00:00:00.000Believe it or not, and I think you will, we're in the middle of a revolution, a global revolution, technological information revolution, and a lot of really powerful people don't like it one bit.
00:00:14.180We have witnessed the collapse of state and institutions from corporations to systems of government. The elites have lost control. Journalists have lost power. Academics have lost power and control.
00:00:33.300The old status quo is under attack or destroyed, and it's happening all over the world. And the new status quo is chaotic and aggressive. Every day, it seems like there's another battle being fought.
00:00:49.180The public revolt against the elite class has shattered every domain of authority. We don't trust any institution anymore. And that's not just an American thing. Now the elites are scrambling to maintain power.
00:01:05.360They flourished under the industrial society. But now, as a result of the information revolution, it has been gutted of its legitimacy with no signs of recovery, only a power grab or something else that is yet to be defined.
00:01:22.140The elites want us to believe that our issues are economic, better yet, socioeconomic, because that's even more divisive, a better diversion. But the real issues is with the elites themselves. The real problem is corruption.
00:01:39.220And all of it has happened as a result of the Internet, not the corruption, but the exposure and the networking with one another. Elites can no longer hide their failures and their corruption, nor can they silence people easily.
00:01:56.760When we finally saw the elites for who they really are, we were really kind of disgusted, both the Republicans and the Democrats, by their lack of morality.
00:02:07.600It's why 50 percent of the public says, I don't belong to either party.
00:02:12.160The public has become ungovernable, at least from the elite's perspective.
00:02:19.200Martin Gurry was a media analyst for the CIA, as all of this was unfolding early in the 21st century.
00:02:26.760He saw this shift up close and he understands media theory, I think, at a higher level than most academics.
00:02:35.140He bests them in practical knowledge and he has the perfect message.
00:02:42.600That America needs to understand the understanding, the new American oligarchy or whatever it is that is on the other side of this thing.
00:02:54.000I found him by reading his book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.
00:04:52.040I wish I would have read your book in 2016 when it first came out because it has answered so many questions on what's happening in our world right now.
00:05:01.420So, so first, welcome, um, let me, let me, I, I want to first get you to start with the premise of the book.
00:05:13.300So describe it for anybody who hasn't read it yet.
00:05:19.640So let me just kind of tell you a story about how the book came to be because it pretty much encapsulates that.
00:05:25.440I was a, um, an analyst of global media at CIA, possibly the least sexy job you could have at CIA, right?
00:05:35.500Um, but, but at that moment, it turned out to be, um, the most significant perch probably in the world to be sitting at because I had been, um, obviously dealing with very, very small volumes of information.
00:05:51.320And in those days, uh, open media was a tiny, tiny trickle.
00:05:54.980And I was there when suddenly this digital earthquake epicenter, say Palo Alto, um, suddenly propelled this tsunami of information in volumes that were unprecedented in human history.
00:06:11.280I want to, I want to stop here because I want to write, uh, read what you actually write.
00:06:16.980Because it is profound the way you put this more information was generated in 2001 than all of the previous existence of our species on earth.
00:06:29.320In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total and 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001.
00:06:43.620So what we're going through, I've been saying for a while that we're going through a revolution like the industrial revolution, except this one is just compressed, not over a hundred years, but a period of like 10 or 20 years.
00:06:58.200And everything seems like it's coming apart at the seams.
00:07:01.960This was a really important place to start.
00:07:05.000Talk about that and then continue with your story.
00:07:07.820Talk about what this information explosion means.
00:07:29.500But when you look at the chart, it looks like a tsunami, like this thing that just keeps rising.
00:07:33.760Um, I, I don't necessarily agree with you in the sense that it's being compressed.
00:07:41.480I think we are in the very early stages of it.
00:07:44.820In other words, I think we're just seeing, we're only seeing the very initial, uh, shock, I guess, trauma, uh, that the collision of this old hierarchical 20th century top down.
