The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Knowledge Is Free.
We Are Anonymous. We Are Legion.
We Do Not Forgive.
We Do Not Forget. Expect Us.

5.5 Self-dramatizing with Anonymous

Because political conditions were much less dangerous in democratic countries, self-dramatization there seemed proportionately more extravagant.

Political rebels in Europe, Israel, and the US felt betrayed by the failure of the structures of authority, particularly the government and the economic elites. The feeling wasn’t entirely unreasonable. The masters and regulators of finance had placed large foolish bets, but when the bottom fell out in 2008 it was the public, not them, who paid the losses. There was ample room for criticism, even for cynicism.

In the end, however, a term like “failure” can only be applied relative to some expectation—and we have seen that the rebels’ expectations of modern government were at once fantastical in their scope and vaporous in definition. They ascribed magical or, I venture to say, divine qualities to cumbersome, alltoo-human bureaucracies. They believed government could work miracles: it could give meaning to their personal lives. This faith was most evident in Israel, a country that quickly overcame the effects of the crisis. Protesters there were affluent and employed, but expected the government to deliver personal fulfillment within a context of social justice. What that meant was never explained. Most of the American Occupiers also held down jobs. Conversely, those nearest to poverty never participated in any of the 2011 street revolts.

Even in the rhetoric of the protests, the connection to the economic crisis was, at best, indirect. Manuel Castells had it right when he wrote that “the movement” was about “everything and nothing at the same time.” ⁴⁷ 2011 never fixated on 2008: the impulse was to abolish history entirely, and open up a future purified of cause and effect.

In their eagerness to play a part in some world-historical drama, the rebels often gave the impression that they were searching for causes. They disdained specifics—ideology, policy—but excelled at lengthy menus of accusations. Stéphane Hessel, French prophet of outrage, understood this process of selfaggravation.

It is true, the reasons to get angry may seem less clear today, and the world may seem more complex. Who is in charge; who are the decision makers? It’s not always easy to discern. We’re not dealing with a small elite anymore, whose actions we can clearly identify. We are dealing with a vast, interdependent world that is interconnected in unprecedented ways. But there are unbearable things all around us. You have to look for them; search carefully. ⁴⁸

A life spent in search of unbearable things will be necessarily destructive of the legitimacy of most standing institutions and social arrangements, including those which created and sustained the destroyers.

Unlike the fictional character V, the actual protesters of 2011 were unable to wipe clean the slate of power and society. Mubarak fell, the Spanish socialists were voted to near extinction, Netanyahu compromised, Obama borrowed the slogans of OWS—but the consequences, three years down the road, nowhere matched the glittering expectations of participants. The old systems still stood. The hierarchies of the industrial age, with their top-down myopia, stumbled on. The behavior of these structures obeys an inner logic: despite Itzik Shmuli’s utopian proclamation, government never became a servant to the forces of

revolt.

But the hypothesis I presented in this chapter was not that the public in 2011 had the interest or the capacity to replace current institutions of authority. It had neither. Sectarian to the core, the public would have felt corrupted by the thought of assuming the functions of the Center. The phase change concerned, at the most obvious level, a new capacity to mobilize large numbers of the public and so to command the attention of all political players, from government leaders to the media to ordinary voters. This was a new thing under the sun, and it became possible only in the altered landscape of the Fifth Wave. Digital platforms allowed even rioters who wished to loot London stores to organize and act more intelligently, for their purposes, than the authorities.

The consequence wasn’t revolution but the threat of perpetual turbulence. The authorities felt, and still feel, their incapacity keenly. Governments are aware that the public could swarm into the political arena at any moment, organizing at the speed of light, hurling anathemas of repudiation. Political elites in democratic countries have become thoroughly demoralized. Whether this was deserved or not is a separate question, to be examined in the next two chapters. But the crisis of confidence among established politicians has precluded the possibility of bold action, of democratic reform.

