#martin gurri

[landrysg]

... Mediated government is procedural business: As liberalism in action, it explicitly rejects any claims to cosmic significance. …The arrangement made for an occasional collision and explosion worked surprisingly well for over a century. Catholics put up with Protestants, Christians with atheists, farmers with factory hands, hippies with suits, in that dynamic cluster of American aspiration we call the pursuit of happiness. Religion was only part of it. … For reasons too complex to delve into here, the sources of meaning and spirituality began to wither and die. … A nation of joiners and volunteers first dissolved into a passive TV audience—and finally blew apart, with a rude noise, among the volatile conflicts of the web. Human nature hasn’t changed, however. We still crave justification. … The private sphere, formerly the realm of meaning, is now a wasteland haunted by accusing phantoms. The pursuit of happiness has come to feel like a panicked flight to nowhere. The pathology has spilled over into politics. Hungry for a loftier state of being, many somehow imagine they have found it in bashing the dull machinery of representational government. These seekers have mistaken Leviathan for God, the will to power for the state of grace—and, by exalting political action almost literally to heaven, they have succumbed to what might be called the transcendental temptation. Only politics, they believe, can save the earth. Only politics can establish social justice. Only politics can preserve the “normies” from the pedophiles who run the country. As it happens, they are demanding personal validation from an institution explicitly designed not to provide it. Let me suggest a medical name for this cognitive disorder: “Greta Thunberg Syndrome.” … As a cursory glance at 20th-century history should teach us, the transcendental temptation is indistinguishable from the totalitarian one.

-- Martin Gurri

[continuations]

Moderation in Social Networks

First Pavel Durov, the co-founder and CEO of Telegram, was arrested in France, in part due to a failure to comply with moderation requests by the French government. Now we have Brazil banning X/Twitter from the country entirely, also claiming a failure to moderate.

How much moderation should there be on social networks? What are the mechanisms for moderation? Who should be liable for what?

The dialog on answering these questions about moderation is broken because the most powerful actors are motivated primarily by their own interests.

Politicians and governments want to gain back control of the narrative. As Martin Gurri analyzed so well in Revolt of the Public, they resent their loss of the ability to shape public opinion. Like many elites they feel that they know what's right and treat the people as a stupid “basket of deplorables.”

Platform owners want to control the user experience to maximize profits. They want to be protected from liability and fail to acknowledge the extraordinary impact of features such as trending topics, recommended accounts, and timeline/feed selection on people's lives and on societies.

The dialog is also made hard by a lack of imagination that keeps us trapped in incremental changes. Too many people seem to believe that what we have today is more or less the best we will get. That has us bogged down in a trench war of incremental proposals. Big and bold proposals are quickly dismissed as unrealistic.

Finally the dialog is complicated by deep confusions around freedom of speech. These arise from ignoring, possibly willfully, the reasons for and implications of freedom of speech for individuals and societies.

In keeping with my preference for a first principles approach I am going to start with the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech and then propose and evaluate concrete regulatory ideas based on those.

We can approach freedom of speech as a fundamental human right. I am human, I have a voice, therefore I have a right to speak.

We can also approach freedom of speech as an instrument for progress. Incumbents in power, whether companies, governments, or religions, don’t like change. Censoring speech keeps new ideas down. The result of suppressed speech is stasis, which ultimately results in decline  because there are always problems that need to be solved (such as being in a low energy trap).

But both approaches also imply some limits to free speech. 

You cannot use your right to speech to take away the human rights of someone else, for example by calling for their murder.

Society must avoid chaos, such as runaway criminality, massive riots, or in the extreme civil war. Chaos also impedes progress because it destroys the physical, social, and intellectual means of progress (from eroding trust to damaging physical infrastructure).

With these underpinnings we are looking for policies on moderation in social networks that honor a fundamental right but recognize its limitations and help keep society on a path of progress between stasis and chaos. My own proposals for how to accomplish this are bold because I don’t believe that incremental changes will be sufficient. The following applies to open social networks such as X/Twitter. A semi-closed social network such as Telegram where most of the activity takes place in invite-only groups poses additional challenges (I plan to write about this in a follow-up post).

First, banning human network participants entirely should be hard for a network operator and even for government. This follows from the fundamental human rights perspective. It is the modern version of ostracism, but unlike banishing someone from a single city it potentially excludes them from a global discourse. Banning a human user should either require a court order or be the result of a “Community Notes” type system (obviously to make this possible we need some kind of “proof of humanity” system which we will need in any case for lots of other things, such as online government services, and a “proof of citizenship” could be a good start on this – if properly implemented this will support pseudonymous accounts).

