A reader asks,
How would you encapsulate Martin’s thesis?
1. Starting around 2000, the amount of information on the Internet doubles in a year. If that goes on for ten years, there would have been 420 one thousand times the information in 2010 as in 2000. Even if that number is imprecise (and it has to be imprecise), there is way more information out there than there used to be. The increase is staggering.
2. 20th-century elites and institutions relied on having a much less chaotic and engulfing information environment. Politicians, journalists, and academics now are overwhelmed by: (a) what they don’t know that others do know. Think of citizens using cell phones to cover events sooner and more completely than paid journalists; and (b) by the amount that others know about them that they used to able to keep secret. Think of President Kennedy trying to get away with his sexual escapades today.
3. The elites cannot accept the new reality that there is so much information that they cannot control. They see new competitors as illegitimate (“fake news”) and they blame others for elites’ loss of status and respect.
4. The general public is frustrated by the arrogance of the elites, and they have the means to assemble revolts. This has happened everywhere, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests to the January 6 riot. These revolts have no organization and so they end up not accomplishing much.
5. Society requires authority. But the existing authorities can seemingly do nothing other than hope for a return to the 20th century when they had closer to a monopoly on information. And they seem to be completely incapable of dealing with the digital world. They cannot operate at Internet speed (it takes the bureaucracy too long to react to events) or at Internet scale (the Obamacare web site fiasco).
6. Maybe a new generation of elites and/or institutions will emerge that is more adept at dealing with technology and sufficiently humble to deal with a situation in which information is more dispersed than it was last century.
4. I’d go beyond having “no organization.” My biggest takeaway from Revolt of the Public is they don’t have some they’re FOR. They’re against the elites, but they don’t have an alternative. The image from January 6 that always sticks in my mind is that of a bunch of middle-aged adults wandering the Capitol aimlessly (most not going off the carpeted area that’s supposed to serve as a pedestrian path) and taking selfies. They had breached the capitol but has no idea what to do when they actually got inside. The analogy I keep coming back to (both for that event and events Gurri discusses in his book) is someone yelling at his friends, “hold me back,” and no knowing what to do when he isn’t held back.
*something
LOL! I like that last analogy!
Most of those against the elites agree on it being bad, but do not agree on what is the alternative. Most, if asked “what should be done?” will have their own answer. They have many answers – but they only agree the elite program is bad. The political problem is always to get enough agreement on what action to take.
On the Capitol protest, they sorta-wanted to go to where Congress was and say the election processes needed to be audited so normal folk would trust the outcome. But they had little expectation to actually be inside, and no Trump supporting leaders guiding them to make that protest inside by the dozens, rather than outside by the tens of thousands.
2^10 = 1024. Where does 420 million come from?
I came to ask this too. 420 million is close to 29 doublings, not 10.
However, most of the information added to the Internet is not legible: it is locked behind gates, whether it is Google’s estimates of user interests and behavior, Tesla’s archive of car performance data and video, a British or Chinese city’s surveillance video archives, orc whatever else. A lot of old data bitrots — Wikipedia has a bot that scrubs its outgoing links and replaces broken ones with links to the Internet Archive.
Tweets, and more recently user-uploaded videos, do add a lot of items and bytes respectively, but I would not count them as new information….
… especially if we are counting a cat video in 1080p to be twice as much info as the same video in 720p. Data != information.
Exactly this. The signal vs noise ratio has deteriorated significantly.
In 10 years of doubling you should only have 1024 times as much information. 420 million happens somewhere between the 28th and 29th year.
I suspect then that Arnold meant 2030…
Which also makes sense, since 2010 happened a while ago now 🙂
I have no idea where I pulled that 420 from. Oops
As others have said the public lacks organization: They know what they are against but not what they are for. But this is not a bar to change, even revolutionary change. All that is missing is for a leader to emerge. Trump wasn’t that leader but his 73 million votes, in the face of his staggering political incompetence, shows how hungry for such a leader the public is.
As systems become more complex, they become unmanageable unless control is pushed downward and outward. Think, for example, of the early telephone system that relied on operators to manually connect calls. At some point, people realized that, if the system kept growing, every person in the country would have to become an operator. The solution was to do exactly that: give each user the ability to connect calls.