The phase change began in 2011, but the end is not in sight. In the Italian general elections of February 2013, a new party, the “Five Star” movement, won 25 percent of the vote for the lower house of parliament and became the secondlargest entity there. The party was the creation of a comedian-blogger who called himself Beppe Grillo, after the Jiminy Cricket character in Pinocchio. In every feature other than its willingness to stand for elections, Five Star reproduced perfectly the confused ideals and negations of the 2011 protests. Despite receiving more than eight million votes, it lacked a coherent program. The single unifying principle was a deep loathing of the Italian political establishment. The rise of Beppe Grillo had nothing to do with reform or radical change, but meant the humiliation and demoralization of the established order.

That was the most profound consequence of 2011: sowing the seeds of distrust in the democratic process. You can condemn politicians only for so long before you must reject the legitimacy of the system that produced them. The protests of 2011 openly took that step, and a considerable segment of the electorate applauded. Like money and marriage, legitimacy exists objectively because vast numbers of the public agree, subjectively, that it does exist. If enough people change their minds, the authorizing magic is lost. The process is slow and invisible to analysts, but, as I have noted, the tipping point comes suddenly—a matter of weeks for the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes. How far down this road existing liberal democracies have proceeded is a matter of guesswork. We still have time to discover that the street revolts of 2011, in V’s words, did “change the world,” and not in a good way.

CHAPTER NOTES

1 Henri Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge University Press, 2008) 9.

3 Manifiesto “Democracia Real Ya,” my translation, http://www.democraciarealya.es/manifiesto-comun/

5 Castells, Networks of Outrage, 128 forward.

7 Photo by Juan Santiso.

9 Cabal, Indignados! 15 M, Kindle location 451.

12 “El PSOE solicitará al Congreso de Diputados que se reconozcan los ‘derechos humanos’ de los simios,” El Mundo, May 24, 2006, http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2006/04/24/sociedad/1145890969.html

14 Castells, Networks of Outrage, 122.

15 “Facebook Facts & Figures for 2010,” Digitalbuzz, March 22, 2010, http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/facebook-statistics-facts-figures-for-2010/

16 Noah Efron, “The Israeli Summer,” The Huffington Post, July 31, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noah-efron/the-israeli-summer\_b\_914389.html ; Harriet Sherwood, “Israeli Protests: 430,000 Take to the Streets To Demand Social Justice,” The Guardian, September 4, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/04/israel-protests-social-justice; Asher Schecter, “A Short

street

36 “One in Four Riot Suspects Had 10 Previous Offenses,” BBC, September 15, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14926322

41 Doug Gross, “British PM Proposes Social Media Ban for Rioters,” CNN, August 12, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/08/11/london.riots.social.media/index.html

42 Screen shot from video of London riot, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed0QJJL9sYQ

43 From Joe Lustri, bogieharmond, http://www.flickr.com/photos/68146720@N05/
6356999163/in/photolist-aFKhnR-avSxur

44 Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, 102.

45 The Urban Dictionary offers a helpful definition of “lulz” for the uninitiated: “Lulz is the one good reason to do anything from trolling to rape. After every action taken, you must make the epilogic dubious disclaimer, ‘I did it for the lulz.’”

46 The best summary of Anonymous participation in OWS, which includes the YouTube videos, is Andy Captain’s “The Real Role of Anonymous in Occupy Wall Street,” Fast Company, October 11, 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/1788397/real-role-anonymous-occupy-wall-street

47 Castells, Networks ofOutrage, 185.
48 Stéphane Hessel, Time for Outrage, (Hachette Book Group, 2010) 11.

A CRISIS OF AUTHORITY

The street protests of 2011, while ostensibly political, were part of a global assault on the guardians of authority across every domain of human activity. The protesters stood in the same relation to government that bloggers and social media did to newspapers, YouTube to television, Napster to the recording industry, massive online courses to universities, Amazon to shopping malls, the open science movement to the scientific establishment. From the commanding heights of the information sphere, the public sought in each case to break a monopoly held by an accredited elite.