Second, networks must provide extensive tools for facilitating moderation by participants. This includes providing full API access to allow third party clients, support for account identity and post authorship assertions through digital signatures to minimize impersonation, and implement at least one “Community Notes” like system for attaching information to content. All of this is to enable as much decentralized avoidance of chaos, starting with maintaining a high level of trust in the source and quality of content.

Third, clients must not display content if that content has been found to violate a law either through a “Community Notes” process or by a court. This should also allow for injunctive relief if that has been ordered by a court. Clients must, however, display a placeholder where that content would have been, with a link to the reason (ideally the decision) on the basis of which it was removed. This will show the extent to which court-ordered content removal is taking place.

What about liability? Social networks and third-party clients that meet the above criteria should not be liable for the content of posts. Neither government nor participants should be able to sue a compliant operator over content.

Social networks should, however, be liable for their owned and operated recommender algorithms, such as trending topics, recommended accounts, algorithmic feeds, etc. Until recently social networks were successfully claiming in court that their algorithms are covered by Section 230, which I believe was an overly broad reading of the law. It is interesting to see that a court just decided that TikTok is liable for suggestions surfaced by its algorithm to a young girl that resulted in her death. I have an idea around viewpoint diversity that should provide a safe harbor and will write about that in a separate post (related to my ideas around an "opposing view" reader and also some of the ways in which Community Notes works).

Getting the question of moderation on social networks right is of utmost importance to preserving progress while avoiding chaos. For those who have been following the development of new decentralized social networks, such as Farcaster and Nostr some of the ideas above will look familiar. The US should be a global leader here given our long history of extensive freedom of speech.

[adiraroyalbattleship]

Martin Gurri: "There's No Going Back to Normal"

[iquote]

“Life is meant to be lived rather than analyzed.”

- Martin Gurri

[meanypunches]

Below is my review of a political book which normally I would not include here except that it reflects cultural anxieties that are also often discussed in the context of horror films. Scholarship indicates the 60s as a turning point away from classic horror or ‘secure’ narrative forms and towards a ‘paranoid’ or ‘insecure’ style. Though some outliers are earlier, circa 1968 is a big year for this shift. A lot was happening politically too. The author of this book Revolt of the Public, Mr. Martin Gurri, is a former ‘open-source’ analyst for the CIA, an agency that operates in the ‘dark wood’ as I like to think of it, a type of ‘unmarked’ or obscured space, i.e. a space of counterintelligence (disinformation) and even at times covert violence. His book aims to describe how “new information technologies . . . shattered the categories we inherited from the industrial age”. (p. 285) He describes this as a ‘phase change’ circa 2011 that includes the ‘Arab Spring’ and other more democratic upheavals. In context of horror films, I call out Cabin in the Woods (Lionsgate 2011), which I would say reflects this same cultural (political) paranoia and insecurity in narrative (folkloric) form. It is also interesting to me in context of the review below that the filmed version of John le Carré’s book Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and starring Gary Oldman also was released in 2011. The film and the book articulate cultural anxieties similar to those expressed in Mr. Gurri’s book, but dating back to the Cold War. In many ways our present concerns about Chinese and/or Russian influence operations and penetration of our elites within our governing institutions mirror Cold War anxieties about “moles” and communist infiltration. Horror films perhaps are a ‘safe’ space to articulate ideas like ‘society should crumble’. When too many political actors talk like this, it is perhaps when real fear has taken hold. It remains to be observed how many such operators merely talk the talk, and how many walk the walk…

My review of Revolt of the Public, by Martin Gurri

There are moments reading this description of post-2008 political anxieties that it resembles a horror show, but how much of this is ‘horror’ and how much is ‘show’’? Certainly the realities of the ISIS terror-state were horrific enough as detailed in the last chapter added to the revised edition of this work first published in 2014. Dismantling the ISIS ‘caliphate’ is the rare example of an institutional or systemic success cited by the author and here I would have to agree the global system scored a win. Gurri’s discussion of Spain circa 2011 however offers more surreal than real horrors from the political system, particularly the bit about the “silent scream”. To illustrate, I’ll mention in passing that according to social systems theory, communication along with the attendant information (and redundancy) is essentially ‘society’, otherwise described as differentiated (modern) systems of communication such as law, politics, economy, art, science, religion etc. With the Spanish example you can clearly see the strong differentiation of the political system (which includes the street protests) from the legal system (which would include the specific mechanisms of casting and counting votes). The street may engage in a silent scream, but blank votes aren’t counted. (see pp. 105-06) Still the message here of the silent scream, like so many dystopian postmodern horror films circa 2011 is that ‘society needs to crumble.’ Yes, in the heady atmosphere of post-Trump paranoia, it is difficult to deny the insecurities of political communication have been amplified by the internet, yet historically and socially these insecurities are nothing new; horror films dropped the classical or ‘secure’ narrative form in favor of the ‘postmodern’, insecure or paranoid style around 1968. Gurri skates over history like thin ice.

