Table of Contents

PRELUDE TO A TURBULENT AGE
HODER AND WAEL GHONIM
MY THESIS
WHAT THE PUBLIC IS NOT
PHASE CHANGE 2011
A CRISIS OF AUTHORITY
THE FAILURE OF GOVERNMENT
NIHILISM AND DEMOCRACY
CHOICES AND SYSTEMS
FINALE FOR SKEPTICS
RECONSIDERATIONS: TRUMP, BREXIT, AND FAREWELL TO ALL THAT

About the Author

Martin Gurri is a geopolitical analyst and student of new media and information effects. He spent many years working in the corner of the CIA dedicated to the analysis of open media. From that privileged perch, he watched the global information landscape undergo a transformation so radical as to seem unprecedented in the history of our species. After leaving government, Gurri focused his research on the motive forces powering this transformation. The result of this labor is The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, first published in digital form in 2014 and republished in 2018. He lives in Virginia.

Reviews

“All over the world, elite institutions from governments to media to academia are losing their authority and monopoly control of information to dynamic amateurs and the broader public. This book, until now only in samizdat (and Kindle) form, has been my No. 1 handout for the last several years to anyone seeking to understand this unfolding shift in power from hierarchies to networks in the age of the internet.”
—Marc Andreessen, cofounder, Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz

“We are in an open war between publics with passionate and untutored interests and elites who believe they have the right to guide those publics. Gurri asks the essential question: Can liberal representative democracy survive the rise of the public?”
—Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center, professor of politics and human rights at Bard College