00:07:57.580And I talk, you listen, the world with this enormous information tsunami and, and the implications that it has for the legitimacy and the authority of every institution, including all our democratic institutions.
00:08:10.500So, um, I was sitting there watching this happen, uh, with many others, uh, uh, as CIA and of the first thing that we responded to was what you responded to, which was, holy mackerel, this is vast.
00:08:28.480We're used to, we're used to looking at France as being mainly two newspapers.
00:08:33.040Suddenly it's like this enormous range of stuff, all of it very original, but who are these people?
00:08:38.720What, how could we even cite them, uh, in the Arab world, in Egypt?
00:08:42.860Um, I mean, the Egyptian media was a tiny little thing, all Mubarak all the time, right?
00:08:47.960So suddenly you get all the, and Syria is boring.
00:08:52.260Suddenly you get these bloggers, you know, bloggers who blogged in English because at that time, uh, there wasn't any software for Arabic and blogging and we're hilarious and we're all against the system.
00:09:03.920I mean, and you were reading this and going, what is this?
00:10:44.380When I left government, I dedicated myself to researching the subject.
00:10:48.600Uh, and, and what became clear to me was that our institutions of the, the great institutions of the 21st century, including our political or democratic institutions,
00:10:59.020were set up, received their shape, their form, their substance, their legitimacy, and their authority in the 20th.
00:11:07.040And the 20th century was the heyday of, I talk, you listen, top down, I'm legitimate because, you know, these sets of institutions that we are,
00:11:18.620because I have reached this particular place and institution, you must listen to me.
00:11:22.380In, informationally, um, it was a moment of information scarcity.
00:11:26.980These institutions possessed, each of them, a little semi-monopoly over the information in their own domains that gave them authority.
00:11:36.440What the tsunami did was blow all that away.
00:11:38.780The moment the tsunami hit each one of those institutions, including our government and including our political parties,
00:11:44.840all our political and governmental institutions lapsed into a state of crisis.
00:11:50.980It began long, I wrote the book because I, several of us were seeing this, and, um, part of the effect that I think, uh, this, this, this, uh, disorienting movement has had is
00:12:02.760a lot of the old political categories don't really make a whole lot of sense.
00:12:16.940Um, and while they brought brush, explained some things, they completely missed the big, the big divide, uh, of our moment, which I think is between a public that used to be a silent audience and now is vociferous, is very loud and very angry.
00:12:35.300And the elites who are still clinging to these old 20th century type institutions and are terribly demoralized, uh, and, and, uh, don't particularly care much, uh, about the public.
00:12:46.880You have a feeling that if they could disband the public and summon a whole new version of it, that was a little more obedient, that they would do it in a second.
00:13:49.940And so what's seemingly happening is what might've started out as, Hey, hope and change or the tea party.
00:13:59.520Hey, we want to, we want some, some restraint here on our government has now turned into burn it all down or total control.
00:14:09.160Yeah, I don't see anybody asking for total control.
00:14:13.840And I think the elites would love to have total control, but are, are far from it, are far from it.
00:14:20.300And every day, I think if you inhabit their heads and read their writings, uh, you realize that these are people who are very scared and, and they know that, that the world is slipping from them.
00:14:30.100They are not adapted to the digital era.
00:14:32.620Their institutions are totally maladapted to it.
00:14:36.020Uh, and then they're, they're watching outside their windows and there are all these people out there yelling and screaming and they're going, who are they?
00:14:49.040Um, I, I think, I think there are, um, you know, two sides to this issue.
00:14:54.360I, I started writing the book thinking that I had a side, that I, I was a member of the public, so I, I felt like that was my side.
00:15:02.320But honestly, the public has its own pathologies, all right?
00:15:06.860Um, the public, and I'm talking globally now, um, I know we love to talk about the United States as if there was no world, but this actually happens all over the world.
00:15:16.100And in fact, began that the first manifestations were not in the United States.
00:15:20.160But the public is not one, it's many, it's fractured.
00:15:25.640It's the old passive mass audience, which was like, I always like to say a gigantic mirror.
00:15:45.440That mirror has toppled and fallen and shattered.
00:15:48.120And the public, the public that lives in all the broken pieces, and they're mutually hostile.
00:15:53.940They don't like each other much, even, you know, within what is considered to be their, the right wing, the conservative side, the Republican side, the left wing, the Democratic side, progressive side.
00:16:05.780The people inside those groups hate each other almost more than they hate the other side, right?
00:16:10.300So, how do you unify and mobilize them?
00:16:13.940Well, the one unifying force, both sides, everywhere, is they absolutely loathed the established order, the system.
00:16:21.340So, everything is kind of focused against.
00:16:24.160You can't, the second you say, well, let's be for this thing or for that, let's have a little program about this.
00:16:28.880The public disintegrates its component parts.
00:16:31.740So, to get it mobilized, you need to be against.
00:16:34.820Now, if you are against, if you repudiate, if you negate, and you don't provide an alternative, in the end, that becomes nihilism, right?
00:16:43.480Which is the belief that destruction is a form of progress.
00:16:48.300So, that has been a mantra of mine since hope and change.
00:16:52.280I felt the same way as many people who were voting for Obama felt.
00:17:14.460So, that is the answer of why we're not hearing any new solutions, because there is nothing to unite on?
00:17:22.280Well, the smart politicians will give you just that.
00:17:27.180They will say something that sounds like it has content in it, but when you start analyzing a little bit, you realize that, well, this could fit almost anything, right?
00:20:04.660President Obama, after he lost his governing majority in, I guess it was 2010, resumed what I think was his actual natural state, which he was like a prophet in the wilderness who was kind of like an accuser in chief.
00:20:25.020He would point to, for example, economic inequality, give a long speech about economic inequality, how terrible it was in America, even in comparison with third world countries.
00:21:08.800I don't give myself credit for much, but I watched Obama and I wrote in the book, I said he was so successful at this, there's bound to be imitators.
00:22:15.680I mean, the ultimate expression of nihilism today is when a person picks up a gun and walks into a room full of innocent strangers and start shooting them, sometimes for sometimes for a reason, because they are, you know, jihadis or because they are white supremacists.
00:22:36.560Sometimes for no reason at all, because you represent an impure society.
00:22:50.020You know, these are basically when you read these these people who do these terrible things online.
00:22:55.840They sound just like everybody else online.
00:22:58.520They're ranters, except these people actually take it a further step.
00:23:02.000I think institutionally, when you start bashing at our existing institutions, which, like I said before, have many reasons to be criticized, but don't offer a solution or alternative.
00:23:16.500Then you are engaging in essentially a nihilistic exercise, whether you're a nihilist or not.
00:23:22.940I think the Black Lives Matter movement and the crazy QAnon people on January 6th have a lot more in common than it's given credit for.
00:23:38.340They had no idea inside their heads what that change would be.
00:23:41.380And then they had no organization, no leaders, no programs so that in that moment when they said, I mean, Black Lives Matter, they took over a couple of autonomous zones out west.
00:23:52.420And and the protesters of January 6th, you know, basically violated the Capitol building.
00:23:58.900But once you do that, it's like you can see, you know, the deer in the headlights.
00:24:20.060I've described the the climate in America that there is.
00:24:24.620If you look at a football field from the five yard line, maybe 10 yard line of each each end zone, there are these absolutely bat crap, crazy people who just are they're just angry and they don't care what happens next.
00:26:38.920There are a lot of people who are intermittently angry, I think.
00:26:42.380But when we talk about, for example, political polarization, which I keep getting thrown at me as the defining way to look at our political environment, it makes no sense to think that.
00:26:58.480I mean, Gallup just came out with a poll that said that 50 percent of Americans identify as independents, a record number.
00:27:06.380How is that polarizing between parties?
00:27:08.200Another poll, I forget who did it, also record numbers saying they wanted a third party.
00:27:14.780So how is that polarized between Republican and Democrat?
00:27:17.900So I think part of what we're dealing with is the dysfunction of our information environment.
00:27:23.860Part of it is the dysfunction of the institutions.
00:27:25.840The fact that at the top of our institutions, it really is everybody kind of glomming together and trying to say, well, it's my side or nothing.
00:27:33.660But where the actual majority of the public stands, honestly, Glenn, if you ask me my gut feeling, I would agree with you.
00:27:44.340People just want to live on their lives.
00:27:46.480They're not really interested in getting into these scrums.
00:27:52.760I was in Israel and I spent time with Jews.
00:28:29.340But I do have I do have a little incident, which is kind of kind of sealed that in my head.
00:28:35.680And, you know, I was writing I was one of these back and forth that get published online where they somebody publishes something and you respond.
00:28:44.020And it was all about how we're in an incipient civil war and our politics have become warlike.
00:28:49.440And, you know, I'm sitting here in front of my laptop right above that is my window.
00:28:54.760And I'm reading all the stuff about war.
00:29:24.520Like most American lives live very detached from politics and its family and its church and its community and, you know, its sports league.
00:29:33.760Again, it's many things other than who passed the latest law that you didn't like or that you were advocating or whatever.
00:29:41.600I will tell you, I have the same feeling when I'm at work, I feel one way when I'm anywhere else in the country except for the coast or the power centers.
00:29:53.620I see people getting along, everybody is kind of back to, yeah, I don't agree with that person, but that's, you know, that's that's kind of cool.
00:30:04.040One thing that is is, however, I think, frightening sign is the cancel culture that is happening right now.
00:30:23.400Because when I said one side wants total control, there is one side and I don't even know where it belongs, but there is one side that's like my way or the highway.
00:30:33.760Yeah, I, basically, it's as much a generational thing as anything, but I mean, I think you have in the Internet a lot of identity instability.
00:30:55.440The Internet is a mangler of identity, okay?
00:31:00.160You have to sort of, your organic, you, the person that you're looking at right here, I have to mangle myself if I want to join Wall Street Betsy, if I want to join Black Lives Matter, if I want to join all the, you basically have to join hands with a digital them, you have to mutilate yourself, right?
00:31:20.560And that creates all kinds of uncertainties and doubts, and the more you do that, the more it gets confusing, what pronoun do you use, what's the right word, what should I avoid?
00:31:32.520And the more that that happens, I think somebody is going to step up and decide, well, I'm the Inquisitioner, and I'm going to gain power of a sort by canceling you, right?
00:31:44.400By saying, you said the wrong word, or you used the wrong pronoun, or you don't get it right, and it becomes very intense and very, very dogmatic, even though we're talking about trivial things.
00:31:57.840I honestly don't think it's, I mean, it's important if you belong to that generation.
00:32:02.320I guess to an old geezer like me is much less important.
00:32:04.820I mean, you can cancel me 20 times from Sunday, and I don't care, you know?
00:32:12.440And I think what you have is a generation, you know, this Zoomer generation that's coming up, it's a generation of conformists who basically keep their nose to the grindstone because they're afraid that if they just lift up their heads and say the wrong thing, they're going to get canceled.
00:32:27.320So did I misunderstand some of the direction of the book?
00:32:32.900Because you talked about the media scrambling to try to keep control of things and seeing that Facebook and all of this stuff has unleashed people to make their own networks.
00:32:51.760And it's the networks that they're afraid of.
00:32:54.980And as I read that, I'm looking at what Google is doing.
00:32:59.360I'm looking at what these algorithms are starting to do to if you say something that is deemed hateful, it's not just you, but they look then at everyone who is liking you, following you, reading you, posting with you.
00:33:14.760And they are squashing those voices as much as they can.
00:33:21.640And you talk about this in the book about a 15 percent, I can't remember what you called it, dilution or something that they're squashing these networks and these voices.
