Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we discuss the book the Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, and consider the extent to which the perspective it offers still holds true over 10 years after its initial publication.
Hello, welcome to the Call Like I See it podcast. I'm James Keys, and joining me today is a man whose takes are good enough that all you gotta do is relax and take notes. Tunde. Yogonlana Tunde. Are you ready to show them why you're dead wrong?
No.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Show them why they're right.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: All right, all right. There we go. There we go. Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe and hit like on YouTube or your podcast app. Doing so really helps the show out. Recording on April 1, 2025. And we continue our culture series today by doing some reading between the lines in the book the Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, which was released in 2014 and updated in 2018. In this book, the author Martin Gurry looks at how digital technology has ushered in a new era of information access and altered the power balance between the public and elite institutions and societies around the world, leading to much of the dissatisfaction, instability, and disorder we've seen recently in societies all around the world. Now, to get us started, Tunde, we note that the book laid out 5 of what it called waves of the expansion of information or information revolutions, each of which can be said to have altered the way that societies were organized and operated.
The first wave UAE articulated was writing with, the second being the Alphabet, the third being the printing press, the second, the fourth being mass media, which is the kind of the wave that we are transitioning out of. And then the fifth being the digital technology wave in the networked environment. So this kind of Internet era social media, anybody can publish information and information. You can search it, you can find it. It's not controlled centrally, generally. So what are your thoughts about how. Just again, to get us started, about how the book framed this idea of this fifth wave, as it called it, that we're entering of the information access and just kind of the transition that we're living through as we get to it. Because we're, you know, we're not. He didn't suggest that we're already there. It's just kind of this transition period that we're in.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I thought it was an excellent book and an excellent read. I highly recommend it, which is why we're doing a show on it. Right. Talking about it. But. But no, I think, you know, this Idea of the waves, I think was very interesting. So I feel like he.
Not necessarily to say his theory is the be all and end all of this kind of discussion of human societies and how we operate and move around and go through changes, but it's this idea that I think many of us who have observed history and kind of think about these things over time realize that history isn't necessarily just this linear thing that things always progress in a certain way and over time things just happen because they should or whatever. And I think the idea of thinking of it in waves and not something that happens, you know, in an orderly fashion is if to me, was a very interesting way to look at it because I never, I never approached the topic or seen it approach that way. So to me, the idea of the way that information is shared, I was gonna first say through society, but I think the way this wave thing is like you said the Alphabet to the printing press to then the way that mass media was able to be created through the technologies of the industrial age and disseminated to the public. And now this change, kind of like another stepping stone, this change from that to now, the public's ability to also engage back to those who disseminate kind of the mass media and all that. I think it's very interesting because I never gave the idea of how humans relate to information at a societal level as much, I guess, thought as how it influences the way that societies are driven.
As I, I guess as I have since reading this book is like, wow, okay, this. All these changes historically that sometimes get chalked up to other things. The root of it, maybe other things happen because of this, but the root of it seems to be something as simple as the creation or invention of a new way of communicating. And so it's just an interest to me. It's just another fascinating look at kind of some of this societal stuff.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Yeah, one of the key pieces in this fifth wave to me, and then the transition from this mass media, which is a very top down, like a very top down approach. And actually if you back it up a little bit, you could say the printing press kind of was less top down in many respects because the ability to get a. To be able to put out pamphlets, for example, is much easier than broadcasting on a network, you know. And so there was this change in the 1900s, late in, you know, the 20th century that went from information being the barriers to be able to publish and put stuff out there were lower. If you just get it got a printing press and could, you know, have a Horse taking things around from town to town. You could, you may not be the New York Times, but you could get information out there versus mass media where you had the radio and the television, all that stuff, and the people who owned that space had such dominance over the message and the information. And then you could say that the printing press, interesting. Took what was previously when it was just, just writing, but not the printing press. It was very. Information was very controlled. Printing press kind of opened it up a little bit more and we saw some transition and some chaos and so forth. And then you go to the mass media which kind of tightened it back up again and who can really distribute it and information on a, on a wide scale. And then what we're doing now is opening it back up again. And so like you go from a situation and one of the points he made was that we went from a situation of information scarcity, so to speak. Like you just got to know what the major publishers of information told you was important. You know, the new, the nightly news, here's what's important that you should know about. And that was it. You know, you didn't get to go and kind of search on your own and find your own rabbit holes and things like that, by and large, versus now where we have information abundance. And one of the inverted relationships he talks about is that when information is scary