After attending a conference, he wrote,
The conference organizers got our predicament right. At every level of contemporary social and political life, we are stuck in the muck of a profound crisis of authority. The mass audience of the twentieth century has fractured like a fallen mirror. An angry and alienated public inhabits the broken shards – and nobody speaks for the whole. The elites who should take the first step into the unknown are paralyzed by doubt and fear. They utter the words science and reason like incantations, claim ownership to Platonic truth, and believe, with astonishing unanimity, that they have been overthrown by a tsunami of lies.
A useful exercise would be to compile a list of stories that reflect badly on the elites. Put the list into two columns: stories that are mostly true; and stories that are mostly false.
It sounds as if the speakers at the conference want to blame their woes on the second column. Gurri and I would say that the first column matters more.
I think that our “elites” in government are trying to do things that the founders never meant for government to do and which government isn’t competent to do. The consequences – intended and otherwise – are bad and people are unhappy. The problem is that most don’t see the problem as one of government overreach. Rather they just think that the wrong people are in charge.
+1. With religion fading from public consciousness (its literal stories fail to suspend disbelief, its more nuanced philosophy gets lost in the packaging) the government steps in to fill the void, lacking the wisdom that evolved over millennia.
Up until late 20th century concentrating power made economic sense — both education and information had been costly. In a farming society you could afford to educate may be 1% of the population. Idle thinking was a luxury because hands-on physical labor was the highest marginally productive pursuit.
With the information age explosion there is zero information/education edge that can be claimed by any narrow group. So naturally the power structure will flatten, with emergent coalitions periodically forming when pooling/mobilization/coordination of resources is needed (war/space?). In this world “elites” and governments look grotesque because of their false claim on having any information edge. Actually some adverse selection / echo chambers probably mean their information edge is negative.
“I think that our “elites” in government are trying to do things that the founders never meant for government to do and which government isn’t competent to do. ”
I think you are right, but a large part of why that happened was unavoidable. We could stick with a much more narrow government footprint, but other forms of institutional rot would inevitably replace much of it, driven by natural economic growth and technological advance.
Modern economic growth pushes for organization. Our capacity to produce goods and services exceeds our capacity to sustain complex political organization.
We are blaming “elites” for this, but we really have just succeeded too much too fast, exposing the fact that we collectively lack the social skills to maintain such a complicated set of relationships. Whoever has ended up in charge has always had the same shortcomings they have now. We can blame it on arrogance, or we can recognize things have just gotten naturally more complex over time.
Unfortunately, it is always easier to see what is wrong than to figure out how to fix it. Gurri is giving off some great insights here, but his only prescription is to listen more. That is always good advice, but that isn’t going to fix things. “Elites” are whoever makes decisions, and someone will always have to, even if the choice is to do nothing.
stories that are mostly true; and stories that are mostly false.
And we can focus on the negative things about elites. There are a lot of issues for Jeff Bezos but seriously think what Amazon has done the last 25 years. In many ways kinda mind boggling if you think 25 years ago Amazon was a corner on the interwebs.
Anyway, I still say the Martin Gurri watch is focused on internet comments not true populism movements. We can discuss the Trump campaign revolt but ~90% of his voters voted Romney 2016 and what has done significantly different than Romney. (Trump keeps trying to renegotiate trade deals that little long term effect on anything.)
Yes, the Primary voters were different from Romney to Trump.
That said the Democratic Primary so far is bunch angry Progressives against Biden who is still leading polls by 15%. (Google RCP democratic primary) And Joe Biden is the least Gurri candidate in decades.
That might well mean that a Joe Biden Presidential bid is doomed.
This sounds like Gurri is engaging in the same extravagant “cosplay of historical conflicts” that he attaches to younger elites. I haven’t read his book; perhaps I could be persuaded by his argument in longer form. To my ears, his argument sounds like lovely prose hinting at an underlying truth that is not fully revealed.
We are definitely living through a transformation; more of a hiccup than a crisis I suspect.
“more of a hiccup than a crisis I suspect.”
Right. People can’t help but defer to ‘elites’, it’s built in to our social-psychological firmware.
Instead, what one is likely to see is both limited in scope, and temporary.
Limited in scope: because of Gell-Mann amnesia. Yes, people will get upset about the failures of elites in fields that touch their lives and interests, and in which they have good levels of experience and knowledge, but then they will “turn the page” and forget all that and fail to learn the broader lesson, and continue to be gullible and swallow elite messages without filters or grains of salt. It doesn’t even take very long for people to even forget about the things they did recognize as failures, as the rapid turnover of the news-cycle moves on to something else, and elites in that field carry on as before with business-as-usual approaches.
Temporary: because the empire strikes back. Gurri writes of permanent, irreversible distruption, as if the elites will just passively accept the situation and will be either unable or unwilling to do anything effective about it. That seems to me to be naive, indulging in “this time is different”-ism to wave away the historical counterexamples, and flying the face of recent observations of active efforts to police and control the media and channels of communication and information dissemination, which seems to me to be pretty obviously the strategy of choice for current elites anywhere in the world. In some places it is more officially state-based, overt, and crude (China, Kazakhstan), and in others it is more unofficial, subtle, and rationalized using terms like safety, inclusion, toxic, hate, violation of terms of service, etc.