Looking back from the present, his ‘phase change’ of 2011 seems light years away. He does talk about this modern idea of “impermanence” too. Though I find Gurri’s use of ‘industrial age’ as a broad category to be an oversimplification, on this perhaps the author and I might agree, that books are in many ways relics from the previous age, whatever you want to call it. Perhaps so are book lovers. This last realization I find incredibly depressing and it almost makes me want to stop writing.

It reminds me of another book I read about how we are leaving behind logos and moving to the age of ‘iconos’ where the image replaces the word. The idea of ‘iconos’ was presented in such a hyper-inflationary and conspiracy-theory-driven frame I found it reprehensible. Gurri too discusses the modern power of the image, and his book here is almost reasonable in comparison. Still perhaps both relics prophetically describe the future to which we are headed, a Zardoz-type-world as I’ve imagined at times, with high tech enclaves (center) surrounded by barbarians (border) warring over the scraps. The author’s borrowed idea about center/border distinction is accurate enough. ‘Waiting for the barbarians’ also springs to mind.

Horror films use zombies to describe this feeling, and Gurri is not afraid to use that analogy for traditional institutions such as the section titled ‘Zombie Democracy, Mass Extinction Horror Show’. (p. 239) But again, is this reality, or ‘only a movie’, i.e. merely an (insecure or even paranoid) observation from the perspective of the political system? The difference from my understanding is that center/border describes system operations *within* closed systems of communication, aka ‘society’. One could say ‘inside/outside’ or ‘power/opposition’. Niklas Luhmann called this also ‘inclusion/exclusion’.

Certainly some well-fed individuals from the ‘center’, generally fanatics but also some politicians, imagine they are excluded from modern society in the sense that ordinary rules do not apply to them. I’m sure which politicians you see in this light may depend on your partisan alignment. I would say this is a universal human weakness, and also a natural feeling at times given the society/individual distinction so prominent in modern life. Certainly fanatics may be everyday people, even “you and me” as Gurri reminds the reader, (p. 236) but one need merely read Dostoevsky or look at Ira Einhorn (‘the Unicorn Killer’), Baader-Meinhof or Charlie Manson’s Family to see that modern society has never had a shortage of well-fed fanatical nihilists who cling to scraps of empty rhetoric and aim to make their mark on society regardless of the cost. Perhaps Gurri’s real score here is that the communicative range of fanatics may have been limited due to prior media technologies and forms. The Unabomber certainly achieved worldwide distribution of his message, but only after a letter bombing campaign that lasted decades.

Has Gurri “gone native” (p. 25) and become convinced that we have to destroy the global village to save it?! Not entirely. Still in many ways this book to me resembles a kind of Malleus Maleficarum for the Internet age, an excuse for governments to hunt down the new witchcraft aka ‘nihilists’ (i.e. potential ‘domestic terrorists’) of all sorts. But do governments need an excuse?

Gurri appears less terrified of authoritarian/totalitarian governments like China and more terrified at the thought of uncertainty, which he calls “a splinter of doubt festering in all we know, a radical disillusionment with the institutions of settled truth”. (p. 179) This reminds me of a movie set during the Cold War and based on one of John le Carré’s books where the spymaster describes the weakness of his arch nemesis as being that the man is a ‘fanatic’ and ‘the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt’. Thus spies and other risk managers are supposed to be comfortable with uncertainty and also comfortable with the imperfections of their own system, I suppose is a message at least suggested by le Carré, whose (Western) heroes usually wear their uncertainty and doubt on their sleeves. Did Gurri not learn such a lesson during his time at the CIA? My idea here is that Gurri may be conflating increasing complexity/information with instability/uncertainty. Though they often resemble each other, these are distinct from the perspective of the system itself (as opposed to individuals observing it).

