Admittedly, it is rather lame to start a piece with a cliché as atrocious as asking whether the glass is half empty, or half full. I will try and make that up to you, if only - and any reader of my blog could not have helped but notice - because we all could use a bit of good news these days. Or in humbler terms: we could use a positive way to look at some of the phenomena that have kept us worried of late. The first instance where I definitely think the glass is half full is having - at last - picked up on this book and ordering and reading it. Of course, I might have wanted to read it some eight or six years sooner (depending on the edition), but those are bygones.
The book I'm talking about is Martin Gurri's The Revolt of the Public. In it, Gurri, a former CIA analyst, describes how the internet (or information's 'fifth wave') is transforming political relations, specifically between 'the center' - as he defines the governmental, institutional, and bureaucratic wielders of authority - and the ad hoc networks that form around issues among internauts - which he terms 'the public' - in societies worldwide. I think you should all read the book. This is not to say that I agree with everything he writes. As a matter of fact, irony has it that on the pages of his gloomy and worrisome analysis, I found grounds to be more optimistic, at last, about the impressions of the past couple of years. Indeed, I perceived a perspective from which the glass seemed half full.
The story Gurri describes is twofold. The first step is directly related to the changes provoked by the internet. The situation ante, that is, where the fourth wave (the epoch of mass media) had delivered us just before, was one in which 'the authorities' (political, scientific, institutional) not only held positions of authority, but also exercised almost total control over information and over the narrative(s) extracted therefrom. As these narratives (or call them myths) provide both an explanation of where we come from and an ideation and justification of where we are going, the control over information (Gurri calls it a monopoly) was what rendered the authorities authoritative. Under impact of the fifth wave, of course, this monopoly was unable to hold. Endless groups of people, networks, have successively started to challenge the information, to lament the authoritative nature, and question the very purpose of the authorities. Whatever the particular topic, the ad hoc networks - the public - are nonchalantly capable of challenging one pretense after another of the center. Whether it regards technical, organizational matters, the myths collocating us along the timeline between past and future, established wisdom, or truth itself: the public manages more and more effectively to pierce through the pompous posturing of the center. While Gurri depicts the public as a negative force, incapable of formulating positive, alternative visions for society and the future, the intriguing insight he offered about the center offered me a first glimmer of hope. Because the center, invested in and imbued with the (hierarchical) organization of society that they symbolize and represent, has proved increasingly capable of transforming itself - of learning - and instead responds to the challenges hurled at them from below by drawing more powers of authority and control towards them. The fact that this means a doubling down on their authoritative pretense gives us a clear idea of the vicious cycle we have all been able to observe so clearly over the past years. So what glass could I possibly be nursing hopefully after the preceding? In the first place, we can acknowledge the pretense was already there, as well as their jealously guarded authority. If what has changed is rather my willingness to question these, I could have expected the inevitable reaction: a closing of ranks, the rooting out of dissent, and the ever more authoritarian rejection of skeptics. If you are willing to question authority, you are a denier, now.
Step two of The Revolt of the Public takes us to a phenomenon we can give many names, but Gurri interprets it as an expression of Taylorism. Frederic Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was a mechanical engineer who developed the discipline of 'scientific management'. He hoped to optimize the productivity of the 'human aspect' of manufacturing. Gurri takes this rationalization and scientific (or rather: mechanistic) approach to matters human as representative of (if not causal to) the industrial approach that has become dominant in Western societies since the beginning of the twentieth century. Mega projects, and megalomaniacal ambitions, he describes, have - abetted by the center's pride - pumped up the pretensions of the rulers, and correspondingly inflated the expectations of the ruled. It is easy to see how this second component of Gurri's analysis conspires with the first to make the collision between center and public more inveterate and unproductive still.
Gurri expressly limits himself to political analysis - and this probably allows him as well to make the case as strongly as he does. I personally do wonder whether a hint of culture and philosophy would not make his argument more profound, and accurate. His critique, post-'rona, reminds me of Mattias Desmet's appraisal of the rationalist approach to man and society that supposedly has emptied our lives of meaning and connection since the Enlightenment. I will not give my own analysis in this place - or at this time - though I will hint at the possibility that rational materialism is not the inevitably and inextricably entwined pair it is often assumed to be. Doesn't what Gurri describes as Taylorism historically coincide with the outright sinister tradition of social engineering, at least where it regards the blindly ambitious plans of those who feel attracted by a role in politics? I would take the matter one step further (or a step deeper down) and wonder whether many of us have not become addicted to, or hypnotized by, the power we have become accustomed to at the tip of our fingers. Technology has given us unbelievable control over our environment. But instead of rendering us calmer and more secure, our toleration for uncertainty has only increased. In an era of unprecedented wealth and safety, our negativity bias has degraded into a type of mental obesity, always ready to sound the alarm, and tragically accustomed to a tap of your finger being capable of changing this channel - reality - too.