scarce, there's higher trust, higher levels, like you're looking at what's going on and saying, okay, I believe this more because there's just less sources disputing that wherein there's information abundance. There's much lower trust in any source of information, which is kind of a phenomenon we've learned, is that institutions have much less authority and trust now because they don't control, by and large, elite institutions. There aren't three networks that just tell us what's important for us to know and that's it, you know, so to speak, with minor players here and there. So this inversion and these, these inverted relationships where more information means less trust, less authority and so forth. That relationship to me was a very interesting addition to the kind of dialogue in society right now because we are seeing that, you know, like the, the we've seen trust in the news organizations deteriorate to the extent that some new organizations, news organizations respond and say, okay, well we're not going to get trust from a large amount of society, so let's just tell some people what they want to hear and then we can carve out our own little group of people who just hear what want to Hear what they want to hear. And we're not trying to get the trust of other people, you know, like, we're just going to service this one audience. And so we've seen that kind of fragmentation and then it. With the ability for anyone to publish, you can see that even greater degree. You can see it on one sense, you know, with cable television, but even to a greater degree on like YouTube or something like that, where people are. Everybody's kind of speaking to people who want to hear what they have to say. And there is no. No larger institution that has the trust of a lot of people or the vast majority of people. Whereas, like a CBS or an ABC. Did you know, if you go back 50 years or something like that.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that is fascinating because as you're saying it, I'm thinking, well, maybe the trust will just be. Everyone trusts Google, but only to give them a platform to get the information right. Like, it's just interesting. And it's an interesting point you make as you're talking. It makes me realize there's this weird dynamic and you use the word inversion. That's what made me think about it between. Because it's interesting. Like you're saying the Industrial Age as itself was something that helped break up the kind of hierarchical style of leadership from the human kind of society aspect for the public as relates to things like monarchies, let's say.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: You mentioned this to me offline. Just you really point. I thought you. It was a really compelling point when you said from an economical standpoint. It really like the Industrial age broke everything up from. From an economical standpoint where you had. It wasn't just monarchs owning all the land and doing, you know, when their landlords kind of were. It was like they were enterprising people being able to come up and kind of do their own thing, so to speak, in a way that was. Didn't exist prior to the industrial era.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Well, that's what I'm saying. It's interesting nowadays because it's like another layer of that thought that you made me think of when you're saying the word inversion. Because I'm thinking like, yeah, this is interesting. So to just be on that point, you know, for the audience here was the discussion was on the idea that, you know, going into the early 1800s, if you can say the Industrial age started around then. If you look at Europe and kind of the dominating places of the world, you know, even Asia, Africa, whatever, everything was still monarchies in a sense. Kings, tribes, you know, that kind of stuff. And then the industrial Age helped spread democracy because it created wealth in other pockets, like in, you know, the merchant class, industrialists, all that. And so, long story short.
Yeah, but what I'm realizing, James, is it's interesting what allowed for the democratization of kind of the people and the public, the societies over that period also, like you're saying, led to this hierarchy of information.
And now that we have most of the world in a democratic public process, this new fifth wave of the ability for information to be so fractured and like you're saying, the fragmentation is leading to a Balkanization, like what happened in the Balkans 30 years ago, where everyone's having their own little truth and now we're starting to fight about what's real. You know, what's, what's the reality here, like you said about fake news and not trusting authority. And it's reminds me too, like I kept thinking about during a pandemic, people like you and I, I would say people that have still the trust of the old authority of the mass media and the industrial AIDS type of systems. That's when we were kind of confused as to, well, how come that for an example, the president, United States picked a guy who was the head of the top virology guy in the, in the country. And you and I would say, well, okay, let's listen to the guy. But then the other half of the country was like, we don't trust this guy. And again, this book helped me understand that phenomenon in a way that I hadn't. And what I'm getting at, James, is it'll be interesting to see that maybe this democratization of information, where the public gets a chance to have their voices at all times, will lead us from a democratic situation for the, for the public to a more authoritarian. And I'm just thinking about this inversion, like you're saying that it's just interesting. So.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that's the unknown. I mean, and I think the book acknowledges that, that where this is going it'd be impossible to predict because there are just all these different factors. You know, you have things that correlate, but just difficult to even point to causation directly. So what we're going to end up having is what I think the book goes through is kind of, here's what kind of is happening and here are kind of some of the implications of that. But it doesn't, and I think there's a discipline to this, it doesn't go too far into saying, okay, and here's how it's all going to play out, because, yes, there Are scenarios where this can, I'm going to get into one in a little bit where this could lead us to a more open and free society. And then there are scenarios where this could lead us to a very close, very tight fisted, you know, very tight fisted control of even more hierarchical and more authoritarian, you know. And so where it ends up going we'll have to see.
