Surfing the Fifth Wave
Navigating the crisis of authority in the digital age.
“Revolt of the Public: The Crisis of Authority” by Martin Gurri is the best book I’ve read about the collapse of trust in institutions in the 21st century so far. His central thesis is that the public, defined by him as groups of amateurs who organize themselves around different issues using social media, are breaking industrial-age establishment hierarchies. According to Gurri, this empowerment of the amateur has led to a “crisis of authority.”
Defining the Landscape
Gurri defines the “five waves” of change in media throughout history. The first four waves were the invention of writing, the development of the alphabet, the invention of the printing press, and mass media. To best understand the fifth wave, one should look at the previous fourth wave, the mass media. Gurri writes:
The fourth wave, now nearly spent, was that of mass media. Its organization was industrial, its orientation commercial or propagandistic, but its most radical innovation – the difference between what transpired before and after – was the demand for a silent public. Whether print, radio, or TV, the mass media is always in broadcast mode, one voice speaking to many. This has been true in the US no less than in North Korea.
Authority, in the form of media, government, and cultural institutions, controlled the scarce resource of information. They were able to monopolize broadcasting, from television and radio programming to what got published in newspapers, books, and magazines. They controlled the narrative with top-down, I-talk-you-listen-hierarchy. Through this monopolization, they were able to frame events to legitimize their authority. This gave the public a sense of trust in the authorities that ran society.
The elites were gatekeepers of the narrative. They controlled how stories were told. Look at some of the major historical events of the Mass Media era. Pearl Harbor wasn’t framed as the U.S. getting caught with its pants down in the Pacific. It was a “Day Which Will Live in Infamy.” The Bay of Pigs was not so much a botched invasion as it was the naive but forgivable mistake of a young president. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were not so much the result of decades of direct and indirect intervention in the middle east, but rather “they hate us because of our way of life.” Setting the narrative allowed for elites to further legitimize their authority to the public. Because of this legitimization through media scarcity, for the most part, the public trusted the elites who ran society.
But Information scarcity did not last. In the second half of the twentieth century, information technology like personal computers, smartphones, and the internet turbocharged the creation and sharing of information by elites and the public alike. The top-down mass media structure was turned on its head. And the gatekeepers were not ready.
Phase Change
The fifth wave arrived suddenly at the beginning of the 21st century.
Moore’s Laws states that the amount information created every year will double pervious year. Gurri writes: “More information was generated in 2001 than in all previous existence of our species on earth. In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total. And 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001, adding around 23 “extrabytes” of new information…” This trend continues today. The gatekeepers of the once scarce information have been sidestepped. An amateur with iPhone in their pocket has access to more information than the president of the United States had 25 years ago.
Gurri marks 2011 as the year the fifth wave officially arrived. In 2011, political movements organized by amateurs manifested around the world: the Arab Spring in the Middle East, The Indignados Movement in Spain, Occupy and Tea Party movements in the United States. Energized and informed publics used social media to organize themselves in ways never seen before. During the Arab Spring, nine out of ten Egyptians and Tunisians said they used Facebook and Twitter to organize and promote mass demonstrations.
As I stated earlier, the fifth wave can be best understood in contrast to the fourth wave. Here are some of the defining characteristics of the fifth wave as I see it:
Scarcity to abundance. Advancing information technology like personal computers, smartphones and the internet enabled 1) the unrestrained flow of information around the world and 2) the creation of new information at exponential rates.
Asymmetrical to symmetrical. Information scarcity allowed elites to hold control of information from the public. The internet made this relationship irrelevant. This leads to a significant equalization in the distribution of information. Everyone has access to the same information available to everyone else. When Jeff Bezos opens the Google homepage, he sees the same page as a tired college student pulling an all-nigher during finals week.
Top-down to bottom-up. If the mass media was used by the elites to assert their authority, the public used decentralized communication to coordinate. Publics can quickly and effectively organize using social media, emails, forums, and text messaging. The networked publics become more effective than the masses.
Friction to frictionless. Mass Media is an artifact of the industrial age. This was an era of mass production and mass distribution aimed at the average consumer. This brings a lot of friction for mass media: costs in production, distribution, waste, property, employees. The list goes on. Think of the amount of resources and cost that producing a daily newspaper takes. Then think of how anyone with an iPhone can post whatever content they want to a potentially larger audience with a Twitter profile or popular blog.
One-way to two-way. I-talk-you-listen was the defining model of mass media. Mass Media made the consuming public passive and conforming to the narrative of the elites by limiting the spectrum of public intellectual and commercial conversation. With the internet, the public gained the ability to actively learn, create, and coordinate information to surpass gatekeeper institutions of the Fourth Wave.
There are trade-offs to each point above. With new power, comes greater expectations.
