(Brendan Smialowski / European Pressphoto Agency; and Joe Burbank / Orlando Sentinel)

On Tuesday I made my way to a glass office building near Metro Center, which hosted a discussion by four youthful journalists on “Politics and Technology.”  Despite their employment in a doomed profession, the panelists were knowledgeable, articulate, and intelligent to a fault, and made honest attempts to wrestle with the implications of social media for their work.  (The magnetic pull of journalism for the young might be explained by a long string of Hollywood productions, going back to All the President’s Men, in which grizzled reporters play the detective roles once reserved for Humphrey Bogart.)  Being Washington journalists, they also talked about politics.

Those interested in the Twitter stream emanating from the proceedings can link to the #SMWpolitics hashtag.  Here, I intend to offer my own impressions, and reflect on the tangled subject of mass media, new media, and politics.

People in the news business are scrambling to keep up with the new means of communication.  This is entirely to their credit, and in my experience places them ahead of their counterparts in, say, State Department or CIA.  The panelists were deep into Facebook and Twitter (Google+ still seems up in the air).  They have vast numbers of followers and friends, and obtain much of their information through social media.  For example, they follow the digital doings of congressmen – from the Anthony Wiener bizarre to the more usual staff-produced pap.

They are young and handy with these tools of communication.  Yet a question clearly gnawed at them:  what’s my job?  Is it to grow vast numbers of followers in the mode of Justin Bieber?  To become a shepherd to this flock, leading it to the home website – Huffington Post, Politico, ABC News?  To sit in on President Obama’s Google+ “circle” as one of many thousands?  To report on new media – on politics – on new media’s effect on politics?

The question is seldom articulated.  It’s probably taboo to say it out loud.  Instead, the anxiety emerges in sentences beginning with “Our job is to [fill in the blank].”  The journalist’s job, for example, is to educate.  That was said at the panel.  Educate whom, about what?  Well, the masses, about the possibility of bullshit in online sources.  But the masses might well know this already – and it isn’t at all clear that, if they don’t, they will turn to journalists for education.  Or the journalist’s job is to expose.  Politicians, we were told, are not identical to their canned social media effusions – most have staffers posting in their names.  President Obama, for one, confessed that he wasn’t tweeting his own tweets.

Apparently, only journalists are privy to this hidden knowledge.

This last attempt at justification came in response to the question:  if politicians and the public can talk directly on Twitter and Facebook, who needs the news media?  A good question, I thought.  A long-term dilemma.  At present, journalists benefit from the dinosaurian character of the political actors on the scene.  The people on the panel exuded scorn for the objects of their coverage, and rightfully so.  In the matter of information and communication, our politicians are amazingly unevolved.  They hear “internet” and conjure a series of tubes, and they are terrified of what the public might be up to in those dark warrens.

This won’t always be so.  A new generation of office-holders will grasp the power of digital media to forge communities – to speak directly to, and hear directly from, all interested constituents.  At that moment, the political influence of the news media will be fatally reduced.

I first heard the ugly word disintermediate in the late Nineties.  The context was the news business itself, particularly newspapers, which bundled together all kinds of odds and ends then sold them in a near-monopoly market.  Once web content broke the monopoly, people went straight to the sources, ignoring the middlemen.  They disintermediated.

Disintermediation, which destroyed the music business a decade ago and today is killing off the news business, will soon begin to torment our politics.

The media always owned the microphones.  They had, and still have, a loud public voice, and don’t need social media to communicate.  The same is true of politicians.  They gave their speeches, and the public listened.  To most of them social media is an unnatural act, a two-way microphone – a problem.  But to the public, social media means the end of passivity and silence.

A vast political frontier has been opened by the digital revolution.  In the Middle East, a rebellious public has overthrown dictators from this space, but in our country, with its relatively benign institutions, it lies so far unexploited, practically untouched.  If such disparate political eruptions as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street represent the public mood, however, we may soon see an assault on the temples of authority conducted by networked insurgents who can communicate circles around the dinosaurs of the political class.  This would be transformation on a radical scale:  the Fifth Wave, sweeping away many of our standing political arrangements.

It could happen as early as the November elections.  President Obama was swept into office by an insurgency, but today he embodies the establishment.  He sits like pharaoh at the top of the pyramid.  For much of the public, he is Washington, and neither his actions in office nor those of his staff convey much of a sense that they understand the nature of this alienation.  The brilliant deployment of social media by the Obama team in 2008 seems, in three short years, to have become a lost art.  The president is the president:  Democrats up in arms against the government will not mistake him for a fellow rebel.

The Republicans’ situation is, if anything, worse.  Mitt Romney personifies the establishment.  He’s burdened with attributes which infuriate the insurgent wing of his party:  great wealth, governorship in a blue state, responsibility for a complicated health care law.  Unlike candidate Barack Obama in 2008, Romney has never given any indication of having a clue about social media.  He’s a conventional old-fashioned candidate, seeking election by conventional well-established means.

The 2012 presidential contest will be a great thudding battle of dinosaurs.  A space has thus opened up for something:  probably not another candidate, I imagine, but a surprise attack by a disgruntled public, the spread of a furious disruptive message, a nimble movement against.  That’s what social media does best.

Because elections, like all human events, are tossed about by random factors, there’s no predicting whether such a revolt of the public will in fact occur.  However, the possibility will add some suspense, and much analytic interest, to the dull rituals of the campaign.

The young journalists on the panel didn’t see any of this, of course.  There was a lot they didn’t see.  Like the politicians they cover, journalists perch atop an institutional pyramid, and are blind to everything non-pyramidal.  As a member of the audience, while watching a Twitter stream projected on a screen behind the panelists, I heard any number of sharp assessments of how social media might influence established political players and processes.  I heard nothing about the Fifth Wave:  how the new means of communication, so inherently contrarian and disruptive, might propel a new and eccentric class of political actors, and seek to shatter, for good or evil, the current rules of the political game.

The mid-January defeat in Congress of the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and its evil twin, the Stop Piracy Act (or SOPA), is a dramatic illustration of the decline of established authority in the face of a rebellious public.  The authorities engaged in this particular farce were political and economic:  a handful of senators and congressmen, and the organizational chieftains of the entertainment industry.  The performance began with quiet murmurs behind drawn curtains, but ended with a pratfall-filled chase scene in the full light of day, worthy of the Marx Brothers.

The sponsoring politicians clearly believed this was a technical matter, to be settled among lawmakers and interested parties.  It never occurred to them that anyone would be paying attention.  For their part, representatives of the “creative” establishment felt entitled to reduce the web to something like an occupied country, and co-opt the Justice Department to secure their profits.  It never occurred to them to question the outsourcing of their business needs to the government.

This being Washington DC, the line between political and corporate power was fuzzy.

According to Politico, Allison Halatei, former Deputy Chief of Staff to House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, and Lauren Pastarnack, a Senate Judiciary Committee Senior Aide, just accepted jobs with two of the lobbying firms backing SOPA and PIPA. Halatei and Pastarnack helped write the bills. Halataei is now the National Music Publisher’s Association chief liaison to Congress, and Pasternak is now the director of government relations for the MPAA.

The head of the MPAA is Chris Dodd, a former senator.  By law, he is banned from lobbying Congress, but as sultan of the music publishers he can throw fistfuls of coins to his friends from a $100 million lobbying war chest.

PIPA/SOPA enjoyed support from the Republicans who run the House and the Democrats who run the Senate.  It was a rare bipartisan effort, mantled in the undivided power and prestige of the federal legislature.  That it collapsed so quickly, and in such a comic opera atmosphere, should be considered a symptom of our strange moment in history.

The dispute over SOPA is often framed as pitting Washington-savvy Hollywood against the naïfs of Silicon Valley.  This characterization is by no means false.  I applied it in my previous post on the subject, and it pretty accurately describes the early phases of the conflict.

But something changed.  As the knowledgeable Yochai Benkler observes, it wasn’t Google or Facebook which orchestrated the bills’ astonishing reversal of fortune.  It was the eruption into the process – typically sudden and unforeseen – of the hordes of an aroused public.

It turned out many people had been paying attention after all.  Marketing campaigns by tech companies helped call attention to the problems with SOPA, but this was largely an organic movement, an internet thing.  I don’t know much about the internet, but I know this:  virality is unforeseeable.  Marketing geniuses, deploying the sexiest technical applications, will fail to achieve it.  Yet teenage kids reproducing images of kittens go viral in a trice.

The web is overwhelmingly populated by cute cat communities and their like.  This is Ethan Zuckerman’s insight, not mine.  Building on the idea, Zuckerman has advanced a “cute cat theory” of web activism:  if you mess with the governance of the internet, you will get into serious political trouble at the point when you truly and really piss off the cute cat users – the multitudinous, normally apolitical public.  That, in brief, is what happened to Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and to SOPA’s sponsors in Congress.

