--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781732265141" library_document_id: "65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e" source_sha256: "5ce4681f6925ec280ef79b11332d97c771babda12c7d1e05c6466d18ecbcc424" pdf_physical_page_count: 412 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 10 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e?start=10&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=10&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=0&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=20&limit=10" --- # The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=10 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium © 2018 Martin Gurri All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by Stripe Press / Stripe Matter Inc. Ebook by Bright Wing Books (brightwing.ca) Stripe Press Ideas for progress San Francisco, California press.stripe.com Printed by Hemlock in Canada ISBN: 978-1-7322651-4-1 First Edition ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=11 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 1 PRELUDE TO A TURBULENT AGE 2 HODER AND WAEL GHONIM 3 MY THESIS 4 WHAT THE PUBLIC IS NOT 5 PHASE CHANGE 2011 6 A CRISIS OF AUTHORITY 7 THE FAILURE OF GOVERNMENT 8 NIHILISM AND DEMOCRACY 9 CHOICES AND SYSTEMS 10 FINALE FOR SKEPTICS — TRUMP, BREXIT, AND FAREWELL TO ALL THAT TABLE OF CONTENTS ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=12 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=13 | PRINTED_PAGE=1 PRELUDE TO A TURBULENT AGE Can there be a connection between online universities and the serial insurgencies which, in media noise and human blood, have rocked the Arab Middle East? I contend that there is. And the list of unlikely connections can easily be expanded. It includes the ever faster churning of companies in and out of the S&P 500, the death of news and the newspaper, the failure of established political parties, the imperial advance across the globe by Facebook and Google, and the near-universal spread of the mobile phone. Should anyone care about this tangle of bizarre connections? Only if you care how you are governed: the story I am about to tell concerns above all a crisis of that monstrous messianic machine, the modern government. And only if you care about democracy: because a crisis of government in liberal democracies like the United States can’t help but implicate the system. Already you hear voices prophesying doomsday with a certain joy. I am no prophet, myself. Among the claims I make in this book is that the future is, and must be, opaque, even to the cleverest observer. Consider the CIA and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, or the Fed and the implosion of Lehman Brothers in 2008. The moment tomorrow no longer resembles yesterday, we are startled and confused. The compass cracks, by which we navigate existence. We are lost at sea. 1 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=14 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED But we can speak of the present. And I think it demonstrable that an old, entrenched social order is passing away even as I write these words—one rooted in the hierarchies and conventions of industrial life. Since no substitute has appeared on the horizon, we should, as tourists flying into the unknown, fasten our seatbelts and expect turbulence ahead. INFORMATION IS COOL, SO WHY DID IT EXPLODE? I came to the subject in a roundabout way. I was interested in information. The word, admittedly, is vague, the concept elusive. Information theory finds “information” in anomaly, deviation, difference—anything that separates signal from noise. But that’s not what I cared about. Media provided my point of reference. As an analyst of global events, my source material came from parsing the world’s newspapers and television reports. That was what I considered information. I also held the belief that information of the sort found in newspapers and television reports was identical to knowledge—so the more information, the better. This was naïve of me, but if I say so, understandable. Back when the world and I were young, information was scarce, hence valuable. Anyone who could cast a beam of light on, say, Russia-Cuba relations, was worth his weight in gold. In this context, it made sense to crave more. A curious thing happens to sources of information under conditions of scarcity. They become authoritative. A century ago, a scholar wishing to study the topics under public discussion in the US would find most of them in the pages of the New York Times. It wasn’t quite “All the news that’s fit to print,” but it delivered a large enough proportion of published topics that, as a practical proposition, little incentive existed to look further. Because it held a near monopoly on current information, the New York Times seemed authoritative. Four decades ago, Walter Cronkite concluded his broadcasts of the CBS Nightly ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=15 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED News with the words, “And that’s the way it was.” Few of his viewers found it extraordinary that the clash and turmoil of billions of human lives, dwelling in thousands of cities and organized into dozens of nations, could be captured in three or four mostly visual reports lasting a total of less than 30 minutes. They had no access to what was missing—the other two networks reported the same news, only less majestically. Cronkite was voted the most trusted man in America, I suspect because he looked and sounded like the wealthy uncle to whom children in the family are forced to listen for profitable life lessons. When he wavered on the Vietnam War, shock waves rattled the marble palaces of Washington. Cronkite emanated authority. It took time to break out of my education and training, but eventually the thought dawned on me that information wasn’t