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

DAILY REACH (PERCENT)

website insisted that they had failed because of insufficient funding. “The staff was heroic and dedicated, but we did not have enough money, and we all knew that,” one administrator claimed. ¹¹ In reality, we have seen, the failure of government has been systemic. It has followed the pattern of Greek tragedy, in which excessive pride, or hubris, brings the hero to ruin. Modern government believed it could conquer uncertainty and ordain the future. It couldn’t: and when it tried, it failed. In the present case, government believed it could create a vast “marketplace” on command, and simplify it to a few clicks per transaction. It couldn’t do that, either.

The tragic flaw wasn’t incompetence with regard to technology. It was the illusion of control—preeminently, the inherent urge of hierarchy to control information.

On this matter, government has arrived at a fundamental choice. It can continue to squeeze a top-down framework on a networked culture, as if the social and technological reordering of the new millennium could be wished back to 1989. The terms of government’s increasing proximity to the public will then be dictated by forces external to government, and, it may be, indifferent or hostile to democracy.

Alternatively, government can opt to participate in its historical realignment with the public, and retain a measure of control by moving information online in ways that are legible to the bottom of the pyramid. Even if interactivity—the backand-forth of a truly networked system—is restricted, the production process of government can be made manifest at every step. Networked government, I said, is today a utopian ideal: open government, in my judgment, remains a possibility.

For government to communicate with the public online to any extent, official language must be radically altered in style and length. That is also a choice, and by no means a trivial or superficial one. Consider the making of laws by the two houses of Congress. Each proposed bill can be posted, each version, alteration, or amendment noted in real time: but that is not enough. When, like the stimulus, a law is 1,000 pages long, it becomes indigestible by the public. In fact, it is almost certainly indigestible to most of the elected representatives who vote on it: an instance of top-down ambition trumping the democratic process.

When government goes online, it will no longer be speaking just to itself. If the government chooses to feed information directly to the public at every level of operation, it must learn the language of the public, even if it limits the public’s ability to talk back. Laws will be shorter, for example. How much shorter? I have no idea, but I imagine a lot less than 1,000 pages. The public, not the government, will set that boundary, indirectly, through the information sphere.

Brevity from government isn’t a crazy dream. If our grandparents could deliver Social Security in 37 pages, we can produce much less consequential tax or budgetary decisions on a similar scale. It’s the government’s call.

That is only one speculative illustration of what might happen if government chose to work its drafts out in the open, online. The legal and pseudo-technical jargon clogging most official communications would also be reduced to a minimum. The current incentives for opaqueness would be replaced by a need for persuasiveness. Bureaucracy would behold itself through the cold eyes of the public. That alone might be transformative. The interventions and interpretations of regulators would be compared, transparently, to the original intent of a law. Instead of 11,000 agency websites there would a single matrixed .gov web, extending as deep into the global information sphere as our elected officials can tolerate.

This can be tried step-by-step. It can be embraced sequentially by portions of the Federal government in a rare shot at trial and error. But something along these lines will either be done by the government or likely will be done to it. The public is on the move. The age, recall, is stuck at midnight. I don’t do prophecy, so call it speculation: but I feel certain that, to the extent government stands aloof from the global information sphere, to that exact degree the information sphere, in the form of Tea Party-like revolts and Wikileaks-style revelations, will burst back, uninvited and destructive, into the precincts of power.

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The reason to push information out to the public isn’t primarily so it can participate in making law or policy. The public’s engagement with laws or policies has always been determined by its interest in an affair, and that, in turn, has been limited by the fractured nature of the public. For any given political issue, a vital community, obsessed with the subject, may jump on the case. Most of the population will yawn and turn away. Only in the rarest of instances will shared points of reference arouse a politically significant multitude—and even then, it may or may not represent the will of the majority. The public, we must always remember, is not, and can never be, identical to the people.