Some tech companies, in fact, seemed dazed by the ferocity of the public’s reaction.  Within a week of Godaddy’s announced support for SOPA, a user boycott had moved over 70,000 domains out of the company’s hosting site, forcing a clearly disoriented management to distance itself from the bill.

The effort to publicize the fight over PIPA/SOPA involved web activists like Rebecca MacKinnon and new media mavens like Jeff Jarvis, nonprofit entities like Wikipedia and multibillion-dollar outfits like Facebook.  On 18 January, while Congress continued to ponder various versions of the two bills, Wikipedia, Reddit, and thousands of additional sites – including, let it be noted, the most popular cute cat location – went dark in protest.  Other websites maintained service but made their displeasure known.  Google, for example, conspicuously blacked out its logo.

But it was the blizzard of tweets and emails from an outraged public which battered Capitol Hill into submission.  Soon politicians were scrambling to change positions with fervent demonstrations of new medianess:

First, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, took to Facebook, one of the vehicles for promoting opposition, to renounce a bill he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who leads the G.O.P.’s Senate campaign efforts, used Facebook to urge his colleagues to slow the bill down. Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina and a Tea Party favorite, announced his opposition on Twitter, which was already boiling over with anti-#SOPA and #PIPA fever.

Then trickle turned to flood — adding Senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Roy Blunt of Missouri, and Representatives Lee Terry of Nebraska and Ben Quayle of Arizona. At least 10 senators and nearly twice that many House members announced their opposition.

“Thanks for all the calls, e-mails, and tweets. I will be opposing #SOPA and #PIPA,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, wrote in a Twitter message. Late Wednesday, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, withdrew his support for a bill he helped write.

Two days after the Wikipedia blackout, both PIPA and SOPA were withdrawn without ever coming up for a vote.

There are lessons from this struggle, for those with eyes to see.  Political power sought control, rather than the imposition of any particular ideology.  The web is mostly illegible to government.  Those who have absorbed James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State know that modern governments everywhere seek to transform the social landscape to make it more legible from the center.  On this account, SOPA won’t be the last attempt to impose a policing regime on the web.

Political and business actors argued from authority, rather than the merits of the case.  They suffered from tunnel vision, willfully ignoring the unintended consequences of patrolling the public’s means of communication on the web.  Political players believed they worked within a club of friends.  The entertainment industry looked at its business interests and saw a moral imperative.  Neither expected opposition from outside their charmed circle, so neither could muster persuasive arguments when, to their complete surprise, that opposition materialized.

Established authority was blind to the information environment in which the public works and plays.  It could not see where the revolt against SOPA came from.  Authority emanates from hierarchical structures which once monopolized access to information and communication.  Everything produced outside these structures appears worse than illegitimate:  unreal.  Dodd thus blamed his industry’s legislative disaster on “Internet companies” and their “ability to spread their message globally, without regulation or fact-checking.”  He never saw the public that trounced him.

Finally, the nature of the conflict between authority and the public is what the Pentagon would call asymmetric:  one is powerful and slow-moving, the other numerous and quicksilver.  Principles of action diverge accordingly, with authority worshipping rank and orderly process, while the public, as public, displays informality and a contrarian streak sometimes verging on nihilism.  With SOPA, authority tried to make the web more like itself.  Disruptive change, I suspect, will soon flow in the opposite direction.

The question now troubling me is whether it’s possible to quantify the transformation.

Take the situation in Egypt.  Much has been made about the influence of Facebook and Al Jazeera on the revolution in that country.  Yet is it possible to associate Egypt’s political turbulence with (say) a particular percentage of the population having access to Facebook or being able to receive Al Jazeera?  If, as the theory of the Fifth Wave assumes, information determines behavior, there should be a way to correlate the flow and access of information to events on the street.

I am currently embarked on a research effort to test this proposition.

I have already learned a few things.  The public, I’ve discovered, is easy.  Its conquest of the means of information and communication is relatively simple to document.   Reams of data are available on access to the web and use of social media, for example, and all of it conforms to the same shape over time:  a birth in the obscure long tail of information, followed by a sharp spike upwards toward the light of universal awareness.

Source: Twitter

Source: wikipedia

Source: Technorati

If I were to chart Google or Baidu searches, YouTube ingests, WordPress or blogger.com sites, photos and video posted to Facebook – not to mention channels and viewership for satellite TV – I am confident the trajectory would remain the same.  Such measurements tell a story.  Over the last decade, to the horror of accredited elites everywhere, the public has stormed the commanding heights of information and communication.  From this unprecedented position of strength, it has proceeded to assault, weaken, and in some cases overthrow established institutions in every domain.

