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

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business environment riven by conflict and stress. Whether or not the flood of innovation has disrupted the economy as a whole, as Brynjolfsson and McAfee believed, it has been associated with something resembling an extinction event for individual corporations. The reality of change and hardship behind the story, I note, is consistent with the expected effects of the Fifth Wave on the marketplace.

Individual shops at Tyson’s Galleria do indeed come and go. Shopping malls rise and fall. It has been Tyson’s good fortune (so far) to count among the risers.

The public has been perfectly indifferent to this rolling massacre of the corporations. And so it should be: out of the carnage, it gets what it wants. Some companies deliver the goods. That others tried and failed—and died—is of little consequence. The first are now last, and the consumer is in charge.

We come here to a great paradox and tentative explanation about why the networked public, so destructive of the status quo, has tolerated and to some extent embraced the standing economic system. The market is pure trial and error. In business, as in nature, most new trials fail. This is true of every sphere of human activity. Most new government policies fail to meet their intended goals, for example. Most educational reforms fail. Most scientific hypotheses fail. The trial part of trial and error entails mostly error, unless the set of trials is large and competitive enough to produce a possible success, and the system is smart and agile enough to recognize success and reward it.

Many of the structures battered by the global struggle between the public and the elites have been captives of single-trial processes, and sought to define success hierarchically, from authority. New initiatives typically have failed—and failure has been typically explained away and doubled down on. The CIA, we saw, demanded and received more money after 9/11. Advocates of the \$787 billion stimulus blamed its failure on the insufficient amounts spent. Such arguments persuaded only while the institutions held a monopoly of the means of information and communication: in other words, only so long as they went unquestioned. Today, of course, the public always questions, and will usually find the answer in the information sphere.

PERCENTAGE OF U.S.HOUSEHOLDS

potentially profitable outcome, and success or failure is determined from below, by the consumer. If a company fails badly enough, it’s gone. The void will be filled by a more successful company. The quickening of the rate of extinctions has represented the remarkable adaptation of capitalism, as a system, to the hostile conditions of the Fifth Wave, including the pervasive anti-authority sentiment.

I want to be precise. I am not saying that business has been smarter or more effective than government. Corporations invest heavily in being smart and effective, but Paul Ormerod has shown that, allowing for the difference in time scales, the failure rate of businesses recapitulates the mindless, random pattern of species extinction. ⁶⁴ Nor am I claiming that the corporate CEO has demonstrated greater prophetic powers than, say, the scientist or the bureaucrat. On this point, I will simply cite Duncan Watts: “Corporate performance is generally determined less by the actions of CEOs than by outside factors, like the performance of the overall industry or the economy as a whole, over which individual leaders have no control.” ⁶⁵ It would be strange, anyhow, to glorify the captain of a ship whose expectation of sinking increases by the moment.

In the current environment, as I understand it, businesses have proved no wiser, more far-seeing, or successful than other institutional actors. But capitalism, as a whole, has made more productive use of the failure of its parts than most institutions under assault by the public. To borrow Taleb’s terminology, capitalism appears to be “antifragile”: it “regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.” ⁶⁶ This has allowed the system to prosper despite the horrors of 2008, while, not unrelatedly, bestowing on the consumer a multitude of new technologies and products.

For the individual company, however, the speeded-up environment has felt like a bum’s rush—an unmitigated disaster. And this brings up the last, strange wrinkle in our economic dilemma.

If the question is whether the individual corporation stands in a similar relation to the mutinous public as do all the hierarchies of the Center, the answer must be, “It sure looks that way.” At the level of the single company, the new marketplace, dominated by personalized demand, resembles the larger conflict I have described in this book, only in miniature and on fast forward. The heart of the matter is structural. Today’s companies were organized for the industrial age. Beyond a minimal size, each company is a little bureaucracy set up to do one thing, or a few things, well. A company may do its thing better or worse than competitors, but if asked to do something different, or to keep changing what it does, it will perform terribly. Bureaucracies are good at conservation, dismally bad at change.

The corporate world is aware of the contradiction, and has been engaged for some time in a frenzied tinkering on the margins of the status quo in the hope of finding a solution. Calls for “changing the culture,” for implanting a “culture of innovation,” for “thinking like a startup,” have become part of the background noise of doing business. Unfortunately, the trouble isn’t cultural or psychological. It’s structural, and it threatens the authority of powerful persons and groups within each corporation. Few of them can be expected to embrace the threat. Attempts have been made to replace hierarchy with “councils,” and bureaucracy with a more networked approach. I don’t know of any signal successes from these experiments, which run up against the spirit of bureaucracy and, I suspect, against the grain of human nature.