Gurri has also become hung up on the idea of ‘perfection’ as an ‘industrial’ age idea, when I see this mostly as a straw man. The architects of the Cold War, aside perhaps from a few fanatics (Sidney Gottlieb springs to mind), knew they were playing an imperfect game. Ironically for a former CIA man, though he discusses the Cold War he refuses to embrace that conflict as a major success of government (or at least the democratic, ‘open’ segment of global society), and as a situation where perfection was not the aim but rather merely ‘containment’. The Space Race too is skipped over in Gurri’s analysis of institutional failure/success. He does accurately describe the “iron triangle of government, the universities, and the corporate world [that] controls the careers of individual scientists” in contrast to the earlier heroic yet modern age when Einstein was (at least portrayed as) a “lonely and disinterested seeker after truth”. (p. 148) Yet Thomas Pynchon has been writing about this folklore since at least 1966 the last I checked. Certainly in “JFK’s time, the public and the elites averted their gaze from the emperor’s nakedness”, (p. 213) but this did not hold true so much for the next President, Lyndon Johnson—so why does Gurri present such a myopic view of historical time?

Perhaps Gurri is the one expecting too much perfection from society, and history—it seems a blind spot in his analysis. From the individual perspective (the ‘personal’ that Gurri wants to embrace), society feels unstable now, with this I agree. The internet and information (even ‘disinformation’ or perhaps counterintelligence) had a hand in this instability, yes. The author makes the solid point that “‘catalyst’ rather than ‘cause’” is the emphasis here as “even the simplest human events constitute complex systems ruled by nonlinearities. Within such systems, teasing out a single episode and proclaiming it the prime mover makes as much sense as picking a grain of sand and calling it ‘the beach.’” (p. 43) Yes! If only we could get more academics and politicians to agree that society is not a trivial machine! Systems theory and, in tandem, modern risk theory suggest that (social) grains of sand pile up until (social) accidents happen! This cuts into all manner of forecasting and attempts at control or steering of society.

Who can count all these grains of sand?! The author understands this, yet has a strange notion that ‘opposition’ post-Internet is somehow special merely because it is louder. “To stand for change now means to be anti-system, anti-program, anti-ideolology[sic].” Quite a typo, “-lology” like LOL. (p. 67) In many ways this makes no sense from a scientific (or historical) perspective, but then again science is an authoritative structure, isn’t it? Does the author even recall punk rock, surrealism, dada or (dare I mention it) the chaos of the late 60s and early 70s? Yes many of these examples are mostly from the art system, but look at those time periods and there is some structural coupling with the political system as well. The “middle-class hipster”, intellectual and elite types have always been the most easily seduced by radical nonsense, (p. 116) but so too can even sophisticated political commentary conflate “behavior” with “rhetoric”. (p. 312)

Gurri claims he wrote the first edition of this book to describe how “new information technologies . . . had shattered the categories we inherited from the industrial age”. (p. 285) I’ve already described my difficulty with his broad brush category of ‘industrial’, but more importantly, does his analysis merely show that individuals often perceive highly complex social systems as unstable or in myopic ways that can lead to tragic results? Any cybernetician from the 1970s I think would agree. A systems theorist might say that to the psychic system ‘the unmarked space becomes indistinguishable from the overmarked space’. Since over a century ago, data initially collected by Yerkes-Dodson supports this idea.

I do agree with Gurri that governments may seek to control information more severely as a consequence of social variety powered by social media. Gurri seems to think they cannot do this successfully, but I find that idea naive. Court cases on the First Amendment are ongoing as I write and polls show a large percentage of ‘the public’ would clamp down on speech if they could. Globally at least, free speech is generally disfavored. Post-Trump, it is difficult to argue against the idea that the ‘center’ in many ways has been displaced, or perhaps in a worst case scenario could collapse, i.e. become undifferentiated from other systems as politics aggressively asserts itself across rival systems. As it is now, everyone wants to sit at the ‘border’ or in ‘opposition’ to ‘power’, at least rhetorically, and there’s the difficulty.

Even if the volume of ‘border’ rhetoric is much louder now, it remains to be seen how much of this is only talk. The ‘center’ (‘power’) may continue its operations (coding) functionally despite all the wild talk of dissolution, as in the case of Spain 2011 and even Trump ultimately. As Gurri notes, citing Jonathan Haidt no less, “the elites have chosen not to question their own worldview”. (p. 324) It remains to be seen whether this ‘center’ will retreat entirely into the shadows of the corrupt and the criminal, who are able to toss critics out of hotel room windows.

