WEBVTT - How Tech Has Made Government Obsolete | Martin Gurri 0:00:00.120 --> 0:00:05.320 How technology makes the current form of government obsolete. Now, 0:00:05.519 --> 0:00:08.080 I just finished reading an amazing book called The Revolt 0:00:08.080 --> 0:00:10.159 of the Public, which goes back through history, which you 0:00:10.200 --> 0:00:13.360 know I love, talking about how technology changes the way 0:00:13.360 --> 0:00:17.000 we communicate and act, and it goes to explain how 0:00:17.360 --> 0:00:19.560 all the problems, well many of the problems that we 0:00:19.600 --> 0:00:22.400 see today, specifically the problems with the loss of trust 0:00:22.400 --> 0:00:26.239 of institutions and the way that this top down control works, 0:00:26.560 --> 0:00:29.920 and of course the way that the economic model is 0:00:30.080 --> 0:00:34.440 mimicking the complex system of information. I sat down with 0:00:34.520 --> 0:00:37.760 the author of the book for an awesome conversation. Martin 0:00:37.760 --> 0:00:40.120 Gurry joins me, and we are going to discuss the 0:00:40.159 --> 0:00:43.320 book itself, what were the fourth and fifth wave of communication, 0:00:43.479 --> 0:00:47.120 How the parabolic increase and the rise of information is 0:00:47.240 --> 0:00:50.360 making the current forms of government obsolete. We go through 0:00:50.680 --> 0:00:54.280 recent history to look at revolutions that happened from twenty 0:00:54.360 --> 0:00:56.800 eleven forward, Occupy Wall Street, and so much more to 0:00:57.000 --> 0:01:00.120 break this down so you can understand exactly what's going on. 0:01:00.520 --> 0:01:02.920 It'll give you a framework to figure out where we're 0:01:02.960 --> 0:01:05.800 going and how you should be managing your life. And 0:01:05.840 --> 0:01:07.920 this is something that you should know specifically with the 0:01:08.000 --> 0:01:11.080 restrict Act that's going into place right now, is ramping 0:01:11.200 --> 0:01:16.720 up this war, this battle because government is not compatible 0:01:16.840 --> 0:01:19.080 with what's going on anyway. It was an awesome conversation 0:01:19.120 --> 0:01:21.039 with Martin Gurry, with the author of this book. We 0:01:21.080 --> 0:01:22.600 do spend a little bit of time kind of setting 0:01:22.680 --> 0:01:25.560 up the book before we really dive into the revolutions. 0:01:25.840 --> 0:01:27.840 So check out the time stamps down below if you 0:01:27.840 --> 0:01:30.520 want to jump ahead, but I'd encourage you to listen 0:01:30.520 --> 0:01:32.360 to the whole thing with that. Let's jump right in, 0:01:33.240 --> 0:01:35.640 all right, Martin, thanks so much for joining me today. 0:01:35.680 --> 0:01:37.600 I'm excited to dig in and talk to you about 0:01:37.600 --> 0:01:40.680 your book and learn so much. So thanks for joining me. 0:01:41.480 --> 0:01:42.240 My pleasure. Mark. 0:01:42.360 --> 0:01:46.119 So, yeah, I just read this book here, The Revolt 0:01:46.240 --> 0:01:49.840 of the Public, and you know I love books like this. 0:01:50.560 --> 0:01:51.880 It was a big, thick book. I had a lot 0:01:51.920 --> 0:01:53.960 of good information, a lot of stuff that I have 0:01:54.080 --> 0:01:55.880 been seeing, a lot of stuff I have been saying. 0:01:56.840 --> 0:02:01.080 But man, you really dug in deep to it. I guess, 0:02:01.160 --> 0:02:03.920 maybe just give us the quick thesis of the book 0:02:03.960 --> 0:02:06.880 before we start digging into what it's about. From your words, 0:02:06.880 --> 0:02:08.560 I guess yeah. 0:02:08.600 --> 0:02:13.560 I mean, the origin of the book goes way back 0:02:13.600 --> 0:02:17.920 when I was still in CIA, I was an analyst 0:02:17.960 --> 0:02:20.880 of global media, and I and a number of people 0:02:21.160 --> 0:02:28.040 with me noticed this just radical transformation of the information sphere. 