Why it's become harder to keep promises
A framework to understand what's going on.
We’ve broken of our old mass-produced shell. But people aren’t used to asking questions. There’s no perception of limits, no correct interpretation of errors. Mistakes are seen as faults that deserve severe punishment.
This generates an ideal in which it’s not possible for a problem to exist before a solution.
If the solution isn’t there: “Someone is keeping it hidden...” (conspiracies); “Someone wasn’t able to...” (incompetence); “Someone has to pay for it...” (blame)—take your pick.
No one ever thinks: “Someone is looking for it.”
If we could say this of science—the discipline we push the young towards, a field deemed ‘rigorous’ in the current narrative—imagine the mess we make of communication and governance.
Conspiracies, incompetence (perceived or real), and blame have a secondary effect. They force elites in government and companies to up their game. Hence streams of words expended on promises, many impossible to keep.
Martin Gurri saw it coming—the chaos and the pointing of fingers. Like an unpopular weather forecaster, he saw the harbingers of turbulence. We favor information networks and hubs over hierarchical authority and experts.
However these forces may disrupt, to find a solution we need to see the problem.
Is someone looking for it?
Whether we like it or not, politics is an important factor in our lives. And we’re at an impasse. The authority and legitimacy of the institutions and the elites running them have eroded. The public is angry, dissatisfied, and disillusioned.
People in political parties no longer trust anyone in the other party; they often don’t trust people in their own. We’ve lost faith in elites and public institutions. But networks can’t govern a nation, state, or even a region.
Because we’re endlessly fractured and dispersed. It’s a problem that may take generations to solve. However, we won’t get there unless we understand what’s going on and acknowledge the need for ‘someone who’s working on it.’
The public is us—the people who read books, manage businesses, plow farms, drive trucks, work in hospitals, teach, sell cars, run factories, belong to and lead unions, and do a million other jobs like yours.
The age of information has trained us to mistrust authority, seek people of like minds in echo chambers, and (by example) taught us to think of opposing views as those of the enemy. Can we separate the rhetoric from behavior?
Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst whose work was to survey the global information landscape. A decade ago he noticed a trend, a pattern that rose around the run of the century—an explosion of information, and a concurrent spike in political instability.
He saw Occupy Wall Street, Egypt’s Tahrir square, the Arab Spring, the Indignados movement in Spain, Obama, the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, the Tent Protests in Israel, Brexit, and the rise of populism and wondered if these uprisings were isolated incidents or part of a larger trend.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead
Clay Shirky had seen how groups were using the Internet to connect with like-minded people in 2009. Here Comes Everybody was the point of view of a techno-optimist who understood the value of collaboration. (I’ll include a case study later in this essay.)
Gurri’s analysis points to the issue—governments have lost the ability to dictate the stories a society tells about itself. For example, I could use his thesis to explain the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020.
Despite a complete lack of evidence, millions of Americans believed that the presidential election was stolen. When the messenger has no credibility, the data has no value. Confusion and anarchy come from an overabundance of information.
In The Revolt of the Public (2014), Gurri points to an increase in nihilism1, the mindset that ‘everything is fucked up so I might as well destroy it all.’ Maybe he overstates the problem. But he’s someone who saw the problem and looked for a potential solution.
What’s part of the public’s disenchantment is the perception that institutions are failing and misleading citizens, inequality is deepening, people are dying of despair, and this generation is doing materially worse than previous ones.
We may have recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, but “the public has not recovered from the shock of watching supposed experts and politicians, the people who posed as the wise pilots of our prosperity, sound and act totally clueless while the economy burned.”
What’s growing is the gap in the fulfillment of expectations. We get a lot of ‘parole, parole, parole’ (words, words, words), as the Italian song says, that don’t seem to cure our perception. Hence the negation (e.g., cancel culture) and nihilism.
A note on books
Some books resonate emotionally—fiction is in this camp. Others shine a light on a complex issue. And then there are books that provoke, they generate ideas we can’t help mulling over.
Gurri’s book is in this third category. While its content does not make for an easy read, its form—the hard cover with pages that lay flat—is very reader-friendly. I don’t have to use paperweights to hold it open as I take notes.
We drown in data when all we want is meaning
I believe the value of any one book is in its elaboration. And to elaborate, it’s useful to cross-reference other materials and data. However, before I move onto discussion of a framework, I wanted to review some key points Gurri makes.