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

Try to imagine the response of a CIA briefer telling the president of a crisis in Venezuela, who is asked for his source of information: “It’s The Devil’s Excrement, Mr. President.” Regardless of the cost in information missed, the briefer will avoid using any sources with such awkward names. His professional dignity—not to say, his professional success—demand the imposition of taboo.

I don’t want to make too much of the conflict over naming styles. It’s a skirmish, a surface manifestation of our struggle in the depths. I touched on the subject because it clarified, in an almost comical way, the non-negotiable claims of identity implicit in the two contending structures: how each side has come to be organized.

The incumbent structure is hierarchy, and it represents established and accredited authority—government first and foremost, but also corporations, universities, the whole roster of institutions from the industrial age. Hierarchy has ruled the world since the human race attained meaningful numbers. The industrial mind just made it bigger, steeper, and more efficient. From the era of Rameses to that of Hosni Mubarak, it has exhibited predictable patterns of behavior: top-down, centralizing, painfully deliberate in action, processobsessed, mesmerized by grand strategies and five-year plans, respectful of rank and order but contemptuous of the outsider, the amateur.

Against this citadel of the status quo, the Fifth Wave has raised the network: that is, the public in revolt, those despised amateurs now connected to one another by means of digital devices. Nothing within the bounds of human nature could be less like a hierarchy. Where the latter is slow and plodding, networked action is lightning quick but unsteady in purpose. Where hierarchy has evolved a hard exoskeleton to keep every part in place, the network is loose and pliable—it can swell into millions or dissipate in an instant.

Digital networks are egalitarian to the brink of dysfunction. Most would rather fail in an enterprise than acknowledge rank or leaders of any sort. Wael Ghonim’s passionate insistence on being an ordinary Egyptian rather than a political leader was an expression of digital culture. Networks succeed when held together by a single powerful point of reference—an issue, person, or event —which acts as center of gravity and organizing principle for action.

Typically, this has meant being against. If hierarchy worships the established order, the network nurtures a streak of nihilism.

THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD AND THE BORDER HAS NO CLUE WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Another way to characterize the collision of the two worlds is as an episode in the primordial contest between the Center and the Border. The terms were employed by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky in another context, long before the advent of the information tsunami, but they are singularly apt for our present condition. ¹

“Center” and “Border” can be applied to organizations embracing specific structures, ideals, and beliefs about the future. The two archetypes are relative to each other, and perform a kind of dance which determines the direction of social action.

The Center, Douglas and Wildavsky write, is dominated by large, hierarchical organizations.

It frankly believes in sacrificing the few for the good of the whole. It is smug about its rigid procedures. It is too slow, too blind to new information. It will not believe in new dangers and will often be taken by surprise. ²

The Center envisions the future to be a continuation of the status quo, and churns out program after program to protect this vision.

The Border, in contrast, is composed of “sects”—we would say “networks”— which are voluntary associations of equals. Sects exist to oppose the Center: they stand firmly against. They have, however, “no intention of governing,” and develop “no capacity for exercising power.” Rank means inequality, hierarchy means conspiracy to the Border. Rather than articulate programs as alternatives to those of the Center, sects aim to model the behaviors demanded from the “godly or good society.”

Making a program is a center strategy; attacking center programs on behalf of nature, God, or the world is border strategy. ³

To maintain unity, the sectarian requires “an image of threatening evil on a cosmic scale”: the future is always doomsday. The Border somehow reconciles a faith in human perfectibility with the calm certainty that annihilation is just around the corner.

Sects resolve internal disputes by splintering. Their numbers must remain small. This may be the one strategic difference between the face-to-face sect, as described by Douglas and Wildavsky, and the digital network: the latter can inflate into millions literally at the speed of light.

Viewed from within this scheme, the stories of the last chapter appear in a new light. Hoder, Wael Ghonim, and Shawn Fanning emerged as sectarian heroes of the digital Border, striking at the forces of monopoly and centralization. Ahmadinejad, Mubarak, and Jack Valenti each represented a mighty hierarchy of the traditional Center, slow-turning yet implacable, perfectly willing to smash the individual to preserve the system. Two of the young sectarians, Hoder and

Fanning, received disproportionate punishment. The third, Ghonim, spent eleven nights in the dungeons of the Center. But at the end of the day two great hierarchies—the Mubarak regime and the recording industry—had been toppled.