0:02:28.639 --> 0:02:35.680 Once that digital tsunami of information hit and we noticed 0:02:35.919 --> 0:02:40.440 further were behind that, there was this political turbulence. Now 0:02:40.480 --> 0:02:44.800 it seems very naive now, but we thought, we asked ourselves, 0:02:44.919 --> 0:02:47.440 what's the connection. Right, we have the Internet, which is 0:02:47.520 --> 0:02:49.919 kind of like this fun communications thing, and you have 0:02:50.040 --> 0:02:52.720 politics over here. Right. And now, of course we know 0:02:52.800 --> 0:03:00.000 the mutual influence is powerful, determinative, but at the time 0:03:00.760 --> 0:03:03.600 none of us do that. So after I left government, 0:03:03.800 --> 0:03:06.400 I dedicated myself to research of that, and it became 0:03:06.440 --> 0:03:15.840 clear to me that essentially the profound transformation in the 0:03:15.880 --> 0:03:24.800 structure of information was changing completely the institutional environment in 0:03:24.840 --> 0:03:28.919 which we had evolved from the twentieth century underward, institutions 0:03:28.919 --> 0:03:33.160 that were all shaped by the twentieth century ideal of 0:03:33.320 --> 0:03:39.520 top down. I talked, you listen, there's no talking back 0:03:40.040 --> 0:03:42.840 from the public, and that a lot of the categories 0:03:42.880 --> 0:03:46.839 in politics, such as liberal and conservative and the right 0:03:46.920 --> 0:03:50.040 and left, which go back one hundred and fifty to 0:03:50.120 --> 0:03:53.360 two hundred years, really had lost a lot of meaning 0:03:53.880 --> 0:03:58.680 and what I saw was that there was an eruption 0:04:00.200 --> 0:04:04.560 leaping into the center stage as a political actor of 0:04:04.640 --> 0:04:08.800 the network public, people who had suddenly gained voice because 0:04:08.960 --> 0:04:13.560 of their ability to link up to the digital platforms, 0:04:14.080 --> 0:04:17.640 and that almost every political conflict in the world today, 0:04:18.000 --> 0:04:22.200 some exceptions in some countries, almost everyone really maps down 0:04:22.360 --> 0:04:27.039 to the network public against the elites who run those 0:04:27.120 --> 0:04:32.440 institutions that were shaped in the twentieth century, who initially 0:04:32.520 --> 0:04:36.279 had no understanding what was happening. After certain events like 0:04:36.360 --> 0:04:39.560 Trump and Brexit, understood what was happening, but did not 0:04:39.760 --> 0:04:42.960 like it and wanted it to stop happening. So almost 0:04:43.000 --> 0:04:48.159 every conflict you have, and every eruption of change and 0:04:48.480 --> 0:04:52.400 around the world, around the world, can be mapped to 0:04:52.440 --> 0:04:59.280 this profound, profound through tectonic collision between the public and 0:04:59.320 --> 0:04:59.800 the elites. 0:05:02.800 --> 0:05:04.680 I guess since the beginning of time, that's how it's been, 0:05:05.600 --> 0:05:08.680 the public verse, since the beginning of time, that's what 0:05:08.680 --> 0:05:10.440 it's been, right, the public versus the elites. 0:05:10.440 --> 0:05:12.800 And how not at all, not at all, I think. 0:05:12.880 --> 0:05:15.080 I think in the olden days, the public just kind 0:05:15.080 --> 0:05:17.000 of knuckled its forehead and said yes, sir. 0:05:17.440 --> 0:05:21.000 But it was still the elites trying to figure out 0:05:21.040 --> 0:05:24.120 how they could control the masses. Uh, there's a there's 0:05:24.160 --> 0:05:27.800 a part in the Bible in Exodus where Pharaoh looks 0:05:27.839 --> 0:05:29.920 out over all the Israelites in Egypt and said, they 0:05:29.960 --> 0:05:33.280 outnumber us. What will we do? And they said, here's 0:05:33.279 --> 0:05:36.200 what we'll do. Let's work them so hard that they'll 0:05:36.240 --> 0:05:38.800 never have a chance to uprise again. So, I mean 0:05:39.120 --> 0:05:41.039 that was written thousands of thousands of years ago, so 0:05:41.120 --> 0:05:43.000 it's maybe always been a way that they try to 0:05:43.080 --> 0:05:45.800 kind of somehow manage the people. 0:05:46.240 --> 0:05:51.400 Only insert the qualification that you can be an elite 0:05:51.440 --> 0:05:55.640 in an institution that has legitimacy, and whether that you 0:05:55.640 --> 0:05:58.080 should have it or not are that's a separate conversation. 0:05:58.160 --> 0:06:02.960 But you have legitimacy, meaning you have authority, meaning that 0:06:03.080 --> 0:06:06.120 I can tell you what to do and you will 0:06:06.120 --> 0:06:08.480 probably do it without me having to point a gunna, 0:06:08.520 --> 0:06:11.320 do you right? For example? And there are elites who 0:06:11.360 --> 0:06:13.200 need to point a gunna or you're not going to 0:06:13.279 --> 0:06:16.359 do it. And we're slowly coming to the point where 0:06:16.440 --> 0:06:21.400 if the elites don't have a whole lot of compulsion, 0:06:22.800 --> 0:06:25.200 nobody's going to listen to them. Yeah, you can see 0:06:25.240 --> 0:06:27.159 that you saw it with COVID for example. 0:06:27.240 --> 0:06:29.599 Yeah, that's definitely a topic we're going to dive into. 0:06:29.760 --> 0:06:31.520 And you're right, you made that point very clear in 0:06:31.520 --> 0:06:35.440 your book, kind of breaking down the trust in these institutions. 0:06:35.480 --> 0:06:37.280 I want to come back to that. But looking back 0:06:37.320 --> 0:06:39.719 throughout history, we see that it's always some piece of 0:06:39.800 --> 0:06:42.599 technological innovation that seems to kind of change the way 0:06:42.600 --> 0:06:45.680 that we communicate and organize. A point that I had 0:06:45.720 --> 0:06:47.440 talked a lot a lot about and you talked about 0:06:47.480 --> 0:06:49.919 as well, was about five hundred years ago we had 0:06:49.960 --> 0:06:53.720 the Protestant Reformation that really seemed to have been driven 0:06:53.760 --> 0:06:56.719 by a catalyst about seventy years previous, which was the 0:06:56.760 --> 0:07:00.520 printing press, and sort of this dissemination of information that 0:07:00.600 --> 0:07:02.640 then led to this I think you would call it 0:07:02.680 --> 0:07:06.520 like this democratic access to information that changed so sort 0:07:06.520 --> 0:07:08.960 of like that times like a thousand or times a million. 0:07:09.200 --> 0:07:11.400 Oh, I don't even know. I actually think the printing 0:07:11.440 --> 0:07:16.760 press was probably the most disruptive innovation in terms of 0:07:16.840 --> 0:07:21.400 information change. I mean, it's still early days with the internet, right, 0:07:21.440 --> 0:07:25.120 so we may get there and surpass that one, but no, no, 0:07:25.200 --> 0:07:29.520 I think I think and it's instructive to go back 0:07:29.560 --> 0:07:36.800 to that time because you know it. The results were brutal. 0:07:37.240 --> 0:07:40.760 The results, the consequences, the immediate consequences of the printing 0:07:40.800 --> 0:07:44.400 press were brutal. If you went to the Thirty Years War, 0:07:44.600 --> 0:07:48.880 which was kind of an offshoot of their Reformation, in which, 0:07:49.000 --> 0:07:54.119 for example, if you know, if you went to church 0:07:54.240 --> 0:07:57.760 and the church next door had three different words than 0:07:57.840 --> 0:08:03.040 what your hymnal did or creed had, you now had 0:08:03.080 --> 0:08:06.160 those words in your book. You knew them there they were, 0:08:06.240 --> 0:08:08.440 they had So the other guy who didn't have those 0:08:08.480 --> 0:08:11.160 words or who had different words, they had to die. 0:08:11.720 --> 0:08:13.880 The Thirty Years War was the bloodiest war in the 0:08:13.920 --> 0:08:16.680 history of Europe. And if you had gone there and 0:08:16.720 --> 0:08:19.440 asked those people what do you think of the printing press, 0:08:19.800 --> 0:08:21.760 that would have said it's the most horrible invention ever, 0:08:22.040 --> 0:08:25.120 take it back, destroy it. Well, today we know it 0:08:25.200 --> 0:08:29.040 was probably the most liberating, not only because of the Reformation, 0:08:29.600 --> 0:08:32.120 but because of the scientific revolution. You could not have 0:08:32.360 --> 0:08:35.840 had that with manuscripts. And then the French and American 0:08:35.880 --> 0:08:39.240 revolutions that brought democracy to the world. Yeah. 0:08:39.400 --> 0:08:42.440 Yeah, And if we frame that up in