Martin Gurri > Quotes

“Following the horrors of 9/11, Fukuyama and his ideas were derided as triumphalist nonsense. But he was only half wrong. Fukuyama, a Hegelian, argued that Western democracy had run out of “contradictions”: that is, of ideological alternatives. That was true in 1989 and remains true today. Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history. There was another possibility he failed to consider. History could well be driven by negation rather than contradiction. It could ride on the nihilistic rejection of the established order, regardless of alternatives or consequences. That would not be without precedent. The Roman Empire wasn’t overthrown by something called “feudalism”—it collapsed of its own dead weight, to the astonishment of friend and foe alike. The centuries after the calamity lacked ideological form. Similarly, a history built on negation would be formless and nameless: a shadowy moment, however long, between one true age and another.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“From start to finish, the 2016 presidential race can best be understood as the political assertion of an unhappy and highly mobilized public. In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the public’s surly and mutinous mood. Trump has been for this public what the objet trouvé was for the modern artist: a found instrument, a club near to hand with which to smash at the established order. To compare him to Ronald Reagan, as some of his admirers have done, or to the great dictators, as his opponents constantly do, would be to warp reality as in a funhouse mirror.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“An iron triangle of government, the universities, and the corporate world controls the careers of individual scientists. Consequently, the ideal of the lonely and disinterested seeker after truth has been superseded by that of the scientist-bureaucrat.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Negation, digitally amplified, has been the glue holding together a multifarious public.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The qualities I would look for among elites to get politics off this treadmill are honesty and humility: old-school virtues, long accepted to be the living spirit behind the machinery of the democratic republic, though now almost lost from sight.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The two perspectives, I fear, are not mutually exclusive, and may well be complementary. It is perfectly possible for the elites to lapse into paralysis while the public staggers into nihilism. Indeed, this could be our future.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“life is meant to be lived rather than analyzed,”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technology-driven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened—yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“So I would borrow one more virtue from The Wizard of Oz: courage.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence. That takes me deep into the realm of subjectivity, but there are empirical hints and signs. In Egypt, we saw, the old regime was initially replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the country’s only fair elections to date. The hard reality in the Middle East is that Islamist groups have prospered wherever secular Arab authoritarians have wobbled. In the US, the more demanding faiths — evangelists, Mormons, Hasidics — have grown at the expense of older institutions which too much resemble the earth-bound hierarchies of the Center. The spread of Christianity in China is among today’s best-kept secrets. For the governing classes and articulate elites of the world, this turn to religion is both appalling and incomprehensible — but this is a denial of human nature. If the City of Man becomes a passing shadow, people will turn to the City of God.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority

“In the tectonic depths of social and political life, the balance of power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage. That is the non-utopian thesis of this book.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Politics in modern countries, however, takes place beyond the immediate perception of the public. Political information is thus mediated rather than direct—almost always resembling the Iraq war example rather than the truck I can see with my own eyes. This sets up a large number of variables in the interaction between an individual, the mediator, and the information.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“No matter what I believe to be true, there always seems to be another side to the question. If you were to put me to the torture, I’d probably confess that this is my analytic ideal: to consider the question from as many relevant perspectives as the mind can hold.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Under the perilous conditions of the Fifth Wave, governments cling more than they rule.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“What happens when the mediators lose their legitimacy—when the shared stories that hold us together are depleted of their binding force? That’s easy to answer. Look around: we happen. The mirror in which we used to find ourselves faithfully reflected in the world has shattered. The great narratives are fracturing into shards. What passes for authority is devolving to the political war-band and the online mob—that is, to the shock troops of populism, left and right. Deprived of a legitimate authority to interpret events and settle factual disputes, we fly apart from each other—or rather, we flee into our own heads, into a subjectivized existence. We assume ornate and exotic identities, and bear them in the manner of those enormous wigs once worn at Versailles. Here, I believe, is the source of that feeling of unreality or post-truth so prevalent today. Having lost faith in authority, the public has migrated to the broken pieces of the old narratives and explanations: shards of reality that deny the truth of all the others and often find them incomprehensible.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“the Fifth Wave of information—has ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“My thesis holds that a revolution in the nature and content of communication—the Fifth Wave of information—has ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age. For this to be the case, I need to show how the perturbing agent, information, can influence power arrangements. Information must be seen to have real-life effects, and those effects must be meaningful enough to account for a crisis of authority. A century of research on media and information effects has delivered confusing if not contradictory findings. The problem for the analyst is again one of complexity and nonlinearity. Intuitively, it should be a simple matter to establish the effects of information. I see a truck bearing down on me, for example: that’s information. I move out of the way: that’s behavior caused by information. Or I watch television news of the US invasion of Iraq: that’s information. I form an opinion for or against, and agitate politically accordingly: that’s behavior caused by media information.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The public, I mean to say, has been fully complicit in the failure of government. And the question of alternatives must extend beyond the formal organization of democracy to our expectations of what democratic government can deliver.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The public, in command of the information sphere, has found corruption everywhere at the Center, and has wielded its new persuasive power to attack the legitimacy of every authoritative institution. The criminalization of scientific error was just one clash in this war of the worlds.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Early in the new 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. I can quantify that last statement. Several of us—analysts of events—were transfixed by the magnitude of the new information landscape, and wondered whether anyone had thought to measure it. My friend and colleague, Tony Olcott, came upon (on the web, of course) a study conducted by some very clever researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. In brief, these clever people sought to measure, in data bits, the amount of information produced in 2001 and 2002, and compare the result with the information accumulated from earlier times. Their findings were astonishing. More information was generated in 2001 than in all the previous existence of our species on earth. In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total. And 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001, adding around 23 “exabytes” of new information—roughly the equivalent of 140,000 Library of Congress collections.1 Growth in information had been historically slow and additive. It was now exponential. Poetic minds have tried to conjure a fitting metaphor for this strange transformation. Explosion conveys the violent suddenness of the change. Overload speaks to our dazed mental reaction. Then there are the trivially obvious flood and the most unattractive firehose. But a glimpse at the chart above should suggest to us an apt metaphor. It’s a stupendous wave: a tsunami.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“To borrow Taleb’s terminology, capitalism appears to be “antifragile”: it “regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“actionable reality resides in the personal sphere”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority

“integrity in life and work. A healthy society is one in which such exemplary types draw the public toward them purely by the force of their example.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority

“The public is not, and never can be, identical to the people: this is true in all circumstances, everywhere. Since, on any given question, the public is composed of those self-selected persons interested in the affair, it possesses no legitimate authority whatever, and lacks the structure to enforce any authority that might fall its way. The public has no executive, no law, no jails. It can only express an opinion, in words and in actions—in its own flesh and blood. That was what transpired in Egypt. The roar of public opinion precipitated political change, but it was the Egyptian military, not the public, who compelled Mubarak and Morsi to step down.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Among my concerns in writing this book has been the fate of democracy in the indecisive conflict between the public and authority. From this perspective, OWS’s numbers may have been small, but the message was consequential. It helped tip American politics at the highest level toward pure negation and distrust, eroding the legitimacy of democratic institutions. For this reason alone the Occupy protests belong with the bigger revolts in my investigation of phase change.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Under authoritarian governments, vital communities will tend to coalesce in political opposition as they bump into regime surveillance and control. The regime still controls the apparatus of repression. It can deny service, physically attack, imprison, or even kill H. informaticus—but it can’t silence his message, because this message is constantly amplified and propagated by the opposition community. Since the opposition commands the means of communication and is embedded in the global information sphere, its voice carries beyond the reach of any national government. This was the situation in Egypt before the uprising of January 25, 2011. This is the situation in China today. The wealth and brute strength of the modern state are counterbalanced by the vast communicative powers of the public. Filters are placed on web access, police agents monitor suspect websites, foreign newscasters are blocked, domestic bloggers are harassed and thrown in jail—but every incident which tears away at the legitimacy of the regime is seized on by a rebellious public, and is then broadcast and magnified until criticism goes viral. The tug of war pits hierarchy against network, power against persuasion, government against the governed: under such conditions of alienation, every inch of political space is contested, and turbulence becomes a permanent feature of political life.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Even in the rhetoric of the protests, the connection to the economic crisis was, at best, indirect. Manuel Castells had it right when he wrote that “the movement” was about “everything and nothing at the same time.”47 2011 never fixated on 2008: the impulse was to abolish history entirely, and open up a future purified of cause and effect.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Greenspan chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System—a portentous name for the central bank of the United States, usually called, without affection, “the Fed.” By law, the mission of the Fed was, and still is, to maintain the stability of prices while promoting sustainable growth and full employment. The claims behind these goals possessed what I can only describe as a magical quality. They presupposed powers of prophecy and control wholly detached from economic reality. The chairman of the Fed, like the genie in the Arabian Nights, was expected to tame the whirlwind.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium