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

Importance measured by public attention reflected elite tastes. As newcomers from the digital frontiers began to crowd out the elites, our sense of what is important fractured along the edges of countless niche interests.

The shock of competition from such unexpected and non-authoritative quarters left the news business in a state of terminal disorientation. I mentioned the charge of civic irresponsibility lodged against defecting customers. We will encounter this rhetorical somersault again: being driven to extinction is not just a bad thing but morally wrong, sometimes—as with the music industry’s prosecution of its customers—criminally so. Yet the news media wasn’t averse to sleeping with the enemy. The most popular blogs today are associated with newspaper websites, for example, while the New York Times’s paywall discreetly displays orifices which can be penetrated through social media.

Such liaisons beg the question of what “news” actually is. The obvious answer: news is anything sold by the news business. In the current panic to cling to some remnant of the audience, this can mean anything at all. On the front page of the gray old Times, I’m liable to encounter a chatty article about frying with propane gas. CNN lavished hours of airtime on a runaway bride. The magisterial tones of Walter Cronkite, America’s rich uncle, are lost to history, replaced by the excheerleader mom style of Katie Couric.

One reason the notion of “citizen journalism” never got off the ground was the fundamental confusion about what the professional journalist is expected to do, other than squeeze out content like a milk cow.

No part of the news business endured a more humiliating thrashing from the tsunami than the daily newspaper, which a century before had been the original format to make a profit by selling news to the public. True confession: I grew up reading newspapers. For half my life, this seemed like a natural way to acquire information. But that was an illusion based on monopoly conditions. Newspapers were old-fashioned industrial enterprises. Publishing plants were organized like factories. “All the news that’s fit to print” really meant “All the content that fits a predetermined chunk of pages.”

In substance, the daily newspaper was an odd bundle of stuff—from government pronouncements and political reports to advice for unhappy wives, box scores, comic strips, lots of advertisements, and tomorrow’s horoscope. Newspapers made tacit claims which collapsed under the pressure of the information tsunami. They pretended to authority and certainty, for example. But the fatal flaw was the bundling, because it became clear that we had entered on a great unraveling, that the tide of the digital revolution boiled and churned against such artificial bundles of information and “disaggregated”: that is, tore them apart.

(My 93-year-old mother has kept her subscription to the Washington Post strictly because she loves the crossword puzzles. I have shown her websites teeming with crossword puzzles, but she remains unmoved. My mother wants her bundle, and belongs to the last generation to do so.)

Information sought a less grandiose, less industrial level of circulation. The question was who or what determined that level. Every possible answer spelled misery for the daily newspaper, but the pathologies involved, I thought, reached far deeper than one particular mode of peddling information, and implicated the relationship between elites and non-elites, between authority and obedience. That passive mass audience on which so many political and economic institutions depended had itself unbundled, disaggregated, fragmented into what

I call vital communities: groups of wildly disparate size gathered organically around a shared interest or theme.

These communities relied on digital platforms for self-expression. They were vital and mostly virtual. The topics they obsessed over included jihad and cute kittens, technology and economics, but the total number was limited only by the scope of the human imagination. The voice of the vital communities was a new voice: that of the amateur, of the educated non-elites, of a disaffected and unruly public. It was at this level that the vast majority of new information was now produced and circulated. The intellectual earthquake which propelled the tsunami was born here.

Communities of interest reflected the true and abiding tastes of the public. The docile mass audience, so easily persuaded by advertisers and politicians, had been a monopolist’s fantasy which disintegrated at first contact with alternatives. When digital magic transformed information consumers into producers, an established order—grand hierarchies of power and money and learning—went into crisis.

I have touched on the manner of the reaction: not worry or regret over lost influence, but moral outrage and condemnation, sometimes accompanied by calls for repression. The newly articulate public meanwhile tramped with muddy boots into the sacred precincts of the elites, overturning this or that precious heirloom. The ensuing conflict has toppled dictators and destroyed great corporations, yet it has scarcely begun.

I’d been enthralled by the astronomical growth in the volume of information, but the truly epochal change, it turned out, was the revolution in the relationship between the public and authority in almost every domain of human activity.

I CHRISTEN THE NEW AGE AND OTHER DEFINITIONAL ILLUSIONS

This book is not a history of the revolution, since it’s much too early for that. Thoughtful interpretations of the genesis and nature of the change have been written by Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, and Glenn Reynolds, among many others. ³ If you wish to understand the world being formed outside your windowpane, let me introduce you to this growing body of work, then step aside.

Nor am I propounding some world-historical argument for or against the new order. Using terms for analytic style coined by Isaiah Berlin and borrowed by Joseph Tetlock in his famous study of expert political judgment, I’m afraid that I am a “fox” rather than a “hedgehog.” No matter what I believe to be true, there always seems to be another side to the question. If you were to put me to the torture, I’d probably confess that this is my analytic ideal: to consider the question from as many relevant perspectives as the mind can hold.