But one of the things I want and kind of when you mentioned the struggles that society had dealing with the COVID pandemic, which is a, like that's a difficult thing for a society to deal with anyway. Like, it's not like you don't look back through history and look at a bunch of societies that dealt with major pandemics swimmingly, you know, and just like, oh yeah, yeah, we just moved through that, you know, it was all good. So that's a very difficult thing to deal with anyway. But one of the things the book talks about and this, he didn't, he didn't really, he didn't invent this. He acknowledged it. But just talking about trying to understand kind of some of the operators in society and you know, the centers of power as what he referred to as the center and the border with the center being kind of the, the, the powers in place, the elites and the institutions and so forth, and the border being kind of the people who are not happy with or not not necessarily involved in the established order, but may have an interest in taking apart the established order and just how those people operate. And what he did, I thought that was really good, is how he connected. If you look at the border and center kind of mentality, if you look at, you know, Mubarak getting overthrown in Egypt, that's kind of the same kind of energy as Occupy Wall street, which is kind the, the indignados in Spain, which are all things that we saw in the 2010s, you know, and this kind of, this, this friction that was happening and how the, how the center reacts when the border attacks, what, what hap. When the border does stuff. And you know, the border, for example, is not good at having forward plans. You know, the border is just good at kind of saying what's wrong with the existing order, but not necessarily how to fix it or putting in place. The border is very non hierarchical. The center is very hierarchical. So these different characteristics, if you look at it, then you can see, and you know, I think one of the big insights in the book, you can see a lot of these social movements, these public movements that happened in the 2010s as kind of the same energy. So what did you take away from. From that kind of connection that he was trying to draw there?
[00:14:21] Speaker B: I thought it was excellent. Again, it made me for the first time appreciate a concept like entropy, but like within a human, like instead of it being like matter and kind of the physics definition of entropy, actually.
[00:14:36] Speaker A: Cultural entropy.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Yeah, like cultural entropy. That's a great point. I was going to say entropy of thought, but even better is cultural empathy. And I would say, yeah, so an entropy of the, of the cultural public or the public's culture over time.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: And just real quick, just to bring this kind of physics term into, you know, this, because we were talking about entropy is kind of how systems generally go from order to disorder. Like, that's just a natural phenomenon from a physics standpoint. And so trying to impute that into kind of this cultural standpoint.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: And, and, and that's a natural phenomenon.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: It's kind of.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And to kind of, to keep going and finish that thought is. Then the disorder always forms a new order again.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: Now, it might not be an order that is the same as the old order, but there's, there's. The disorder doesn't just stay nebulous forever.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: Correct, Correct.
