The Revolt of the Public: Martin Gurri
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhSaPi_zAyY
- Eruption of public anger against the established order, politics, society as it exists.
The alienation ordinary citizens feel from the institutions that organise modern life, a
conflict that pits the public against the elites who manage those institutions
- In 2019 there were at least 25 major street insurgencies, struck across all spectrums:
the revolt of the public is not just about economic deprivation, it is not just a cry for
democracy
- What's going on?
- Information revolution has effects, its changed the mind of people = increasing levels
of social and political turbulence i.e. Arab Spring. Evidently, digital platforms have
allowed ordinary people to leap onto the political stage and become an actor
- online culture fractures opinion like a broken mirror and and the public lives on the
broken pieces
- In the 20th century, radical groups wanted to conquer power to impose their own
political programme derived from ideology; today the public is indifferent to power
and openly rejects institutions, leaders, positive programmes, even coherent
ideology. Society is too fractured.
- The public can only unite in repudiation, the public is always against the established
institutions while offering no alternatives = nihilism, the belief that destruction is a
form of progress
- There is a crisis of authority of institutions, institutions of the 21st century received
their shape in the 20th, which was the hay-day of the top-down model of
organisation. For the model to be tolerated as legitimate, it needed to have a semi-
legitimate autonomy over the information domain. Information was scarce and
valuable, institutions that controlled the flow had authority, could tell citizens what the
problems were in society and how to think about them
- The information tsunami has swept away the legitimacy of this model. The elites
today are demoralised because they know that their every mistake, every failed
perception, every self-interested act etc; will be exposed and talked about endlessly.
Elite failure sets the information agenda
- So we have a republic bent on repudiation to nihilism and elites who are stuck in a
reactionary dream (wanting to make it back to the 20th century)
- There have increasingly been other manifestations of conflict: Class, Populism -
elites who want to explore this hunger of repudiation for their own ends and
manipulate a vulnerable public. Gurris view: populism is a club used by the angry
public to bash institutions
- The revolt of the public is aimed at the hierarchical structure of modern government
as such in disregard of the political systems involved. Public movies online at the
speed of light, in the digital age the government could be faster but also that elites
have no intention of allowing this to happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDMTxtoH-kE (not part of the course)
- The digital economy is an economy in which there is more power outside than inside
organisations which is a radical change to the industrial age, because individuals are
, equipped with devices and connected through networks which makes it possible for
citizens to pool individual power to force institutions/organisations to treat us how we
want and reach a goal.
- In 2011, there was a moment of political action that changed politics.
- Gigantic volumes of information are destructures of authority. The industrial age
believed in hierarchy and scientific control of the bottom by a wise and rational elite
that solved problems. Each institution controlled its own domain of information.
- The public's ability to communicate and assemble instantaneously can erupt
unpredictably at any time over any cause
- The public has a fractured dynamic, has no organisation, anti-leader, no ideology, no
political programme - how do they suddenly unify? They’re unified against.
Destroying the established order becomes a positive, no alternatives proposed =
nihilism. The danger is the nihilist who believes the world needs to be purified in
blood.
- The elites believe that to get to where they are, you achieve certain things & know
better than the ordinary citizen.
- Distance= sense the public feels that the elites are in the pyramids looking down, but
elites see people are irrational multitudes. Democracy is caught in a secular
transition from the industrial age
- Media: sense that people are being manipulated, fake news, state of
incomprehension.
- Trump won the election because he didn’t have political experience, institutional
connections or an ideological following, he signalled to the public that he was not one
of the other elites, he was nihilistic. He is a product of the revolt of the public, the
visible effect of the public's mood
- This conflict has to be managed in such a way that democracy becomes reconciled
with the digital world; public reconciled to liberal democracy
Gurri: The revolt of the public
- The fate of democracy is bound to the fate of the elites in democratic nations. The
current elite class, having lost its monopoly over information, has been stripped of
authorizing legitimacy.
- Trump: the public endowed him with a radical direction, and institutions proved too
weak to stand in his way. The US public, like the public everywhere, is migrating
away from the structures of representative democracy to more sectarian
arrangements. The public craves meaning and identity.
- The Republican Party has bled dry of coherence and authority as an institution
- The Democratic party has also endured an equally fatal loss of authority; have
unbundled into political war-bands
- What has changed?
- The information balance of power: the public used to exist only as a passive
audience. Information was dispensed on the industrial model: top down and one to
many
- In 2016, the public's trust of news institutions has hit an all time low. Trump
campaigned against an unloved institution that was providing him with free publicity,
with respected institutions being ruins of what they once were.
- The decline of authority in European nations: Greece 2015: Syriza party headed
by Alexis Tsipras, stood against the EU & globalization, promised radical change
