Into the Maelstrom
The Revolt of the Public
Disclaimer: nearly all of the following is merely a paraphrasing or direct plagiarism of Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Public”.
The old, entrenched social order of the West is slipping away even as I write these words. Since no substitute has yet appeared, we should, as tourists flying into the unknown, fasten our seatbelts and expect turbulence ahead.
Information
Information is anomaly, deviance, difference. Anything that separates signal from noise. When the world was young, information was scarce, hence valuable.
A curious thing happens to information under conditions of scarcity. It becomes authoritative. For example, the New York Times and Walter Cronkite once seemed authoritative.
Information, of course, isn’t just raw material to be exploited for analysis. It has a life and power of its own. Information has effects. The first significant effect is this:
As the information available to the public increases, the authoritativeness of any one source decreases.
The idea of an information explosion dates back to the 1960s, but it only truly occurred in the 1990s, initially because of television rather than the internet. First came Landline TV, restricted to one or two channels. Then came cable and the far more invasive satellite TV: CNN (1980) and Al Jazeera (1996).
It was only in 1990 that the first server on the World Wide Web switched on. MP3, the destroyer of the music industry, arrived in 1993. Blogs appeared in 1997. Wikipedia evolved in 2001. Facebook was born in 2004. Bitcoin was released to the public in 2009.
Early in the millennium it became apparent to anyone with eyes to see that we had entered an informational order unprecedented in the experience of the human race.
The sheer abundance of information today is stupifying. Already, in the bygone year of 2001, more information was produced in 12 months than the entire previous existence of our species on Earth. In fact, double. And 2002 would in turn double the previous total again, with a staggering 23 Exabytes of new information.
The primary result of this explosion of information is uncertainty. Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquire an arbitrary aspect, and seem grounded by mere moral predilection rather than intellectual vigor.
When proof for and against reaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion will hang over every authoritative judgment.
Public and Authority
The public, as I see it, 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.
Though the public today is an actor, the previous quote describes its current structure with uncanny accuracy. It is not a fixed body of individuals- it’s composed of amateurs fractured into vital communities, each clustered around an “affair of interest” to the group.
Authority, meanwhile, is legitimacy, the scarcest resource of them all. A bit like beauty, we know it when we see it- we believe a report, obey a command, or accept a judgement because of the standing of the originator. At the individual, ephemeral, level it is achieved by professionalization. Lasting authority meanwhile resides in institutions rather than the persons who act and speak on their behalf. They are able to hoard money and data, and evolve an oracular language designed to awe and perplex the ordinary citizen.
A crucial connection exists between institutions and monopoly conditions. To the degree it can command its field of play, the word of an institution will go unchallenged.
The Revolt of the Public
In the depths of the public’s unconscious, human beings interact with platforms and information, and are changed by the interaction. The accumulated changes have shaken and battered established institutions from companies and universities to governments and religions.
The view from the depths is of a colossal many-sided conflict, the outcome of which, for good or evil, remains uncertain.
We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world which has not yet been born. Given the character of the forces of the change, we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture. You who are young today may not live to see its resolution.
Each side in the struggle has a standard bearer: authority for the old industrial regime that has dominated globally for a century and a half, and the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest. Each doubts the humanity of the other, and the two are arrayed in contrary modes of organization which require mutually hostile ideas of right behavior.
The pertubating agent between authority and the public is information. It naturally irritates the incumbent structure of hierarchy- established and accredited authority like governments first and foremost, but also corporations, universities, the whole roster of institutions from the industrial age, and emboldens the network, that is, the public in revolt.
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.
Networks are composed of sects, voluntary associations of equals. To maintain unity, they reconcile a faith in human perfectibility with the calm certainty that annihilation is just around the corner. At their core, they represent a negation of the center rather than a coherent positivist ideology.
Power 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. Brute force plays a part, but 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 the number of true believers, the more solid the foundation underneath the 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.
Before the information age, unmediated man lived and died within a political system. To impose its will on unmediated man, regimes had to find a way to convey the particulars to him in the context of a persuasive story. Unmediated man depended on his community for information, and the single most important aspect of this information environment was that so little was new. The range of interests was narrow, the set of sources quite small. Unmediated man woke up every morning expecting a world 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. 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 equal, unmediated man lacked the means to conceive of an alternate story to the one which justified his present way of life. He may have protested against local conditions, but he never would have sought to overthrow the political system.
At this point a newly-evolved hero makes his entrance to 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 of information beyond the immediate community.
His arrival confronts the regime with a new threat- the public may now gain access to information which subverts the regime’s story of legitimacy. In the regime’s worst nightmare, the public actually conceives of an alternative form of government and acts to attain it.
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 demands an undifferentiated, passive mass audience.
However, sheer volume makes this 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. Most importantly, this shatters the illusion that our ways of life are inevitable and preordained, a first necessary step toward revolution. Whether revolution will ultimately occur of course depends on many factors, many of which have little to do with information, but the first conditions for revolt have now been met.
Today, our vast global information sphere churns with controversies, points of view, and rival claims on every subject. If Homo informaticus were to try to absorb this mass, his head would explode. That is not what transpires. He will pick and choose, as do other members of the public.
The consequences of all of this 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.
As the regime’s story of legitimacy becomes less and less persuasive, homo informaticus joins the ranks of similarly disaffected members of the public, who are hostile to the status quo, eager to pick fights with authority, and seek the means to broadcast their opinions and turn the tables on their rulers.
At this stage, the public, clustered around communities of interest, has effectively taken control of the means of communication.
The regime still controls the apparatus of repression. It can attack, deny service, and even imprison, torture (as in the case of Ross Ulbricht) or kill homo informaticus, but it can’t silence his message, because his message is constantly amplified and propagated by a community in opposition to the regime.
The resulting mass extinction of legitimacy leaves no margin for error, no residual store of public good will. Any spark can blow up a political system, liberal or authoritarian, at any time, anywhere.
As the status quo increasingly descends into anarchy, crypto occupies a unique place in the historical narrative. Perhaps a sideshow, perhaps not, the platonic dueling grounds of on-chain DeFi and emergence of digital tribes and DAO’s offer compelling glimpses into a possible future, and a chance to experiment with new means of organizing. The gamified concepts of today will later become utilitarian applications, and perhaps drive a new, tokenized, world.