Though Gurri does also favor democratic forms, I don’t think governments like China and Russia are as vulnerable to these same social forces. Despite its outward skin of modernization, China as I know it remains at its heart (center?) essentially a premodern (in the sense of ‘undifferentiated’) or even totalitarian segment of the global system, like North Korea but with a smear of lipstick (or is that blood?) across its zombie face. Kissinger I think still has lipstick traces on his collar from the 70s. The Chinese to my mind merely exchanged the imperial labels for communist ones. I would say Russian history since 1917 too has also been essentially driven by dynastic pretensions, regardless of the Marxist rhetoric. Gurri seems to think the Chinese elite have abandoned Marxism (p. 303), but hardly for democratic liberalism I would say. True, I am no expert, at least on China or Russia. If not for the internet, my amateur review of this book would likely never exist aside from in my own notes. Still, Gurri is willing to admit he is not a fortune teller. My take is we are all now not ‘nihilists’ (or zombies), but amateurs playing at the game called ‘Modern Society’. Certainly the stakes can be much higher than any game. If that is not what Gurri means to say, okay, but what a pretty cover on this book (the revised edition), worth having in any amateur’s library.

[podlater]

Watch "Martin Gurri: "There's No Going Back to Normal"" on YouTube

[arcticdementor]

Martin Gurri's The Revolt Of The Public is from 2014, which means you might as well read the Epic of Gilgamesh. It has a second-edition-update-chapter from 2017, which might as well be Beowulf. The book is about how social-media-connected masses are revolting against elites, but the revolt has moved forward so quickly that a lot of what Gurri considers wild speculation is now obvious fact. I picked up the book on its "accurately predicted the present moment" cred, but it predicted the present moment so accurately that it's barely worth reading anymore. It might as well just say "open your eyes and look around".

…

In conclusion, 2011 was a weird year.

Gurri argues all of this was connected, and all of it was a sharp break from what came before. These movements were essentially leaderless. Some had charismatic spokespeople, like Daphni Leef in Israel or Tahrir-Square-Facebook-page-admin Wael Ghonim in Egypt, but these people were at best the trigger that caused a viral movement to coalesce out of nothing. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington, he built an alliance of various civil rights groups, unions, churches, and other large organizations who could turn out their members. He planned the agenda, got funding, ran through an official program of speakers, met with politicians, told them the legislation they wanted, then went home. The protests of 2011 were nothing like that. They were just a bunch of people who read about protests on Twitter and decided to show up.

Also, they were mostly well-off. Gurri hammers this in again and again. Daphni Leef had just graduated from film school, hardly the sort of thing that puts her among the wretched of the earth. All of these movements were mostly their respective countries' upper-middle classes; well-connected, web-savvy during an age when that meant something. Mostly young, mostly university-educated, mostly part of their countries' most privileged ethnic groups. Not the kind of people you usually see taking to the streets or building tent cities.

Some of the protests were more socialist and anarchist than others, but none were successfully captured by establishment strains of Marxism or existing movements. Many successfully combined conservative and liberal elements. Gurri calls them nihilists. They believed that the existing order was entirely rotten, that everyone involved was corrupt and irredeemable, and that some sort of apocalyptic transformation was needed. All existing institutions were illegitimate, everyone needed to be kicked out, that kind of thing. But so few specifics that socialists and reactionaries could march under the same banner, with no need to agree on anything besides "not this".

…

Gurri isn't shy about his contempt for this. Not only were these some of the most privileged people in their respective countries, but (despite the legitimately-sucky 2008 recession), they were living during a time of unprecedented plenty. In Spain, the previous forty years had seen the fall of a military dictatorship, its replacement with a liberal democracy, and a quintupling of GDP per capita from $6000 to $32000 a year - "in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US". The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of. They had cradle-to-grave free health care, university educations, and they were near the top of their society's class pyramids. Yet they were convinced, utterly convinced, that this was the most fraudulent and oppressive government in the history of history, and constantly quoting from a manifesto called Time For Outrage!

So what's going on?

Our story begins (says Gurri) in the early 20th century, when governments, drunk on the power of industrialization, sought to remake Society in their own image. This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on. Philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings would lead the way to a new era of gleaming steel towers, where society was managed with the same ease as a gardener pruning a hedgerow.

…

Realistically this was all a sham. Alan Greenspan had no idea how to prevent recessions, scientific progress was slowing down, poverty remained as troubling as ever, and 50% of public school students stubbornly stayed below average. But the media trusted the government, the people trusted the media, and failures got swept under the rug by genteel agreement among friendly elites, while the occasional successes were trumpeted from the rooftops.

