The Revolt of the Public

Author:: Martin Gurri Tags: productive discourse nuance politics society#media/book Summary:: In the past, it used to be an elite class that monopolized truth and basically controlled all of society as a result. With the explosion of information and social media, the masses have power over what is truth and therefore society. The balance of power has shifted off of elites, and as a result, societies are both more free in the sense of being exposed to more than before but they are also more uncertain.

• Notes
  • Reconsiderations

    • “we are all political nihilists” political nihilism

      • no one has hope in our institutions anymore
      • the elites are like chickens with their heads cut off coping with the destruction of systems and their loss of authority in setting the narrative
    • new age of info, everyone is dispensing what they believe to be truth
      • in past elite class dispensed truth top down
      • but we really do need an ”elite class” to handle truth

        • “Only a tiny minority can be bishops of the church… it applies with equal strength to the dispensation of certainty and truth.”

  • Prelude to a Turbulent Age
    • information is exploding literally exponentially

    • “However I conducted my research, whatever sources I chose, I was left in a state of uncertainty–a permanent condition for analysis under the new dispensation”

      • “Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust.”

      • uncertainty is the new de-facto. It’s become clear to everyone that the world is not in fact clear

    • “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.”

      • vital communities are the new groups on the internet

      • “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.”

    • “When digital magic transformed information consumers into producers, an established order–grand hierarchies of power and money and learning–went into crisis”

      • consuming vs producing
      • creating empowers ownership and individualism
    • fox and hedgehog
    • conflict between the old ways and new ways, how do we get the best of both?
    • public is the set of amateurs that now form vital communities
    • authority is the people and institutions (but mostly institutions with lasting) that claim a monopoly and credibility over others bc of accreditation
  • Hoder and Wael Ghonim: shows how something soft like information can beat something hard like physical “power” due to the Fifth Wave ^5e_9g_kOZ
    • mass media and social media aren’t different things, “A single, deeply matrixed information sphere”
    • awareness threshold: tipping point of media diffusion above which rises quickly to public attention and below which goes unnoticed (~15%)
      • media diffusion critical mass

    • “Ghonim was a carrier of the Fifth Wave, an aggregator and connector, a drop of rain in a global storm, while Mubarak in his moment of crisis could only grope for a switch to turn out the light.”

    • power as hard and information as soft which is why people argue that brute force beats smart talk and therefore power will always win out over this explosion in information (i.e. existing authority will win despite the rise in information and public)

    • “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.”

      • visual and imagery is easier for people to grasp a quick and more intense point and feeling than via words
    • information also has massive redundancy now because you can’t stop Youtube
  • 3 - My Thesis

    • thesis: “We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, an a new world that has not yet been born…” many fundamentals things taken from granted (liberal democracy and economic stability) are not a given in the new world.

      • public is on one side and authority of old world is on the other. Agent through which they fight is information
    • old age focused on official accreditation and sounding authoritative while the new age mocks that and is more self-deprecating
    • incumbent is all about hierarchy and represents accreditation from institutions, top-down centralized structures
    • on other side is#network of amateurs connected to one another digitally. lightning quick but unsteady in purpose.
      • is inherently against something

    • “The result is paralysis by distrust. The Border, [the network people and public] it is already clear can centralize but not replace the Center [because they have no desire to govern]. Networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern. Bureaucratic intertidal confronts digital nihilism. The sum is zero.”

      • mass movement reflects The Border but comes a phase when they need to embrace their “enemy” which is The Center to actually govern and sustain something long-term

    • ‘’That democracy became hierarchical, organizational, an institution of The Center is less a paradox or conspiracy theory than a historical accident… The defection of citizens from the voting booth and party membership give evidence to a souring mood with the established structures.”

