and the crisis of authority in the new millennium
By Martin Gurri
A great read. It posed a new theory and one that seems to be aging well:
“The information technologies of the 21st century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age.”
Basically, a lack of top-down control of information led to an open question on all institutions.
Those institutions – the government specifically – are making increasingly bigger promises about what it can do.
The public, fed minute by minute updates from both elites and non-elites, has endless datapoints to hold the institutions – again, government most centrally in this book – accountable to what they said they would do.
“The failure of democratic governments to deliver on equality, social justice, full employment, economic growth, cheap apartments, happiness, and a meaningful life, has driven the public to the edge of reject of representative democracy as it is actually practiced. Some have gone over the edge. Failure has bred frustration, frustration has justified negation, and negation has paved the way for the nihilist, who acts, quite sincerely, on the principle that destruction of the system is a step forward, regardless of alternatives.”
This bolded part is important. Gurri points to negation as one of the defining factors of our politics that is a race to the bottom. Negation being everything that we’re/you’re against as a means of branding your politics is good for whipping people up to vote, but as he says ultimate negates the institutions themselves. And what are people left with? It’s like that friend who says no to every restaurant suggestion you have but is unwilling to offer a suggestion themselves.
So, nihilism….
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I saw the first reference to the FBI using this new term called Nihilistic Violent Extremist (NVE): individuals creating chaos through violence with no political allegiance and whose goal, if there even is one, is to pull down the system entirely.
This is what I got from the book:
The end result of flattening the information hierarchy through the internet and social media has led to an open question on the institutions who always overpromised on the fact that they would bring you The Good Life (not the government’s ‘job’, though they can assist IMO).
And with all of their shortcomings streamed digitally and in real time by the public (who then more and more, in a doom-cycle, expects them to fix these failures and is again let down), the public gets more and more negative.
Negation leads to nihilism.
And nihilism is quite hard to overcome, especially if it has reached any critical mass within the heart of one to many within the culture.
The last open question in this cycle is whether it’s worth using democracy to save democracy. Or, whether you should use violence (nihilistic right and left of the public) or law and order (government/elites: see Trump 2 admin use of FCC/ICE/ rule by Executive Orders, etc.)
Here are some pages I made notes of when reading. I ordered the Stripe Press copy and it’s so beautiful that I didn’t feel right putting pen markings in it, so I made very few notes and put them in Apple Notes.
- Page 58: “The perturbing agent between authority and the public is information.”
- Page 241: “The public’s conquest of the information sphere has meant the overthrow of the gatekeepers – often accompanied by the collapse of the stories that imbued their institutions with authority and prestige… Collapse of the official story in both countries (Tunisia & Egypt) preceded the collapse of the regime: when towering figures stood exposed as clueless pygmies, the end was close at hand.”
- Page 250: “So it comes down to alternatives. The most effective alternative to the steep pyramid of industrialized democracy isn’t direct democracy on the Athenian model or cyber-democracy in the style of Wael Ghonim’s Facebook page. It’s the personal sphere: the place where information and decisions move along the shortest causal links. To the extent that choices are returned to the personal from the political, they can be disposed directly, in the light of local knowledge, as part of an observable series of trial and error. Personal success can be emulated and replicated. Personal failure will not implicated the entire system.”
- Page 280: “The end of the Cold War, in which Fukuyama discerned the milenial triumph of democracy, appears in hindsight to have been the high-water mark for the prestige and legitimacy of this system. Once the external pressure applied by communism was removed, democratic countries lost their internal cohesion, and began the slow descent into negation. The failures of high modernism became painfully evident, when detached from the epic canvas of a life-and-death struggle. The indiscutrial model of organization, with its militaristic respect for rank, had placed democratic government at a great distance from the governed. Lacking a shared enemy and the urgency of a war footing, public and authority discovered they stood on the opposite sides of many questions.”
Two terms core to his idea:
- The Fifth Wave
- 1st wave: Writing “…led to a form of government dependent on a mandarin or priestly case.”
- 2nd wave: The Alphabet… “the republics of the classical world would have been unable to function without literate citizens.”
- 3rd wave: Printing Press & Movable Type… “probably the most disruptive of all. The Reformation, modern science, and the American and French Revolutions would scarcely have been possible without printed books and pamphlets.
- 4th wave: Mass Media… “I talk, you listen.”
- 5th wave: digital revolution, flattening of the information sphere (my interpretation of what he means)
- Home Informaticus
- Information Man: “You and I, and possibly a majority of the human race today, are him: end products of an evolutionary process involving the spread of education, expanded levels of wealth adn security, and improved means of communication. Our traits can be explained only in reference to an ancestral environment – in this case, a parched information landscape. That’s the logic of evolution.”