Understanding 9/11 from the point of view of Al Qaeda incurs, for the analyst, the risk of “going native” and losing his moral equilibrium. That sort of thing happens with distressing regularity in academia, and even in government. But pretending that there is only one point of view aborts even the possibility of analysis. For that, all you need is an original prejudice and a sufficiently narrow mind.

The story I want to tell is simple but has many conflicting points of view. It concerns the slow-motion collision of two modes of organizing life: one hierarchical, industrial, and top-down, the other networked, egalitarian, bottomup. I called it a collision because there has been wreckage, and not just in a figurative sense. Nations which a little time ago responded to a single despotic will now tremble on the edge of disintegration. I described it as slow motion because the two modes of being, old and new, have seemed unable to achieve a resolution, a victory of any sort. Both engage in negation—it is as a sterile backand-forth of negation that the struggle has been conducted.

So I am writing this book because I fear that many structures I value from the old way, including liberal democracy, and many possibilities glimmering in the new way, such as enlarging the circle of personal freedom, may be ground to dust in that sterile back-and-forth.

The book’s temper is reflective. It was written out of a desire to understand. The structure should be intuitive, or so I fervently hope. The chapters are selfstanding but thematically connected. Each represents a mystery to be penetrated in this most mysterious of conflicts. Heroes and villains will appear, and because life is meant to be lived rather than analyzed, I have no qualms about saying who I think is which. There will be a scarcity of saints but an abundance of martyrs. That is the way of our moment in time.

To tell my story I must use my own words, but if I am to communicate successfully with you, the reader, you must understand what I mean by them. Terms like the public and authority are not simple, and require much thinking about. A goal of this book is to flesh out the reality which these terms represent —yet, for obvious reasons, I can’t just spring their meaning at the end, like the punchline of a joke. Let me, instead, offer quick–and-dirty characterizations to get the story started, and we can see how these hold up as we go along.

First, the public. It’s a singular noun for a plural object. I usually refer to the public as “it,” but sometimes, in a certain context, as “them.” Whether one or the other is correct, I leave for grammarians to decide. Both fit.

We’ll explore later what the public is not. My understanding of what the public is I have borrowed entirely from Walter Lippmann. Lippmann was a brilliant political analyst, editor, and commentator. He wrote during the apogee of the top-down, industrial era of information, and he despaired of the ability of ordinary people to connect with the realities of the world beyond their immediate circle of perception. Such people made decisions based on “pictures in their heads”—crude stereotypes absorbed from politicians, advertisers, and the media —yet in a democracy were expected to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.”

Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of which the public was formed, the “private citizen,” was a political amateur, a sheep in need of a shepherd, yet because he was sovereign he was open to manipulation by political and corporate wolves. By the time he came to publish The Phantom Public in 1927, Lippmann’s subject appeared to him to be a fractured, single-issue-driven thing.

The public, as I see it [he wrote], 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. ⁴

Today, the public itself has become an actor, but otherwise Lippmann described its current structure with uncanny accuracy. It is not a fixed body of individuals.

It is composed of amateurs, and it has fractured into vital communities, each clustered around an “affair of interest” to the group.

This is what I mean when I use the word “public.”

Now, authority, which is a bit more like beauty: we know it when we see it. Authority pertains to the source. We believe a report, obey a command, or accept a judgment because of the standing of the originator. At the individual level, this standing is achieved by professionalization. The person in authority is a trained professional. He’s an expert with access to hidden knowledge. He perches near the top of some specialized hierarchy, managing a bureaucracy, say, or conducting research. And, almost invariably, he got there by a torturous process of accreditation, usually entailing many years of higher education.

Persons in authority have had to jump through hoops of fire to achieve their lofty posts—and feel disinclined to pay attention to anyone who has not done the same.

Lasting authority, however, resides in institutions rather than in the persons who act and speak on their behalf. Persons come and go—even Walter Cronkite in time retired to utter trivialities—while institutions like CBS News transcend generations. They are able to hoard money and proprietary data, and to evolve an oracular language designed to awe and perplex the ordinary citizen. A crucial connection, as I said earlier, exists between institutional authority and monopoly conditions: to the degree that an institution can command its field of play, its word will tend to go unchallenged. This, rather than the obvious asymmetry in voice modulation, explains the difference between Cronkite and Katie Couric.

With this rough sketch in hand, I’m ready to name names. When I say “authority,” I mean government—office-holders, regulators, the bureaucracy, the military, the police. But I also mean corporations, financial institutions, universities, mass media, politicians, the scientific research industry, think tanks and “nongovernmental organizations,” endowed foundations and other nonprofit organizations, the visual and performing arts business. Each of these institutions speaks as an authority in some domain. Each clings to a shrinking monopoly over its field of play.

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I have one more characterization to propose.