Beyond the intrusion of business consultants skimming billions off their corporate clients, little has changed structurally since Henry Ford’s day. If change does arrive—if the speed and freedom of networking can somehow be wedded to the mass and stability of hierarchy—it will represent a transformation in human relations as radical as any in history. Until that apocalyptic moment, I imagine that the savage churning of corporate births and deaths will continue to accelerate.

UNCERTAINTY, IMPERMANENCE, AND OTHER SYMPTOMS OF LIFE WITHOUT AUTHORITY

The story I presented in this chapter didn’t amount to mathematical proof of a crisis of authority. Human events are rarely susceptible to that kind of analysis. Deep changes in human relations are also difficult to perceive, much less quantify, while they are taking place—and my story concerns a collision of worlds far below the horizon of cultural awareness. Most Victorians, I imagine, had no idea that they were living through an industrial revolution.

I made specific claims using specific types of evidence. I intended to describe what a crisis of institutional authority looked like, and to illustrate a handful of instances, rather than to demonstrate the proposition beyond a shadow of a doubt. So: my analysis could be falsified. A cluster of unconnected causes could be responsible for the collapse of the public’s trust in institutional actors: scientists, experts, bankers, and the like. I don’t believe this to be the case—but I’ve been wrong before, and not just once.

If I were a doctor attempting to diagnose this particular sickness—the crisis of authority—I would look for definite causal patterns and symptoms. Among the patterns I would include exaggerated expectations by the public, abetted by exaggerated claims of competence by authority. I must believe that seismologists can save me from earthquakes, that the chairman of the Fed has tamed the business cycle: and these authorities must either believe the same thing, or, at a minimum, collude in my delusions.

A second causal pattern would be the elites’ loss of control over the story told about their performance, particularly when it has failed to meet expectations. Such control, I noted, is a function of monopoly, so another way to diagnose this pattern is to determine whether the public has broken the institutions’ grip on information and communication. Climatologists conspiring to silence dissident views must believe that their data is a professional secret and their private emails are inviolable, while the public must be able to see the emperor in all his nakedness, and to disseminate that unimpressive image globally. The effect will be a growing distrust and loss of legitimacy.

A third pattern would be the rise of alternative centers of authority. This is a corollary of the loss of monopoly. Once the conversation broadens and the public takes command, the dynamic isn’t that of Einstein scrutinizing the cosmos from his mountaintop, but of Michael Mann and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change looking over their shoulders at Steve McIntyre and his blog. Each vital community formed by amateurs interested in an affair becomes a threat to the authority of the institutions.

I believe I’ve dwelled on these patterns extensively enough to show that they are everywhere around us, undermining the established order. But there are manifestations of the crisis—since I’m impersonating a doctor, let’s call them symptoms—that haven’t found their way into this story. And I want to discuss

two of them, very briefly, at this point.

The political and expert classes claimed competence over settled truth. That’s who they were, what they did: they produced certainty and erased doubt. But if certainty is a function of authority, then a symptom of authority’s decline will be a radical and generalized uncertainty surrounding important questions. Alas, no instrument exists to measure certainty or its lack: but it is instructive to compare our mindset on this question with that of our parents and grandparents.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on.

Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.” ⁶⁷ And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If the IPCC climatologists fear a dispute with skeptics, how can they be believed? If the Risk Commission seismologists can’t warn us about catastrophic risk, who will? As I tried to show in this chapter, the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.

And the magisterial Encyclopedia Britannica? Gone the way of the dodo. Its place has been taken by Wikipedia, which, with its “edits” and “reverts” for many entries, leaves the reader uncertain about the agenda of any given version.

Lack of certainty isn’t ignorance: it’s a splinter of doubt festering in all we know, a radical disillusionment with the institutions of settled truth. One important effect has been a sort of cultural barroom brawl, as every question of significance becomes an irritant and source of strife between interested parties.

What, for example, can be said without qualification about Christianity or Jesus? Two of the more ferocious edit battles in Wikipedia happen to rage around these subjects.

This state of affairs invites counter-revolution by the established order. Again and again, in subject after subject, accredited experts have attempted to regain control over the levers of epistemic closure. At every opportunity, institutional actors attacked the public on the grounds of its uncertainty: for example, the public stands accused of cocooning into a daily me, of conducting a “war on science,” of indulging in unprecedented partisanship, and more. Such nagging gives the game away. The counter-revolution of the authoritative elites has floundered, because the elites are themselves tormented by that terrible splinter of doubt.

You would expect, in a time of uncertainty, a landscape crowded with frauds and con artists peddling positive formulas for happiness, love, sex, good health, and better government. You would expect, too, the most trivial assertions to be attended with much noise and thunder: absent authority, every message must be shouted to have a hope of being heard. Stridency will infect every mode of communication, but will be most disruptive of political rhetoric. Just to keep an audience, politicians and commentators will have to scream louder and take more aggressive positions than the competition.