The problem, I find, comes in quantifying the flip side of the story:  that is, in trying to identify measures of institutional authority and decline.  One pillar of authority in the modern world, for example, is the academy.  To enter requires a costly and laborious process of accreditation, but those inside the temple feel entitled to speak with oracular certainty about all sorts of subjects, and were once listened to with awe and respect.

How is the influence and authority of the academy to be measured empirically?  I can only offer hints and signs.  At the heart of the academy stands the system of tenure.  Using two data points in time provided by the New York Times, I can draw the slope of decline for tenured professorship since its golden age around 1960:

Source: New York Times

This, however, smacks of the worst of intellectual sins:  cherry-picking data.  The number of students attending four-year schools, to my knowledge, continues to grow.  The tuition charged to these would-be scholars has grown much faster than the rate of inflation and even the increase in medical costs, as can be seen here:

Is this evidence that the academy holds the keys to a highly valued commodity, or – as some have argued – of an “education bubble” ready to burst?  I have no idea.  Descriptively, I can make the case that pronouncements from famous professors and university studies are increasingly met with an indifference verging on contempt.  Qualitatively, the academy appears to have lost much of its authority.  But can this historical process even be translated into empirical measures?

If only because it has travelled farthest down the road to ruin, the news media provides the most satisfying measures of institutional standing.  Newspaper subscriptions, TV audience, stock value – there are no ambivalent perspectives for journalism.  All the available data points look like stepping-stones on the way to the graveyard.

Source: Alexa

Measures for government are toughest to identify.  In some way, these should throw light on the relationship between political power and the public:  who controls the agenda for public discussion, who commands attention and respect, who’s indispensable to a transaction, and so forth.

Opinion polls showing the degree of public trust in government are an important indicator – and, as might be expected in an “age of distrust,” they show an unprecedented revulsion against government (see here and here).  However, such pulse-takings represent subjective assessments of objective conditions.  The public’s disgust reflects a sense that government has failed in ways that should be empirically measurable.  Yet I confess I’ve had a lot of difficulty conceptualizing measures of government authority and government failure, while avoiding the irresistible urge to cherry-pick.

One obvious measure is government debt.  The numbers, which follow a trajectory similar to that of tuition, indicate a failure to cover the cost of the state’s social contract with the public.  It is no exaggeration to say that the real-life consequences of the chart below have been seismic:  they include the rise of the Tea Party, the overthrow of President Obama’s 2008 coalition, and greatly intensified scrutiny and conflict over the terms of the social contract itself.

Source: usgovernmentspending.com

Debt tells us nothing about the performance of government, a notoriously difficult activity to measure.  Yet the public’s quarrel is at least as much about broken promises and failure to deliver the goods as it is about the inability to pay for the federal budget.  The radical critique of the function of government begins with a perception that, relative to their stated mission, government bureaucracies function quite poorly.

On occasion, one catches an empirical glimpse of this performance problem.  The chart below shows the decline, over the last decade, of first-class mail carried by the Post Office.  Postal service was a foundational responsibility of the federal government – a powerful disseminator of subsidized information, including newspapers, as well as a centerpiece of the spoils system whereby jobs were handed out to political supporters of the party in power.  Today, commercial carriers take care of a great deal of bulk mail; email and text messaging do the same for the written word.  The Post Office serves mainly to deliver (still subsidized) junk mail.  Even as a storehouse of prized federal jobs, it is failing.  The Post Office’s untenable position, described by the drooping line in the chart, can be seen as an early warning to the government as a whole of the effects of the Fifth Wave.

Source: US Post Office Department

The final chart is only in part meant as a joke.  It compares the daily reach of USA.gov, which describes itself as “the U.S. Government’s Official Web Portal for all government transactions, services, and information” with the iconic cute-cat site, icanhascheezburgers.com.  The result:  when it comes to garnering online attention, cute cats trump the pomp and glory of the federal government.  This won’t come as a surprise to Ethan Zuckerman, who many years ago propounded his “cute cat theory” of internet activity.

It might, however, serve as a warning to politicians and bureaucrats.

Source: Alexa

Some months ago, a member of my family died who had an intermittent presence on Facebook.  At her husband’s request, the profile was taken down.  This made sense.  The deceased had left few traces of herself online, and bumping into her name, as if she were still with us, was painful.

But what of those who, over the years, have produced a rich trove of content on Facebook, expressing the tastes and opinions – the everyday comments and humor – of a vibrant human life?  The good we do may be interred with our bones, but our Facebook posts live after us, and family and friends may see in them a lasting remnant of a beloved personality.  They may wish to preserve the account to honor the memory of the dead.