The confrontation has followed a predictable pattern. Whenever a Center organization thought it owned a document or file or domain of information, the networks of the Border swarmed in and took over, leaving the landscape littered with casualties from such guerrilla raids. Thus the music business collapsed, newspapers shed subscribers and advertisers, political parties shrank in numbers. The US Government lost control of its own classified documents. Book publishers and the TV and movie industries, still very profitable today, depend on technical and copyright regimes which could be breached at any moment.

Since power wasn’t a file that could be copied or shared, the political battleground has tilted more in favor of hierarchy. Iran, we saw, imprisoned Hoder and brutally repressed the 2009 protests. The Chinese trained their famous “internet police.” Cuba and Vietnam abused and imprisoned dissident bloggers. Even the US Government during this period has been allowed to operate on the assumption that the public were the enemy—for example, in airports and federal buildings.

The Center held the advantage in the political domain, but not absolutely—not as scissors forever cutting paper. Networks exploited their speed, nearinvisibility, and command of the information sphere to inflict pain and confusion on the Center. On 9/11, a miniscule network of violent men slaughtered thousands of Americans, while the government stood by, blind and helpless. In 2008, Barack Obama, propelled by online networks which generated funds, volunteers, and an effective anti-Center message, crushed the Democratic and Republican establishments. And we have seen how Wael Ghonim’s Facebook invitation to revolution led—through a complex and nonlinear labyrinth—to the overthrow of Mubarak.

Yet in the next stage sectarian advances have been reversed. My suspicion is that they must be reversed, if sects—the public in revolt—truly have no interest in governing and possess no capacity for exercising power. Consider Al Qaeda: it failed to achieve the objective for 9/11, which was to terrorize the US into leaving the Middle East. President Obama’s fortunes have been more equivocal, and I want to postpone for a bit consideration of his unique place in the struggle between Center and Border. Suffice to say, for now, that the president lost his governing coalition after the 2010 elections. In Egypt, the secular protesters who overthrew Mubarak were almost immediately swept aside by the hierarchical forces of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military.

And this is the deeper pattern of the conflict. The programs of the Center have failed, and have been seen to fail, beyond the possibility of invoking secrecy or propaganda. Let the disastrous performance of the rating and oversight agencies before the 2008 financial crisis, and of the Intelligence Community in Iraq, stand for many more examples of Center failure. At the same time, the fracturing of the public along niche interests has unleashed swarms of networks against every sacred precinct of authority. Failure has been criticized, mocked, magnified.

The result is paralysis by distrust. The Border, it is already clear, can neutralize but not replace the Center. Networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern. Bureaucratic inertia confronts digital nihilism. The sum is zero.

The world I want to depict isn’t stalemated. The contending forces are too unlike, too asymmetrical to achieve any kind of balance. My thesis describes a world trapped in a sociopolitical combat zone, in which every principle of living, every institution, I want to say every event—the choice of what is meaningful in time—has been fought over and scorched in the crossfire. It would be natural to expect one side to prevail in the end, but I have my doubts. I can’t picture what Wordsworth’s blissful dawn of 1789 would look like under present conditions, or a forced march to the status quo ante as in 1848. The Center can’t bring back the industrial age. The networks can’t engender an alternative.

The closest historical parallel to our time may have been the wars of religion of the seventeenth century. I say this not necessarily because of the chaos and bloodshed of the period, but because every principle was contested. If an educated person of that era were transported to the present, his first question would be, “Who won—Catholics or Protestants?” For us the question has no meaning. Both sides endured. Neither won. Something different evolved. Much the same, I suspect, will occur with the dispute of hierarchy and network.

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In this conflict, my concern as an analyst is to pay attention to the right subject at the right level of description. I was trained, as even the youngest of us were, to think in terms of the old categories: to think, for example, that the direction of American politics depended on the balance between Democrats and Republicans. Yet both parties are, in form and spirit, organizations of the Center. Both are heavily invested in the established order, offering the public minor differences in perspective on the same small set of questions. Surprises in America’s political trajectory are unlikely to come from the alternation of Democrat and Republican.