just raw material to exploit for analysis, but had a life and power of its own. Information had effects. And the first significant effect I perceived related to the sources: as the amount of information available to the public increased, the authoritativeness of any one source decreased. The idea of an information explosion or overload goes back to the 1960s, which seems poignant in retrospect. These concerns expressed a new anxiety about the advance of progress, and placed in doubt the naïve faith, which I originally shared, that data and knowledge were identical. Even then, the problem was framed by uneasy elites: as ever more published reports escaped the control of authoritative sources, how could we tell truth from error? Or, in a more sinister vein, honest research from manipulation? Information truly began exploding in the 1990s, initially because of television rather than the internet. Landline TV, restricted for years to one or two channels in a few developed countries, became a symbol of civilization and was dutifully propagated by governments and corporations around the world. Then came cable and the far more invasive satellite TV: CNN (founded 1980) and Al Jazeera (1996) broadcast news 24 hours a day. A resident of Cairo, who in the 1980s could only stare dully at one of two state-owned channels showing all Mubarak all the time, by the 2000s had access to more than 400 national and international stations. American movies, portraying the Hollywood approach to sex, poured into the homes of puritanical countries like Saudi Arabia. Commercial applications for email were developed in the late 1980s. The first server on the World Wide Web was switched on during Christmas of 1990. The MP3—destroyer of the music industry—arrived in 1993. Blogs appeared in 1997, and Blogger, the first free blogging software, became available in 1999. Wikipedia began its remarkable evolution in 2001. The social network Friendster was launched in 2002, with MySpace and LinkedIn following in 2003, and that thumping T.rex of social nets, Facebook, coming along in 2004. By 2003, when Apple introduced iTunes, there were more than three billion pages on the web. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=16 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Early in the new millennium it became apparent to anyone with eyes to see that we had entered an informational order unprecedented in the experience of the human race. I can quantify that last statement. Several of us—analysts of events—were transfixed by the magnitude of the new information landscape, and wondered whether anyone had thought to measure it. My friend and colleague, Tony Olcott, came upon (on the web, of course) a study conducted by some very clever researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. In brief, these clever people sought to measure, in data bits, the amount of information produced in 2001 and 2002, and compare the result with the information accumulated from earlier times. Their findings were astonishing. More information was generated in 2001 than in all the previous existence of our species on earth. In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total. And 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001, adding around 23 “exabytes” of new information—roughly the equivalent of 140,000 Library of Congress collections. 1 Growth in information had been historically slow and additive. It was now exponential. Poetic minds have tried to conjure a fitting metaphor for this strange transformation. Explosion conveys the violent suddenness of the change. Overload speaks to our dazed mental reaction. Then there are the trivially obvious flood and the most unattractive firehose. But a glimpse at the chart above should suggest to us an apt metaphor. It’s a stupendous wave: a tsunami. HOW WALTER CRONKITE BECAME KATIE COURIC AND THE AUDIENCE BECAME THE PUBLIC What was the character of the change imposed by this cataclysmic force, this tsunami, as it swept over our culture and our lives? That was the question posed to those of us with an interest in media, research, and analysis. A number of partial answers presented themselves, before I could truly grasp the big picture. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=17 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=18 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=19 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED evidence to the familiar authoritative sources without ignoring a near-infinite number of new sources, any one of which might provide material decisive to my conclusions. Yet, despite the arrival of Google and algorithmic search, I found it humanly impossible to explore that near-infinite set of new sources in any but the most superficial way. 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. Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment. And suspicion cut both ways. Defenders of mass media accused their vanishing audience of cherry-picking sources in order to hide in a congenial information bubble, a “daily me.” Pretty early in the game, the wave of fresh information exposed the poverty and artificiality of established arrangements. Public discussion, for example, was limited to a very few topics of interest to the articulate elites. Politics ruled despotically over the public sphere—and not just politics but Federal politics, with a peculiar fixation on the executive branch. Science, technology, religion, philosophy, the visual arts—except when they touched on some political question, these life-shaping concerns tended to be met with silence. In a similar manner, a mediocre play watched by a few thousands received reviews from critics with literary pretensions, while a computer game of breathtaking technical sophistication, played by millions, fell beneath notice. 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=20&limit=10)