In a recent conversation on this subject, someone pointed out to me the problem posed by continuing activity in a dead person’s Facebook account.  The usual banter and joking would be clearly out of the question, but there would be no one to police the posts.  If the account were left active, impropriety in content would be difficult to avoid.  If the account were somehow frozen, however, the effect might feel less like a living memory than a mausoleum.  And even if most family members wished to keep the account online, there might be others who find the enduring public presence of the dead disturbing.

“Then they can unfriend the account,” I countered reflexively.

The fifth wave of information is a destroyer of customs, habits, and traditions.  On this blog, I have dealt frequently enough with the political effects of this demolition – but on a daily basis the most powerful effects are cultural, often baffling our sense of right and wrong both morally and from the perspective of polite behavior.

In the swirl of the digital storm, we are likely to feel confused and disoriented:  culturally naked.  What does it mean for me to unfriend the dead – what message am I sending?  How is this stranger than maintaining a fictitious connection to a dead person’s chatty web page?  Can one poke the dead?

For obvious reasons, death is the locus of our strongest-held values and beliefs.  An array of institutions works to ritualize death in our culture as in every other.  Religion consoles our fears and our loss.  Funeral homes sell coffins and arrange viewings of the deceased.  Cemeteries, at a price, provide a final resting ground.  Specific attitudes, phrases, and facial expressions are demanded, quite firmly, of the bereaved.  On occasion, murdering husbands and wives have been found out because they were unable to falsify these ritual requirements.

Yet a growing proportion of who we are is captured in digital information:  and digital information never dies.  That is a problem for young people who, on the spur of the moment, post boozy photos of themselves on Flickr, and for politicians who indulge on Twitter their exhibitionist cravings.  These digital blunders will cast a shadow over their real-world pursuits forever.

It is also a problem for those stricken by the loss of a close friend or family member:  the digital portion of their dead lives on.  The publicness advocated by Jeff Jarvis here has an unforeseen consequence.  Public life continues after private death.  Once upon a time, there was a sharp distinction between those who had access to the public sphere and the silent masses – also between the public and personal aspects of our lives.  Those distinctions have vanished, and with them our ability to compose ourselves as the occasion requires.  The privately dead can still share philosophical ruminations on a blog, sports trivia or fart jokes on Facebook.

When a social network like Facebook boasts about “giving people the power to share,” it’s unlikely it meant with the dead.  The company is seven years old, the founder is 28:  to this demographic, death is just another word for nothing left to post.  Not surprisingly, then, Facebook’s policy for dealing with digital afterlife sounds like a weird combination of IT chatter and funeral parlor jargon.  “When a user passes away,” explains the Facebook Help Center, “we memorialize the account to protect their [sic] privacy.”  Memorializing means “only confirmed friends can see the profile” or “leave posts in remembrance.”  (A more fulsome explanation of the policy can be found here.)

Of course, the heart of the matter isn’t Facebook’s awkwardness in managing an event beyond its youthful imagination.  It’s cultural vertigo.  The lack of guideposts around the most dreadful of transitions imposes a sense of radical uncertainty, even horror, on the public.  A casual search easily turns up users who think Facebook’s “memorializing” is “scary,” and others who found it wantonly destructive and arbitrary:

. . . FB doesn’t seem to have responded or taken any action to undo the hurt you are causing to grieving families like mine. My 19 year old son’s FB was memorialised to protect it from hacking following his sudden tragic death. There was absolutely no warning given about all his comments and postings being deleted. All his friends and our family have now been caused the additional pain of losing all his written contributions to our lives without having the opportunity to save them first. This is the age of the internet, where people don’t write letters any more, and for FB to remove them without reason or warning is unforgiveable.

 In the age of the internet, we expect the dead to live in word and image, and not be creepy, or undignified, or painful – yet we have evolved the cultural mechanisms to achieve exactly none of these goals.  When it comes to the digitally undead, as with many domains of the information revolution, we’re making things up as we go:  and the question troubling my mind is whether, at the present speed of change, the evolution of new, more appropriate customs is possible.

A grim axiom of old-time journalism maintains that “if it bleeds, it leads.”  The mass audience pays attention to violence – so goes the assumption.  Since the news media desperately seeks an audience, it gravitates toward violence, at times ceding the information agenda to those who perpetrate it.