Government leaders, in contrast, tell us that as our economy and society become more complex, bigger and more intrusive government is needed to control them. The problem is that these incredibly complex systems are beyond the ability of anyone or any organization to control. As long as we keep expecting the “right” leader to do this impossible task, we will continue being disappointed in our government and our elites.
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
– Shelley
Consider: “And they seem to be completely incapable of dealing with the digital world.” and “Maybe a new generation of elites and/or institutions will emerge that is more adept at dealing with technology.”
Those authorities and elites capable of dealing with the digital world and technology already exist. In China.
One of Gurri’s several key errors is to guess that new “systems of control” for the internet age can’t exist, so can’t be discovered and established. But they exist, so it’s only a matter of time before they emerge.
In China we already see the centralized model. In the US, we are witnessing the emergence of the decentralized model more fitting to our society’s mode of social organization, though aided by the fact that the markets for information services have themselves becomes incredibly centralized and ideologically homogenized, such that a a few key decision makers can knock people almost entirely out of the system, and will tend to make the same decisions, at the same time.
If elite authorities are not genuinely helpless, they are not going to just stand around and let this happen. The state is doing its part – what do you think all the money and effort suddenly going into “DVE” is really about?
I think one reason for this error is that Gurri is counting “information”, where the real number for social analysis is something like humans times “online-ness” (hence, “very online”). In the end – as China understands – the problem is one of controlling people, not bits. This is more like a S curve than an infinite exponential.
In 1995, only 10% of adults reported ever using the internet at all for anything. And they were probably only using it some of the time, for some basic function. Calibrate this to “1” on the “online-ness” index which maxes out at 10,000. By 2007, when smartphones came out, 75% of adults reported it, and maybe used it ten times as much, I’d call this 100. Today, somewhere in the mid-thousands, but the potential gains and growth rates at this point are pretty marginal, which is what we observe.
As online-ness reaches a plateau and stops scaling, the capacity of IT systems and increasingly capable algorithms to surveil, analyze, and control eyeball-time continues to increase rapidly. And after all, everyone is holding the world’s best surveillance bug in their hands all the time.
One can already see the kinds of tools and techniques being researched and developed, to stop rabbles from communicating and organizing. When Facebook (aka Instagram, aka WhatsApp) wants to stop something from going viral, it has early-warning systems looks for the signs of the same message or link being broadcast forwarded multiple times, and if that number hits 4 or 5 forwards, then the systems start putting on the brakes. “Oh, you have end-to-end encryption for the content of your message, sure, and that seems to neutralize some of the system of control, but *not* for where you are in the sequence of forwards, which reinvigorates it.” Twitter seems to be investigating and experimenting with similar tactics. Remember how that NYPost story about Hunter Biden got ‘throttled’, it’s distribution and visibility ‘reduced’?
Gurri likes to use the events in Egypt as a textbook example, but Tahrir Square could not happen today, just as Tienanmen Square cannot happen again, and just as Yellow Vests and Jan 6 will not happen again in our near future. The revolt of the public got quashed.
“In China we already see the centralized model. In the US, we are witnessing the emergence of the decentralized model more fitting to our society’s mode of social organization, though aided by the fact that the markets for information services have themselves becomes incredibly centralized and ideologically homogenized, such that a a few key decision makers can knock people almost entirely out of the system, and will tend to make the same decisions, at the same time.”
A sentence worth pondering.
One can hope that a new decentralized model might emerge, but the current one-party top-down national government seems hell-bent on erasing federalism as demonstrated by the prohibitions on state and local education reform in the $1.9 elite plunder bill and the pending nationwide prohibition on election integrity in HR1.
The flood of abject authoritarianism swamps the country unimpeded. In an excellent American Greatness piece that explains the mentality behind this corrosive corruption, the great Roger Kimball quotes Kipling:
“When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
This also explain why people in China submit to their state capacity chains.
Indeed, scouting for the FIT league, I was dismayed by how many magazine writers and think-tankers radiate unctuous auras and fawning submission to the ruling class interest. However, where a CCP mid-level functionary might process loyalty to the party first, nation second, and secretly strive for personal advancement, in the USA personal advancement is secured by water-carrying for the corrupt elites. China actually has a merit-based civil service system and individual access to education and advancement is more or less based on objective measures of ability. The corrupt connections and apartheid racial quotas that govern social status in the USA preclude any possibility of Chinese-levels of administrative performance and quality.
