Martin "Fifth Wave" Gurri is at it again.* His topic this time: 2019: The year revolt went global. So:
Politics in the digital age revolve around information. A safe assumption when thinking about this environment is that everyone is aware of everything, globally. This sets up powerful demonstration effects: protesters in one nation can learn from those in another. One reason for the spread of anti-establishment revolts may well be their improved capacity to evade suppression.
And:
The question, for me, is whether these repeated crises of authority at the national level represent a systemic failure. After all, the disorders of 2019 are the latest installment in a familiar tale. Governments long ago yielded control of the information sphere to the public, and the political landscape, ever since, has been in a state of constant perturbation. From the euphoria and subsequent horrors of the Arab Spring in 2011, through the improbable electoral victories of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016, to last year’s violence by the Yellow Vests of France, we ought to have learned, by this late hour, to anticipate instability and uncertainty.
His optimistic hypothesis: "revolt has, quite literally, gone viral." His pessimistic hypothesis: widespread systemic failure:
...the loss of control over information must be fatal to modern government as a system: the universal spread of revolt can be explained as a failure cascade, driving that system inexorably toward disorganization and reconfiguration. Failure cascades can be thought of as negative virality. A local breakdown leads to the progressive loss of higher functions, until the system falls apart. This, in brief, is why airplanes crash and bridges collapse.For systems that are dynamic and complex, like human societies, outcomes are a lot more mysterious. A failure cascade of revolts (the hypothesis) will knock the institutions of modern government ever further from equilibrium, until the entire structure topples into what Alicia Juarrero calls “phase change”: a “qualitative reconfiguration of the constraints” that gave the failed system its peculiar character. In plain language, the old regime is overthrown – but at this stage randomness takes charge, and what emerges on the far side is, in principle, impossible to predict. I can imagine a twenty-first century Congress of Vienna of the elites, in which Chinese methods of information control are adopted globally, and harsh punishment is meted out, for the best of reasons, to those who speak out of turn. But I can also envision a savage and chaotic Time of Troubles, caused by a public whose expectations have grown impossibly utopian. The way Juarrero tells it, “[T]here is no guarantee that any complex system will reorganize.”Not every outcome is condemned to drown in pessimistic tears: the process, recall, is unpredictable. A structural reform that brings the public into closer alignment with the elites is perfectly possible. But I find it hard to see how that can be accomplished, so long as the public clings to the mutism of the consumer and refuses to articulate its demands like a true political actor. One rarely gets what one hasn’t asked for. Reform depends on the public’s willingness to abandon negation for practical politics.
Is this indeed the manifestation of a massive world-wide phase change of the sort David Hays and I have called rank shift? Is this a political manifestation of the singularity we are indeed living through?
*See earlier posts:
- What's up with elites in this emerging world we're in? (Aug 10, 2019)
- The decline of ideology as a political force [China, Hong-Kong] (Sept 2, 2019)
- And the future? [July 24, 2019]
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