Endless cycle. And this is what happened. Like, this is not things. Things don't stay static, essentially, in the physics world. And then, you know, we, we can impute that over the cultural world.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And so here's the thing, man, which is interesting because as you're talking about the early 1010s, it makes me realize the book is, I think, spot on here on this where. And that's why I think he's right in saying the fifth wave is in. We're in this era of the early stage of that. Because what you also can add to that early 2000 and tens period is two important phenomenons that we are dealing with now, meaning the disorder has already happened. And we are, you know, the world is figuring out the new order as we speak, which is the Tea Party. Right. Like you said, Occupy Wall street was one in America at that time. But the second, which was much larger, much more influential to all our cultural discussion, which led to changes in politics, was the Tea Party. And that was kind of a revolt of the public who was tired of the system after the 2008 crash. And then you think about it, the uprising in Ukraine in 2011 is what then began the journey that we're on. That's, you know, kind of spooked Vladimir Putin to take Crimea in 2014, which then led to, you know everything that, that we're dealing with now as relates to Russia and Ukraine, which has then caused fracturing of relationships in other parts of Europe. It's caused tension between us now the United States with our new administration and the Western European allies, which might cause a fracturing in NATO. My point is, I'm more explaining the concept of this entropy. Whereas the beginning of that disorder in the early 2010s has led to what we see, a disorder of the post World War II order, the kind of industrial age kind of all that stuff, culture. And we're in the process of that change. So some point in the next generation or two, there will be some new order formed and we should expect that it looks different than the old order. And that doesn't. I'm not making a statement to say it's going to be better or worse, I don't know, but let's assume that the Middle east will look a bit different. NATO may or may not exist in the same way, so on and so forth. So that's what I'm saying, James, that has helped me realize that entropy from a physics standpoint is also a reality in, in kind of the human mind and as extrapolates to the culture of the public, real esoteric, it's all in the same universe.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: So no, I think that was illustrated kind of with the discussion in the book on the, in Spain and the indignado, that movement, in terms of how it was really led by people who, whose adult life. And you know, they're, they're remember, they didn't remember the, how bad Spain was prior to the current generation and that their generation essentially in terms of economically, civil rights, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so they looked at where Spain was, which to the older generations was such an improvement. It said it was like a wow, this is amazing. And they did not appreciate at all, you know, what it was. And they're like, we got to tear this thing up because this is just, this is unacceptable. And when it came to specifically what it's like, oh, it's more nebulous and oh, we want, you know, a more ethical society and things like that. And it wasn't because a lot of the things, whether it be economically or whether it be from a political standpoint, there was the battles that had been fought were won to make society what would be considered more open, more livable, so to speak. And so you saw that like they're trying to take apart the system that allowed them to have the role to take it apart, you know, like to be able to speak up at anything and not be put in some, you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I think one of the things though, that was really, really stood out to me when in the border, in the, in the, in the center framing was that and how to distinguish that, you know, would be the leaderless aspect of these, These public. These revolts of the public, so to speak. And that's one way to identify them is that because they're not hierarchical, they. He talked about them in terms of being networked. These are networked. And that because they're networked, the existence of the Internet makes it really make. Makes it very powerful. Gives them a power that they didn't really have before. Something like this to be able to put together these networked coalitions that are. That don't have some central person to center around. And so if somebody, if you have a central person to center around, it's actually less revolt of the public at that point, you know, like from the construct here, it's less border.
That's a different center, so to speak, trying to take over where it's. You look at these movements in Egypt and stuff like that. There wasn't one person who stood in front of everybody and kind of kept everything. Everything flowed through them and so forth. And then if there was an overthrow, when the bar got overthrown, they. This person then stepped up and said, okay, I'll be the guy, or even the, you know, the Spanish Ignatos, you know, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, and Occupy Wall Street, I considered Black Lives Matter to be similar to this, in which I remember we discussed some of the issues that Black Lives Matter had because it was leaderless, because. Because everybody kind of could just say, hey, Black Lives Matter is about this, Black Lives Matter is about that. And it's like, well, I didn't know that Black Lives Matter is supposed to be out all that other stuff. You know, I thought it was just about, you know, not black people.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: You know, it's interesting, James, think about it. Then the response is also nebulous by the opponents to these things. Like the term woke, right?
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: That's also something that's kind of leaderless. And people are able to define it how they want the people that support, you know, I guess being anti woke. If you ask them what's woke, you'll get a different answer from each one. So it's a good point. Like a lot of these things are leaderless and by leaderless, networked and so.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: Like they are able to. You're able to pull a lot of people together. And this gets us to the next point that I wanted to talk about was kind of you're able to pull a lot of people together and get them united around something, but it's not a leader necessarily. It's not one person dictating the agenda with a top down approach because that's kind of the center way to operate, which is still happening. And you know, the other thing just real quick as he talked about is how the center oftentimes has been in These recent last 15 years or so unprepared from these borders attacks. They would be prepared. Mubarak wouldn't have got overthrown by the Muslim Brotherhood, you know, who is another center kind of organization that has a hierarchy and everything like that. He was prepared to do battle with them, you know, but when it came from a network, there is no head that you could just cut off and you're good to go. Then he was ill prepared. And so we've seen some societies have done better. You know, he gave an example in Israel where Netanyahu in this time period was dealing with demonstrations and was able to, to, to, to break the network by giving them some of what they wanted, you know, which was very uncharacteristic for him. But he kind of realized that the way to do this isn't to try to censor them or anything like that. Let me, let me try to give, make enough of them happy and then they'll kind of, and then they'll kind of dissipate.