context of 0:08:42.480 --> 0:08:43.880 kind of what the book is and how we want 0:08:43.880 --> 0:08:48.319 to kind of move forward, it was basically the state, 0:08:48.400 --> 0:08:50.640 the church and state. At the time, we're basically controlling 0:08:50.679 --> 0:08:53.240 the information, telling the people what the Bible said, but 0:08:53.280 --> 0:08:55.559 they had no access to it. But once it was democratized, 0:08:55.559 --> 0:08:57.280 once the people were able to get it and read 0:08:57.320 --> 0:08:59.120 it for themselves, they said, wait a minute, you've been 0:08:59.200 --> 0:09:02.400 lying to us whole time. And now even though the 0:09:02.480 --> 0:09:05.280 Church labeled them heretics and heresy and killed them, if 0:09:05.320 --> 0:09:08.559 they spoke out about it, it didn't matter. I mean, 0:09:08.880 --> 0:09:10.280 would that be a right way to frame true? 0:09:10.960 --> 0:09:13.000 I think the parallel is good in many different ways, right. 0:09:13.320 --> 0:09:17.720 I mean number one, yes, the church and you know, 0:09:18.040 --> 0:09:21.800 you get inquisitions, right, and I mean we are not 0:09:21.880 --> 0:09:24.240 at the thirty years War level. We're not killing each other. 0:09:24.480 --> 0:09:28.120 But there are the minor, not not real inquisitions. But 0:09:28.120 --> 0:09:31.160 but I mean, you're not gonna get burned at the stake, 0:09:31.200 --> 0:09:34.560 but you might lose your job, you might get you know, 0:09:34.880 --> 0:09:40.439 all the platformed called out by digital mobs. You your 0:09:40.559 --> 0:09:44.120 reputation could be tord to shreds overnight by saying the 0:09:44.160 --> 0:09:47.240 wrong words, right, So that's one thing. The other one 0:09:47.280 --> 0:09:50.080 is that once you start that process though, of well, 0:09:50.160 --> 0:09:52.800 I am breaking off from the Church and the next 0:09:52.800 --> 0:09:57.040 thing that happens is some group inside you. Your group says, well, 0:09:57.080 --> 0:09:59.559 I'm breaking off from you, and another group says I'm 0:09:59.559 --> 0:10:01.760 breaking up from that, and you get this kind of 0:10:01.800 --> 0:10:09.520 process of specialization where at the end you arrive at 0:10:09.640 --> 0:10:11.760 almost a chaos and you have to work out at 0:10:11.760 --> 0:10:14.720 what point do you put a boundary around that and 0:10:14.800 --> 0:10:17.760 try to make that thing work? Right. The Reformation basically 0:10:17.800 --> 0:10:23.800 exhausted itself in the Thirty Years War and essentially resulted 0:10:23.880 --> 0:10:29.559 in our system of nation states, the nation states in 0:10:29.640 --> 0:10:33.360 both order that religious groups that sort of deserred the 0:10:33.360 --> 0:10:34.719 way in my opinion. 0:10:34.840 --> 0:10:37.000 And if you go back before that, it was the 0:10:37.040 --> 0:10:41.200 religious groups that recreated the social order. Right, So we 0:10:41.280 --> 0:10:44.120 kind of had this decentralized kind of world, and the 0:10:44.200 --> 0:10:47.920 churches kind of came into power by bringing order, right. 0:10:48.000 --> 0:10:53.200 They brought order through chivalry and acts of kindness, and 0:10:53.240 --> 0:10:55.760 then they also rebuilt public infrastructure, which then kind of 0:10:55.760 --> 0:10:59.280 created that centralization. Then the printing press tore that apart, 0:10:59.440 --> 0:11:00.960 and then the nation and states kind of brought it 0:11:01.000 --> 0:11:01.480 back together. 