00:36:39.140In the olden days, the news, if you're a newspaper, but also the sports page, the comics, the advice of the love lord, the crossword puzzle, all those things bought you a bunch of eyeballs, a big audience.
00:36:53.620And you sold that audience to advertisers, right?
00:40:26.860Well, each side sees a moot in its own eye and a beam in the eye of its opponents, right?
00:40:33.260I think people who are to the left of the spectrum see white supremacists everywhere.
00:40:42.160People who are to the right of the spectrum see Antifa's everywhere.
00:40:46.260I think that's to some extent sincere, I'm sure, but also self-serving because then you can pass laws and you can generate that anger.
00:40:56.480In other words, it's much easier to find yourself railing about white supremacists or Antifas than it is to talk about some boring politician in the Senate or something like that.
00:41:10.400So you want to portray the other side as the most extreme possible version of it.
00:42:28.020And I'll come back to that in a minute if you want.
00:42:31.220You couldn't have had the scientific revolution.
00:42:33.280You couldn't have had the American Revolution.
00:42:34.740You wouldn't have the French Revolution.
00:42:36.200All these things that determine our life today without the printing press, that's the third wave.
00:42:41.880The fourth wave was that top-down mass media that I actually got to experience when I was a young person, where, you know, we were all kind of brought into the information environment, but in a very authority-driven way.
00:42:58.120In other words, you weren't participating.
00:43:00.740And the fifth wave is that tsunami, that digital madness that occurred around the turn of the century that is still very early on, and we don't really know what is it.
00:43:12.800It may, in the end, be more disruptive than the printing press, but the printing press in its day was horrific.
00:43:28.480I mean, my friend Antonio Garcia Martinez, smartest man on Twitter, by the way, says, if you, just a thought exercise, if you went to the 30 Years' War, right, and that was the bloodiest war that had ever been experienced in Europe, millions died, took generations for the population of Germany to reconstitute itself.
00:43:54.720And the war was fought over tiny little religious differences.
00:44:00.000You know, your book had 10 words that my book didn't have, and my book had many words that you should have had.
00:44:06.860And over these tiny differences that were very clear and crisp in those books, people slaughtered one another.
00:44:13.160If you went to that time and said, what do you think of the printing press?
00:44:16.180People would have said, it's the most horrible and destabilizing and destructive invention of our times, right?
00:46:15.120So I think it was a terrible moment that was as much a question of the public participating as it was of the powers that be then coming in and trying to establish order violently.
00:46:27.700So is the diminishment of religion a good thing or a bad thing to settle things down?
00:46:37.920I mean, I would imagine if you're looking at the world that way, you would say it was the sex of religion that that really kind of edged, you know, egg that on and made things much worse.
00:46:51.580Is is this part of the breaking up of networks or quieting of networks?
00:46:57.200Or is this just what we're going through right now, this diminishment and, you know, in in our in our faith and our churches?
00:47:06.560Is that just part of the natural that hierarchy doesn't work anymore?
00:47:10.860Well, I mean, I think that that question can only be answered contextually.
00:47:44.520So religion in that case needed to be managed out of fanaticism.
00:47:50.460I think where we are today is an entirely different context.
00:47:54.020And I've been thinking about this a lot, a lot later lately, Glenn, which is not just religion, but OK, what where do people get their meaning?
00:48:06.080Where do people get their sense of dignity and importance?
00:48:09.000You know, well, they get it from family.
00:48:27.400A lot of what is happening today, and this is, again, very hard to prove empirically, but I have a very strong sense that this is true.
00:48:35.260Is people trying to find meaning in politics, which cannot possibly deliver.
00:48:42.380So I think I think the critical race theory, you know, the social justice warriors, the ecological war warriors that has become almost a religion.
00:48:53.600And I think people are and they will find it very, very empty, which will only lead to more bad things.
00:49:04.500You know, I think many, many, many of these online groups and many of these academic fantasies like the ones you mentioned are are religion like.
