I’m starting to think Sean Illing of Vox is going to be a COTTonLINE favorite interviewer of people with important ideas. Today he talks with Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public. Some key Gurri quotes:
What we have is this collision between a public that is in repudiation mode and these elites who have lost control to the degree that they can’t hoist (sic) these utopian promises upon us anymore because no one believes it, but they’re still acting like zombie elites in zombie institutions. They still have power. They can still take us to war. They can still throw the police out there, and the police could shoot us, but they have no authority or legitimacy.
When you analyze the institutions that we have inherited from the 20th century, you find that they are very top-down, like pyramids. And the legitimacy of that model absolutely depends on having a semi-monopoly over information in every domain, which they had in the 20th century.
There was a shining moment when we all had truth. (snip) If truth is really a function of authority, and if in the 20th century these institutions really had authority, then we did have something like truth.
Then came the Internet and the elites lost control of the narrative. Like so many, Gurri is better at describing the problem than at prescribing a “cure” or fix for that problem. That said, his problem description is pretty good. We’ll likely have to muddle through to some sort of solution not yet visible from here.