0:11:02.360 --> 0:11:05.560 Yeah. Yeah, and there were different you know that the 0:11:05.679 --> 0:11:08.800 nation state at a certain point, particularly when it got 0:11:09.000 --> 0:11:14.120 to the industrial state and the industrial democratic states like 0:11:14.160 --> 0:11:16.960 the United States, say in the nineteenth century, then you 0:11:17.000 --> 0:11:19.800 had to you have to somehow provide for the fact 0:11:19.840 --> 0:11:23.640 that you know, just printing books or having access to 0:11:23.679 --> 0:11:26.120 a printing press, which only a few people could have, 0:11:26.559 --> 0:11:29.920 was not really enough. So then mass media came into 0:11:30.000 --> 0:11:32.880 being as a way of bringing, you know, bringing into 0:11:32.880 --> 0:11:38.120 the fold the tens of millions of citizens who had 0:11:38.320 --> 0:11:42.040 essentially entered history. They had become educated, they had become 0:11:42.320 --> 0:11:45.200 relatively affluent, they understood the world, but it had no 0:11:45.360 --> 0:11:49.280 access to the current information. And so you had the 0:11:50.480 --> 0:11:53.880 mass media movement that you know, I'm old enough, that 0:11:54.000 --> 0:11:55.480 was the world I was born into. 0:11:56.400 --> 0:11:59.439 Yeah, the mass media where you had had a few 0:11:59.480 --> 0:12:01.880 new sources to choose from it. We'll get to that now. 0:12:01.920 --> 0:12:03.600 You talked about in the book. A couple of things 0:12:03.600 --> 0:12:05.079 that you talked about the book was one was sort 0:12:05.120 --> 0:12:08.839 of like this fourth wave and then fifth wave of information. 0:12:09.440 --> 0:12:10.760 I do want to go back to just kind of 0:12:10.760 --> 0:12:12.360 one thing that you said, just kind of for everybody, 0:12:12.400 --> 0:12:14.800 kind of reiterate this since I've read the book. You 0:12:14.840 --> 0:12:16.480 talked about in the book, and you have a chart 0:12:16.480 --> 0:12:19.520 to illustrate this, and maybe this was the catalyst for 0:12:19.559 --> 0:12:21.559 you writing the book. That you said in two thousand 0:12:21.559 --> 0:12:25.200 and one, all of a sudden you realize that more 0:12:25.360 --> 0:12:29.079 information was created in two thousand and one than all 0:12:29.120 --> 0:12:33.480 of humanity before, and then double that amount happened in 0:12:33.480 --> 0:12:36.320 two thousand and two. And when you realize that, you 0:12:36.400 --> 0:12:39.920 realize that everything was going to be different. So that's 0:12:39.920 --> 0:12:41.720 the key piece, and I think it's super powerful. Actually 0:12:41.720 --> 0:12:44.480 just tweeted that out earlier today as I was preparing 0:12:44.520 --> 0:12:47.920 for this. That's a massive movement, and I could only 0:12:47.960 --> 0:12:51.240 imagine it must be going parabolic for me, especially now. 0:12:51.880 --> 0:12:55.040 Exactly that's exactly right. And you have to add to 0:12:55.080 --> 0:12:57.720 that that are institutions, and by that I mean not 0:12:57.840 --> 0:13:05.480 just government, but political part but corporations, the media, the academia, 0:13:06.080 --> 0:13:12.600 all these essentially nine twentieth century institutions were developed with 0:13:12.800 --> 0:13:16.600 a small trickle of information in mind, most of which 0:13:17.200 --> 0:13:22.160 they control, and that the gigantic doubling upon doubling up 0:13:22.160 --> 0:13:25.480 on doubling of information has just battered them away. The 0:13:25.520 --> 0:13:30.319 institutions are in a state of absolute prostration because they 0:13:30.320 --> 0:13:32.000 weren't set up for this. They were not set up 0:13:32.000 --> 0:13:33.839 for the world that we live in today. They are 0:13:34.000 --> 0:13:37.520 like the dinosaurs. So the media are coming down. They're 0:13:37.559 --> 0:13:41.640 just maladapted. They were big in the twentieth century, they 0:13:41.640 --> 0:13:46.959 are looking at going extinct in the twenty first. Wow. 0:13:47.280 --> 0:13:49.480 So what was the fourth wave and then what's the 0:13:49.520 --> 0:13:50.040 fifth wave? 0:13:51.400 --> 0:13:53.600 Right? Let me go quickly through them all so that 0:13:53.640 --> 0:13:57.600 the whole thing makes sense. The first wave first was 0:13:57.920 --> 0:14:01.840 the invention of writing, which required sort of like a 0:14:01.880 --> 0:14:07.280 priestly or each wave of information, each structure of information 0:14:08.800 --> 0:14:14.640 accommodates or delivers a certain political and social system. So 0:14:15.840 --> 0:14:18.040 you have the the invention of writing. You need a 0:14:18.080 --> 0:14:21.520 mandarin or a priestly cast like in Egypt to do 0:14:21.600 --> 0:14:24.760 this very elaborate system of writing with thousands of symbols. 