      • Not Voting as a form of Protest

    • “Pessimism tends to the be province of the disillusioned idealist and the false sophisticate”

      • on optimism
    • on why power may be more soft than thought: “Thus the potential influence of information over political power flows more from its fit into stories of legitimacy then from, say, investigative reporting or the dispensing of practical knowledge”
    • Unmediated Man, species predating Homo informaticus
      • his world was everything around him, his community
      • expected little change
      • “All things being equal, Unmediated Man lacked the means to conceive of an alternative story to the one which justified his present way of life.”
      • feedback was limited thus “the government could (and in fact must) behave as if the public didn’t exist. For political purposes, the public became whatever the government told it to be”
    • Homo informaticus has been exposed to a larger world beyond the immediate community (via media)
      • Can try to control still but much harder and “as more intermediaries are used, it becomes progressively more likely that dissonance will be introduced into the information stream.”
      • ==decisive factor is the introduction of an independent media medium because that is all you need to introduce a credible alternative at wide scale==
        • ex: Al Jazeera
        • makes it a choice between the status quo and something different, where there was never a choice
          • demonstration effect: shows the possibility of something assumed to be impossible
      • new doubt when viewing the world
      • also requires choosing a subset instead of absorbing the whole
        • “If Homo informaticus were to try to absorb this mass, his head would explode… He will pick and choose… By that very selectivity, the public breaks power of the mediator class created by mass media”
    • problem with government is that they are deprived of fast feedback channels (only thing is elections)
    • “The mass extinction of stories of legitimacy leaves no margin for error, no residual store of public good will. Any spark can blow up any political system at any time, anywhere.”
    • ideas of answers
      • Information influences politics because it is indigestible by a government’s justifying story
      • 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
  • 4 - What the Public is Not
    • “The public is not, and never can be, identical to the people… because the people are an abstraction of political philosophy”
      • “The public is not sovereign. It’s authority has always been based on persuasion rather than law”
    • “the masses functioned as the anti-public. More precisely: the masses impersonated the public for the benefit of the hierarchy, while stripping it of all spontaneity and repudiating its authentic interests. In the marketplace, for example, the mass consumer was created by stripping away all particularities and recognizing only certain universal needs and tastes: those satisfied by mass production.”
      • in making everyone equal, we went too far and generalized everyone to the same thing.
      • How do we preach equal but different? explored a bit in Alex Danco’s article on Rene girard secrets about people questions
    • “the masses had buried the public” because becoming masses had made them one identical mass instead of the independent free-minded public that we once had
    • shift from consuming to producing creator economy
      • information overload related to creator economy and over production of niches. We need curation and need someone to trust for curation. How do we focus on what’s important while having a system that incentivizes us to come together and develop a consensual understanding? ideas ^MKX0MfwMS
    • “The mass movement buried alive the public and deprived the crowd of all spontaneous life and independence of purpose. Everything was scripted and the scripts appeared insincere almost by design.”
      • elite class played the role of puppet master controlling strings of the two sides to fight each other
      • with the Fifth Wave, information become instant and lead to spontaneous events and authentic feelings spilling out instead of scripted flows
  • 5 - Phase Change 2011: fundamental reason for gulf and conflict is lack of trust
    • elite class never trusted the masses, they are not people of reason.
      • this has always been the case and forced them into submission via institutions and hierarchy
    • what is new is the masses distrust of the elite class
    • “social and political arrangements tend to accumulate noise” thus when change comes it is sudden and dramatic like a dam breaking
    • Protest movement in Spain called Real Democracy Now that was focused on a complete repudiation of the existing political and economic systems
      • irony is that they wanted to destroy the very system that gave rise to them (before was military dictatorship)
      • movement was purely based on negation, no real positive alternatives so there was no way to move forward
      • problem is that the current feels wrong or bad but there is no alternative because we are talking about our foundational systems in society
        • taken to the extreme this mindset isn’t good because it argues against criticizing anything, but it’s important to keep in mind when criticizing that there should be an alternative that is actively being sought
        • It shouldn’t be a barrier to questioning our underlying assumptions though, should be an invitation to think deeply about all the things we take for granted and all the things we put up with on the daily that we shouldn’t have to
    • the question of nihilism, where they felt compelled to destroy themselves for the sake of destruction
    • “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.”
  • 6 - A Crisis of Authority