Whether I just described with any accuracy the outlines of social and political life today, I leave it for the reader to decide.

With that, I turn to a second symptom: impermanence. Authority has always fostered an illusion of inevitability. For obvious reasons: if an expiration date were stamped on the Federal government, defection from its mandates would begin today. To the extent that the public doubts the permanence of the institutions, the authority of the latter will be subverted.

I grant that impermanence, like uncertainty, is a perception of reality, impossible to measure precisely. But there’s a hard empirical world that confronts perception at any moment in time, and, analytically, I find it safest to stick close to that world.

A good place to start is with our relationship to technology. This used to be a matter of mastering self-contained tools and procedures—learning to drive a car, make a telephone call, operate a lathe or a harvester. Now, it’s about the capacity to absorb open-ended change. The chart above showed the accelerated rate at which we adopt technological innovations. That’s the hard reality of it. New devices, systems, and media now succeed one another at an impossible pace. Old technical knowledge quickly degrades and becomes useless, like the floppy disks and audiocassettes which clutter the dusty corners of our homes.

There’s a belief that digital is forever—that the naked photos of your youth will haunt you to the grave. The opposite is closer to the truth. Digital means ephemeral. Online authority, influence, and attention fluctuate rapidly. Websites go up, have their brief moment on the speaker’s platform, then turn mute. Their words and images sometimes persist, fossilized, but just as often disappear. Vast volumes of emails, text messages, same-time chats, have vanished as if they never were. Old links point to nothing. Old platforms like AOL or Friendster are worthless today. Old formats are “incompatible” with new ones: a very good word. Impermanence means nothing more than the incompatibility of the present with even the recent past.

Consider, too, our engagement with work and government. Another chart in this chapter depicted the life expectancy of S&P companies in term of an extinction event: old, illustrious brand names, with their products, crash and burn at a much faster rate than a century ago. The worker has adapted to this churning of the workplace: the average time he will spend with any one company is down to 4.4 years. ⁶⁸ Those are empirical measurements of the vanity of economic success.

Government, I admit, is more speculative, but in the last decade the world has witnessed wild tumbles of the political wheel of fortune. Barack Obama crushed the Democratic and Republican political establishments in 2008, saw his ruling coalition swept away in the 2010 mid-term elections, then was comfortably reelected in 2012. Regimes frozen solid for decades, like those of Tunisia and Egypt, suddenly melt into air.

The world of hard facts confronting our perceptions has become unmoored from the past, and appears to be in the process of devouring itself. How we have responded, subjectively, to this world—that’s open for discussion. I’d like to raise just one interesting possibility.

You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence. That takes me deep into the realm of subjectivity, but there are empirical hints and signs. In Egypt, we saw, the old regime was initially replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the country’s only fair elections to date. The hard reality in the Middle East is that Islamist groups have prospered wherever secular Arab authoritarians have wobbled. In the US, the more demanding faiths— evangelists, Mormons, Hasidics—have grown at the expense of older institutions which too much resemble the earth-bound hierarchies of the Center. The spread of Christianity in China is among today’s best-kept secrets.

For the governing classes and articulate elites of the world, this turn to religion is both appalling and incomprehensible—but this is a denial of human nature. If the City of Man becomes a passing shadow, people will turn to the City of God.

At the violent extreme you come to groups like Al Qaeda, whose alienation from the established order both blindly strikes at and embodies the spirit of the age: there’s no more searing image of impermanence than that of the collapse, in fire and dust, of the World Trade towers. Western intellectuals often dismiss Al Qaeda as a primitivist organization run by blinkered fanatics, but it is nothing of the kind. The group operates at the merciless front lines of the revolt of the public against authority, and its disregard not just for human life but for nearly every structure which binds people together poses again, with some urgency, the question of nihilism.

Uncertainty and impermanence are symptoms of social life under the conditions of the Fifth Wave. That, in any case, is my conjecture. It may be that both attributes reflect the reality of the human condition more accurately than the mastery and confidence assumed by the industrial age. Alan Greenspan and the Italian seismologists really felt uncertain about what the data meant, whatever they said in public.

But the conflict at the heart of this book isn’t a debate about the nature of reality. It’s a struggle for supremacy, in which blood has been spilled. Uncertainty, in this struggle, reflects a negation of the standing structures of knowledge. Impermanence signifies the demolition of the current structures of power and money. A large empty space, a conceptual hole, a nothingness, is in the process of creation, where once a complex society wrestled institutionally with its own contradictions and fallacies.