NIHILISM AND DEMOCRACY
The grand hierarchies of the industrial age feel themselves to be in decline, and I’m disposed to agree. They evolved to operate on a more docile social structure —one in which far less information circulated far more slowly among far fewer persons. Today a networked public runs wild among the old institutions, and bleeds them of the power to command attention and define the intellectual and political agenda.
Every expert is surrounded by a horde of amateurs eager to pounce on every mistake and mock every unsuccessful prediction or policy. Every CRU has its hacker, every Mubarak his Wael Ghonim, every Barack Obama his Tea Party. Nothing is secret and nothing is sacred, so the hierarchies some time ago lost their heroic ambitions and now they have lost their nerve. They doubt their own authority, and they have good reason to do so.
This great strategic reversal has produced few alternatives to the ideas and ideologies that dominated the industrial age. 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. So in the second decade of the new millennium, political arguments resemble a distorted echo of the French Revolution or Victorian England: we still quarrel in terms of left and right, conservative and liberal, even while the old landscape has been swept clean and the relevance of these venerable labels has become uncertain.
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