The best analysis of January 2021 came from a book self-published in 2014. Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public is a cult classic that remains the essential description of how the internet changed politics. The former CIA analyst’s thesis now seems obvious, and yet the dominant narratives about “populism” and “disinformation” make it clear that many people still don’t understand what happened: The internet changed the public’s relationship to authority.
Gurri identified the underlying dynamics that explain why the Department of Justice is punishing an American citizen for making memes, shaman barbarians stand in the speaker’s chair, and sports fans bully hedge fund managers. The GameStop short squeeze in particular unfolded like a chapter in the book. Gurri’s work remains essential for understanding our world.
The Revolt of the Public tries to explain a phenomenon that had already swept the world by 2014. Why did the new information environment bring political turmoil? Why did regimes crumble in the face of the internet? Gurri wrote the book as a warning that liberal democracy would also need to weather the information age. His thesis is simple: “We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually, and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born.”
The old world is the 20th century. The new world is defined by access to information and a public that can communicate without intermediaries. The 20th century industrial age was defined by top-down hierarchical bureaucracies that could obtain scale through size, whereas the new digital world is defined by interconnected networks. These two worlds are in constant conflict, yet each side is only dimly aware of what the other side represents. Every social upheaval over the past 20 years can be seen as a proxy conflict between hierarchies built in the 20th-century and 21st-century networks.
Gurri draws attention to this shift by comparing company names from the 20th century to today. The National Broadcasting Company and the General Electric Company versus Google and Yahoo. The change in naming conventions signals a deeper change in our relationship to authority. The 20th-century world is the “center,” while the digital world represents the “border.”
The center “believes in sacrificing the few for the good of the whole … it is too slow, too blind to new information. It will not believe in new dangers and will often be taken by surprise.” The center consists of institutions who wield hard power. The border consists of various sects who exist only to oppose the center. They have no intention of governing and develop no capacity for exercising power, yet the internet allows border sects to inflate into the millions. These two sides engage in an information war.
Gurri reminds us of an uncomfortable but well-known philosophical conundrum. There is no such thing as a “fact.” Or, as Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote, “Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a 17th century invention.” All information must be mediated through a larger theory, narrative, or story in order to make sense. In the 20th century, mass media was used to mediate information, and the people who ran the media had tremendous power. Those who set the conversation ruled, and our regime gained legitimacy through narrative control.
Today, people are exposed to so much information on a daily basis that they must choose what deserves attention. This process also changes the role of the media gatekeepers, who can no longer simply report on things that happened but must insist that their information is more important than other information. Have you noticed how many headlines now include the phrase, “Here’s why that matters”? Political polarization has increased because people use political affiliation as a way to filter information. Gurri’s analysis is more sophisticated than the dominant “disinformation” narrative because he examines the public and the informed amateur.
The public is any group of people who are interested in a particular affair but are not active participants in it. Their impact is reduced to supporting or opposing those who do participate. There are many publics that form around different issues. The television age made the ruling class view the public as synonymous with the “audience,” but publics are no longer silent and aren’t satisfied with being told when to applaud. Out of this landscape emerge the informed amateurs.
The informed amateurs are people who know enough to offer sophisticated challenges to ruling orthodoxy on a particular issue but who aren’t professionals within “center” institutions. These are the citizen journalists, forum posters with statistics degrees, bloggers who work on Wall Street, and autodidact podcasters. Just like how the latest unicorn startup is called Mambu, the informed amateur arrives in unserious packaging. The amateurs have different incentive structures than professionals who are trying to rise in the ranks of a bureaucracy. Sometimes this makes them sloppy, but it also means they notice what’s been overlooked.
Credible and sophisticated challenges to the professionals accumulate online. The professionals take this personally and overreact. They condescend to the amateurs, slander them, and do their best to ignore all challenges. Meanwhile, the digital world records all of their errors, all of their mistakes, all of those emails they thought the public would never see. This leads to a corrosive distrust of elite institutions. Over time, the various publics that are fractured around different issues begin to coalesce around the only shared value left: Screw the elites.
The GameStop short squeeze, in which thousands of retail day traders coordinating via social media briefly drove the stock of GameStop to stratospheric levels, proved Gurri’s thesis and showed why “populism” won’t be going away. Informed amateurs found a legitimate investment opportunity and spread that information. Functionally, this was no different than Jim Cramer dispensing advice on CNBC. But elites were caught unaware. They reflexively tried to wage a narrative war and ended up demonizing working schmoes who have zero functional power. This imprudent response turned the event into a populist flashpoint. Suddenly, day traders trying to make a buck saw themselves as enacting revenge for 2008.
Gurri’s analysis of the dynamics at play is unmatched, but he makes slight missteps when he tries to diagnose the “crisis of authority.” He writes that authority is something that “flows from legitimacy derived from monopoly” and that it must be exercised through persuasion. Yet, the crisis of authority is not new. In 1975, Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce wrote that the “eclipse of the idea of authority is the defining feature of the contemporary world.” Our problem today is that authority has become such an incoherent concept that even those, like Gurri, who notice its absence cannot define it.
Del Noce reminds us that the word authority is etymologically linked to the Latin word “augere,” which means to increase or grow. Authority is power applied to cultivation. Authority, in other words, requires a vision of what man ought to grow toward. Our ruling class has a very specific vision of man. It sees mankind as a locust swarm that merely consumes and produces in pursuit of private appetites. The competent pursuit of this debased vision is indistinguishable from malicious attempts to humiliate normal people. For example, Bill Gates wants people to drink water made from human feces. No one who advocates for that will ever have authority.
The new world and the old world will continue to come into conflict, and the battle lines will continue to shift in unanticipated ways as unexpected networks rise and create new vectors of disruption. The nascent social credit system our elite is building will eventually come into direct conflict with the forces of digital democracy. Instead of endlessly speculating about what is to come, more people should read Gurri to understand the future that is already here.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