Hidden behind this RC-syndrome, we can perceive another ingredient of our tenuous relation with our mind, our understanding. Operating 90 percent of our daily devices is magic, to most of us. The actual mechanics inscrutable to us, and far removed from our own, physical and intuitive experience, we are growing more and more dependent. This dependency does not only exist with respect to our devices, but it certainly obtains with respect to those who at least claim to understand their functioning. And how broadly do we want to define such technical expertise? It is one thing to perfect or repair a fuel engine or a hydraulic pump. But it is quite something else - and here we see Gurri's hypothesis of Taylorism make sense - to tinker with 'food security', 'public health', or monetary supply a.k.a. public credit. Anybody with a shred of common sense - that insistent enemy of arcane knowledge - understands that 'Western' countries have been running a public Ponzi scheme featuring pensions, healthcare, and bailouts as only the more flagrant instances of magical rope-walking tricks. If to be human is to be empathic, we should understand that indebting our children and grandchildren so as to postpone the collapse of the monetary-economic system is a grave injustice. Yet, the perpetrators pretend they are in control, and the people - if not the public - pretend they have faith. You're in the car, your father is driving, and while your parents constantly argue over the exit they may have gotten wrong, whenever you ask, they will bark at you for questioning their wisdom. They know damn well where they're going!
So as the center tries harder and harder to regain the authoritative voice it remembers having had at some point, it becomes less and less capable of recalling the wisdom of trial-and-error and the empirical standard underlying truth. We can ask ourselves how much of this is new. How much nonsense has always been fed to the people, under the guise of science and wisdom? Gurri uses the example of Brazil's new capital erected in the middle of the jungle. But how about valium for kids, or fluoride for all? We could name the invasion of a foreign country or three. The war on drugs, which drugs are still effortlessly winning. Or the abolition of bankruptcy, if you are 'too big to fail'. More specific to a sector would be the opioid crisis. Via illegal marketing methods that bought the collaboration of physicians, pills were pushed to millions with a variety of complaints. Hundreds of thousands died as a result. One has to wonder not simply whether the 'cure' was worse than the disease, but whether this approach to treatment is the dis-ease itself: it is the very mindset that is making us suffer. Expecting a push on a button, or a pill or a shot, to change our condition, instantly.
I am obviously adding my own examples to the ones presented by Gurri. Please do not blame him if I took his ball and ran with it. Where I do not waver from his analysis, though, is in including science and its venerable institutions in the center that tries desperately to retain its authority at the top of the pyramid. One thing the public has done lately is expose the corruption that has destroyed the independence and dependability of academia, that trophy of the third wave of information. Until the recent past, we counted on that institution of the fourth wave, mass media, to do this checking for us, but they have become entangled as well in defending their position against the assault from below. Checks-and-balances - another wisdom from a not-so-distant past - are pushed out from the center, as pressure from the public induces the center to close ranks and define its identity, and its narrative, its myth, in ever stricter terms. It is intriguing that the cliché of the mad scientist no longer seems useful these days. What we get today are Eichmann scientists, scientists too absorbed in dutifully performing the role their narrative attributes to them to ever question either their data or their role.
We could subsume much of the preceding under the classical category of hubris. A difference would be that it was father Daidalos who warned his son Ikaros in vain to refrain from reaching for the divine. It is the parental center that imagines itself too capable to be true, though the filial people would often like to believe. Maybe we can rephrase the myth more effectively for present times. Have we all become accustomed to playing God? The fantasy was never far removed, anyway. Maybe it was God who created us in his image, or perhaps us who created Him in ours. Either way, creation is one of our distinguishing characteristics, considering we do it for way more than just a nest. But maybe understanding what we can and what we cannot (re-)create, what we should and should not try to control, is the challenge we have to face in this age. Reject authority and accept reality. And acknowledge that more materialism does not give us more meaning. The 'expert' center has been preparing a whole series of 'solutions' for us already. Maybe you are wondering whether I am secretly harboring the same dreams, such as Central Bank Digital Currency, happiness without ownership, or even just an insect burger. But even though the 'great reset' is declaredly a rejection of materialism ('consumerism'), its fundamental issue is that it sees us in material terms. If we have seen in the past century what disasters and death 'social engineering' was able to accomplish, they think 'human engineering' will set everything straight.
So what on earth did I find encouraging, or optimistic about The Revolt of the Public? Becoming aware of the incompetence, the hypocrisy, the corruption of our institutions does not mean we are dealing with a new phenomenon. Even if we did not understand before, or if we did not have the means to challenge authority, then now at last we might be capable of changing things for the better. Not through revolutionary zeal and by ambitiously vying for a position in the crooked center ourselves, but by re-dimensioning our own expectations and the center's ambitions. And by leading a meaningful life, whatever that might mean to you. Order your copy and read it now, because while I am sure your takeaway will be quite different from mine, it will help you as well to make sense of some of the fundamental changes that continue to transform our world.
Do you know anyone that has practiced any clinical science of anxiety, anger, etc? Let's collaborate on convincing AGs to spend the recent $50 billion Opioid settlements on PSAs like Eleanor Roosevelt's "Do one thing every day that scares you." (clinical science to reverse our "flaw of excess anxiety"...aka Exaggerating threats.....)... up to 60% of anxiety patients are cured by placebo. Fed by Corporations (Fox,fb, Twitter) abundant fabricated anxiety is cured by the placebo of anger. ... did you miss how corporations accumulate power by exploiting our flaws that are hidden by our egos?😁😁😁😁