    • “An important function of authority is to deliver certainty in an uncertain world. It explains reality in the context of the shared story of the group. For this it must rely on persuasion rather than compulsion”
    • “Authority is an expansion of author, which originally meant something like “initiator”— the active human element in an otherwise inert population”
    • Failure of institutions has always been there but Fifth Wave made it visible and out in the open and amplified and made to represent all of institutions
    • This is a crisis that is happening not just in government but in our universities, financial systems, and science institutions
      • ex: science used to be a guarded and highly closed off field where the top scientists (i.e. Einstein were regarded as god-like people whose proclamations were divine). No one asked to see the raw data or double check, people barely understood what was going on
      • With the democratization of access to information and the ability to talk back to authoritative sources via social media and the internet, the public can finally have their own say and even argue against what is being thrown down
      • Things have also changed for the worse where today’s scientists have the wrong incentives (going after funding) and they are more like bureaucrats
        • ex: top climate scientists were more concerned about dealing with outsider (and excluding them) than letting people see the truth even when they admitted that the outsider’s calculations were right Climategate
          • no wonder people lost trust in the top scientific institutions, no longer a democratic process or equal
      • in the Industrial Age many of these things moved from the The Border to The Center via bureaucratic institutions and more and more layers of accreditation to keep out amateurs
    • problem is that these institutions have built up a larger than life image of themselves when they actually can’t live up to those expectations that are now being tested due to public having access to information
      • as these institutions move closer to The Center, they are more concerned with projecting authority and power rather than being honest with the public about how much they dont know (and experts in fact don’t know that much more than laypeople for the big things that matter i.e. black swan events)
    • crisis of authority is not definite but it anecdotal
      • crux of the argument thesis crisis of authority
      • first symptom is uncertainty
        • “Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty.... Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio.... And the more you know, the less you trust.... The public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.”
        • nothing can be said without qualification or uncertainty anymore
        • “you would expect too, the most trivial assertions to be attended with much noise and thunder: absent authority, every message must be shouted to have a hope of being heard.”
          • we reward the loud minority now because of our lack of trust. Not a select group of people to talk so the loudest have taken over
      • second consequence is impermanence
        • digital is ephemeral, new becomes old way faster than before
  • 7 - The Failure of Government
    • public used to trust government even in failure but now we distrust even in the face of success
    • with JFK public (aided by the media) assumed the best and made excuses to deal away with any actual blame
    • on the other hand, with Barack Obama, public assumed the worst and clouded every decision in doubt
      • another factor is how partisanship has increased and Barack Obama is black
    • all these kind of public fueled revolt movements were united in negation and advocating a positive program would have shattered these groups because they were murky and divided about what they stood for
      • questions how do you unite people around something positive rather than something negative? society media people
    • James C. Scott called twentieth century’s high modernist approach to government routinely gambled on colossal projects designed to bring perfection to the social order
      • i.e. Mao Zedong‘s “Great Leap Forward” or villagization of Tanzania or Stalin’s collectivization of Soviet agriculture
      • In more democratic examples, Chicago’s Cabrini Green, Brasilia and various wars by US against things like poverty, crime, drugs, etc.
    • This was a utopian faith—assumed that rational planning and scientific know how, posed on a gigantic scale, could eradicate miseries of human condition. Very top-down structure. elite class were the savior for the working class
      • was about justice for all and the chosen saviors coming to save the downtrodden the masses
    • Brasilia: construction project for a new capital in the wilderness of the country in 1957 by new president of Brazil.
      • It “stood for the negation of Brazil: of the real country, with an actual history, with habits and styles evolved from past experience. To achieve perfection, the world had to be made anew.”
      • out of touch with the reality
    • late modernism approach is about happiness and making everyone happy instead of making things perfect
      • this means catering to everyone a little bit instead of having a singular drive towards one thing
      • i.e. bills have become 50x as long as before
    • “ If political power has become the guarantor of happiness, then politicians must take the blame for the tragic dimension of human life. Democracy, as a system, must be held accountable for every imperfection and anxiety afflicting the electorate.”
    • “The public has judged government on governments own terms, but added bad intentions. My analysis: high modernist claims exceeded government’s capacity for effective action. Late modernist dithering can be explained more economically by political necessity.”