Perhaps the best hope for the people of the USA would be a USSR-style disintegration of the national government. Maybe one or two of the resultant splinters and branches might grow a healthy tree.
I think it is worth comparing China to other similar nations, perhaps Iran.
As you say, China’s elites understand that it isn’t about controlling information, but about controlling people. Though control is honestly too strong of a word. Rather, the party’s control of information is rather porous, though only in certain ways. An awful lot of information that isn’t accessible in Chinese is accessible in English. For most people in China, it just isn’t worth it going to the trouble of working around the great firewall.
I think that is the thing that Chinese elites understand that elites in few other countries do. They work to make to it so that opposing the Party’s rule just isn’t worth it. Contrary to the opinions of a lot of Western media outlets, China’s elites are trying to build a country where ordinary people have dignity. Many commentators have seen Xi’s crackdown on corruption as a cynical ploy to get rid of opposition to his own consolidation of power. I think that is too simplistic. The sheer scale of how many party members who have been disciplined is inconsistent with mere cynicism, though certainly Xi has likely gone much softer on important allies and supporters. But thousands of officials have been disciplined. I don’t think it is merely cosmetic. Rather, I think that the likeliest explanation is that the Party has a newfound ability to monitor and discover cases of corruption, and genuinely want to reduce corruption. When Party elites say that corruption threatens the Party’s continued rule, I think that they truly believe it, though they are loath to give up their own privileges or to make changes to eliminate corruption at the higher levels of the party.
I don’t know as much about Iran, but one of the clear differences is that Iranian leaders seem to have much less concern for ordinary Iranians. Chinese elites break international norms to make the country richer; Iran’s leadership breaks international norms in a way that impoverishes their nation and does little to benefit the masses. I also suspect that Iran has a higher share of people fluent in foreign languages, a high share of people living abroad, and a higher share of people interested in the world outside of Iran. Iran also has a universalist, political religion in Islam. Christianity has been growing in China, and that may in the future threaten the party’s rule. I also suspect that Iran is more corrupt than China as well, though I could be mistaken about that.
Where I end up at is that as much as it may be the case that China has figured out how to rule in the new digital age, there are likely few countries which could replicate their success.
Thanks for this. I had bought the audiobook, which is tentatively still in the cue. What I still don’t understand is what phenomena/current events this thesis is trying to explain. As a very concerned academic in the social sciences, it doesn’t seem highly relevant to the ongoing crisis. That crisis isn’t due to too much information, but by people (okay, many are elites) ignoring knowledge we actually have in favor of ideological preferences. Arguments against the SAT, for massive racial biases in police shootings, for inevitability of gender transition in young gender nonconforming children, etc. is Gurri only concerned with big tech?
If you still have a job, “ignoring knowledge we actually have in favor of ideological preferences ” might be vague enough to protect you.
In fact, more colleges and organizations are proclaiming untruths as true, and requiring verbal affirmation of “white privilege” & guilt.
On pain of loss of job, loss of status.
Here is a more intriguing question, at least for me.
Is Levin’s recommendation in “A Time to Build” incompatible with the implications of Gurri’s thesis?
Levin also wants things to go back to the way they were before, but Gurri says there is no going back.
Levin tells institutions that the incentives created by social media have distorted their operations and degraded their ability to achieve their purposes, and that they should reassert control to reestablish trust. Gurri says that control and trust are gone with the wind, that the social media genie is out of the bottle, and hoping that it might even be possible to get it back in is naive and delusional. Levin says ‘form’, but Gurri says, “Forming is Over”.
See, now here is something about which they could have actually had a productive and amicably adversarial argument in that Pairagraph conversation. Oh well, opportunity lost.
Maybe the Pairagraph format would benefit from, not a ‘moderator’, really, but someone who did something in the same intellectual family as ‘steelmanning’, That is, to take the steelman versions of two positions, and then to bring their Relative Complements into focus, making the important differences, incompatibilities, and contradictions clear, and then focusing the dialectic on resolving those differences. Heh, given the imagery of ‘focus’ and ‘resolution’, I guess you could call this “Camera-manning”.
In a trail, where both sides agree, there are stipulations of facts which put aside common agreement and focus trial effort and resources on these disagreements. That is, they toss out the Union, and pit their Relative Complements against each other, in front of the judging audience. This happens automatically in the interest of efficiency out of the incentive to save money and time. Absent that, one needs a third party to keep the train of thought on track.