[00:22:04] Speaker B: Let me just say this because a lot's happened. This book was written in 2014. So well, that was.
[00:22:09] Speaker A: The particular revolt of the public that was talking about was a different one.
[00:22:13] Speaker B: Then because I know we've had the supreme housing Israel and yeah, I just know there's been a lot of stuff in Israel in recent years. So we're talking, you know, 15 years ago to stuff, not the stuff now. Yeah, but no man, that's good stuff because. And also for the audience, just the center and border in the book, one can equate to the establishment versus the fringe. I mean that's just another linguistic way to look at it. Those on the edges of.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: But it's still, it's more specific than that though, because the border, the characteristics of the border isn't just someone who's displaced from power. It's the way they operate is of someone who does. They're not trying, the border is not trying to operate like the center, you know, and so sometimes you have people that are on the fringe that just want to replace the established order and do the same, have the same kind of framework and structure, but just with a different guy at the top or a different collection of people at the top. Whereas the border, as he discusses it and is referencing, you know, previous works, is something that is, is as a, as a feature. You know, like they are not hierarchical. They do not operate with an agenda. They operate. And where I wanted to go to you with you with this is this idea of negation and oftentimes these border organizations and what the examples he gave and then others that what they're based on isn't that we're going to do blank in society. We want to change society by doing this five point plan. It's oftentimes about. And you can unite lots of different groups because it's about negation. It's about we want you to stop doing this. We want to break this system without necessarily for a plan for what comes next. So what did you think about his discussion of how negation is kind of a uniting when, when you put the, you know, the negation concept on top of this networked system where you can, you can unite large numbers of people about getting rid of Mubarak, even though most of them don't agree on what to do after that. You know, like, so you can, you can get step one, you can get a lot of people in but. And you just don't even have to address whatever stop step two or step three or step four is going to be.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: Now that's. I think this is why to me the book was pretty profound because the way that he defines the fifth wave and then having lived through the last decade, I mean, and just like we're talking about here while you know, living through the Tea Party and they occupy Wall street and seeing this stuff like we said, these disruptions of other political regimes around the world, whether Europe or the Middle east or Asia, things like that.
I just, I just think it's very interesting because it made me feel like, yes, we've truly left the industrial age and this is the real beginnings of the Information age. We're, we're going through a different period now and humanity is going to react and structures itself. It'll change. That's why we've been talking about the entropy. So the fact we're in the middle of it means, like you said earlier, we can't see what's going to be coming in a generation or two. But the fact that we're not going back to the way things Were I think is now evident, like you said earlier. And I'll define that we're not going back to three broadcast networks as the only sources of our information. We're not going back to an authoritarian, authoritative type of mass media. We're just going to go to something.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: Else once 90 people believe what it's saying. Or 80.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: Believe what it's saying. Yeah.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: And so. And so that's why I think that concept of negation is excellent. Because. And I would say this, James, trying to be reflecting in myself even while I was in digesting the book. That's what I'm saying. Like I realized that just my personality and my makeup is. I'm. I'm a guy that is I guess, a tortoise, not the hair culturally I'm a center, not the border guy in today's world, I guess. And because I'm the type of guy.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Also, you know, mid-40s, like you might have looked at it.
[00:26:01] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying.
[00:26:01] Speaker A: You were 21.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Well, and that's where I'm getting at. Which is. Which is probably why this is inevitable to continue with human societies going forward, which is I'm 47. I grew up, you know, born in the late 70s. So I grew up at the tail end of the Post World War II era When we beat the Soviets. And I remember the wall coming down and I remember, you know, the Tiananmen Square thing when I was 10 years old and being told that, you know, the fact that they don't teach that and not allowed to teach it in China is not good. And so I'm real based on this idea that centralized authority is not good. You know, the kind of 20th century totalitarian way of doing things was bad. The United States kind of representative government and democracy style was good, blah blah, blah. And I see a messy world but good.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: You know, you don't have. We're not disappearing people into the night generally. You know, we're like, it's. Yeah.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: No, some of the ideals of something greater. Yeah. And the whole equality thing and all that. And so what I'm saying is I'm wrecking this book helped me appreciate that the entropy is just going to happen. And you've made a great point. The fact that I am in middle age and I'm not 21 and the point you made earlier about the indignados in Spain was great because it reminds me of several things we could point to culturally here. I mean that was. The older generation at that time had lived under Franco, who was a Dictator. So you're right, the older people, someone 75, you know, in Spain, was very happy about the way the system because they lived through all these changes.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: A dictator. So the political repression, the economic system was in the toilet, you know, like. And they had lived through this period of unimagined prosperity by moving from the dictator to this open society. And then the young people are walking around like, oh, this sucks.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: This sucks. Exactly.