0:14:25.000 --> 0:14:27.440 The alphabet is the second wave. You could not have 0:14:27.440 --> 0:14:32.160 had the classic republics of say Rome and Athens without 0:14:32.200 --> 0:14:35.960 an alphabet. The third one we just spoke about is 0:14:36.000 --> 0:14:40.720 the printing press. The most is eruptive ball in my opinion. 0:14:41.080 --> 0:14:43.600 The fourth was mass media. I also mentioned that. And 0:14:43.640 --> 0:14:46.080 then the fifth is where we are today. You're right 0:14:46.120 --> 0:14:48.760 in two thousand and one. Two thousand and one doubled 0:14:48.840 --> 0:14:53.840 all previous information in history. Two thousand and two doubled 0:14:53.960 --> 0:14:55.840 two thousand and one, And I'm not sure that it's 0:14:55.840 --> 0:14:59.600 one hundred percent doubling, but it has continued. Parabolic is 0:14:59.600 --> 0:15:00.160 a good word. 0:15:00.320 --> 0:15:03.840 Yeah, yeah, and yeah, so when you look at it 0:15:03.840 --> 0:15:06.840 from that zoomed out frame, and then you realize that 0:15:07.280 --> 0:15:09.920 technology changed the way that we communicate, which then change 0:15:09.960 --> 0:15:11.840 the way that we organize, and so then the state 0:15:12.320 --> 0:15:16.320 also changes how it organizes and manages us. And so 0:15:16.680 --> 0:15:18.040 one of the points that you made in the book 0:15:18.120 --> 0:15:22.080 was that really through the Industrial Age, it kind of 0:15:22.080 --> 0:15:24.960 brought us from the farms into the cities and the factories, 0:15:25.200 --> 0:15:27.480 and then we started having this kind of mass movement 0:15:27.640 --> 0:15:31.280 of really Henry Ford kind of created this assembly line 0:15:31.440 --> 0:15:34.240 and it was a way to control the masses and 0:15:34.320 --> 0:15:36.760 kind of equalize the masses. And then you talked about 0:15:36.800 --> 0:15:39.440 how then we needed sort of like a governance system 0:15:39.480 --> 0:15:42.880 and an information system on top of that to kind 0:15:42.920 --> 0:15:46.000 of manage that was that, right? Can you explain that? 0:15:46.320 --> 0:15:50.160 Yeah, that's pretty close. I mean, you're talking about the 0:15:50.160 --> 0:15:56.240 Industrial Age. Industrial age was the profit of the Industrial 0:15:56.240 --> 0:15:58.680 Age was this guy who's sort of been forgotten but 0:15:58.880 --> 0:16:04.800 was very important as important still Ferrick Taylor, who believed 0:16:04.840 --> 0:16:07.520 that he did all kinds of time and motion studies 0:16:07.680 --> 0:16:11.480 and essentially treated workers like like pieces of equipment right 0:16:12.120 --> 0:16:15.520 for for the sake of efficiency. So everything was delivered 0:16:16.000 --> 0:16:19.520 by the brilliant engineer at the top gave all the 0:16:19.560 --> 0:16:21.800 instructions where all the tools are going to be. The 0:16:21.880 --> 0:16:23.920 workers had no say in anything. They just they just 0:16:23.960 --> 0:16:28.040 basically moved. There could have been robots. That is the 0:16:28.120 --> 0:16:30.240 model for the industrial age. 0:16:30.680 --> 0:16:31.000 Uh. 0:16:31.920 --> 0:16:38.560 The mass movements, particularly the totalitarian mass movements like like Marxism, Leninism, 0:16:38.720 --> 0:16:42.720 like Nazism, like fascism, resembled that model very much. They 0:16:42.760 --> 0:16:46.760 had the brilliant fewer at the top or or you know, 0:16:46.880 --> 0:16:51.320 the polic bureau, and basically they decided everything all the 0:16:51.360 --> 0:16:56.320 way down to as Gorbashoff used to say, women's women's stocking. 0:16:56.320 --> 0:16:58.440 How many women's stocking is you're going to manufacture in 0:16:58.480 --> 0:16:58.880 a year? 0:16:59.000 --> 0:16:59.200 You know? 0:16:59.800 --> 0:17:05.640 Uh? And that system can only function and democracy wasn't 0:17:05.680 --> 0:17:09.600 quite that that brutal, but it was a version of that. Okay, 0:17:09.880 --> 0:17:13.920 there were two three four TV channels, there were two 0:17:14.119 --> 0:17:18.959 three four carmakers. You had very limited choices. You were 0:17:19.000 --> 0:17:24.000 a mass consumer, and industry found it very comfortable to 0:17:24.119 --> 0:17:27.840 say this mass product is exactly what you want. Right. 