Bad actors the world over know this weakness of the news media, and play to it ruthlessly.  They riot and kill to get their message across.  In the bizarre controversy over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, a number of governments and groups worked to stoke up “Muslim rage” against the West – yet nobody paid much attention until violence erupted.  While the cartoons, by themselves, failed to inspire much rage, the upheavals and murders inspired a great deal of coverage for a particular political attitude.

The Al Qaeda strategy of perpetrating spectacular atrocities was shaped entirely by media considerations.  Osama Bin Laden combined the characteristics of the mass murderer and the PR man, a mix by no means unique in history.  He gambled that the media would find the power and influence of the perpetrators to be proportionate to the damage inflicted, and he succeeded probably beyond his wildest hopes.  Endlessly cycled images of the twin towers collapsing and New Yorkers fleeing in panic conveyed an unmistakable message:  the attackers, by the evidence of our own eyes, were now America’s most dangerous enemy.  This, of course, mirrored Bin Laden’s claims for his small band of terrorists.

To those unwilling to trade the death of innocents for headlines, the alternative is dire:  they can write their message in their own blood.  For months, this has been the communications strategy followed by the insurgents in Syria.  It has been grimly successful.

The first large-scale anti-regime demonstrations in Syria took place in mid-March.  A great many events have occupied the world’s attention since that date – the killing of Bin Laden by Seal Team Six, for example, and the near-collapse of the Eurozone under a mountain of sovereign debt.  Muammar Qaddafi of Libya was first overthrown, then captured and executed.  Waves of mindless looters overwhelmed the forces of law and order in London.  Republicans and Democrats battled in Congress.  Entertainers made news, as did professional sports competitions.

For rebels from a country Al Jazeera called, as late as February, a “kingdom of silence,” the problem was how to gain a voice and shape a political message which would be heard above the noise of global events.  By default, that message became a morality play about the Assad regime.  Despite Al Jazeera’s equivocations, Assad was shown to be no different from the corrupt despots of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya who were pulled down by their own people.  Syria belonged with the great Arab uprisings of 2011.

That was the message.  From the first, the voice was the literal voice of the Syrian people, magnified by YouTube.  The regime’s total control over the country’s media, and its expulsion of foreign journalists, were circumvented by a barrage of cell phone videos which found their way to the web.

Locations in Syria where videos originated (as of November 21)

Their effect was immediate.  The size and vigor of the protesting crowds caught observers by surprise.  So did the ferocity of the regime’s repression, unleashed in late March and captured in hundreds of terrifying videos.  This theater of violence overturned long-established narratives.  In January, Bashar Assad had boasted that Syria remained “stable” because his government’s anti-Israel stance coincided with “the beliefs of the people.”  In February, Al Jazeera could still quote Assad apologist Joshua Landis saying, “Unlike Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak . . . Bashar al-Assad is young.  Young people are quite proud of him.”

By mid-April, when Al Jazeera inaugurated its Syria uprising blog, neither of these propositions seemed remotely credible.

Since then, regime and protesters have been locked in a deadly embrace.  Syrian military and security forces have besieged entire cities, slaughtering indiscriminately.  The number of deaths is estimated by the UN at 3,500 and by the Syrian opposition at 4,500.  Violent repression has reduced the size but not the energy of the demonstrations.  These continue every day.  A new problem faced by the opposition, however, is that struggles of attrition are intrinsically dull and un-newsworthy.  To retain the attention of a distracted global public, it must do more than fight Assad’s powerful repressive machinery to a tie.

The response has been to personalize the dead.  Whatever their total number, they must be mourned one at a time.  Videos from Syria have evolved over time, with proportionately fewer images of cheering crowds and more of weeping families surrounding the bloody faces of the dead.  The latter include women and children, but are mostly young men – some with the top of their skulls blown clean away, others with torn limbs and mangled torsos, but all strangely calm, at peace in the fratricidal storm.

Syria on YouTube today resembles a house of the dead.

I am not aware how these videos are uploaded to the web.  I only know the last link in the dissemination chain:  the Twitter stream of Ahmed al Omran, the eponymous blogger of Saudi Jeans whom I have followed intermittently over the years.  Omran, obviously a Saudi, is a worthy subject for a future post on this blog.  He now works as a “production assistant” for social media at NPR, and lives in Washington DC.  Like NPR’s Andy Carvin, he has taken on the role of curator for the flood of content coming out of Syria.

Digital curation too is  a topic for another day.  With Omran, it means producing a vast volume of tweeted links to Syrian YouTube videos, many highlighted by suggestive upper-case warnings:  “GRAPHIC,” “EXTREMELY GRAPHIC,” “HEARTBREAKING.” The effect is not unlike that of the “adults only” rating on teens.  It becomes difficult to resist clicking on the link to experience the horror within.