And the comment you just made to me just now is what probably the older generation thought, like, us, right? Like, okay, the system's not perfect. We can see where we could make some changes and do this and that, but we don't need to destroy this thing, right?
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Well, no, it's similar to. And I don't want a single single that out, but it's something that's personal for you and I that we had the conversation of is when we were hearing a couple years back, there were younger black people that were saying, racism is worse now than ever.
What.
Which was just like. To hear somebody say that out loud was like, wow. You know, like.
[00:28:18] Speaker B: And let's just chalk that up to.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: It's not that I want to mock that person. Like, I said it like, yo, yeah, racism's bad. You know, we should figure out ways to try to, you know, mitigate that. But don't. Don't give me the worst thing ever. You know, like, we gotta. We gotta. We have. We don't. We wouldn't want to say that. You know, we sound. We sound like we don't know what we're talking about.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: Well, you know what's interesting, I was going to make a joke about that's a reflection of our education system in the US and the terrible teaching of history, but I actually will correct myself and for the purpose of this learning about the fifth wave, that's a lack. That's a crisis of authority. Right? That's a lack of. That's fractured information. That young person is getting different information. I mean, you got. Right. And so.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: Well, that's where I want to go with this, actually.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: No, no, let's keep going.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: Okay. Well, what I was going to say with this, this is the part of the. Now, I think that the negation. And I know you had also discussed how that leads to the nihilism, you know, Nihilism.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: That's where I want to go. Yeah, that's interesting.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: But to me, this negation piece, while I see that as the phenomenon that dominated maybe the 2010s, this is where the book might have been. A prisoner of the Moment because I just finished another book called Filter World and this talks about the power of.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: The algorithm one at a time on the show, man.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, but this talks about the power of the algorithmic sorting and. Which wasn't in place in the early 2000 and tens, you know, so what we're talking about when we're talking about how, you know, Mubarak gets overthrown, thrown, you know, and it's organized on Facebook and all this other stuff, this was before the social media and the digital technology was so well sorted or algorithmically for people. And I think that where we're going now, actually I agree that we're in a fifth wave and that, you know, what we're in now is very different. The information abundance, lack of trust, erosion of authority, all of that stuff, I think are very good insights, but I don't think we're in. I think what's going to actually happen now, now that this stuff is happening algorithmically. One of the key things about this algorithmic sorting of people is that you following someone on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or whatever doesn't mean you're going to see all of the stuff that they post. So it's, it's a, it's the connection you have online now is all mediated by the algorithms. And so I actually think that makes people more controllable, you know, and more so even than mass media would potentially. Now you. And you can actually sort people out into their own groups and have and manipulate those groups however you see fit if you control the algorithm. And so where I see this saying, oh man, the public has all this power now, I think actually that power is about to be muted because. Or is being muted because the algorithmic sorting is so different from the. I follow this person, so when they post this thing on a protest, I see it and I might go join the protest. It's like, no, no, no, Whoever, whoever controls the algorithm decides whether you see what's happening on the protest or if you see something completely. If you see something totally irrelevant, because that's not, you're not, you're your group, your pod, your, your algorithmic, you know, rabbit hole is not going to see that stuff for whatever reason, whoever. So I think now we're in a situation and this goes also pulls on the idea of techno feudalism, which is a book we did, you know, a year or so ago. The controller of the algorithm now has more control even than the three major networks if you go back 50 or 100 years. And so we'll see how that I'm not. Again, I'm not saying how it's going to play out. You know, negation definitely does seem to still be a uniting factor amongst disparate groups. But the question is whether or not those disparate groups now can even form enough connections if the controller of the algorithm doesn't want them to.
[00:31:52] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's, that's why I think it just. We got to buckle up and it's going to be an interesting ride for humanity. No, I think, and this will probably go on because of our age. It's not going to get solved by, you know, if I live to my 80s or something, I don't think this gets solved in the next 30, 40 years.