The point isn’t to pull the public up to the top of the pyramid in some sort of king-for-a-day “e-government” exercise, but to push the output of the elites to the personal sphere, where the public lives and makes decisions.

The revolt of the public against authority can be framed as a contest between two disparate ways of looking at the world: the institutional and the practical. Institutions can perceive only generic abstractions like the unemployment rate or the GDP. They are blind to the accumulation of detail that is everyday life. Practical knowledge fills that gap: it consists of local idiosyncrasies that are impossible to generalize. This can be as simple as knowing which car dealerships in the neighborhood cheat on repairs and which medical practitioners go by the book rather than the patient.

The choice of openness depends on the direction in which information should flow to guide effective action.

A supporter of democracy would argue, purely on principle, that information should flow from government out to the public, where it can be plugged into the matrix of everyday decisions. But I believe the same answer obtains from the perspective of efficacy in achieving outcomes. The failure of government has proceeded in parallel with the devaluation of practical knowledge.

Intoxicated with the possibility of perfection, high modernist rulers endeavored to reduce local reality to the administrative grid of their observations. They wanted society at ground level to look like Brasilia or Cabrini Green. The public, too, came to imagine that personal fulfillment depended on institutional action, and adjusted its expectations of democracy accordingly. We stand late in that cycle of top-down ambition and failure, with the public in revolt, the elites horrified by their own weakness and decadence, and the collision between the two worlds crushing practical and institutional knowledge into nothingness.

Government can choose otherwise. By pushing its business online, it will demolish the mystique of institutional knowledge. You and I, as members of the public, will observe the messy birthing process of official statistics, and connect any pertinent information directly to our everyday experience. I (you, us) will have the opportunity to make personal decisions with a reasonable understanding of how complexity, bearing the aspect of government, will factor into the decision. If I run a business, for example, I will receive early warning of possible regulations that may affect my profit margins.

I (and you) can then take appropriate action. I can plunge into the complexity of the political world, if I wish, and participate in a lobbying campaign. More importantly, I can move within my personal sphere, where meaningful choices reside, to position myself and my business in whatever I believe to be the right relation to government. I can still make bad decisions. In fact, I probably will: I can’t ordain the future any more than Alan Greenspan or President Obama could. But my failure will redound on me, not on the government—and I will be able to apply practical knowledge immediately to repair my circumstances, rather than wait for action from remote and formulaic institutions. I will conduct my life with humility, according to trial and error, rather than double-down on error and expect power to deliver success.

By placing before the public the early drafts of government business, elected officials and their expert-bureaucrats will bring themselves down to earth. They will allow the public to catch them in the act of making assumptions, trade-offs, best guesses. Government will be demystified, as nature was after the scientific revolution. This will temper the public’s expectations of the outcome. If the minutes of the Risk Commission’s meeting in L’Aquila had been immediately posted online, the criminal prosecutions that ensued probably would have been avoided: scientific failure would have been understood to be a consequence of the limits of human knowledge.

To any who care to look, it will be apparent, in real time, that the veil of uncertainty clouds the vision of presidents and Fed chairs, no less than that of ordinary men and women. Once that fact is admitted, the loss of magical powers might well be compensated by a gain in legitimacy. I don’t consider this a paradox, only the difference between observing actions based on illusion or reality.

Tremendous energies have been released by people from nowhere, networked, self-assembled, from below. That is the structural destiny of the Fifth Wave—the central theme of my story. Democratic government in societies of distrust can choose to ride the tsunami or to be swamped by it. The latter choice will leave government mired in failure and drained of legitimacy. It will leave democracy, I fear, at the mercy of the first persuasive political alternative.

CHAPTER NOTES

1 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 81.

2 Bureau of Labor Statistic’s “How the Government Measures Unmployment,” http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps\_htgm.htm

3 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chapter 5: “Telescopic Philanthropy,” http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/charlesdickens/BleakHouse/chap4.htm

4 N. N. Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact ofthe Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007), 34–35.