The analyst searching for discontinuities—for the possibility of radical change— must wrench his mind free of the old categories and turn to the subterranean strife of hierarchy and network: in the political parties, between “netroots” activists and a variety of Tea Party networks on one side, and the Democratic and Republican organizations on the other. There, different languages are spoken, and potent contradictions can be found.

My great concern as a citizen is for the future of liberal democracy.

Democracy as an ideal can be abstracted from every attempt to implement it—in fact, democracy has often been used to condemn democratic systems which fall short of perfection. Representative democracy as it has evolved historically in the US and elsewhere, however, is a procedural business, necessarily integrated with the ruling structures of the time. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the procedures of representative democracy reflected a distrust of centralized power and the faith that wealth and land ownership conferred personal independence. In the industrial age, procedures became tightly centralized, top-down, rule-bound, and oriented toward the masses rather than the individual.

That democracy became hierarchical, organizational, an institution of the Center, is less a paradox or a conspiracy theory than a historical accident. The consequences are beyond dispute. Many aspects of representative democracy have become less democratic, and are so perceived by the public. The defection of citizens from the voting booth and party membership give evidence to a souring mood with the established structures. Many have been moved to a sectarian condemnation of the entire system as ungodly and unjust. The more assertive political networks today proclaim our current procedures to be the tyranny of Big Government or a farce manipulated by Big Business.

In the collision of the old world with the new, democracy has not been absolved from harm. It too is a battleground, like the daily newspaper. It may survive, but that is not a given, and it almost certainly will be changed. How it changes may depend on the aggregated decisions of individual citizens—in other words: on us —no less than on procedural reforms. This is part of my thesis—and the one place where I will deviate from a pure description of the world, to contemplate what ought to be done.

CYBER-UTOPIANS, CYBER-SKEPTICS, CYBER-PESSIMISTS, AND HOW ALL THEIR SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFIES VERY LITTLE

Before the start of recorded history, we find hierarchies managed by elites in authority. For all that time there was a bottom of the social pyramid, more or less inert. How this inchoate lump became the public is a story for a later chapter. Two preconditions had to be met, however. For a public to exist it had to achieve self-consciousness—some irritation or dissatisfaction was needed to pry it apart from the elites. For the public to voice its thoughts and opinions, and thus transform itself, potentially, into a political actor, required a means of communication. This became a possibility only after the spread of the printing press.

My thesis holds that a revolution in the nature and content of communication— the Fifth Wave of information—has ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age. For this to be the case, I need to show how the perturbing agent, information, can influence power arrangements. Information must be seen to have real-life effects, and those effects must be meaningful enough to account for a crisis of authority.

A century of research on media and information effects has delivered confusing if not contradictory findings. The problem for the analyst is again one of complexity and nonlinearity. Intuitively, it should be a simple matter to establish the effects of information. I see a truck bearing down on me, for example: that’s information. I move out of the way: that’s behavior caused by information. Or I watch television news of the US invasion of Iraq: that’s information. I form an opinion for or against, and agitate politically accordingly: that’s behavior caused by media information.

Politics in modern countries, however, takes place beyond the immediate perception of the public. Political information is thus mediated rather than direct —almost always resembling the Iraq war example rather than the truck I can see with my own eyes. This sets up a large number of variables in the interaction between an individual, the mediator, and the information.

Do I, in my condition as a member of the public, accept all the mediators information, and act accordingly? This has been proposed, originally by thinkers like Walter Lippmann, who were intellectually imprinted by their experience in World War I. Through the use of persuasive stereotypes and other techniques, Lippmann argued, those who controlled information—the people in authority, the elites—also controlled “the pictures in our heads.” Propaganda, on this account, injected new opinions and actions directly into the gullible brains of the public. ⁴

Or do I accept none of the mediators’ information, because my moral and political beliefs were formed by “strong” social bonds, like church and family, rather than “weak” links like reading a newspaper? That also has been proposed, most recently by Malcolm Gladwell to disparage the possibility of social media “revolutions.” Alternatively, I may be invulnerable to mediated information because I’m encased in an armor of prejudice, and dwell comfortably in an information bubble, or daily me.