With the faces of the dead pleading its case, the Syrian opposition has made remarkable advances in the last few weeks.  A poll by the Arab American Institute found that the “overwhelming majority of Arabs in the six nations covered in the survey side with those Syrians demonstrating against the government (from 83% in Morocco to 100% in Jordan).”  The pan-Arab dailies are also unanimously in favor of the demonstrators.  Al Jazeera, after an initial wobble, has resumed more typical anti-regime coverage.

And suddenly the opinion of the people matters to Arab rulers.  Most have heard premonitory rumbles, and are now maneuvering to avoid the fate of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Qaddafi.  The unpopularity of the Assad regime – the barbarities it commits every day, as witnessed by cell phone videocams and propagated by YouTube – make it a tempting target for political posturing.  Early this week, the Arab League approved sanctions against Syria.  The League is a club of kings and dictators, but the members sought to strike a pleasing note with the Arab public.  Such harsh treatment of a fellow despot, observers agree, was unprecedented.

Soon after the Arab League decision, Turkey’s government, long a friend and ally of Syria, imposed sanctions of its own.  The UN Human Rights Council just released a document accusing the Syrian regime of “crimes against humanity.”  The OIC, an organization of Muslim countries, has urged that it “immediately stop using excessive force.”  Meanwhile the French are making overtures to the opposition umbrella group.  Except for Iran, Assad is now pretty much alone in the world.

In Syria, the dead remain politically alive.  They rivet the attention of the Arab public and the world beyond, and they render visual testimony of the illegitimacy of their rulers.  To the opposition, they have become a stockpile of moral justification.  Despite the promise by the opposition leadership to preserve “the peaceful nature of the popular revolution,” an armed rebellion has been organized by deserters from the military.  This has attracted media curiosity but little criticism, and has been reported as a sign of weakness for the regime rather than a breach of trust by the opposition.  The daily parade of the dead has justified violent resistance.

Conversely, the choices of Syria’s rulers are circumscribed by the knowledge that their victims will accuse them from beyond the grave.  It is one thing to commit mass murder behind a drawn curtain, as done without negative consequences by Bashar Assad’s father in the city of Hama.  It is quite another to do so in front of an audience – to become the guilty party in a crime witnessed by the world.  From a strictly geopolitical perspective, it invites foreign intervention on humanitarian grounds, on the Libyan model.  This is the regime’s predicament:  the more it kills to survive, the greater the host of gruesome images which will perturb the conscience of the Arab and global publics.

In the collision between the public and the centers of authority, no battleground is more savage than that over “intellectual property”:  that is, books, articles, news reports, images, movies, music.  For the last 20 years, copyright law has grown more restrictive and punitive, increasingly treating works of the mind like private property.  Since the advent of the web, conversely, the public has become used to treating creative products as free goods.

At the moment, law is at war with custom.  The casualties so far include whole industries – and an incalculable amount of innovation.

The benign explanation for the legal onslaught is that, back in the Happy Nineties, the US government aimed to foster knowledge by maximizing the value of its products.  A cynical and probably more accurate account is that established industries in Hollywood and New York out-lobbied Silicon Valley upstarts for protection in Washington.  Movie, music, and publishing companies wished to forestall the loss of valuable properties to the public domain (think Mickey Mouse); later, they sought to stay afloat in the digital flood by criminalizing tools and behaviors which threatened their business models (think Napster).

Whatever the reason, the imperial expansion of copyright protections over the last two decades has been nothing short of astonishing.  The original Copyright Act of 1790 set the term of protection at fourteen years, renewable for another fourteen if the author still lived.  In 1998, terms were extended to 95 years for products owned by corporations, and life plus 70 years for those owned by individual authors.  More to the point, the 1998 law showed that terms could be extended at will.  Yochai Benkler, author of the most lucid analysis on the subject, observes that practically “the entire stock of twentieth century culture,” including almost all video and sound recordings, will never enter the public domain under the present dispensation.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Law of 1998, or DMCL, currently supplies the legal arsenal of protection imperialists.  Beyond the apocalyptic title, the law was massive in length, unwieldy, and restrictive.  “Fair use” doctrine, which allows the partial copying of products for various purposes, was narrowed virtually out of existence.  Criminalization, formerly applied only to large-scale theft of intellectual property for profit, was extended to private copying even when no money is exchanged.  Digital platforms which hosted copyrighted material without permission were mandated, on notification, to take the offending content down.