Authority, as I use the term, flows from legitimacy, derived from monopoly. To some indeterminate degree, the public must trust and heed authority, or it is no authority at all. An important social function of authority is to deliver certainty in an uncertain world. It explains reality in the context of the shared story of the group. For this it must rely on persuasion rather than compulsion, since naked force is a destroyer of trust and faith. The need to persuade in turn explains the institutional propensity for visible symbols of authority—the patrician’s toga, the doctor’s white frock, the financier’s Armani suit. Authority being an intangible quality, those who wield it wish to be recognized for what they are.

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And they have been, historically, the only actors in the social drama, with the public relegated to the audience, able only to weep or applaud. Authority is an expansion of author, which originally meant something like “initiator”—the active human element in an otherwise inert population.

Current structures of authority are a legacy of the industrial age. The public, when it needs answers, turns to institutions rather than to charismatic individuals. These institutions have been subjected to a Taylorist process of rationalization: they are, without exception, top-down, specialized, professionalized, prone to pseudo-scientific rituals and jargon. To enter such a precinct of authority requires a long and costly accreditation process—years of academic education and apprenticeship. Many are called, few are chosen. The elect believe themselves to be unquestioned masters of their special domain— and so they were for many years. From the middle of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth centuries, the public lacked the means to question, much less contradict, authoritative judgments derived from monopolies of information.

Most people in authority today came to their positions in that happy time. On moral as well as intellectual grounds, they dismiss the outsider out of hand. Their reflexive loathing of the amateur trespasser inspired Hoder’s 19½-year sentence and the mutual annihilation lawsuits against Shawn Fanning and Napster.

Of course, the ferocity of this response can be explained in part by a fear of losing access to power and money. Authority has been closely associated with both—it’s a natural connection. Power needs accurate intelligence on which to act. Monopoly has always been a position from which to exploit the market. If I stop thinking in generalities and imagine a concrete person in authority, I’ll conjure up a policeman, a politician, a banker.

The links between authority on one side and power and money on the other are dense and often invisible to the public. But each exerts a discrete influence on social relations, and of the three, I believe authority to be easily the most consequential.

Even in purely practical terms, persuasion has always trumped compulsion or bribery. The authorizing magic of legitimacy can channel social behavior more deeply and permanently than the policeman’s club or the millionaire’s check.

These propositions should be considered truisms, but they are not. Not by the public, which, as we have seen, assumes that every failure of authority must be explained by a collusion of money with power. And not by many analysts, who embrace some version of the old Marxist concept of “false consciousness”—the idea that the public can be persuaded to heed authority against its own best interests.

False consciousness can be invoked in a world in which the laws of history, and thus the shape of future events, are perfectly understood. Only then, with the tree of causation lucidly in mind, are we allowed to speak of the relation between a sane conscious decision and reality as “true” or “false.” But that is not the world we live in. That is not the human condition. Between every decision and its consequences rises an impenetrable veil of uncertainty. The present can only guess at the future—and the track record, as we’ll soon see, isn’t good. Even among experts, the track record is terrible. The reason isn’t false consciousness but the stupendous complexity of human events, which renders prediction impossible.

When asked about the impact of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai was supposed to have responded: “It is too soon to say.” In that one instance, if true, Zhou spoke as an honest political analyst rather than a revolutionary prophet.

The crisis of authority hollowing out existing institutions didn’t arise because these institutions prostituted themselves to power or money. That was an explanation after the fact—one that happened to be believed by much of the public and many experts. The fact that needed to be explained, however, was failure: the painfully visible gap between the institutions’ claims of competence and their actual performance. The gap, I maintain, was a function of the limits of human knowledge. It had always been there. What changed was the public’s awareness of it.

In the industrial age, the pratfalls of authority had been managed discreetly, camouflaged by the mystique of the expert at the top of his game. Today failure happens out in the open, in public, where everyone can see. With the arrival of the global information sphere, each failure is captured, reproduced, multiplied, amplified, and made to stand for authority as a whole. Crisis has followed logically from the destruction of the persuasive power—the legitimacy and credibility—possessed by established institutions.