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

by Martin Gurri

told a story of elites losing their ability to control the narrative and protect their reputations.

The World Wide Web gave a single anonymous individual the ability to humiliate a powerful media conglomerate and one of its most famous reporters.

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.

issued. I recommend reading this chapter twice, once before you begin the rest of the book and once afterward.

democratized information poses a dilemma for modern society. If the public loses patience and respect for government, the result would be disintegration. If elites choose to dig in, they are likely to resort to repression.

Elites will have to cede authority and permit more local variation and experimentation. The public will have to be more tolerant.

We should pay less heed to those who only can pour out condemnation and blame. We should show greater appreciation for those who make constructive attempts to experiment and fix.

Should anyone care about this tangle of bizarre connections? Only if you care how you are governed: the story I am about to tell concerns above all a crisis of that monstrous messianic machine, the modern government.

Among the claims I make in this book is that the future is, and must be, opaque, even to the cleverest observer.

The moment tomorrow no longer resembles yesterday, we are startled and confused. The compass cracks, by which we navigate existence. We are lost at sea.

Information is cool, so why did it explode?

Back when the world and I were young, information was scarce, hence valuable.

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

Few of his viewers found it extraordinary that the clash and turmoil of billions of human lives, dwelling in thousands of cities and organized into dozens of nations, could be captured in three or four mostly visual reports lasting a total of less than 30 minutes.

as the amount of information available to the public increased, the authoritativeness of any one source decreased.

as ever more published reports escaped the control of authoritative sources, how could we tell truth from error? Or, in a more sinister vein, honest research from manipulation?

Early in the new millennium it became apparent to anyone with eyes to see that we had entered an informational order unprecedented in the experience of the human race.

Growth in information had been historically slow and additive. It was now exponential.

However I conducted my research, whatever sources I chose, I was left in a state of uncertainty—a

Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust.

When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment.

disorientation. I mentioned the charge of civic irresponsibility lodged against defecting customers. We will encounter this rhetorical somersault again: being driven to extinction is not just a bad thing but morally wrong,

“All the news that’s fit to print” really meant “All the content that fits a predetermined chunk of pages.”

My mother wants her bundle, and belongs to the last generation to do so.)

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 docile mass audience, so easily persuaded by advertisers and politicians, had been a monopolist’s fantasy which disintegrated at first contact with alternatives.

The newly articulate public meanwhile tramped with muddy boots into the sacred precincts of the elites, overturning this or that precious heirloom.

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.

But pretending that there is only one point of view aborts even the possibility of analysis.

Nations which a little time ago responded to a single despotic will now tremble on the edge of disintegration.

There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.”

The public, as I see it [he wrote], 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.

Authority pertains to the source. We believe a report, obey a command, or accept a judgment because of the standing of the originator.

Persons in authority have had to jump through hoops of fire to achieve their lofty posts—and feel disinclined to pay attention to anyone who has not done the same.

Lasting authority, however, resides in institutions rather than in the persons who act and speak on their behalf.

But I think I have already established that we stand, everywhere, at the first moment of what promises to be a cataclysmic expansion of information and communication technology.

Vital communities formed online, splintered along the usual divergence of interests but sharing a common wish to defend and expand that virtual public space against the predations of the regime.

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.

Three generations of North Korean dictators have bet big on famine and poverty in exchange for silence and control.

They speak when there should be silence, and utter what should never be said. They trample on the sanctities, in the judgment of the great hierarchical institutions which for a century and half have controlled, from the top down, authoritatively, the content of every public conversation.

The idea is not that some forbidden opinion or other has been spoken. It is the speaking that is taboo.

Any challenge, however insignificant, isn’t just a potential threat to them but a violation of that order, a perversion which must be crushed utterly in the name of all that is good and true.

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.

“What Napster is doing . . . is legally and morally wrong.” The immoral act in question, let’s recall, consisted of teenagers exchanging music files.

You will note that I wrote “catalyst” rather than “cause”: even the simplest human events constitute complex systems ruled by nonlinearities.

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

If this leap was possible, the modes of organizing a mass movement prevalent since the French Revolution would be superseded—and attacking power and authority could become the work of amateurs, ordinary people, the untutored public.

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.

Mubarak, on the brink of the precipice, wanted to change sides on the dictator’s dilemma, withdraw his gamble on modernity.