There was a very interesting section on JFK’s failure at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy tried to invade Cuba, but the invasion failed very badly, further cementing Castro’s power and pushing him further into the Soviet camp. Representatives of the media met with Kennedy, Kennedy was very nice to them, and they all agreed to push a line of “look, it’s his first time invading a foreign country, he tried his hardest, give him a break.” This seems to have successfully influenced the American public, so much so that Kennedy’s approval rating increased five points, to 83%, after the debacle!

…

In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!

…

Any system that hasn't solved every problem is illegitimate. Solving problems is easy and just requires pressing the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button. Thus the protests. In 2011, enough dry tinder of anger had built up that everywhere in the world erupted into protest simultaneously, all claiming their respective governments were illegitimate. These protests were necessarily vague and leaderless, because any protest-leader would fall victim to the same crisis of authority and legitimacy that national leaders were suffering from. Any attempt to make specific demands would be pilloried because those specific demands wouldn't unilaterally end homelessness or racism or inequality or whatever else. The only stable state was a sort of omni-nihilism that refused to endorse anything.

(I’m reminded of Tanner Greer’s claim that the great question of modernity is not “what can I accomplish?” or “how do I succeed?” but rather “how do I get management to take my side?”)

Gurri calls our current government a kind of "zombie democracy". The institutions of the 20th century - legislatures, universities, newspapers - continue to exist. But they are hollow shells, stripped of all legitimacy. Nobody likes or trusts them. They lurch forward, mimicking the motions they took in life, but no longer able to change or make plans or accomplish new things.

…

How do we escape this equilibrium? Gurri isn't sure. His 2017 afterword says he thinks we're even more in it now than we were in 2014. But he has two suggestions.

First, cultivate your garden. We got into this mess by believing the government could solve every problem. We're learning it can''t. We're not going to get legitimate institutions again until we unwind the overly high expectations produced by High Modernism, and the best way to do that is to stop expecting government to solve all your problems. So cultivate your garden. If you're concerned about obesity, go on a diet, or volunteer at a local urban vegetable garden, or organize a Fun Run in your community, do anything other than start a protest telling the government to end obesity. This is an interesting contrast to eg Just Giving, which I interpret as having the opposite model - if you want to fight obesity, you should work through the democratic system by petitioning the government to do something; trying to figure out a way to fight it on your own would be an undemocratic exercise of raw power. Gurri is recommending that we tear that way of thinking up at the root.

Second, start looking for a new set of elites who can achieve legitimacy. These will have to be genuinely decent and humble people - Gurri gives the example of George Washington. They won't claim to be able to solve everything. They won't claim the scientific-administrative mantle of High Modernism. They'll just be good honorable people who will try to govern wisely for the common good. Haha, yeah right.

…

Gurri divides the world between the Center and the Border. He thinks the Center - politicians, experts, journalists, officials - will be in a constant retreat, and the Border - bloggers, protesters, and randos - on a constant advance. His thesis got a boost when Brexit and Trump - both Border positions - crushed and embarrassed their respective Centers. But since then I'm not sure things have been so clear. The blogosphere is in retreat (maybe Substack is reversing this?), but the biggest and most mainstream of mainstream news organizations, like the New York Times are becoming more trusted and certainly more profitable. The new President of the US is a boring moderate career politician. The public cheers on elite censorship of social media. There haven't been many big viral protests lately except Black Lives Matter and the 1/6 insurrection, and both seemed to have a perfectly serviceable set of specific demands (defunding the police, decertifying the elections). Maybe I've just grown used to it, but it doesn't really feel like a world where a tiny remnant of elites are being attacked on all sides by a giant mob of entitled nihilists.

…

At the risk of being premature or missing Gurri's point, I want to try telling a story of how the revolt of the public and the crisis of legitimacy at least partially stalled.

Gurri talks a lot about Center and Border, but barely even mentions Left and Right. Once you reintroduce these, you have a solution to nihilism. The Left can come up with a laundry list of High Modernist plans that they think would solve all their problems, and the Right can do the same. Then one or the other takes control of government, gets thwarted by checks/balances/Mitch McConnell, and nothing happens. No American Democrat was forced to conclude that just because Obama couldn't solve all their problems, the promise of High Modernism was a lie. They just concluded that Obama could have solved all their problems, but the damn Republicans filibustered the bill. Likewise, the Republicans can imagine that Donald Trump would have made America great again if the media and elites and Deep State hadn't been blocking him at every turn. Donald Trump himself tells them this is true!

