS, predominantly white. Sectarian ideals propelled them to politics. All repudiated, in principle, the need for leaders, programs, and top-down organizations.
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Two: To a remarkable extent, 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.
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Three: Like their brethren in Spain and Israel, the OWS protesters were energized primarily by the force of their repudiations. They made no demands, but they felt free to accuse. The objects of their loathing—a predatory economic system, a corrupted government, a society ruled by money—united them in a way that common goals did not.
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The few hundred demonstrators who showed up on that date were chased off public spaces by the police, until they found refuge in Zuccotti Park, where, in a strange muddle of ideals, they were protected by the sanctity of private property. When the media ignored the initial occupation, the organizers forgot their anti-consumerism and turned to a commercial public relations firm, Workhorse Publicity, for help with spreading the word of their revolution. The company did so well that it actually won a professional award for its efforts.
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They wanted the prestigious gadgets and entertainment which attended great affluence. But like rebels in other democratic countries, they effected a strange mental separation between the life they wished for and the structures which made that life possible. This indirect method of self-destruction again raises the question of nihilism,
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The government’s take on social media was also predictable. The Member of Parliament for Tottenham proposed that the BlackBerry Messaging Service be shut down. Prime Minister David Cameron agreed that rightful authority needed to impose limits on the public’s capacity to express itself digitally. “When people are using social media for violence,” he said, “we need to stop them.”41 He didn’t say how, and nothing much came from the brave talk. The mindset, however, was revealing. Belief that political power could switch off the information sphere was shown to be more than an aging dictator’s ...more
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In their eagerness to play a part in some world-historical drama, the rebels often gave the impression that they were searching for causes. They disdained specifics—ideology, policy—but excelled at lengthy menus of accusations. Stéphane Hessel, French prophet of outrage, understood this process of self-aggravation. It is true, the reasons to get angry may seem less clear today, and the world may seem more complex. Who is in charge; who are the decision makers? It’s not always easy to discern. We’re not dealing with a small elite anymore, whose actions we can clearly identify. We are dealing ...more
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That was the most profound consequence of 2011: sowing the seeds of distrust in the democratic process. You can condemn politicians only for so long before you must reject the legitimacy of the system that produced them. The protests of 2011 openly took that step, and a considerable segment of the electorate applauded. Like money and marriage, legitimacy exists objectively because vast numbers of the public agree, subjectively, that it does exist. If enough people change their minds, the authorizing magic is lost. The process is slow and invisible to analysts, but, as I have noted, the tipping ...more
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Authority, as I use the term, flows from legitimacy, derived from monopoly.
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It explains reality in the context of the shared story of the group. For this it must rely on persuasion rather than compulsion, since naked force is a destroyer of trust and faith.
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