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

IF MY STORY HAS BEEN FICTION, THE NULL HYPOTHESIS MUST BE TRUE

Every thesis is simply a description of the world. From this description something must follow, some demonstrable effect or change—otherwise, there’s no point to raising the subject. Effects can be immediate or more distant and higher-level. Because a thesis must rely on abstractions like “the public” and “authority”—or, for that matter, “gravity” and “relativity”—it is to the effects that we must look for both support and falsification. Eddington’s findings in Brazil and Principe, for example, were in line with the predictable effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Identifying effects in human affairs is beyond tricky, because the instances are so few and the causes interact rather bafflingly with each other. The analyst must live with a higher degree of uncertainty and imprecision than a physical scientist would tolerate. I wish I could offer you a number, like Einstein’s curvature of light, to prove or disprove my story: but I can’t. If I tried, it would be a symptom that I had succumbed to the industrial delirium for numerology.

Honest analysis does require that the thesis be stated clearly, and that effects be identified with as much precision as possible.

My thesis describes a world in which, as a result of changes in information technology, two structural forces are found in permanent collision: the public, organized in networks, and government (authority), organized hierarchically.

The overall effect has been constant political turbulence. Everywhere the status quo is attacked and under stress—yet nowhere has the revolt of the public crystallized into a completed revolution. Since, for structural and historical reasons, such a tidy end-point is unlikely to come soon, I would expect a proliferation of Egypt-style protests that threaten or overturn regimes, but fail to reorganize into a new order.

A first-level effect can be seen in the character of the public. Opposition to governments and policies has been self-organized rather than controlled, conducted by amateurs rather than professionals, and outcome-oriented, usually against, rather than ideological. These traits appear to be intrinsic to sectarian networks. I would therefore expect more people from nowhere, in the indignado and Tea Party mold, to erupt on the political scene—true for democracies and authoritarian regimes alike. I’d also expect representative democracy, as a system, to come under increasing challenge when desired outcomes fail to materialize.

The behavior of late modern government, too, counts as a first-level effect. Government today is slow to respond, afraid to advance, unwilling to yield. In democratic countries, it is habitually drawn into promising outcomes which it has no clue how to deliver. The public’s conquest of the information sphere has left rulers dazed and confused. They know that heroic actions are expected of them, but also that every initiative will be contested and every failure amplified. The contradiction is structural and invariable, if the thesis holds.

Under such conditions, I would expect democratic governments to intervene ever more thinly and erratically over the surface of society, to give the appearance of doing something, of being in charge. More broadly, I’d expect politicians and governments in democratic countries to promise more while risking less. Laws and policies, for example, will continue to inflate in length, allowing the authors to generate some words that appear, however vaguely, to have ordained the future.

I turn to higher-level effects with trepidation: these are difficult to trace in the maze of complexity, but happen to carry enormous significance for the particular story I have told. So what I’m going to place before you, reader, is an interpretation, a story derived from another story, about the indirect effects of my thesis that seem most powerful to me.

By far the most consequential higher-level effect has been the near-fatal hemorrhage of legitimacy from established institutions. I say “near-fatal” because in democracies the institutions have survived in the mode of the living dead. They exist but can only stumble clumsily around the political landscape. In authoritarian countries, matters stand somewhat differently. The regime and ruling party of Mubarak in Egypt are dead and buried, but similar institutions, run by much the same people, have replaced the old regime. In Libya, Tunisia, and elsewhere, an institutional chaos prevails.

In all cases, I believe, the feeble pulse of the institutions can be traced to the unforgiving trauma inflicted by the public. I would expect such assaults to persist, bringing about continuing declines in public trust of government, increased levels of negation and condemnation of the system in public discussion, more leaked documents believed to be damning to rulers, and a proliferation of street protests. I would look for entities external to government, such as corporations and NGOs, to absorb many of the functions traditionally assigned to the brain-dead institutions. Government could begin to unbundle.

Additional higher-level effects include a progressive loss of inhibition by the public in its attacks on authority, the rise of anti-establishment political groups, and the possibility, lurking in the shadows, of the nihilist and his fever dream of annihilation. I would therefore expect ever more frequent calls for the overthrow of government and the abolition of the system. Pariah parties, like the National Front in France and the Five Star in Italy, will enjoy electoral success. Violence could explode at any moment, though the precise circumstances needed to light the fuse are unknown to me and probably unknowable.