0:17:28.400 --> 0:17:31.320 What the digital age has done just sweep all of 0:17:31.320 --> 0:17:34.560 that away and lay bare the fact that, no, it 0:17:34.600 --> 0:17:38.400 turns out we're very divided. We want all kinds of things, right, 0:17:38.440 --> 0:17:43.280 we want all kinds of things. The mass consumer of information. 0:17:44.359 --> 0:17:45.960 Like I said, I was born into that. It was 0:17:46.000 --> 0:17:50.760 like looking into this gigantic mirror and we were all there. 0:17:50.880 --> 0:17:55.720 We were all the same picture, the public in the 0:17:55.760 --> 0:17:58.399 digital age. It's just if that mirror has fallen and 0:17:58.480 --> 0:18:02.200 shattered and we all live on different pieces. So it's 0:18:02.240 --> 0:18:05.639 a very divided, very fragmented, very conflicted world. 0:18:06.280 --> 0:18:10.119 Yeah, I mean, I wonder for me growing up in 0:18:10.119 --> 0:18:11.720 the eighties and the nineties, the same way, we all 0:18:11.720 --> 0:18:15.000 listened to the same songs, we all watched the same movies. 0:18:15.680 --> 0:18:17.920 You know, bands got really big and they could fill 0:18:17.920 --> 0:18:20.119 out a stadium, And now today there's you know, a 0:18:20.200 --> 0:18:22.600 million bands and they're just streaming on some station. Right. 0:18:24.200 --> 0:18:27.439 I wonder if it's I mean, I guess it's just 0:18:27.520 --> 0:18:29.040 natural progression. I don't know if it's a chicken or 0:18:29.040 --> 0:18:30.240 the egg. I think you kind of made the point 0:18:30.240 --> 0:18:33.000 of the book that, like, our choices were limited, so 0:18:33.040 --> 0:18:35.719 our tastes were limited. But as we've been given more 0:18:35.800 --> 0:18:40.119 choices now, our tastes have grown. I guess that's just 0:18:40.119 --> 0:18:40.960 a natural evolution. 0:18:41.000 --> 0:18:45.840 I actually think, I actually think we have now rediscovered 0:18:46.600 --> 0:18:48.719 our actual tastes. In other words, it was never the 0:18:48.720 --> 0:18:52.199 case that we wanted three kinds of car. It was 0:18:52.240 --> 0:18:55.520 never the case that we wanted three TV channels. That's 0:18:55.600 --> 0:18:57.960 just what there was. And since we had no voice, 0:18:58.119 --> 0:19:01.359 the public had no voice, we just took it. I mean, 0:19:01.359 --> 0:19:03.840 their alternative was you walked if you didn't like any 0:19:03.840 --> 0:19:05.680 of them, or you turned off the TV if you 0:19:05.720 --> 0:19:09.879 didn't like any show. Right, So it was all or nothing, 0:19:10.720 --> 0:19:12.800 and most people just went along with it. But I 0:19:12.800 --> 0:19:16.600 don't think it was any any moment where any anybody, 0:19:17.119 --> 0:19:21.840 any large number of people within the mass audience actually 0:19:22.560 --> 0:19:24.760 believe that being part of a mass audience was what 0:19:24.800 --> 0:19:25.600 they were meant to be. 0:19:25.920 --> 0:19:28.919 Yeah, yeah, you talked about I think you called it 0:19:29.040 --> 0:19:33.560 rather Gate. Explain Rathergate for us. 0:19:33.840 --> 0:19:35.840 Yeah, let's see if I remember that one that was 0:19:35.960 --> 0:19:41.160 essentially a report during the trying to remember what year 0:19:41.280 --> 0:19:45.600 it was. It was two thousand elections, was it? When 0:19:46.040 --> 0:19:51.040 essentially it was very critical of George W. Bush for 0:19:51.680 --> 0:19:55.320 basically using his privilege to avoid going to just go 0:19:55.400 --> 0:19:59.520 to the National Guard, leaving the guard early and all 0:19:59.600 --> 0:20:02.520 kinds of what might be construed as abuse of power. 0:20:03.760 --> 0:20:07.840 And this is a TV broadcast of which Dan Rather, 0:20:08.320 --> 0:20:12.359 who was the heir to Walter Cronkid, who was like 0:20:12.440 --> 0:20:15.160 the great figure of authority in the news world. 