I’m willing to bet Gurri (or anyone else) on it, so long as we could somehow reduce the wager to quantifiable and objectively observable criteria. But by 2030 I predict elites will have more control over public opinion (including about elites) than they do now. Again, this will be tough to measure, as one can’t simply rely on something like Pew’s “trust in institutions” measure, which has a strong ‘political tribalism’ component.
I’m not convinced this Populist-vs-Elites struggle is anything other than rhetorical flourish; cosplay in other words.
Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” meme with a “cognitive elite” is true, I think, but it doesn’t need to be framed in some kind of new Huntington-esque Clash-of-Civilizations with social media toting combatants.
We are giving human agency way more causative ooomph than it deserves.
“more of a hiccup than a crisis I suspect.”
It will be interesting to see how the situation in Hong Kong resolves. If the protests spread to mainland China, that’s pretty strong evidence that what Gurri describes is more than a hiccup. If China manages to crack down and restore order, that’s evidence that governments can still impose their rule when it matters.
The Hong Kong protests fit Gurri’s populist uprising theme? OK, I wouldn’t have connected the two. Maybe I need to explore Gurri’s ideas more than the articles and videos I’ve read/viewed.
I’m not so sure that’s compatible with Gurri’s thesis. Gurri says that decentralized social media circumvents the former systems of control by a small number of elite gatekeepers of mass communication of information and formation of public opinion. So the elites were propping up their reputations, and the tool of reputation management started to lose effectiveness, and now reputation has declined.
That argument would work if the performance and trustworthiness of elites were held constant, so something else, and new, were needed to explain the change in reputation.
But if the performance and trustworthiness of elites also declined at the same time – “stories that reflect badly on elites” – then why ever bother with a social media explanation? Maybe they have a bad reputation because they deserve it. And maybe the direction of causality is reversed, that is, they don’t have a bad reputation because of social media, but the bad performance is newsworthy and discourse-worthy, and so it would tend to be what people would be talking about in any format, and it just so happens a lot of discourse has moved onto the internet.
Obviously “it’s both” is a possible answer, but that still undermines the thesis that the emergence of social media is the main determinative factor.
“Gurri says that decentralized social media circumvents the former systems of control by a small number of elite gatekeepers of mass communication of information and formation of public opinion. So the elites were propping up their reputations, and the tool of reputation management started to lose effectiveness, and now reputation has declined.”
The technological shape of communication as it evolves is largely inherited by each generation of decision makers, and in the US, it is not contained by their priorities. That shape was highly hierarchical in the 20th century due to costs, not the strategies of elites. By definition, anyone running a media resource was an elite, and had a gatekeeper role. They were also large businesses, and were subject to normal market and management competition. As a result, the gatekeepers were subject to meritocratic forces.
Today anyone can inject their opinion, and competitive forces are reduced by the noise. That’s not all bad, but let’s not kid ourselves. The gatekeepers of the 20th century were more accountable to the consequences of their opinions than we see today.
I thought the post sounded familiar:
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
– Charles Bukowski
And also, see Dunning-Kruger effect.
Do you agree with the Bukowski quote?
Are Gurri’s “elite”:
1. intelligent doubters, or
2. overconfident idiots
in your opinion?
I’m not sure if you are expressing an opinion or doing the equivalent of name-dropping with quotes.
Does anyone have such a list? What would be a good example for each column?
To continue my thought…
I read Gurris post. I guess I don’t travel in the same circles as you guys.
*Unnamed “industrial” conference. I guess it could be any of them? Shell Oil’s Beyond Fossil Fuels? Restoring Trust in the Nuclear Power Industry after Fukushima?
*Unnamed elites. He could name them but you already know who they are so why bother. I don’t have a reference. CEO of John Deere? Exxon? Illinois Tool?
*They all believe these five things without question. All of them. 100%. I dont even believe those things and I’m a life-long democrat.
*These elites are, for the most part, elderly, male, and white. They flounder like fish in a dying lake wondering what went wrong. Interesting observation I must say.
*The “Industrial Age” is ending. Nobody knows what takes its place.
Well, for one thing, didn’t the industrial age end in the 70s? Didn’t the information age take its place? Not being a scholar, I am not sure how to interpret this, except it seems Mr. Gurri is starting from a place 40 years in the past. Also, we learned last week,via Tyler Cowen’s links, that most executives in big businss identify as Republicans. I don’t see these guys as confused about which bathroom at they airport they should use. I mean, is anyone confused by this? Anyway…
Here’s a news story that pretty much sets the elites atwitter:
Trump threat to raise Chinese tariffs putting pressure on Fed to cut interest rates again
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-threat-to-raise-chinese-tariffs-putting-pressure-on-fed-to-cut-interest-rates-again-2019-08-02
So…which column do you put this in?