Book Review: The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, by Martin Gurri

The public — networked groups of individuals assembling transiently over shared interests — is on the move. Titans of the Industrial Age — hierarchical institutions and the elites commanding them — are on the run. Information Technology has created information abundance, eroding the monopoly on information from which institutions and elites derived authority. Media analyst Martin Gurri presciently identified the coming crisis in 2014 as the Fifth Wave. His framework offers a powerful method for understanding our present age of instability and anger.

Start with information. Scarcity creates high returns to centralization; hierarchical organizations grow up around information scarcity to manage access, with a lucky few rising to the top. This, asserts Gurri, was the fundamental trend of the Industrial Age, which saw the rise of mass organizations (governments, business, universities) and coalitions (unions, political parties). All of these groups derived their authority and legitimacy from privileged access to scarce information.

That information monopoly was lost sometime around the turn of the century. The Internet, and the networks built on top of it, made information abundant — wildly, unimaginably and uncontrollably abundant. Far flung individuals from everywhere — and nowhere — were suddenly empowered to network digitally over shared interests as the distance between those at the top and everyone else had been erased. Seizing control of the information sphere, these networks smashed the existing hierarchies: news media, political parties, governments, universities and business. The result has been collision in a figurative and literal sense: the egalitarian, bottom-up, and networked “public” crashing into the hierarchical, top-down and industrial “elites”. Current discourse, in which stridency and volume are the only options for making your message heard about the cacophony of undifferentiated voices, is a symptom of the erosion of authority.

Finding the Public

Gurri defines the public idiosyncratically, borrowing the concept from commentator Walter Lippmann:

The public … 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.

This definition contrasts the public with the people — an abstraction central to political theory — and is critical for the argument because no two “publics” are alike. They are transient, contingent, leaderless. In support of this thesis, Gurri marshals evidence from some of the defining public movements of the recent past:

• Arab spring
• Indignado protests in Spain
• Euromaidan (protests across Ukraine in 2014)
• Tent city dwellers of Tel Aviv
• Occupy Wall Street

These movements were fascinating in part because they were mostly leaderless. Even recognizable faces, such as Wael Ghonim in Egypt, insisting earnestly that they were but ordinary members of the public. Yet this egalitarianism extended to the point of dysfunction, demonstrated by the fact that each movement, being fundamentally defined by negation, a sense of being against the current system, was unable to pivot to being for an articulable alternative. Gurri observes,

Sheer negation, hostility toward the status quo, became the shared point of reference for networks and individuals advocating mutually inconsistent ideals.

Publics assembling against the status quo shook the foundations of existing hierarchies, but none demonstrated the capacity (or, frequently, interest) to build a replacement.

Intriguingly, the publics Gurri analyzes were constituted primarily of the affluent who should be invested in preserving the status quo. Gurri attributes this puzzling feature of the modern era to a failure of expectations. Governments, particularly democratic, had in fact performed well by many objectives measures, but not relative to the inflated expectations of the public, which he terms “fantastical in their scope and vaporous in definition” (pg. 163). The difference this time was that hierarchical institutions controlled by those governments were unable to control the information environment around their actions. In the Industrial Age, the public had few levers outside of the ballot box (if that) to express their disappointment and so feedback loops from the public to institutions were attenuated at best. Today, the public controls the information sphere and can rapidly assemble online and in person in response to perceived failures. In an environment of information abundance, elites and the institutions they run have lost control of the narrative. Gurri finds the steady erosion in the authority of government in the novel ability of the public to response to this mix of grandiose political promises and quotidian bureaucratic failure.

Institutional Response

Institutions have responded with denial, horror and self doubt. There has always been a gap between the lofty mantle of knowledge and competence claimed by leaders and the human reality of delivery. Aspirational democratic politics and authoritarian regimes both depend on a public belief that the individuals perched at the top have things under control. In the age of information scarcity failures — of which there were many — were relatively obscure. These failures could, over time, optimistically lead to lessons learned, experimentation and growth, ultimately contributing to the major successes of modern governments, such as widespread healthcare coverage, road systems, sanitation, and power grids. Information abundance has rendered that gap between expectation and reality painfully obvious, raising the costs of failure intolerably high. Zombie-institutions, run by authorities lacking the nerve to face the public’s wrath and the capacity (institutionally and personally) to deliver on the grandiose claims of democratic campaigns therefore, rationally, fall back on process and “consultation” in a desperate effort to avoid any failure. But, without the opportunity to learn, capacity erodes and ambitions are curtailed. The ironic and radical implication is that transparency, an argument marshalled in favour of government authority, may be a Trojan Horse, savaging institutional capacity from within.

1648 or 1789?

Gurri’s argument concludes with a striking and troubling claim: the revolt of the public, enabled by technology, is fueled by inflated expectations of the public and exaggerated claims of competence by institutions that do not withstand scrutiny in an era of information abundance. The crisis of democracy is therefore a crisis of authority prompted by the question of how to govern in a toxic atmosphere of nihilism and distrust. The capacity of governments to respond to this crisis will be a defining question in the coming decades and this highly underrated book provides a valuable tool for doing so.

But, if this is a revolution, what kind is it? So far, we have not seen collapses like those following the revolutions of 1789, 1917, or 1991. Rather, we observe instability leading to polarization and institutional paralysis. Gurri suggests that the better analogy are the religious wars of the 17th century, themselves derivative of a prior information revolution (the printing press), and which preceded the Westphalian system struck in 1648. In other words, the solution to this crisis will not be Manichean, but Hegelian, a synthesis that bestows institutional capacities on networks. Technologies that permit networked groups to coordinate and build are central to the modern workplace, and radical experimentation in harnessing economic incentives of distributed actors is central to the crypto community. Could these technological tools give rise to new forms of coordination and action better suited to an age of information abundance?