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

by Martin Gurri

Information had effects. And the first significant effect I perceived related to the sources: as the amount of information available to the public increased, the authoritativeness of any one source decreased.

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.

Not long ago, a revolutionary was a dedicated professional. To achieve his goal, he needed an organization to conduct command and control, a published program to explain the need for radical change, resting on an ideology which persuaded and attracted large numbers of the public—who would then be formed into a mass movement by means of command and control. Organization, program, printing presses, ideology, mass command and control: this costly, slow-moving machinery, with its need for hierarchy and obedience, could be transcended by a single click of the mouse if Wael Ghonim won his bet.

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.

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. 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 illustrious scientists gathered in Piccadilly knew they were witnesses to history. Eddington’s measurements placed the curvature of light at slightly over 1.7 arc-seconds. Sir Frank Dyson, Astronomer Royal, underscored the significance of the findings: “There can be little doubt that they confirm Einstein’s prediction.” With those words, the universe assumed a new form.

The hierarchies of the industrial age stood unchallenged. Nobody doubted Eddington’s findings or demanded to see the raw data. Curiously, if anyone had done so, they would have discovered problems. Science work is messy. Eddington didn’t simply come up with a single measurement of 1.7 arc-seconds for the gravitational curvature of light. There were many measurements, some from Principe, some from Brazil, which needed to be assessed and averaged somehow.

Ben Santer, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, best expressed the shared conviction that McIntyre represented the barbarian inside the gates: I believe our community should no longer tolerate the behavior of Mr. McIntyre and his cronies. [ . . . ] In my opinion, Steve McIntyre is the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science. I am unwilling to submit to his McCarthy-style investigation of my scientific research . . . I will continue to refuse such data requests in the future. Nor will I provide McIntyre with computer programs, email correspondence, etc. I feel very strongly about these issues. We should not be coerced by the scientific equivalent of a playground bully.17

Among the patterns I would include exaggerated expectations by the public, abetted by exaggerated claims of competence by authority.

I want to be extremely clear about what I’m suggesting. A vast structural collision—pre-eminently, the revolt of the public against authority—has left democratic governments burdened with failure, democratic politics far removed from reality, and democratic programs drained of creative energy, and thus of hope. At this point, the nihilist makes his appearance. He is not a philosopher with an elaborated ideology, or a political figure leading an organization. Membership in the Nihilist Party cannot be had for love or money. Rather, the nihilist is merely reacting, as all human beings must, to the pressures applied by his environment: which means, in this case, that he is acting to destroy that environment.

Honest analysis does require that the thesis be stated clearly, and that effects be identified with as much precision as possible.

The current elite class, having lost its monopoly over information, has been stripped, probably forever, of the authorizing magic of legitimacy.

The elite vision of a post-truth era ultimately rests on a fallacy. It assumes that there was once a time when voters acted on some sort of rational calculus based on “objective facts,” and were immune to “appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Consider Matthew d’Ancona’s condemnation of the tactics used by Brexit advocates: “This was Post-Truth politics at its purest—the triumph of the visceral over the rational, the deceptively simple over the honestly complex.”108 But that has always been the way. All the cunning dictators, like Hitler and Mussolini, persuaded by appealing to raw emotions—but so did the great democrats from Pericles to Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s how human persuasion works.

At least the president is held accountable for his 2,000 falsehoods. The elites dwell in their own fragment of truth yet seem blissfully unaware. They tell us Trump is Hitler. They explain that their defeat is a conspiracy of lies. They insist that the world can be returned to what it was before November 2016. Most damaging, they are as willing as Trump to demolish the historical reality of their own institutions. An acting attorney general can refuse to implement a presidential executive order, for example. The head of a consumer agency can deny the chief executive’s authority to appoint her successor. A minor foreign service official can resign with a very public letter directing the secretary of state to “stop the bleeding” or “follow me out the door.”110