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title: "The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium"
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# The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
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As the regime’s story of legitimacy becomes less and less persuasive, Homo informaticus adjusts his story of the world in opposition to that of the regime. He joins the ranks of similarly disaffected members of the public, who are hostile to the status quo, eager to pick fights with authority, and seek the means to broadcast their opinions and turn the tables on their rulers.
The means of communication are of course provided by the information sphere. The unit of broadcasting can be a single individual—a Hoder, a Wael Ghonim, any member of the public, including Homo informaticus. The level of reach is billions, distributed across the face of the world.
At this stage, the public, clustered around networked communities of interest, has effectively taken control of the means of communication. Vital communities revolve around favorite themes and channels, which in the aggregate reveal the true tastes of the public, as opposed to what mass media, corporations, or governments wish the public to be interested in.
Under authoritarian governments, vital communities will tend to coalesce in
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political opposition as they bump into regime surveillance and control.
The regime still controls the apparatus of repression. It can deny service, physically attack, imprison, or even kill H. informaticus—but it can’t silence his message, because this message is constantly amplified and propagated by the opposition community. Since the opposition commands the means of communication and is embedded in the global information sphere, its voice carries beyond the reach of any national government.
This was the situation in Egypt before the uprising of January 25, 2011. This is the situation in China today. The wealth and brute strength of the modern state are counterbalanced by the vast communicative powers of the public. Filters are placed on web access, police agents monitor suspect websites, foreign newscasters are blocked, domestic bloggers are harassed and thrown in jail—but every incident which tears away at the legitimacy of the regime is seized on by a rebellious public, and is then broadcast and magnified until criticism goes viral.
The tug of war pits hierarchy against network, power against persuasion, government against the governed: under such conditions of alienation, every inch of political space is contested, and turbulence becomes a permanent feature of political life.
Objective conditions and the nature of the political system must be accounted for, when it comes to the evolutionary process I have just described. The viciousness of the regime matters. It was safer to protest against Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt than against Qaddafi in Libya or Assad in Syria— or, for that matter, the Kim dynasty in North Korea.
But the rise of Homo informaticus places governments on a razor’s edge, where any mistake, any untoward event, can draw a networked public into the streets, calling for blood. This is the situation today for authoritarian governments and liberal democracies alike. The crisis in the world that I seek to depict concerns loss of trust in government, writ large. 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.
I began by posing a question about how something as abstract as information can influence something as real as political power. Let me end the chapter by proposing an answer, in the form of three claims or hypotheses.
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1. Information influences politics because it is indigestible by a government’s justifying story.
2. The greater the diffusion of information to the public, the more illegitimate any political status quo will appear.
3. Homo informaticus, networked builder and wielder of the information sphere, poses an existential challenge to the legitimacy of every government he encounters.
I will explore the implications in the remainder of the book.
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CHAPTER NOTES
1 Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection ofTechnological and Environmental Dangers (University of California Press, 1985).
2 Ibid., Kindle location 1172.
3 Ibid., Kindle location 1591.
4 Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (Transaction Publishers, 1993. Originally published by Macmillan, 1922).
5 The two-step flow of influence theory was introduced by Paul Lazarsfeld and others based on a study of the 1944 presidential elections. For its application to Twitter, see Shaomei Wu, Winter A. Mason, Jake M. Hofman, and Duncan J. Watts, “Who Says What To Whom on Twitter,” presented at the World Wide Web Conference in 2011, http://www.wwwconference.org/proceedings/www2011/proceedings/p705.pdf
6 Roland Schatz, “Rebuilding Reputation Won’t Work Without the Full Picture,” slides presented at the 11th
International Agenda-Setting Conference, 2010,
http://issuu.com/mediatenor\_international/docs/rebuilding\_reputation
7 Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Won’t Be Tweeted,” The New Yorker, September 27,
2010.
8 Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Books, 2008).
9 Clay Shirky, “The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 90 No. 1, January–February 2011.
10 All the Homo informaticus charts are mine.
11 Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 137.
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WHAT THE PUBLIC IS NOT
I borrowed Walter Lippmann’s definition of the public because I found it honest and unpretentious: “The public, as I see it, 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.” The philosophical assumptions underlying these words were typical for Lippmann, who possessed an almost mystical faith in experts and elites—the “actors” he mentioned. But taken baldly and innocently, the definition happened to fit the facts of the subterranean conflict which is the theme of this book.
There is no single body of the public. There are many publics, each of them embedded in a particular culture and circumstance. Nor is the public organized to endure as a permanent fixture of social life. If the interest in an affair which has brought a public into being somehow dissipates, the public itself, like the Marxist hope for the state, will wither away.
The difficulty for the analyst is that he must characterize this heterogeneous beast. The public is a protagonist in my story. In its multiple manifestations, it has exhibited common habits of behavior made possible by the conditions prevalent today: the Fifth Wave of information. To cite just one example, I noted the remarkable affinity with Border-sectarian loathing of authority described, in a different context, by Douglas and Wildavsky. Only those blinded by archaic categories will fail to see that that public, once synonymous with “the audience,” is no longer silent, no longer passive—that it has leaped onstage and become a leading actor in the world-historical drama.
4
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Yet any feature I might depict in my portrait of the public can be falsified by some example, and any attempt I might make to simplify or personalize the subject will result in caricature and error.
The most promising way forward, it seems to me, is to follow N. N. Taleb’s “subtractive knowledge” method of analyzing complex questions. Rather than assert what the public is, I explain what the public is not. This resembles the sculptor’s approach of chipping away at the stone until a likeness emerged, or the bond trader’s formula of identifying safe investments by subtracting risk. 1 Since the public is an unstable and undetermined entity—a complex system— this negative mode of characterizing its behavior is least likely to fall into the fallacy of personification, of inventing some new Marxian-style “class” with a single consciousness and will.