Finally: in the political environment described by my thesis, government must make it a priority to defend itself against the public. I would expect the Chinese regime, for example, to be far more concerned with surveillance and control of the Chinese public than with foreign adventures—and to court risk overseas primarily to manipulate domestic opinion. The same would apply to our own Federal government. It will treat the American public like the enemy and deal with foreign enemies mostly to impress the public.

In democracies, elected officials will be tempted to gain favor by distancing themselves from the democratic process. I would expect a number of would-be Barack Obama imitators, who seek to rule by disdain of power, and to head systems they profess to abhor. I’m not sure whether this is possible for political players who lack the president’s gift of contradiction: but many, I expect, will try.

Let me stop here. I have laid out, in as much detail as I can, the conditions under which my analysis can be falsified, but my job isn’t quite over yet: one more step is required. To respond to the question posed by that pesky skeptical reader, I need to flip my thesis upside down, like a pancake. I must present a “null hypothesis.”

First, I must explain what that bit of jargon means.

Suppose the evidence I have submitted in this book turned out to be a series of random accidents and coincidences—sound and fury, signifying nothing. I believe, for example, that the events of 2011 folded into a meaningful whole, a phase change in the revolt of the public and the crisis of authority: but suppose I am radically mistaken. Suppose these events were unrelated to each other in any way. If what I took to be signal turned out to be noise, so that nothing new—no effects, direct or indirect—would follow logically from my description of the world, that would be the null hypothesis. It’s the theory of the persistence of the status quo.

The null hypothesis to my story would describe some version of the world in which cyber-skeptics like Malcolm Gladwell live. (But note that it could not match Gladwell’s contentions exactly: these, I insist, have been falsified by events.) In this world, hierarchical institutions still rule unchallenged. Properly interpreted, 2011 turns out to be a series of local events, largely manufactured or at least co-opted by powerful elites utilizing copy-cat tactics. The public and its weak-bond networks can irritate but never seriously threaten the authority of modern government.

The overall effect of the null hypothesis is a political environment safely entrenched within the processes of the industrial age. Government actions and policies are sheathed with authority and persuasiveness, while government failures implicate specific politicians or parties but never the system as a whole. You should expect, under such conditions, for political life to be characterized by continuity rather than disruption. Protests occur, but they target specific rather than systemic issues. Public opinion will be more forgiving—even, on occasion, as gentle as it was with JFK over the Bay of Pigs.

A first-level effect is the nature of the opposition: it’s loyal rather than radical, shares many basic assumptions with those in power, and sits comfortably inside the political system. If this is true, Republicans and Democrats, Tories and Labor, will take turns running the government, and the public will accept the monotony in the manner of a dull but tolerably successful marriage. Counterhierarchies of professional agitators might be found in the world of the null hypothesis, but eccentric political organizations, inspired by bloggers or comedians or Facebook pages, will never encroach on the power pyramid.

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A crucial first-level effect of the null hypothesis concerns information: it belongs to the institutions and remains effectively under their influence. Persuasion is practiced mostly by the elites, whose voices and phrases are echoed by the public over the information sphere. Discussion focuses on “problems” and “solutions” rather than the failure of the established order. You should expect public opinion to align with elite opinion, and the information sphere to serve as a pillar of the system rather than as the means for its subversion.

Higher-level effects will reflect the tenacity of the industrial mode of organization. Institutions retain the full measure of legitimacy: they rule uncontested. Government embarks on ambitious interventionist projects at home and abroad. The public and its purported eruptions are really the manipulations of interested parties, insiders playing at populism. The public lacks reality: it is a phantom, without the will to stand apart or against.

In this environment, you should expect a substantial measure of trust in government, few leaks of damning official documents, mutual deference and limited negation in political disputes. When, as at present, the trend in every instance appears to run in the opposite direction, you should suspect a conflict among the institutions rather than posit the revolt of a fictitious public.

Even in democracies, the preferred government style will be command and control—coupled, however, with reduced interest in policing the public. The Chinese and US governments will take for granted the loyalty, or at least the forbearance, of the population, and will concentrate their energies on projections of power in pursuit of social improvement and the national interest. Established political parties will absorb new political factions and tendencies. They will wield great influence over affairs, but will be checked on occasion by visionary leaders who, from the top of a very steep pyramid, implement ambitious schemes.