5 The most lucid and readable book on networks and small worlds, in my judgment, is still Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (2002).

6 My chart.

7 Ed O’Keefe, “How many .gov sites exist? Thousands.”, Washington Post, December 20, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/how-many-gov-sites-existthousands/2011/12/20/gIQAkGAG7O\_blog.html

8 All website data derived from alexa.com

9 Chart by alexa.com

10 Robert Pear, Sharon Lafraniere, Ian Austen, “From the Start, Signs of Trouble at the Health Portal,” New York Times, October 13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start-signs-oftrouble-at-health-portal.html?\_r=0

11 Ibid.

FINALE FOR SKEPTICS

My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twentyfirst century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 and 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines.

If my thesis is true, we have entered a historical period of revolutionary change that cannot achieve consummation. Institutions are drained of trust and legitimacy, but survive in a zombie-like state. Governments get toppled or voted out, but are replaced by their mirror images. Hierarchies are brought low, but refuse to yield the illusion of top-down control. Hence the worship of the heroic past, the psychology of decadence—the sense, so remarkable in a time of radical impermanence, that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Very little about my thesis can be considered original. I said this at the outset, and reiterate it now. The events that make up the bulk of my story have received massive amounts of attention from high and low. But attention has riveted on the singular and the tactical: beyond generalizing turbulence in the Middle East into an “Arab spring,” many connections have been missed.

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I have aimed at the strategic, at the big picture, folding Napster and blogging and “Climategate” into the same insurgency that swept Barack Obama to office and knocked Hosni Mubarak off his pharaoh’s throne. I have portrayed a public in revolt against authority in every domain. So maybe that has been my contribution.

It should be apparent by now that I’m less interested in originality than in democracy, which has been caught in the crossfire between the public and authority—sometimes, as in Egypt, literally so. The revolutionary impulse of the age has been fueled by strangely personal utopian expectations. The failure of democratic governments to deliver on equality, social justice, full employment, economic growth, cheap apartments, happiness, and a meaningful life, has driven the public to the edge of rejection of representative democracy as it is actually practiced. Some have gone over the edge. Failure has bred frustration, frustration has justified negation, and negation has paved the way for the nihilist, who acts, quite sincerely, on the principle that destruction of the system is a step forward, regardless of alternatives.

Anders Breivik, Norwegian, affluent and well educated by global standards, posted a 1,518-page manifesto online abominating the system that had pampered him, then detonated a bomb near the prime minister’s office in Oslo and personally shot dozens of young kids to death. Consider him a premonition. The longer the collision between public and authority grinds on unresolved, the more likely we are to endure a multiplication of Breiviks.

And we already know what that looks like. Al Qaeda, the nihilist wing of political Islam, has shown the way.

A number of contingencies flow from my thesis, choices open to government and to the public. I have touched on them with what might have been appalling brevity. I can choose to orient my demands on life toward the personal instead of the political. This will shift meaningful decisions to the relative freedom of the personal sphere, away from remote institutions lost in the Wonderland of complexity. Government can choose to push out the drafts of its business into the open, online, where they can be scrutinized by any who care to do so. This will provide early warning of official interventions at the personal level, and explode the myth of command and control—thus aligning the public’s expectations with reality.

I honestly don’t know whether these choices, if taken, would restore the legitimacy of the democratic system in the eyes of the public. But it would counter much of the distrust: a step in the right direction.

One large question remains. The skeptical reader has been asking it since the first chapter. How (he wonders) can he be sure that my thesis, with all that follows, is right? The answer is: he can’t be sure. That’s not how analysis works. In fact, that’s not how human knowledge works. We can never know with certainty that any proposition is right. We can only try to show that, so far, it hasn’t been proven wrong. Analysts thrive on counterfactuals and falsification— or at least they should.

As an analyst, I must take the skeptic’s question seriously. I must be an extreme skeptic myself. Since my thesis can never be shown to be completely right, I must take care to understand where and how it can be wrong.