Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public

Intellectual Bootcamp

I’ve written about Martin Gurri and The Revolt of the Public many times here. The book, for me, was a kind of cheat code to the whole period from, say, 2014-2024, when just about everything that happened seemed to map onto the conceptual frame that Gurri had developed.

The really important point with Gurri, as I see it, is the view of history encompassed in his idea of the ‘five waves.’ The waves are 1.the development of writing; 2.the development of the alphabet; 3.the printing press; 4.mass media 5.digital communications. Each affects the flow of information in a different way and produces a different balance of power between the ‘center’ and ‘the border.’ If writing moved power towards priestly castes connected with hierarchical states, and the legacy of the alphabet is with us in many of our holy books, the printing press deeply democratized the flow of information — with the Protestant Reformation, in particular, to be understood as a function of the shift in the balance of power as bestowed by the printing press, while, to some extent, the American and French Revolutions fit the same mold. The age of mass media reversed that direction, giving us an “I-talk-you-listen model of organizing humanity.” That manifested with the mass distribution of daily newspapers in the 19th century but then far more so with radio, cinema, and television. In all forms, the exchange worked basically the same way. A capitalist investment was needed to develop the expensive infrastructure for a radio or television station. In the process of exchange, the viewing public was reduced to an “inert mass” — there was no possibility, even, of throwing tomatoes at the stage as in an older theater production; the only viable response was to mutter at the screen if you didn’t like something. That dynamic — “freedom of the press for those who can afford a printing press” — is the one we’ve all grown up with and have deeply internalized. Gurri’s thesis is that, starting around the early 2000s, that model started to disintegrate and we find ourselves in the white waters of “the fifth wave.”

Gurri reached his conclusion in a just-so-story kind of way. He was an analyst in the wing of the CIA that summarizes media communications around the world and he started to find that it was impossible to do his job. Blogs and comments had so metastasized that a stately job like media analysis was now unrecognizable. This was already a truism in the 2000s, but the tendency was to dismiss the new developments as a lot of noise surrounding a, basically, ironclad structure. Gurri was prescient enough to realize that the structure itself was deeply changing — the economically light-footed, two-way, disaggregated communication of the web bore little resemblance to the expensive, top-down structure of mass media, and, since the flow of information is the chief regulator of societies, that shift announced the movement into a fundamentally different era. “We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world, which is not yet born,” Gurri writes. “Given the character of the forces of change we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture.”

Gurri published The Revolt of the Public in 2014. He was largely thinking about 2011 as a hinge year — the year of the Arab Spring, of Occupy Wall Street, etc. “2011 marked the moment when the public first equalized the asymmetry in power with government,” he writes. What he means is that digital communication turbocharged the resources of the ‘public’ — aka ‘the border’ — giving the public a new ability both to organize and to critique and dismantle the legitimacy of the central authorities. The Revolt of the Public was self-published and received little attention at the time. It reached wider awareness after 2016 when Trump seemed to defy all known laws of politics, and Gurri’s theory of the shifting relationship between the public and authority was, by far and away, the best-fit explanation for what was going on. Essentially, all the other developments of the 2010s and early 2020s could be explained through a quick glance at The Revolt of the Public. #MeToo, for instance, was textbook Gurri — the public having a new weapon in the form of Twitter threads by which it was possible to bypass the legal system and editorial scrutiny and to bring down a variety of powerful men who believed themselves safe from repercussions as per the structure of the old system. Events like Covid and the Biden reelection campaign were constructed around a fragile center taking dominant control of its airwaves but unable to snuff out critique as it emerged on the margins and spread from there. The spectacle of Biden at the 2024 debate was like the distillation of everything that Gurri had been saying about political dynamics in the 21st century. “Democratic life has been reduced to the exhibition and contemplation of the emperor’s naughty bits,” he wrote.

If we accept Gurri’s premise of the tectonic importance of information in regulating the balance between public and authority, we are left with a view of history that is very far from the linear advance of scientific progress. “History, I was assured, advances in a stately procession,” Gurri writes of his education. “I now believe this is flat wrong.” History, in his model, occurs through a series of ruptures, or mutations. A new communicative technology essentially obviates all the dynamics of a previous era, producing a set of fresh power relations. In an evocative passage, Gurri discusses the micro cassettes and floppy disks “moldering in the corners of our attics.” He writes: “Old formats are incompatible with new ones — a very good word. Impermanence means nothing more than the incompatibility of the present with even the recent past.”

Gurri is often very pessimistic — he tends to assume that the public, in its digital form, is incapable of anything other than negation — but that idea of “the new world, which is not yet born” has haunted me and been something like a mantra for the last few years. Something like Substack seemed like the manifestation of that — new tools for the public to be able to communicate with itself, to do so cheaply and without passing through the credentialing processes of the center. To me that represented an equivalent to Wordsworth’s “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” — the sense of a whole emergent way of being, which was able to execute an end run around the entirety of the hierarchical, exclusionary mass media model.

In the last couple of years, though, I’ve started to question that premise. I was aware that I was being more optimistic than Gurri, but I also started drinking the more bitter medicine of Andrey Mir. Mir views himself as Gurri’s “doppelgänger” and is deeply indebted to Gurri’s analysis, but they part company over the question of whether the public’s revolt is self-renewing. Gurri seems to take it for granted that it is — that, at any rate, it is extraordinarily difficult for the center to constructively operate when it is constantly subject to the scrutiny of the public. Mir is more directly in line with Marshall McLuhan and the discipline of media ecology. He argues, through a quasi-scientific analysis, that “media ecology says that the revolt of the public is over and the restoration of institutional power is well underway.” Mir makes four arguments to support his point. The most arresting is that there simply isn’t really fuel for the public to revolt; everybody is already online, there are no new users, and so we are essentially in a zero-sum game where power tends to get distributed much as it always has. The center, meanwhile, has developed new tools in its restoration — algorithmic control over platforms and then AI, all of which (at least in this current, expensive iteration of AI) serve to consolidate control and to marginalize the disgruntlement of the public. That matches an intuitive sense I’ve had, that the wind has gone out of the sails of the public. Somehow, everybody seems to have lost interest in the kind of agitation that was such a feature of the 2010s and that seemed to crest with the pandemic. And the border shows no greater signs of cohering than it did in the abortive efforts towards new social forms in Occupy and the Arab Spring. But a restoration of the center challenges only my own optimism, not necessarily Gurri’s framing. “We may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture,” he writes. That means all sorts of twists and turns, attack and defense, moments when the establishment seems to be firmly in charge and moments when it isn’t, but fundamentally we are in a different structure where the communicative tools of the industrial era are fading out of relevance and the new digital technologies take root.