So there they are: my thesis and the null hypothesis. If events resemble my description of the world, I am not necessarily right in any final sense. But if they appear more accurately described by the null hypothesis, then my thesis is false. It is up to you, skeptical reader, to decide.

Before you do so, I have one more bit of evidence I wish for you to consider.
Much has happened in the months since I began to write this book.

THE FUTURE’S UNCERTAIN BUT THE PRESENT IS ALWAYS HERE

At college, I took a class in Latin American social revolutions, taught by a professor who had just published a book on Chile. The professor had a mantra about the Chilean revolution. “The Marxist Allende government might not last,” he said more than once, “but its reforms are irreversible.” In his book, he had banished contingency from human events. He had fallen in love with the word irreversible. It was fall semester. That September, a week or so after the class began, Augusto Pinochet and the Chilean military overthrew Allende and the Marxists, and reversed all their reforms in as complete and permanent a fashion as history, which never stops, allows us to judge.

My poor professor’s book suffered the academic equivalent of crib death.

I learned a lesson—one that had nothing to do with Latin American social revolutions. I learned about the blindness of experts and the folly of prophecy. Years later, Philip Tetlock was to put scholarly integrity around this insight, in Expert Political Judgment. On reading Tetlock’s data, I found myself fascinated but not in the least surprised.

I am, at present, keenly aware of another lesson from that class. Books that interpret events sooner or later will be falsified by events: you just hope it’s later. Over the last few months, I have scrutinized my information stream with intense curiosity and something less than philosophic detachment.

Let me make the events flowing over that information stream a first cursory test of my thesis and the null hypothesis. Of necessity, I will be brief—superficial. I am coming to the end of my story, and I have no wish to linger unreasonably.

But I won’t be coy. A description of the world of yesterday, today, this very instant, will have little in common, so it seems to me, with the null hypothesis. That might change tomorrow, but I can only deal with what I can see from where I stand.

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On November 21, 2013, Viktor Yanukovich, elected president of Ukraine, backed away from an association treaty with the European Union. The move infuriated a large segment of the Ukrainian public, which had come to see the EU as a guarantor against government abuses and corruption. That same day, Mustafa Nayem, an online journalist just a few months older than Wael Ghonim, summoned the Ukrainian public to the streets with a post on Facebook: “Let’s meet at 10:30 p.m. near the monument to independence in the middle of the Maidan,” the central square in Kiev. ² About 50 protesters were already there when Nayem arrived, but the crowd swelled to 100,000 within days. Eventually hundreds of thousands, quite possibly millions, participated throughout the country.

It became known as the “Euromaidan” revolt: three months of protests, government repression, and political violence, culminating in February 22, 2014, when Yanukovich gave up the fight and fled to Russia. He was, I noted, the elected president, but his removal was considered by the insurgents to be a victory for democracy. For them it was the outcome, not the process, that counted.

Events in Ukraine have repeated the patterns of the revolt of the public under the conditions of the Fifth Wave. My interest in the matter starts and ends with that.

The protesters of Maidan resembled in important ways those in Tahrir Square and Puerta del Sol. They were young and tech-savvy, and they belonged to a cluster of contradictory ideologies and mutually hostile ethnic groups. Some of the leading figures were Russian speakers, for example. Nayem was a Muslim born in Afghanistan. Yet the anti-foreigner hard right also brought a considerable presence to the protests: Yanukovich characterized the uprising as a “nationalist coup.” ³

The rebels were united in opposition to Yanukovich. The uprising gained force on a platform of negation: like their precursors of 2011, the Ukrainian insurgents wished to be rid of the political status quo without having much of an idea about what to put in its place. When they triumphed and the government collapsed, the political situation in Ukraine remained as it had always been: fractured. To one observer, the idealism of Euromaidan constituted “a classic popular revolution.” ⁴ To another, the aftermath was a mere “change of political elites.” ⁵

Like so many other nations, Ukraine seemed frozen in a world-historical

midnight between the old order and radical change.

Information technology didn’t cause the Ukrainian revolution, but the revolution would have been difficult to organize, and might have reached a different outcome, without recourse to cell phones and digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube. The street battles in the dead of winter captured the imagination of the global public. Every instance of government-instigated bloodshed entered the information sphere, with predictable effects on opinion. While the government lived in a past nostalgic for Soviet-style repression, the young protesters understood the speed of information and the power of demonstration effects.

