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

Shirky walks on the sunny side of the street, but he’s no utopian. He prefers optimistic anecdotes, which infuriates the curmudgeons, but in the offending book he gave social media credit for sharing—photos on Flickr, for instance— and collaboration on the Wikipedia model, while admitting that examples of collective action inspired by digital tools were “still relatively rare.” That was true in 2008. ⁸

His message was that the new digital platforms made it easy for groups to “selfassemble,” and that the rise of such spontaneous groups was bound to lead, sooner or later, to social and political change. Very much unlike Gladwell, Shirky foresaw the possibility of the events of 2011, and the part a networked public, connected to the information sphere, could play in revolution. In an article published just before the outbreak of revolt in Tunisia, he addressed the arguments of the skeptics and the pessimists:

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response. ⁹

Today we know both partners in this political minuet were correct. Digital media can be exploited by self-assembled networks to muster their forces and propagandize for their causes, against the resistance of those who command the levers of power.

But this understates the distance between the old and the new. A churning, highly redundant information sphere has taken shape near at hand to ordinary persons yet beyond the reach of modern government. In the tectonic depths of social and political life, the balance of power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage. That is the non-utopian thesis of this book. And it was arrived at, in part, by pursuing threads of analysis about the nature and consequences of new media first spun by Clay Shirky.

HOMO INFORMATICUS, OR HOW CHOICE CAN BRING DOWN

GOVERNMENTS

There remains the question, central to my thesis, of how information can influence political power. The answer isn’t intuitive. Information is soft and abstract. Power is as hard and real as a policeman’s bullet. Yet, as Shirky observed with regard to new media, the wielders of power have always assumed a close and vigilant relationship to information. Governments have worked hard to control the stories told about the status quo—that is, about them.

This anxiety to control information in those who already controlled the guns should alert us that political power may be less “hard,” and more intangible, than supposed.

Power, from our perspective, is a particular alignment between the will of the elites and the actions and opinions of the public: a matter of trust, faith, and fear, apportioned variously but involving both sides. Brute force plays a part, but as the fall of the brutal Muammar Qaddafi demonstrated, no government can survive for long solely on the basis of killing its opponents. A significant fraction of the public must find the status quo acceptable, and the larger the number of true believers, the more solid the foundation underneath a regime. Thus the potential influence of information over political power flows more from its fit into stories of legitimacy than from, say, investigative reporting or the dispensing of practical knowledge.

My analysis of this question centers on the rise of a restless, disruptive organism, which I have taken the bold step to name Homo informaticus, information man. You and I, and possibly a majority of the human race today, are him: end products of an evolutionary process involving the spread of education, expanded levels of wealth and security, and improved means of communication. Our traits can be explained only in reference to an ancestral environment—in this case, a parched information landscape. That’s the logic of evolution. So before I present Homo informaticus, we must first encounter his less fortunate predecessor, whom I will call, in plain English, Unmediated Man.

As his name implies, Unmediated Man lacked access to any media. He was likely to be illiterate, and had neither the means nor the interest to travel very far. His only channels of information were the people around him. While he may sound like an implausible fiction, Unmediated Man described the typical

Egyptian of 1980, and represented most people’s relationship with information from the dawn of our species until very recently.

In the nature of things, Unmediated Man lived and died within a political system: let’s make it an authoritarian regime with great, but not absolute, power to control information. The problem confronting this regime was one of communication rather than control. To impose its will on Unmediated Man, it had to find a way to convey the particulars to him, in the context of a persuasive justifying story.

In reality, of course, all information is mediated. The question is whether mediation is conducted directly, face to face, or indirectly by print and electronic sources. Unmediated Man depended on his community for information: extended family, friends, neighbors, local religious and political authorities, bosses, underlings, co-workers, his butcher, his barber, “the street.” The single most important aspect of this information environment was that so very little was new. The range of interests was narrow, the set of sources small. Unmediated Man woke up every morning expecting a world quite unchanged from the day

before.

So for the regime to communicate and interact with Unmediated Man in terms advantageous to its story of legitimacy, it needed only to control the community —which, of course, it did in many ways. The regime appointed the local authorities, including the political headmen, police, military, tax and land assessors, business license granters, health inspectors, census takers, teachers, etc. Everyone coming in contact with Unmediated Man knew his version of the regime’s story of legitimacy—and those who failed to do so egregiously enough were removed and silenced.

All things being equal, Unmediated Man lacked the means to conceive of an alternative story to the one which justified his present way of life. He may have protested, even violently, against local conditions, but he could never seek to overthrow the political system.

Feedback from below was extremely limited under such constraints. Probably nothing of Unmediated Man’s private fears and frustrations reached the ear of the government. This meant the government could (and in fact must) behave as if the public didn’t exist. For political purposes, the public became whatever the government told it to be.

It is at this point that our newly-evolved hero makes his entrance on the stage. Homo informaticus is a differently-endowed member of the public: he’s literate, and has access to newspapers, radio, movies, TV. He has been exposed to a larger world beyond the immediate community.

His arrival confronts the regime with a new threat: the public with a longer reach may gain access to information which subverts its story of legitimacy. In the regime’s worst nightmare, the public actually conceives of an alternative form of government and acts to attain it.

To cover the threat, the regime must deploy a costly and elaborate state media apparatus. It acts vigorously to own, or at a minimum to control, the means of mass communication: newspapers, radio, TV, books, cinema, etc. The content of state media plays, in harmony, theme and variations of the regime’s justifying story.