With this solution in place, you can rebuild trust in institutions. If you're a Republican, Fox News is trustworthy because it tells you the ways Democrats are bad. Some people say it's biased or inaccurate, but those people are Democrats or soft-on-Democrat RINO traitors. And if you're a Democrat, academic experts are completely trustworthy, and if someone challenges them you already know those challenges must be vile Republican lies. Lack of access to opposing views has been replaced with lack of tolerance for opposing views. And so instead of the public having to hate all elites, any given member of the public only needs to hate half of the elites.

You could think of this as a mere refinement of Gurri. But it points at a deeper critique. Suppose that US left institutions are able to maintain legitimacy, because US leftists trust them as fellow warriors in the battle against rightism (and vice versa). Why couldn't one make the same argument about the old American institutions? People liked and trusted the President and Walter Cronkite and all the other bipartisan elites because they were American, and fellow warriors in the battle against Communism or terrorism or poverty or Saddam or whatever. If this is true, the change stops looking like the masses suddenly losing faith in the elites and revolting, and more like a stable system of the unified American masses trusting the unified American elites, fissioning into two stable systems of the unified (right/left) masses trusting the unified (right/left) elites. Why did the optimal stable ingroup size change from nation-sized to political-tribe-sized?

…

The one exception to my disrecommendation is that you might enjoy the book as a physical object. The cover, text, and photographs are exceptionally beautiful; the cover image - of some sort of classical-goddess-looking person (possibly Democracy? I expect if I were more cultured I would know this) holding a cell phone - is spectacularly well done. I understand that Gurri self-published the first edition, and that this second edition is from not-quite-traditional publisher Stripe Press. I appreciate the kabbalistic implications of a book on the effects of democratization of information flow making it big after getting self-published, and I appreciate the irony of a book about the increasing instability of history getting left behind by events within a few years. So buy this beautiful book to put on your coffee table, but don't worry about the content - you are already living in it.

[afgurri]

This book, by my father, not only explains the populist surge 2016-present, and not only anticipated it in the 2014 first edition before any of it happened, but it is also a beautifully designed hardcover. By far the most beautiful contemporary book I’ve seen.

Makes a great gift, for others or for yourself, and it is out now!

[landrysg]

I think it all goes back to 2016 and to Donald Trump and the elites who had managed this country, who thought of themselves as being not only wonderful in and of themselves, but beloved of the public suddenly realized that they were not, they were being held in contempt. And what’s the explanation? Well, it couldn’t be that they were contemptible. The explanation was these people are being lied to. And a whole host of organizations arose around the principle that disinformation is the poison that is destroying what they call our democracy. I love that term. It’s very possessive, right? Our democracy, it’s ours. … [T]hey have come to the habit of basically believing that everything that’s good for them politically is good for our democracy, and they live in this bubble. … To them, it is just a self-evident good.

-- Martin Guerri

Via Michael Wade (Execupundit): http://www.execupundit.com/2023/09/digital-censorship.html

[continuations]

Low Rung Tech Tribalism

Silicon Valley's tribal boosterism has been bad for tech and bad for the world.

I recently criticized Reddit for clamping down on third party clients. I pointed out that having raised a lot of money at a high valuation required the company to become more extractive in an attempt to produce a return for investors. Twitter had gone down the exact same path years earlier with bad results, where undermining the third party ecosystem ultimately resulted in lower growth and engagement for the network. This prompted an outburst from Paul Graham who called it a "diss" and adding that he "expected better from [me] in both the moral and intellectual departments."

Comments like the one by Paul are a perfect example of a low rung tribal approach to tech. In "What's Our Problem" Tim Urban introduces the concept of a vertical axis of debate which distinguishes between high rung (intellectual) and low rung (tribal) approaches. This axis is as important, if not more important, than the horizontal left versus right axis in politics or the entrepreneurship/markets versus government/regulation axis in tech. Progress ultimately depends on actually seeking the right answers and only the high rung approach does that.

Low rung tech boosterism again and again shows how tribal it is. There is a pervasive attitude of "you are either with us or you are against us." Criticism is called a "diss" and followed by a barely veiled insult. Paul has a long history of such low rung boosterism. This was true for criticism of other iconic companies such as Uber and Airbnb also. For example, at one point Paul tweeted that "Uber is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it."