00:49:18.000And I think none of them, none of them can deliver what what what people are seeking for them, which is OK.
00:49:27.660And I think in the olden days, by the way, when people got their sense of who they were, you know, I mean, if you were in a Masonic lodge or in a sports league, you were kind of like a big frog in a tiny little pond.
00:49:42.900I feel important. And if you had religion, you had consolation and you had you had guide moral guidance.
00:49:50.700So that when politics, particularly natural politics, came up for discussion, your sense of self, your sense of who you were was that remotely touched by that.
00:50:01.120So you could engage in in compromises because the stakes were pretty small.
00:50:05.700Right. I think the problem today when when society is kind of hollow and when you are sort of told that you are you're supposed to express yourself and attain some sort of self-expressive, you know, height.
00:50:18.860And yet it's unclear how that's ever going to happen without any meaning inside your life, then you will put a lot of burden of expectations on a very slender read, which is, you know, this is the search for justice, a search for political solutions for things that are that are way beyond the scope of politics.
00:50:41.460And if you ever look at, you know, the young the young warriors of the autonomous zones in Seattle and Portland, tons and tons of YouTube video fascinating to watch.
00:50:57.740You know, they never give you they never make demands.
00:51:00.820They never make claims. They never say you have to change this and that and the other.
00:51:03.560They basically assume the society is unjust and terrible.
00:51:06.260And then they say, well, look, look, look how great this is.
00:51:09.140This moment is, you know, there's this autonomous zone moment that everybody's supporting a real virtuous world.
00:51:15.440And there's like a tiny little moment of of of meaning in these people's lives.
00:51:20.100Yes, it's very hard. It's very hard to let that go.
00:51:24.040And it will constantly change as it did in the French Revolution.
00:51:41.360But can you give us some historic maybe comparisons at all on what are the possibilities that are lying in front of what are our choices in front of us?
00:53:37.640But it's really it's really hard because I've thought about this a lot, that it's hard at this point because everybody on both sides feel like it has gone so far to the edge that you.
00:53:57.080If you voted for Donald Trump to change the course of this institutionalized corruption and everything else, he was perfectly suited to kick the walls in.
00:54:11.420And I think he kicked a lot of walls in that he didn't even know he was kicking in at the time.
00:55:25.440And number two, I have a deep faith in the common sense of the American people.
00:55:30.780Sometimes it's more apparent than other times.
00:55:32.800But I think, as you mentioned before, as we discussed before, I think the majority of the public is probably not into let's fight to the death over immigration.
00:55:47.280Let's fight to the death over, you know, basically the latest issue that has been made to be some kind of life or death struggle.
00:55:53.980I mean, I'll tell you something and maybe this is nobody's ever accused me of being a romantic and I don't feel like I am.
00:56:02.580But I just got my my first COVID vaccine.
00:56:06.780Right. And there was a line of hundreds of people where I live in Fairfax County, Virginia.
00:56:13.760And I mean, it was it was a remarkable moment.
00:56:19.240It was kind of like a ritual of national renewal that I felt that was it.
00:56:23.020And, OK, Fairfax County has been voting Democratic for many years, but it has lots of Republicans, lots of Trumpets.
00:56:28.540None of us knew who we were in that line.
00:59:10.960I mean, I think the Internet information and the rate of change is happening in a way that no one has ever experienced in all of human existence.
00:59:21.560You know, jobs and whole industries can be over overnight.
00:59:27.800We are not the same country we were even 10 years ago.
00:59:43.480And that's demonstrable when you look at how fast innovations are being brought online.
00:59:48.200I mean, you should take decades for something new to become accepted by the population.
00:59:52.820And when you look at things that with the iPhones, for example, the smartphone, how fast how fast that was adopted.
00:59:59.520I always say, because I talk to young people a lot, young people are the best, right, because their minds are kind of like, whoa, what's going on?
01:00:06.760I tell them, I'm not going to see the end of this.