Because the only way it would get solved, I guess, that, that in a shorter period of time, like in the next generation or two, would be to your point that this allows for the real beginning of a different type of authoritarian totalitarianism. You know, the concerns of a techno feudalist type of book.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: The concerns of an Aldous Huxley, you.
[00:32:27] Speaker B: Know, in a brave new world where like George Orwell.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you will be oppressed and you will love it. You won't even know you're oppressed. You know, this is like, yo, this is. Everything that you see suggests that the world as you know it is as good as it could be and whoever's the leader does no wrong and all this other stuff. And it's like, well, but you only see what algorithmically you're allowed to see.
[00:32:49] Speaker B: Yeah, well, the somacoma in a different way. Right, but, but no, I think, but that's why I said it's, it's just, that's what I said earlier. It's interesting to kind of realize that the authoritative hierarchical information sphere may have allowed for democratic kind of public sphere and then the, the democratization of the information sphere may lead to an authoritarian public sphere.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: Well, very interesting though, because remember the kind of mass media approach was fine for the authoritarian as well. They just had to control the actual broadcast. And what we're seeing now is that the control of the broadcast, because there's so many broadcasting, it doesn't matter if you control the broadcast. What matters is do you control the algorithm? Do you control what? And this is why China is so invested in social media censorship. And you have, you know, like the way that the autocrats around the world now have been, they've been, you know, kind of hands on rough grabbing a hold of these, of the social media stuff, trying to control what people see, what we're going to see, I think in the future is a more subtle way to do it where it's actually you're getting pleasure out of seeing a bunch of stuff that you like to see, but not realizing that you're only being fed a certain amount of information and a certain, you know, slice of information to walk you down this path that the algorithm wants you to walk down, so to speak. And that's the risk right now. But if the value system was in place like in the United States, the mass media was, was becoming of a more democratic system, you had civil rights movement, all this other stuff happening during this mass media movement, it was because the value system amongst the broadcasters, you know, the ethics amongst the broadcasters was such. If the ethics amongst the people who control the algorithms or the regulation was a certain way, then that could probably be promoting of a more open and democratic society as well. The question right now, it's just not, you know, that's owned by individuals, private individuals whose goal, as we can discern it so far, is just to make as much money as they can, which is about, that's not going to be about open and Democrat democratic society.
[00:34:51] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and the fact that we've learned that, you know, the way to make the most money is to get the most engagement. And the way you do that is play on the, the already like human evolutionary response to like triggers like fear and stress and all that.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: So other.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: That's why to me it's, it's, that's why this is totally unpredictable.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: Fear, stress, disgust, you know.
[00:35:13] Speaker B: Yeah, and, and, but no, like you, you allude to China and it's a very good and great example. But that's what I'm saying, this unpredictable here because remember here businesses are able to lobby the government in a way that, that just doesn't happen in places like China. So the fact like you're saying that money is the incentive in the United States means that we may not create the somocoma world like the Chinese may be doing, because that keeps people in a state of comfort that they see whatever they see. In America, the model is disturb people as much as possible with this negation stuff. That's, that's, you know, can, can be triggered by like you're saying disgust, fear, you know, stress, all that. And, and so like that's, well, you.
[00:35:57] Speaker A: Just need more enough. And all they have is negation because you don't give them the tools or the inclination to even try to figure out how to maybe improve something. It's just about you know you're mad about whatever it is. So let's just take about, take out whatever it is and we'll just provoke you to be mad about stuff.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think the risk. I know, I know we're going to wrap up the risk with this is where he finishes. Just to kind of wrap up our discussion.
[00:36:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: Which is nihilism, which is you're going to have a public that has a majority, you know, people that are, as you point, a critical mass. That, that is nihilistic, which is, again, that's. That's the entropy part of it.
[00:36:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: Because that's definitely going to lead to disorder if, if the majority of people are go from negating things to just being nihilistic about society and saying, oh, well, you know, what if just blow it up and who cares? And, and not even thinking about. And I think just as we finish.