Now it is obviously true that some cities opposed Uber because of corruption / regulatory capture by the local taxi industry. At the same time there were and are valid reasons to regulate ride hailing apps, including congestion and safety. A statement such as Paul's doesn't invite a discussion, instead it serves to suppresses any criticism of Uber. After all, who wants to be seen as corrupt or being allied with corruption against something "obviously good"? Tellingly, Paul never replied to anyone who suggested that his statement was too extreme.

The net effect of this low rung tech tribalism is a sense that tech elites are insular and believe themselves to be above criticism, with no need to engage in debate. The latest example of this is Marc Andreessen's absolutist dismissal of any criticism or questions about the impacts of Artificial Intelligence on society. My tweet thread suggesting that Marc's arguments were overly broad and arrogant promptly earned me a block.

In this context I find myself frequently returning to Martin Gurri's excellent "Revolt of the Public." A key point that Gurri makes is that elites have done much to undermine their own credibility, a point also made in the earlier "Revolt of the Elites" by Christopher Lasch. When elites, who are obviously benefiting from a system, dismiss any criticism of that system as invalid or "Communist," they are abdicating their responsibility.

The cost of low rung tech boosterism isn't just a decline in public trust. It has also encouraged some founders' belief that they can be completely oblivious to the needs of their employees or their communities. If your investors and industry leaders tell you that you are doing great, no matter what, then clearly your employees or communities must be wrong and should be ignored. This has been directly harmful to the potential of these platforms, which in turn is bad for the world at large which is heavily influenced by what happens on these platforms.

If you want to rise to the moral obligations of leadership, then you need to find the intellectual capacity to engage with criticism. That is the high rung path to progress. It turns out to be a particularly hard path for people who are extremely financially successful as they often allow themselves to be surrounded by sycophants both IRL and online.

PS A valid criticism of my original tweet about Reddit was that I shouldn't have mentioned anything from a pitch meeting. And I agree with that.

[younes-ben-amara]

لماذا انهارت السلطة المعنوية في العصر الرقمي الذي نعيشه؟

لماذا انهارت السلطة المعنوية في العصر الرقمي الذي نعيشه؟

مساء الخير، عندما يسألونك لماذا من النافع قراءة بعض كتب المثقفين والمفكّرين حتى الذين لم يشهدوا أوج الثورة الرقمية كما نشهدها الآن. فالجواب هو: لأن استشرافهم يدلّ على أن لديهم بصيرة توقعتَ بعض ما نحن فيه الآن. ومن هؤلاء المفكرين حنة أرندت التي فسّرت لنا لماذا المرجعية سقطت في عصرنا. بمعنى: لماذا يصدّق الناس تيك توكر ويتركون خبيرَ أوبئة أو من درس مجالًا لفترة سنوات؟ أو كما يظهره ببراعة هذا…

[fairest]

At the present time, we are in the first stages of a gigantic transformation from the industrial mode of information and communication to something that doesn’t even have a name yet. It’s an extinction event for the narratives. The ideal of representative democracy is in trouble, for example, and the institutions around that ideal will have to be reformed if they wish to retain any sort of legitimacy.  But every possible ideology that might challenge representative democracy is even more discredited. Putting aside old threats like fascism or Marxism-Leninism, which are museum relics, there is no great cry among the global public for the “Chinese model” or Putinism, and Islamism seems to have sputtered out.

The causes, I repeat, are structural, and not dependent on the creativity of the elites. Today, even George Washington and FDR would be roasted alive over the fires of social media. Not surprisingly, the people in charge of running things are terrified of saying anything at all – it might come back to bite them.  In a Darwinian sense, they are selected for the ability to use words that have no meaning.  

The sterility of the ruling class in the production of meaning, in turn, has paradoxical consequences. Crude and incoherent versions of worn-out ideals like socialism and nationalism briefly regain currency, and are said to be the next big thing: amid the panicked babble of the elites, we watch these rough dreams slouch towards Bethlehem to be born again. But there is no second coming. History has never sponsored reruns of dead ideals, even as sitcoms. The appeal to the corpses of once-powerful ideologies itself is evidence of our exhausted powers of explanation, and these dusty mummies, dragged up by the swirl of surface effects, will almost certainly be swept away in the great transformation.

I would not say that our institutions are mired in a period of secular incompetence and decline. That is actually true, but I wouldn’t use those words.  I would say that our institutions are structurally (and, I believe, catastrophically) mal-adapted to the new information environment, and that the people who run them are both unable and unwilling to reform them.  

Martin Gurri