0:20:16.119 --> 0:20:18.159 I think that's a that's a key piece. I mean, 0:20:18.200 --> 0:20:22.880 he was seen as this trusted authority, right totally. 0:20:24.440 --> 0:20:28.760 Dan Rather stood behind this report saying all these things 0:20:28.800 --> 0:20:31.680 about George W. Bush. And what happened was the bloggers 0:20:31.680 --> 0:20:36.040 got a hold of that report and within literally hours, 0:20:36.359 --> 0:20:40.480 somebody had put it online and showed that it was 0:20:40.520 --> 0:20:43.840 in Times New Roman Fund. And this was supposed to 0:20:43.880 --> 0:20:46.119 have happened way back in you know, I think in 0:20:46.160 --> 0:20:50.800 the Vietnam War, and there was no New Times New 0:20:50.880 --> 0:20:55.760 Roman Fund in the Vietnam era. This is a digital fund, 0:20:55.760 --> 0:20:59.159 all right. So it showed that this supposedly type written 0:20:59.200 --> 0:21:02.040 document i'd actually been printed off a computer. The whole 0:21:02.080 --> 0:21:05.880 thing was a hoax, all right. And then Rather sort 0:21:05.920 --> 0:21:08.879 of lost his job over that one. Yeah, yeah, And 0:21:08.880 --> 0:21:12.439 the credibility, of course of the anchorman never regained what 0:21:12.520 --> 0:21:15.200 it was doing. What the krunkitees day. 0:21:15.359 --> 0:21:18.240 It's amazing how fast that happens today, you know, I'm 0:21:18.280 --> 0:21:20.200 on Twitter way too much these days, and I'll see 0:21:20.200 --> 0:21:24.760 someone post something that seems real, authentic, believable, and then 0:21:24.800 --> 0:21:27.160 I'll just read through the comments and just so quickly 0:21:27.280 --> 0:21:29.560 people will just start to disprove it or argue it 0:21:29.680 --> 0:21:33.640 or whatever. And it's amazing how fast that crowdsourced information 0:21:33.720 --> 0:21:36.040 can change. But so you can see it's very hard 0:21:36.040 --> 0:21:38.600 for an institution to put that trying to be a 0:21:38.640 --> 0:21:41.840 trusted institution put that out there and being constantly fact 0:21:41.880 --> 0:21:44.159 checked by the crowd in real time. 0:21:45.600 --> 0:21:50.479 Well, part part of the problem, I think is the mode. 0:21:50.640 --> 0:21:57.160 The rhetorical style of the twentieth century institution, authoritative institution 0:21:57.920 --> 0:22:01.040 was we are run by experts, which is whatever field 0:22:01.080 --> 0:22:05.040 you have, right, we know. So the problem with the 0:22:05.040 --> 0:22:08.240 digital world is now we know that we don't know, okay, 0:22:08.480 --> 0:22:11.040 and these institutions are still telling us you know that. 0:22:11.280 --> 0:22:13.880 I sort of call it the Anthony Fauci syndrome. Right, 0:22:14.040 --> 0:22:17.080 you know, this is really what science tells you, But wait, 0:22:17.440 --> 0:22:19.480 two weeks ago, you told us the exact opposite. So 0:22:19.480 --> 0:22:23.520 people get very confused, and trust in that rhetorical style 0:22:23.600 --> 0:22:28.360 has evaporated. It's zero, right, and the elites that run 0:22:28.400 --> 0:22:30.879 the institutions have not learned and do not want to 0:22:30.960 --> 0:22:34.439 learn to speak in a more conditional way that have 0:22:34.600 --> 0:22:37.000 not learned to say we think this is the way 0:22:37.040 --> 0:22:39.320 things are, correct us if we're wrong, right, which is 0:22:39.359 --> 0:22:42.320 the way most of us speak, But that would that 0:22:42.320 --> 0:22:45.919 goes against the green of that style of vehetoric. 0:22:46.160 --> 0:22:48.400 And the other thing is that with access to that information, 0:22:48.480 --> 0:22:50.080 so you know, a doctor would used to have to 0:22:50.119 --> 0:22:52.080 go through all this medical school to learn this stuff, 0:22:52.119 --> 0:22:54.320 and none of us had any access to that information, 0:22:54.440 --> 0:22:55.919 so then we would just have to trust that they 0:22:55.920 --> 0:22:58.320 had read it. But today I could spend an hour 0:22:58.440 --> 0:23:01.520