Or do I engage in a “two-step” process, in which I first absorb the opinions of a strong personal connection, like a trusted friend or minister, and only then accept certain mediated information? That was proposed way back in the 1940s, and has been found applicable to the manner in which Twitter users “follow” information. ⁵

Or is it the case that mediators have no power to control how I think or act, but can command my attention to those public issues and events I think about? That is the premise of agenda-setting research, which has been applied with some success in the marketplace. Roland Schatz, for example, has correlated the public’s disaster donations with the amount of media attention received by an event. ⁶

All the information effects findings and theories are suggestive. None, in my view, are even remotely conclusive. In the story of Homo informaticus, which completes this chapter, I will aim for some of the immediate clarity in effects of that truck bearing down on me. Here I propose to skip a level, and pause for a peek at the desultory quarrel about the effects of new media: whether its impact on us has been good, bad, or indifferent.

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The global proliferation of the internet in the 1990s and of social media in the early 2000s inspired equal measures of applause and alarm, with a residue of doubt. Some writers saw in digital media a boost to human collaboration and democracy. Critics dubbed this tribe cyber-utopians. Others found in the internet all manner of ills—the corruption of our culture, for example, or an invitation for governments to spy on their citizens. These were the cyber-pessimists. A third, much smaller group wondered whether anything important had really changed: call them cyber-skeptics.

There is less to this dispute than meets the eye.

Let the last come first. Malcolm Gladwell, fittingly in the pages of the New Yorker, compared the strong personal ties of the civil rights activists in the 1960s with the weak ties between participants in online causes like the Save Darfur Coalition. Only strong ties, argued Gladwell, made possible the informal coordination of sit-in protesters in the Jim Crow South. Only the mutual support induced by strong ties could embolden a group to face “high risk” situations and achieve political change. As for “Facebook warriors,” Gladwell allowed that they might accomplish minor feats of collaboration—finding a donor for a bone marrow transplant, for example. But real politics happened among comrades and in the flesh. ⁷

Clay Shirky has noted that a committed activist with strong personal ties to others also can expand his reach by becoming a Facebook warrior. There’s no contradiction involved. But I want to push beyond this argument. Gladwell’s contentions have simply been falsified by events. The initial protests in Egypt were the work of ordinary people, most of them connected digitally, if at all. Wael Ghonim, the Google marketing man, administered his Facebook page from Dubai, under a pseudonym. The strong tie which held together the protesters he summoned to action was loathing of the Mubarak regime.

Gladwell is a thinker of the Center, a mind of the industrial age. This doesn’t prove or disprove his ideas—but it places them in a certain context. He explicitly identified strong ties with hierarchy, weak ties with network, and he could not imagine how one might be toppled by the other: “If you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.” Political change, for Gladwell, was a job for trained professionals, requiring the imposition of a new system, with a new program and ideology, to replace the old. But we have seen how this formula has been contradicted by the sectarian logic of the Fifth Wave. To stand for change now means to be anti-system, anti-program, anti-ideolology.

Gladwell at least grounded his skepticism on a traditional conception of power: hard trumped soft, scissors always cut paper. I find it harder to make sense of the warnings of the cyber-pessimists. They shout from the rooftops that dictatorships have used digital tools to spy on dissidents and manipulate public opinion. This, of course, is true. We saw an example in Iran, where the regime threw disagreeable bloggers in prison while flooding the blogosphere with its own stooges. The Chinese are supposed to be even cleverer at cyber-spying and manipulation.

As analysis, the exhortations of the pessimists hover somewhere between pointless and trivially true. Of course dictatorships wish to spy on dissidents, just as dissidents seek to avoid detection—a game made vastly more difficult for those in power by the proliferation of digital hiding-places. Of course dictatorships wish to manipulate media of all kinds to influence opinion. In the industrial age, however, they did so boldly and officially, from authority, while under the new dispensation despots must try to impersonate the public to have any hope of influencing it. Instead of injecting slogans into the brains of the masses by means of banner headlines on People’s Daily or a televised speech of the lider maximo, they are now forced to ride the tiger of real opinion, and face the consequences should it turn against them.

Pessimism tends to be the province of the disillusioned idealist and the false sophisticate. That seems to be very much the case when it comes to the loudest voices of cyber-pessimism. I have noted their cautions. Let’s move on.

The favorite goat of cyber-skeptics and cyber-pessimists has been Clay Shirky, whose 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, was described by Gladwell as, “the bible of the social media movement”—that is, of the cyber-utopian crowd.