A World of Heightened Expectations
Originally published in 2014, “Revolt of the Public” was republished in 2018 in the wake of events that made it seem more prophecy than commentary. The Gurri thesis has been cited in light of phenomena such as the 2016 United States presidential election, Brexit, the Yellow Vest Movement in France, the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and the rise of authoritarian strongmen around the world. These events seemed incomprehensible by the gatekeeping elite before they materialized.
At the beginning of the 2010s, the internet looked like a tool to empower publics around the world to rise up against dictators and corruption. But now as we stand at the end of the decade, the situation looks far different. While social media has empowered the average citizen, it has also been the source of fake news (now coming in the form of deep fakes), skyrocketing teen depression rates, weakening community ties, and corporate and government surveillance. Online radicalization that inspires desperate individuals is another negative effect of the internet.
While in office, President Obama worried about the “balkanized” media. As the first president to serve during the fifth wave, he understood the institution of the presidency no longer had a single megaphone to broadcast his messages to in the way FDR had radio and JFK had television. Information abundance allows everyone to enter their own information silo, only seeing media that reinforces their ingrained beliefs. Information silos have made even the truth become controversial. Cable news, social media, and YouTube allows citizens to inform themselves as they want, which is very positive to society. It also opens the public to biased and conspiratorial information. We see a rise in conspiracies that have serious effects on people’s lives, like the anti-vax movement in the United States.
The coming decades look to be full of even more change and uncertainty. We live in the age of the crisis of authority. How will our institutions, or more importantly, those who run them, adapt?
New Leaders for a New World
Who will be the new elite? The establishment elites of the fourth wave must learn to evolve and adapt themselves or step aside. A new age of technology and social trends calls for a new class of leaders to answer. The new elite of the 21st century will be surfers of the fifth wave.
Politics and Power
No matter the agreements or disagreements you might have with their politics, President Donald Trump and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are both examples of what successful leaders in the 21st century might look like. Besides the obvious political differences, these two share many traits that make both their out-of-nowhere political rises make sense:
Both wield social media as their main messaging platform as public relations and to organize supporters. The Tweet Deck is the new bully pulpit. Leaders who gain enough followers directly deliver messages to their constituencies by bypassing the filter of the gatekeeping media institutions.
Both focus on satisfying the constituency that elected them to power in the first place. They build trust and loyalty with the bases of supporters who elected them. This inevitably leads to them ignoring the attacks that come at them from outside their bases.
Both come across as authentic to their supporters. (Although they may come across as the opposite to those outside of their bases, that is, disingenuous and dishonest.)
Both are seen as anti-establishment. They are seen as outside of the existing political order. Trump was a reality TV star. AOC was a bartender a year before having an office in the U.S. capitol building. Both seen as disturbing outside forces that have come to disrupt the old way of doing things. Whether that is true or not is up for debate, but they are certainly anti-establishment. But without the internet, neither would be elected even ten years ago.
Both gain support through the advocacy of big, simple and bold ideas. Build That Wall. Medicare-For-All. Simple (to a degree of ignoring possible roadblocks). Bold. Big. New leaders will need new ideas to jump-start constituencies into action.
Art and Culture
Amateurs are using social media to turn into the new elite in culture as well. In 2018, Virgil Abloh made history by being named the first African-American creative director of Louis Vuitton. Gaining fame as Kanye West’s creative collaborator, Virgil came up in fashion through years of constant promotion of his work on social media, successfully showcasing how a creative could rise to astronomical levels of influence in the digital age.
In an op-ed for The New York Times (note, an industrial age media institution), Virgil wrote about what power is. The piece is telling of how a new generation of leaders can earn influence and power in the fifth wave. He writes:
Today’s internet generations have been graced with equity at birth, in that they have the means to create power for themselves, even if they do not start out with it. In the digital world, the myth of power persists as a construct. To believe that you have power is to have it.
Virgil goes on to say that power is self-earned through internet-based platforms. Virgil equates power to influence. The internet allows creators to leverage their influence. The former gatekeepers are irrelevant if you can earn an audience that gives you influence. To his point, power is a myth. It belongs to whoever can manifest the influence to gain it. No permission from authority is required. Power belongs to those who write the myth. Leaders are the ones who create new myths for society to build around, the new shared narratives based in reality.
Earning Back The Publics’ Trust
Information technology allows amateurs the opportunity to surpass authority to gain power like never before in history. New leaders can emerge from diverse fields to innovate old and create new institutions. A designer from Chicago like Virgil or a bartender from Queens like AOC can effectively use social media to garner massive influence that would have never been possible without the establishment before social media. For now, the old establishment must learn to innovate, graciously step aside, or deal with the discomfort of growing irrelevancy.
Mastering the internet for messaging is one aspect of what the new elite must do. In the crisis of authority, trust in elites must be earned by elites. A new class of leaders across institutions, disciplines, and industries must earn the publics’ trust through authenticity, honesty, creativity, humility, and transparency. Leaders who earn the respect and following of the public will surf the fifth wave, those who do not will be swept away.