There will NOT be a “going back”.
But there might be a newer, more transparent form of elites who are honest, and can show their honesty. This would require accepting the reality of various race & sex differences which are non-Woke. As long as any “untruth” remains in power, the elites with power will remain untrustworthy.
Our existing institutions evolved in an environment with a certain level of transparency and centralization of information flow. Presumably new institutions will evolve (maybe out of the old ones, maybe independently) that can live in the higher-transparency environment.
Early 20th Century sociologist Robert Michels set forth in his book Political Parties the the “iron law of oligarchy” which holds that in any polity nominally democratic, rule will necessarily be exercised by elites. This is because the system of representative government leads to specialization and hence supposed expertise.
Thanks to the digital revolution, we are now finding out that our experts are often both corrupt and incompetent.
These 6 points seem like a good simplification of Gurri. In his Pairagraph vs Levin, he focusses on the loss of trust in institutions:
“we must understand why it drained away in the first place. ”
A focus on Truth is missing. Gov’t, academia, media – all lying in obvious ways:
“Not spying on Trump”/ “Fair IRS treatment of Tea Party”; Blacks = in academics to Asians/ Whites, Women same in mind as men; Russian Hoax, Ukraine Hoax vs Trump with No Ukraine Problem with Hunter Biden. So many lies by elites.
Gurri alludes to this a bit:
We must raise humility, along with integrity, to be the highest public virtues.
Levin is so much better on truth:
The problem to be solved is not quite that Americans don’t trust our institutions enough, but that our institutions aren’t trustworthy enough. and on building trust Holding people to a standard means constraining them. This is how institutions build trust.
Gurri agrees with Levin, then adds why the elites are so bad (he could say they suck):
our elites became performative and now value applause over achievement.
[This is certainly a critique of Trump that most Trump supporters would not object to.]
Levin ends:
For centuries, it has been clear to the deepest students of the liberal society that restraint is the prerequisite for a sustainable liberty, and that it is very difficult. “Self-command,” wrote Adam Smith, “is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre.”
Interestingly, Hofstede has restraint as the 6th culture dimension:
“Indulgence stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human drives related to enjoying life and having fun. Restraint stands for a society that suppresses gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social norms.”
The decadence of our elites goes along with their dishonesty – denying the truth of “what reality IS like, now”.
Cynical quick take:
What has changed is that people see plenty of content that hasn’t passes through the traditional curation process. Most of this new content is indeed intended to deceive. But when you point this fact out, it’s hard to make a case that the old, curated content was not intended to deceive. Because, after all, it often was. Yes, I am old enough to remember the Pentagon Papers, though not old enough to remember the concealment of Edward VIII’s romance.
What has not changed is that the people are very bad at detecting deception, which inspires them to punish it severely if they do spot it.
Point (3) in particular is a gross missread of Gurri. Elites control today’s media environment; Gurri thinks so, and to claim otherwise is to not understand Gurri.
Gurri cites and agrees with the writings of Andrew Mir on news journalism. I highly recommend this recent Andrew Mir essay: https://human-as-media.com/2021/02/16/the-eternal-failure-of-selling-news/
Both Mir and Gurri would agree that today’s media environment has also been “acculturated by power” and is controlled by those wish to dissmeinate information (elites) rather than those that wish to receive (public).
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 to have political narrative influence. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, bought The Atlantic and Axios to influence the narrative. She spoke publicly at the desire to control the public narrative. Google and Twitter and Facebook are investing in influencing news coverage by several strategies: they donate money to messaging they want to amplify, they reduce circulation of political messaging they don’t like, etc. Wealthy political donors drive a lot of political news coverage. Fox News was founded by right-wing elites. The Mercer family is a famous right wing elite donor family. Elites absolutely influence the news environment on both left and right of the political divide.
Point (4) also strikes me as wrong. Does the public have the means to assemble revolts? The left-wing revolts as seen by BLM-related protests were organized, financed, and encouraged by left-wing elites. The Jan 6 riot was not a serious revolt. That wasn’t planned, strategized, or financed by right-wing elites. You could argue Rush Limbaugh and pjmedia and Fox News and even Breitbart were all effective right-wing media revolts for their particular times.