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

by Martin Gurri

the people who ran the regime had come to power during the industrial age of information. They had been lords and masters of what could and could not be said in newsprint, what could and could not be shown on television.

But the most important effect of the shutdown was to create a silence—filled at once by Al Jazeera, which among its many agendas had pursued a long-running campaign to de-legitimize Egypt’s ruling clique. Here was redundancy with a vengeance.

They worried about the practical political consequences of giving ordinary people the means of public expression.

reaffirmed how information interacts with power in ways that are open, unpredictable, mysterious.

I’m not a visionary prophesying doom, however, or a scientific wizard forecasting the shape of things to come. I don’t know the future, and I’m pretty sure they don’t either.

If, after all these admissions, you were to ask me why you should read on, I would respond: because the world I’ll describe is probably very different from the one you think you’re living in. The problem is that there are so many superficially dazzling aspects of the information tsunami.

And because we still think in categories forged during the industrial age—liberal and conservative, for example, or professional and amateur—our minds are blind to many of the clashes and casualties of this underground struggle.

My thesis is a simple one. We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born.

The two protagonists share little in common, other than humanity—and each probably doubts the humanity of the other.

The digital age loves self-mocking names, which are a way to puncture the formal stiffness of the established order: “Yahoo!,” “Google,” “Twitter,” “Reddit,” “Flickr,” “Photobucket,” “Bitcoin.”

The incumbent structure is hierarchy, and it represents established and accredited authority—government

From the era of Rameses to that of Hosni Mubarak, it has exhibited predictable patterns of behavior: top-down, centralizing, painfully deliberate in action, process-obsessed, mesmerized by grand strategies and five-year plans, respectful of rank and order but contemptuous of the outsider, the amateur.

Down with hierarchies

Nothing within the bounds of human nature could be less like a hierarchy. Where the latter is slow and plodding, networked action is lightning quick but unsteady in purpose.

Networks succeed when held together by a single powerful point of reference—an issue, person, or event—which acts as center of gravity and organizing principle for action. Typically, this has meant being against. If hierarchy worships the established order, the network nurtures a streak of nihilism.

The center cannot hold and the border has no clue what to do about it

the networks of the Border swarmed in and took over, leaving the landscape littered with casualties from such guerrilla raids.

My suspicion is that they must be reversed, if sects—the public in revolt—truly have no interest in governing and possess no capacity for exercising power.

The programs of the Center have failed, and have been seen to fail, beyond the possibility of invoking secrecy or propaganda. Let the disastrous performance of the rating and oversight agencies before the 2008 financial crisis, and of the Intelligence Community in Iraq, stand for many more examples of Center failure.

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 in...

The world I want to depict isn’t...

If an educated person of that era were transported to the present, his first question would be, “Who won—Catholics or Protestants?” For us the question has no meaning. Both sides endured. Neither won. Something different evolved.

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,

turn to the subterranean strife of hierarchy and network: in the political parties, between “netroots” activists and a variety of Tea Party networks on one side, and the Democratic and Republican organizations on the other.

Representative democracy as it has evolved historically in the US and elsewhere, however, is a procedural business, necessarily integrated with the ruling structures of the time.

Many have been moved to a sectarian condemnation of the entire system as ungodly and unjust. The more assertive political networks today proclaim our current procedures to be the tyranny of Big Government or a farce manipulated by Big Business.

Do I, in my condition as a member of the public, accept all the mediators’ information, and act accordingly?

Nope.

Political change, for Gladwell, was a job for trained professionals, requiring the imposition of a new system, with a new program and ideology, to replace the old.

they are now forced to ride the tiger of real opinion, and face the consequences should it turn against them.

Pessimism tends to be the province of the disillusioned idealist and the false sophisticate.

the new digital platforms made it easy for groups to “self-assemble,” and that the rise of such spontaneous groups was bound to lead, sooner or later, to social and political change.

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.

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 sides.

no government can survive for long solely on the basis of killing its opponents. A significant fraction of the public must find the status quo acceptable,

The range of interests was narrow, the set of sources small. Unmediated Man woke up every morning expecting a world quite unchanged from the day before.

Probably nothing of Unmediated Man’s private fears and frustrations reached the ear of the government. This meant the government could (and in fact must) behave as if the public didn’t exist.

As messages and images proliferate, it becomes progressively harder to determine exactly what their relationship is to the regime’s justifying story. As more intermediaries are used, it becomes progressively more likely that dissonance will be introduced into the information stream.

Information can influence actions by revealing something hitherto not known or believed possible. Scholars have called this demonstration effects.

By that very selectivity, that 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.

Proud in hierarchy and accreditation, but deprived of feedback channels, the regime is literally blind to much global content. It behaves as if nothing has changed except for attempts by alien ideals—pornography, irreligion, Americanization—to seduce the public.

In essence, government failure now sets the agenda.

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 public is not the people, but likes to pretend that it is

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 people, strictly speaking, don’t exist. Thinkers like Locke and Jefferson who affirmed the sovereignty of the people were preoccupied with protecting the freedom of action of the individual citizen against the crushing embrace of the state.

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.

John Dewey published The Public and Its Problems—problems because, in the “machine age,” the public had become “lost,” “bewildered,” and “cannot find itself.” Like a troubled wraith, the public haunted the mansions of democracy.

The “Occupy” groups in the US, with tiny numbers on the street compared to Egypt’s protesters, still claimed to represent the “99 percent” against the predations of the elite.

when everyone is king, power must be divorced from legitimacy.