Taleb’s method is also helpful because the term in question, “the public,” has been made to stand for so many things that it had become obscured under layers of confusion and special pleading. So one last metaphor: my task resembles that of the archaeologist, who brushes away foreign matter until the object is restored to its original identity.
THE PUBLIC IS NOT THE PEOPLE, BUT LIKES TO PRETEND THAT IT IS
On June 29, 2013, a year and four months after the fall of Hosni Mubarak and exactly a year after free elections had installed Mohamed Morsi as the new president of Egypt, the Egyptian public took to the streets in enormous numbers demanding the overthrow of the government. Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, had alienated many with his narrowly partisan approach to government. The protesters were led by secular groups which had found themselves marginalized soon after the collapse of the Mubarak regime.
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But what matters here is what each side was made to represent in a desperate moment, when grand ideals collided with political necessity and interested parties needed to justify their actions.
On July 3, the Egyptian military ousted Morsi, installed an interim government, and began a purge of the Muslim Brotherhood. The military had always feared and detested the Brotherhood, but that was not the reason given for their intervention. They claimed to be abiding by the will of the people. “The Armed Forces . . . has been called by the Egyptian people to help,” affirmed the defense minister, Abdul Fatah Khalil al-Sisi, in the initial statement following the rebellion. Although Morsi had been the elected president, al-Sisi maintained that he had failed to “meet the demands of the people.” 2
A similar argument was put forward by Mohamed ElBaradei, the new prime minister in the interim government:
In a democracy, when you get 20 million people in the street, you resign. Unfortunately, we don’t have a process of recall or impeachment like you have. It was a popular uprising rejecting Mr. Morsi’s continuing in power . . . People went to the street on the 30th of June and were not psychologically ready to go home until Morsi left office.
For the military to push Morsi from power, ElBaradei insisted, “was no different than what happened under Mubarak.” 3
These accounts appealed directly to the central doctrine of liberal democracy: the people were sovereign. Only they possessed the authorizing magic of legitimacy. Political power at every level must be derived from the people as a whole, above the claims of any institution, faction, or person. Thus the people were entitled to organize or reorganize the government as they saw fit.
In a rhetorical device at least as old as the French Revolution, al-Sisi and ElBaradei identified the protesting public with the Egyptian people. The public was sovereign. It was the legitimate ruler of Egypt, and Morsi, by failing to meet the public’s demands, had lapsed into tyranny.
A problem with this argument was the fractured condition of the Egyptian public. Many were “interested in the affair” of getting rid of Morsi, but many others sided with the president and his Islamist allies. Which was the true public? By Lippmann’s definition, both were. Which could be identified with the Egyptian people? I will answer momentarily, but first let’s remind ourselves that Morsi, unlike Mubarak, had been voted into office by 51 percent of the electorate, a clear majority. Over 13 million Egyptians had cast a ballot for Morsi: hadn’t they spoken for the people? Opposition voices were concerned enough on this score to engage in fantastic claims—20 million protesters on the streets, 22 million signatures petitioning Morsi to step down, much larger figures, always, than the president’s vote.
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But democratic legitimacy doesn’t reside in numbers, and the political authority of the public can be determined independently of the question whether the July events in Egypt were a revolution or a coup.
The public is not, and never can be, identical to the people: this is true in all circumstances, everywhere. Since, on any given question, the public is composed of those self-selected persons interested in the affair, it possesses no legitimate authority whatever, and lacks the structure to enforce any authority that might fall its way. The public has no executive, no law, no jails. It can only express an opinion, in words and in actions—in its own flesh and blood. That was what transpired in Egypt. The roar of public opinion precipitated political change, but it was the Egyptian military, not the public, who compelled Mubarak and Morsi to step down.
The public can never be the people because the people are an abstraction of political philosophy. The people, strictly speaking, don’t exist. Thinkers like Locke and Jefferson who affirmed the sovereignty of the people were preoccupied with protecting the freedom of action of the individual citizen against the crushing embrace of the state. The famous “We, the people” of the preamble to the Constitution was a rejection by the framers of the ultimate authority of state governments. The people themselves were eternally absent.
The public, in Egypt and elsewhere, was thus not sovereign. Its authority has always been based on persuasion rather than law. Representative democracies have instituted procedures such as elections and jury trials, in which the public, conventionally speaking, may be said to embody the people. But it is precisely the overflow of the public’s activity beyond the channels of democratic procedures—sometimes, as in Egypt, in revolt against them—that represents the great imponderable of our time.
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In an older generation, the lack of fit between public and people engendered deep pessimism about the future of democracy. Lippmann came to his definition in despair. The work in which it is found was titled The Phantom Public— phantom because it was “an abstraction” and “not a fixed body of individuals.” In brief, it was not the people. In 1927, two years after The Phantom Public appeared, John Dewey published The Public and Its Problems—problems because, in the “machine age,” the public had become “lost,” “bewildered,” and “cannot find itself.” Like a troubled wraith, the public haunted the mansions of democracy. 4
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Lippmann’s pessimism rested on two shrewd observations and a questionable assumption. He observed, presciently, that even in the industrial age public opinion influenced matters of policy and government. Always the elitist, he believed that the public “will not possess an insider’s knowledge of events,” and “can watch only for coarse signs indicating where their sympathies ought to turn.” Because the public was clueless, the political weight of its opinion was likely to be misguided or manipulated by cunning insiders. This led Lippmann to a conclusion that remains largely accurate today:
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