Was 2019 the year of Martin Gurri? Consider the list of countries where protests took place, as he points out in a review post.
when the whole world is watching, a local demand for political change can start to go global in an instant. At a certain point, the process becomes self-sustaining and self-reinforcing: that threshold may have been crossed in November, when at least eight significant street uprisings were rumbling along concurrently (Bolivia, Catalonia, Chile, Colombia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon – with France, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, and Venezuela simmering in the background).
But
This would be a good time to bring up the pessimistic hypothesis. It holds that the loss of control over information must be fatal to modern government as a system: the universal spread of revolt can be explained as a failure cascade, driving that system inexorably toward disorganization and reconfiguration. Failure cascades can be thought of as negative virality. A local breakdown leads to the progressive loss of higher functions, until the system falls apart. This, in brief, is why airplanes crash and bridges collapse.
The generational handover has become a debt repudiation. I sense new economic force, the natural right to coin. Credit to Roger Farmer, proving we are not long lived nor infinitely divisible.
I know a thing or two about France, where major strikes and protests and demands for more government help have been a national pastime since before the minitel. And the Netherlands? I did a quick news search and soccer scores and the arrest of a drug kingpin were way ahead in the headline rankings over any mention of potential public unrest.
One could also consider the list of countries without major protests, which is obviously longer, and spans the whole spectrum of degree of control over information.
If this proposal can be reduced to a objective, quantitative prediction over which we can wager, I repeat my offer to bet Gurri about the number and severity of such events in the future, and their correlation with some local measure of information and thought control.
“It holds that the loss of control over information must be fatal to modern government as a system”
Government can survive, but what is being churned are the “intellectuals” who propagandize support for the government. This, in the US, includes not only academics, career gov’t experts, and think tankers, but the media. You can throw in a few of those who aren’t strictly in those groups but joined via blogging/social media. Almost all are seeing their sinecures become uncertain as the freedom of information exposes their ignorance. Direct actors can now speak directly to the public, and no longer need the middle-man “intellectuals” as aggregators or as they increasingly became faux-aggregators as they substituted their opinion for actual observation.