The new age we have entered needs a name. While the newness of the age has often been remarked upon by many writers, and by now is almost a cliché, very little effort, strangely enough, has been invested in christening it. Tony Olcott writes of a “networked age,” but I think he means the phrase to be descriptive rather than titular—and it’s inadequate in any case. “Digital age” is lame, “digital revolution” better and I will use it in some contexts, but it implies change by means of a single decisive episode, and fails to communicate the grinding struggle of negation which I believe is the central feature of our time. An earlier candidate of mine, “age of the public,” I discarded for the same reason. The old hierarchies and systems are still very much with us.

So let me return to my original point of departure: information. Information has not grown incrementally over history, but has expanded in great pulses or waves which sweep over the human landscape and leave little untouched. The invention of writing, for example, was one such wave. It led to a form of government dependent on a mandarin or priestly caste. The development of the alphabet was another: the republics of the classical world would have been unable to function without literate citizens. A third wave, the arrival of the printing press and moveable type, was probably the most disruptive of all. The Reformation, modern science, and the American and French Revolutions would scarcely have been possible without printed books and pamphlets. I was born in the waning years of the next wave, that of mass media—the industrial, I-talk-you-listen mode of information I’ve already had the pleasure to describe.

It’s early days. The transformation has barely begun, and resistance by the old order will make the consequences nonlinear, uncertain. But I think I have already established that we stand, everywhere, at the first moment of what promises to be a cataclysmic expansion of information and communication technology.

Welcome, friend, to the Fifth Wave.

CHAPTER NOTES

1 Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, “How Much Information 2003?” School of Information Management and Systems, University of California at Berkeley, 2003, http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/howmuch-info-2003

2 Study data courtesy of Hal R. Varian.

3 See Benkler, The Wealth ofNetworks (2006); Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (2008) and Cognitive Surplus (2010); Reynolds, An Army ofDavids (2006). I would also recommend Tony Olcott’s Open Source Intelligence in a Networked Age (2011), Jeff Jarvis’s Public Parts (2011), and John Battelle’s The Search (2005).

4 Lippman, The Phantom Public (Transaction Publishers, Ninth Edition, 2009), 67.

HODER AND WAEL GHONIM

I met Hossein Derakhshan, better known by his blogname “Hoder,” at a bloggers’ convention in Nashville, Tennessee. We sat around a lunch table with other attendees and ate enormous barbecue sandwiches. Hoder was 30 but looked even more youthful than that, an amiable young man with sparkling dark eyes and a ready smile.

The media always referred to him as the Iranian “blogfather,” so it’s natural that we talked about the internet, and blogging, and Iran. I asked whether the blog he wrote in both Farsi and English, Editor: Myself, was blocked by the Iranian government. He assured me with a grin that he had ways to get his message into the mother country.

Hoder was technically savvy: that was his claim to fame. But, for an Iranian and a supposed dissident, I found him surprisingly naïve in political matters. He felt great anger toward the United States and the Bush administration. Part of that was personal: he had become a Canadian citizen, and getting across the border when your name was “Hossein Derakhshan” and you fit the wrong profile for age and sex was, at the time, a humiliating process. But he was full of strange ideas about neocons conspiring with other Iranian exiles whom he didn’t like.

2

Hoder had just begun his curious and confused trajectory, from anti-regime dissident to frenetic supporter of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear posture. My brutally honest assessment of the man: a very likeable person, possessed of a very ordinary intellect.

That was in 2005, a year and a half before his visit to Israel and three years before he entered into his private Calvary, for reasons that are worth considering.

A TWENTY-SOMETHING IN TORONTO OPENS A NEW CONTINENT OF EXPRESSION FOR IRANIANS

Hoder really was an ordinary person, an insignificant man in relation to the great events which, during his lifetime, troubled his country and the world. He was not a politician, not a revolutionary, not a genius, not a scholar—not an authority of any sort. He represents a type we’ll encounter often in this story of the struggle between grand hierarchies and the public: the gifted amateur, propelled to unexpected places by the new information technology.

He was four years old when Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic revolution swept to power in Tehran. That was the only government he knew before he departed into exile, and it came to define his life, for and against. Since that government played the role of villain in this specific story, it would be useful to linger over its characteristics for a moment.

In theory, the Iranian regime is a Platonic republic, with wise guardians protecting the moral and material welfare of all. In practice, it resembles a sterile hybrid begot on the mafia by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The men in charge monopolize all the power and much of the wealth of the country. They claim to be revolutionary, and once really were, in the worst way. Decades ago, however, most of them settled into big mansions, bought expensive cars, and became an entrenched ruling class at home, while pursuing ancient Persian ambitions in the region and the world.

They control the resources of a nation that is large, populous—80 million according to the CIA Factbook—and rich in oil. Iran is the big boy of the greater Middle East, though for ethnic and religious reasons its influence has never been proportional to its size and strength: a wall of mutual hostility and disdain divides Persian from Arab. The rulers of the Islamic Republic consider the global status quo to be a naked injustice to Iran. They crave a place in the sun.