    • “Instead of seeking to achieve political objectives, people seek certain physical and moral qualities,” writes Henri Rosanvallon. “Transparency rather than truth or the general interest, has become the paramount virtue in an uncertain world.”
    • Can things have gone differently? Depends if governments could have achieved some of what they promised?
      • Contends the answer is no based on Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail where there is no connection between results of actions in a complex environment and their stated intentions
        • “When we thin we are solving the problem, we are in fact disrupting the context. Most consequences will then be unintended”
      • same thing with capitalism and businesses but they can shed failures as they go out of business, government accumulates sum of all failures
  • 8 - Nihilism and Democracy
    • “The public rides on new technologies and platforms, but as users rather than makers: it is uninterested in leveraging technical innovation to formulate its own ideology, programs, or plans. The public opposes, but does not propose.” We still debate in political terms like conservative and liberal even though relevance of these labels is uncertain
    • perhaps trump caused a lot of people to reject political nihilism to settle for a lesser candidate that gives hope. Could trump have been the solution to the spiral of nihilism that US was going through?
    • “Radicalism, which once aimed to transform society, now more modestly (but, it may be, more successfully) labored to browbeat democratic governments into acknowledging an endless string of failures in need of correction. “To be radical,” Rosanvallon affirms, “is to point the finger of blame every day; it is to twist a knife in each of society’s wounds. It is not to aim a cannon at the citadel of power in preparation for a final assault.”
      • the fall of radical and hopeful measures that were taken out sometimes democratically off the hope that drastic change could come has now been replaced by small victories that are meaningless in the long run
      • Martin Gurri contends that there are no true radicals left, both the elite class and the masses and public have lost appeal with that approach
      • But is Andrew Yang a testament to that? His whole campaign is a positive one on actual programs for change. Curious how Martin Gurri interprets him
      • “The mortal riddle posed by the nihilist is that he’s a child of privilege. He’s healthy, fit, long-lived, university-educated, articulate, fashionably attired, widely traveled, well-informed. He lives in his own place or at worst in his parents’ home, never in a cave. He probably has a good job and he certainly has money in his pocket. In sum, he’s the pampered post boy of a system that labors desperately to make him happy, yet his feelings about his life, his country, democracy—the system—seethe with a virulent unhappiness” political nihilism
        • only people who are privileged can take a stance of negation against the whole system (poor and marginalized people can’t afford to fight in a revolution..?)
          • but at some point they might decide it is worth it if the system is not moving?
        • harkens to The Coddling of the American Mind and the entitlement highlighted there by young people
          • questions how do privileged young people become entitled? politics society
        • questions how do you channel the passion put into negation of these nihilists into something positive? politics society
        • questions how to square the criticism of entitlement with facts that this generation is objectively worse off than previous generations (millennials have lower real income than boomers)? Why wouldn’t you be angry? How do you get people to see that the world is different now and we live in an unpredictable world
        • good Noah Smith article on shouting class and how Martin Gurri exaggerates the failures of elites and public and the propensity for change
          • Martin Gurri’s response was that maybe exaggerated but thats the perception, and public is never happy with it anyway, and even if there is change or concessions from government the public isn’t happy with it
  • 9 - Choices and Systems
    • we need to be more local and stop expecting people to be able to singlehandedly manage and affect complex systems (i.e. don’t expect president to be able to control economy and don’t associate the outcomes with the president)
      • “when it comes to economic questions, politicians should be rewarded for the modesty of their claims rather than the heroic ambition of their rhetoric.”
      • questions can the leader of a nation project uncertainty? isn’t the role to be a larger than thou figure that projects security
        • principle here that Martin Gurri is going by is honest and transparency are better than white lies / deceiving
    • basically need to bring government down to earth, show works in progress and show that they don’t have all the answers
      • key is to demystify the government
  • 10 - Finale for Skeptics
    • if his thesis about Fifth Wave is wrong, then that means null hypothesis is right
      • (not necessarily true could be other stuff that are slightly along those lines like hierarchical The Center government could still work and be legitimate in the eyes of the public in a diff way)
    • Francis Fukuyama said end of history because liberal democracy won out against every other ideology but negation and political nihilism is also a direction, just absence of any ideology
    • need to figure out positive way to move forward that reconciles Fifth Wave effects of revealing the unrealistic expectations put on the government by the public and the tensions in authority and legitimacy while presenting a positive alternative that makes this relationship work and not be in constant conflict