The ideal for the regime would be to reconstruct, in the controlled media, voices similar to those of the local community through which it dealt with Unmediated Man. In many ways, the structure of mass media fits smoothly into regime schemes of control: it is top-down, one-to-many, monopolistic, and it demands an undifferentiated, passive mass audience.

However, sheer volume makes the reconstruction of the small world impossible. Even in the most controlled media, the amount of information is far greater than what was available in Unmediated Man’s village. Too much of the content is new and unsettling, too much covers distant and alien conditions. As messages and images proliferate, it becomes progressively harder to determine exactly what their relationship is to the regime’s justifying story. As more intermediaries are used, it becomes progressively more likely that dissonance will be introduced into the information stream.

The simplicity and perfect fit between the public’s perception of the world and the regime’s story of legitimacy are gone forever. Under these conditions, the best outcome for the regime is acceptance by the public that the world is too complex to be understood yet too dangerous to be left alone, and must be placed in the care of those whose job it is to manage the nation’s affairs. Examples of mediated acceptance of the status quo are the Soviet Union under Stalin and North Korea today.

By its structure and composition, state mass media allows an even narrower feedback path than did the local community of Unmediated Man. The presence of mediators increases the distance between those at the top of the power pyramid and everyone else.

The decisive transformation of H. informaticus’s mental universe arrives with the introduction of independent channels of information. A single such channel —a privately-owned newspaper, say, or a satellite TV station like Al Jazeera— can work a prodigious change in the public’s perception of the world.

To understand why, we must return to the thorny subject of information effects. Recall that information must be either directly perceived or mediated by others. Recall, too, that complexity makes the positive effects of mediated information impossible to determine. I can’t say that the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page caused the revolution in Egypt. I wouldn’t know how to go about proving such a proposition.

But with negative effects we stand on solid analytic ground. If all the information available to the public reveals the political system to be fixed, like nature itself, for all time, then revolution becomes an absurdity. If everything I know persuades me that no alternative exists to the status quo, then I may despair even unto violence, but I cannot seek what I do not know—political change. The public in these cases is like a deaf mute standing in the street with a truck bearing down. Negative effects funnel human beliefs, and in this way shape human behavior. They are intuitive and powerful.

That single independent channel of information thus holds the potential for radical change. It broadens Homo informaticus’s field of vision to encompass alternative values and systems. Most importantly, it shatters the illusion that his way of life is inevitable and preordained, a first, necessary step toward revolution. Whether revolution will ultimately happen will of course depend on a multitude of factors, many of which have little to do with information. The transition from negative to positive effects must end in nonlinearity, but we can say with confidence that it won’t be triggered unless the public is shown a differently-ordered world: a choice.

Information can influence actions by revealing something hitherto not known or believed possible. Scholars have called this demonstration effects. A trivial example would be a TV commercial for a new, improved dishwasher detergent. A political example was the jolt of hope experienced by the Egyptian opposition after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia. Arab dictators had always died in power and in bed. Their rule had seemed immutable, until the first one collapsed. We can feel the excitement of new possibilities in Wael Ghonim’s words, written on his website shortly after Ben Ali’s flight:

After all that’s happened in Tunisia, my position has changed. Hopes for real political change in Egypt are much higher now. And all we need is a large number of people who are ready to fight for it. Our voices must be not only loud but deafening. ¹¹

In reality, nothing had changed for Egypt. The transformation had taken place in Ghonim’s mind.

Sheer volume of information is subversive of any narrative: alternatives are demonstrated. State-controlled media had generated too much information, too much that was new, but when effective it had convinced Homo informaticus that no safe alternatives existed to the present state of affairs.

By necessity, an independent channel will deliver demonstration effects contradicting the regime’s justifying story with equally plausible explanations.

When judging his government, H. informaticus can then do so in light of alternative possibilities—different views of the same policy or event, different values invoked for an action or inaction, different performance by other governments, real or imagined. The first step toward skepticism is doubt, and H. informaticus, exposed to an independent channel, must confront choices and doubts when constructing his story of the world.

As this evolutionary fable approaches the present moment, content proliferates.

A vast global information sphere, churning with controversies, points of view, and rival claims on every subject, becomes accessible to our hero. Its volume and variety exceed that of the controlled media by many levels of magnitude.

If H. informaticus were to try to absorb this mass, his head would explode. This is not what transpires. He will pick and choose. So will other members of the public. By that very selectivity, that freedom to choose its channels of information, the public breaks the power of the mediator class created by mass media, and, under authoritarian rule, controlled by the regime.

The fall of the mediators, all things being equal, means the end of the regime’s ability to rule by persuasion.

Governments of every stripe have had trouble grasping the sudden reversal in the information balance of power. Proud in hierarchy and accreditation, but deprived of feedback channels, the regime is literally blind to much global content. It behaves as if nothing has changed except for attempts by alien ideals— pornography, irreligion, Americanization—to seduce the public. Most significantly, the regime in its blindness fails to adjust its story of legitimacy to make it plausible in a crowded, fiercely competitive environment.

An accurate representation based on volume would show state media to be microscopic, invisible, when compared to the global information sphere. This is how H. informaticus experiences the changed environment: as an Amazonian flood of irreverent, controversy-ridden, anti-authority content, including direct criticism of the regime.

The consequences are predictable and irreversible. The regime accumulates pain points: police brutality, economic mismanagement, foreign policy failures, botched responses to disasters. These problems can no longer be concealed or explained away. Instead, they are seized on by the newly-empowered public, and placed front-and-center in open discussions. In essence, government failure now sets the agenda.