[00:36:47] Speaker A: Up evidence by the, the Spanish indignados how they affected their elections to the extent and they put in power the people that were kind of opposed to the things that they were more opposed to the things that they wanted than the people that were in power at that time. So they, by their protests, made society less hospitable in the way that they wanted it because they got, they hit the point of nihilism to a certain degree, like, we just got to blow this all up. And it's like, well, you've got 80% of what you want, you know, so you're going to fixate on that 20% that you don't have and then decide you want to blow it up. Well, maybe if that's how your kind of information systems are walking you down that road.
[00:37:23] Speaker B: Think about it. Jan, that's a very good point that makes me think about where we are in the United States just in recent years. You know, you go from the attitude of, let's say, January 6th, which is some Americans saying, let's blow it up that way. Right. Because I didn't mean nihilism. Yeah. And the negation and the nihilism that was applied in, let's say, the 2024 campaign in general. And then, and then people have the nihilistic attitude of, you know, f the system, let's blow it up again, which now a lot of those people seem to be unhappy with the way that the current administration is running things, which they voted for. And this, it seems, that is becoming more authoritarian. So it's like, it's this weird thing that it's my concern is that without the democracy, you know, the population and the Public on the same page about the democracy. We're going to lose the democracy because it's going to allow other actors who want to do their own thing, like we're seeing who don't want billionaires obey.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: By the rule of law, basically.
[00:38:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:38:22] Speaker A: Yeah. That gives them the ground and the end. Because people are like, oh, I don't like it anyway, you know.
[00:38:27] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:38:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: And people just use them now, the government as their personal kind of, you know, money, you know, exchange. And it's just in the open. Yeah, in the oak.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: That's what I'm saying. They've been doing it in secret for a long time, but now it's in the open.
[00:38:40] Speaker B: That's what I mean. That's why the book helped me appreciate like it helped me actually just get through the now phase. Because I used to think the same thing, Jane. That's what is a kind of rational thinker. I'd be like, well, everyone always said they hated the deals in the smoke filled rooms and all this political, you know, the corruption in politics that we all know has been going on forever. Why is every. Why are so many of the same people okay with just watching it out in the open? And I didn't appreciate this idea of nihilism, that people are just like, man, screw this, I don't care. And that's not healthy for the system, but at least it's, it's good to understand where we're at.
[00:39:14] Speaker A: And that's your point.
[00:39:15] Speaker B: Let me keep my sanity.
[00:39:16] Speaker A: That's the point. To your, to the entropy piece. That it just may be a part of the, of the system, part of the process that we have to go through in order to appreciate. Like how do you just happen to.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: Be born at the time to watch it?
[00:39:27] Speaker A: Yeah, like how do you appreciate the lack of corruption? Well, you probably got to deal with a lot of corruption and have that make your life not better.
[00:39:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: For you to be able to, you know, like to then say, okay, no, not having corruption is better. Because right now I think there's enough people who say, yeah, corruption, who cares? It's going to happen anyway. We might as well just, you know, like turn the other, turn away from it or whatever. And. But yes, you know, it's the, the, the, there are going to be actors that try to take advantage of that and there are people who try to push back on that. And so we'll just. This, that's the unknowable piece. You know, like, how is it going to coalesce in society? And so I think the book did a good job of keeping open the possibilities for the future. But the reason why I thought it was a worthwhile read was because it allows you to kind of see from a different framework, a lot of the things that have unfolded. And then you can kind of make your own mind up as far as where things may be going or your own kind of, you know, your feel, your gut feel on that. Because I didn't walk away thinking that everything he's saying was correct or even timely. I thought some of the stuff was like, okay, yeah, this has kind of changed since you talked about it. And it's going in a different direction. Not one that I think you should have anticipated. Like, you wouldn't have anticipated that, but it's something that. It's. More data points. But the general framework is helpful for understanding some of those attitudes that we have. So we would recommend it, as you said in the beginning, you know, and I think that a lot of these things, again, just help us kind of make sense of the world we're living in right now. And this. Yeah, it does. It seems like we picked a pretty interesting time to be walking around, so everybody thinks that, but we really need it, so. But we appreciate, right. For joining us on this episode of Call.
[00:41:01] Speaker B: Like, man, I'll let you know when I come back in my next life.
[00:41:03] Speaker A: If this one was. If this one was more.
[00:41:05] Speaker B: Yeah, just like, which one was better, you know, which way I had more excitement and fulfillment. You know, all that. For sure. For sure.
[00:41:11] Speaker A: So, yeah, we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call. I gotta see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: I'm Tunde.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk soon.