This generation watches little TV, gets its news and information online. . . . The organizers of the recent protests took advantage of this. Amateur broadcasting on Ustream and YouTube quickly spread the news of the events. Independent, crowd-funded radio and television networks used the same low-budget streaming technology to deliver live content from an attic in Kiev. Every movement of the unpopular Berkut (the Ukrainian special forces) was closely followed on Facebook and Twitter; supporters were mobilized to defend tents erected by protesters. ⁶

Ukraine is an invertebrate country: it lacks strong institutions, a true Center. The Yanukovich government functioned in the manner of a mafia family. Yet even that was too slow-moving, too much hierarchy, in the hands of persons of a certain age, to respond effectively to a networked public in revolt. Nayem called the government leadership “too old.” “If you asked Yanukovich or some others about Facebook,” he wrote, “they wouldn’t understand what it can do.” ⁷

The rebels’ desire to eradicate the established order placed them in an ambivalent relationship to democracy. They wanted what they wanted: elimination of the government and the democracy and rule of law exemplified by EU countries. They succeeded only in their negation. Euromaidan wasn’t a coup, as Yanukovich alleged. It was a sectarian revolt. Participants aspired to purity in democratic ideals, but were unwilling to invest their energies on the messy details of democratic government. They left Ukraine as they found it, at the mercy of events.

The new prime minister, a leading voice at Maidan, submitted to EU-mandated economic reforms with a despair bordering on nihilism. “We are a team of people with a suicide wish—welcome to hell,” he said. ⁸ His words were remarkable for their honesty. His political circumstances precluded even the pretense of command and control.

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In Venezuela, sporadic protests assumed the character of a self-conscious street uprising on February 12, 2014. University students began the trouble, but were soon joined by the opposition parties and a considerable segment of the educated class. Specific complaints about crime, inflation, and a bad economy added up to the usual demand for radical change. The protesters wanted the government of President Nicolás Maduro to be gone.

Like Hugo Chavez, his predecessor and mentor, Maduro was a creature of the age of mass movements and top-down control. From his perch at the top of the pyramid, the street protests could only be the work of “fascists groups” agitating for a coup. ⁹ That Viktor Yanukovich had offered an identical interpretation of events in Ukraine demonstrated the power of hierarchy to mold perspective.

Intransigence followed logically from that perspective. Confronted with the public’s demand for change, Maduro, like Yanukovich, opted instead for a show of force. Some 40 persons were said to have died in the street battles that ensued.

As I write this, Maduro remains in office, and it would not be an improbable outcome if he served out his term. But the protests also continue. The violence and disruption continue. Events in Venezuela bear no resemblance to the null hypothesis. The government has focused largely on survival. The country is stuck between today and tomorrow.

Persuasion belonged to the networked public. Chavez long ago bullied mass media into silence, but Venezuelans were deep into social media, and 14 million out of a population of 30 million owned cell phones. Protesters coordinated their movements using the smartphone walkie-talkie application Zello. ¹⁰ Other digital platforms allowed them to flood the information sphere with images of large opposition crowds and government violence. The demonstration effects were powerful and effective. One opinion poll showed that nearly 54 percent of

Venezuelans believed that they were living under a dictatorship. ¹¹ In another survey, 55 percent said they did not consider their government a democracy. ¹² Maduro retained the support of many groups, but the heart of the conflict lay in the failure of his government, the inability of the Venezuelan ruling elites to match their own ambitious rhetoric.

The demographic profile of the rebels should be familiar by now. They were young, many of them university students, nearly all from the well-educated and globally-connected middle class. “I’ve got a rock in my hand and I’m the distributor for Adidas eyewear in Venezuela,” one protester told the New York Times. Other insurgents, according to the Times, included “a manicurist, a medical supplies saleswoman, a businessman, and a hardware store worker.” ¹³ The anti-Maduro uprising belonged to the same affluent networked public we have encountered in multiple settings—and was propelled, here as elsewhere, by a sectarian rejection of the established order.

Venezuela could be Tunisia or Egypt or Ukraine. The public was on the move. A semi-authoritarian government struggled to keep control of the streets. The outcome will no doubt differ from country to country, but the structure followed by events has been shaped, I believe, by the same tectonic forces.

Recent upheavals in Thailand followed a recognizable pattern. In January 2014, large crowds of protesters successfully “occupied” government buildings. Crowds also disrupted polling stations during the February general elections. Violence associated with the protests led to two dozen deaths. The conflict continued into the spring, and appeared to have brought the Thai political system to the brink of paralysis.