While platforms were responsible for content posted by their users, the DMCL left open a loophole, which came to be known as the “safe haven” rule.  Prior censorship by the hosting service provider was not necessary.  It was required to act only when the legal owners of unauthorized content complained.

An attempt by Congress to close this loophole has ignited the latest pitched battle over intellectual property.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, now under consideration in the House, would in essence mandate digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter to pre-censor their content to prevent copyright violations.  The intent, as always, is to protect US producers of intellectual property, particularly from theft abroad.  Among SOPA’s supporters, unsurprisingly, are found the US Chamber of Commerce, the Motion Picture Association, the actors’ and musicians’ unions.  In a New York Times overview, Rebecca Mackinnon describes the new restrictions in the law:

The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright — a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification.

The effect, if SOPA worked as intended, is predictable.  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the like would have to engage in self-censorship, Chinese style, and thus lose the vibrancy of their content – or else be sued to extinction.  The digital universe would be transformed from a wild frontier to the virtual equivalent of today’s airports, where no one enters without intrusive scrutiny by the authorities.  Only a few industries would benefit.  Many other industries, and much commercial activity, would be penalized or wiped out.  It’s a putrid law.

There is, however, the other half of the story – that of the public, riding the fifth wave of information roughshod over every boundary set by authority.

Hackers first explored the digital frontier, and the settlers who followed – the once-passive public – have embraced the hacker culture and its prime directive, “information wants to be free.”  In the new world, intellectual property has become an individual plaything, and a fetish is made of open systems, free sharing, transparency.  Perceptive thinkers, people like Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis, lionize an unsavory character like Julian Assange of Wikileaks because he’s a breaker of codes and revealer of secrets.  The rest of us think nothing of copying articles, mashing up music, posting movie scenes.  Our values, our sense of right and wrong, seem to have mutated in cyberspace, and our actions betray contempt for the judges established authority has set over us:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

SOPA is a desperate maneuver to re-establish sovereignty, and the public knows it.  We watched the music industry implode after crazed efforts to prosecute its own customer base, the New York Times and the Times of London bury their shrinking audience behind porous paywalls.  We are hundreds of millions – billions.  Despite the implacable advance of copyright protections, despite the arguments of lobbyists and the threats of government agents, we feel invulnerable, and we probably are.

That’s the fatal flaw in the politicians’ wish to treat products of mind ever more like a fenced back yard.  It can’t work.  The public today is an irresistible force, while copyright law is nothing like an immoveable object.

Jeff Jarvis

My daughter played a display piano in our pharaonic shopping mall, and received five dollars from a passer-by:  a funny incident.  The next day, we related the story to our son who is away at school, but it was already old news to him.

The reason he knew is because our daughter had posted the whole thing on Facebook.  The reason his mother and I didn’t know he knew is because, at the censorious age of 16, our daughter doesn’t friend adults of any sort – much less of the parental variety.

We are increasingly living our private lives in public, and have become correspondingly obsessed with finding the perfect “setting” to the audience which has earned the right to our life’s story.  In Public Parts, Jeff Jarvis observes that this is true of individuals but also of companies and governments.  By choice or circumstance, all are performing a high-tech version of the Dance of the Seven Veils, revealing more and more information once considered confidential.  Not surprisingly, all feel a degree of concern – amounting to panic in some quarters – about revealing too much, becoming vulnerable or unlovely in their nakedness.

I should mention that Public Parts earned notice initially as the object of a very public food fight between Jarvis and Evgeny Morozov, following the latter’s brutal review of the book in The New Republic.  That review can be found here; Jarvis’ responses are here and here.  Rather than add to the shouting, let me make a couple of observations on the controversy before tiptoeing away.

First, I don’t suppose either man ever encountered a form of attention he didn’t enjoy.  Second, Morozov, while no doubt intelligent and well informed, assumes the pose of an insufferable prig – and may, I fear, actually be one.  Finally, the substance of the dispute – the “cyber-skeptic versus cyber-utopian” hardy perennial – has been ritualized until it resembles the intellectual equivalent of professional wrestling, with choreographed arguments and loud, hoarse voices imitating excitement.

So let us move on.

Jarvis should be considered an apostle rather than an analyst of publicness.  A legion of advocates, he rightly notes, have converted “privacy,” a vague concept of recent vintage, into a universal human right.  Jarvis, for balance, prefers to tack in the opposite direction.  He preaches the goodness of conducting life and business out in the open, where all can see.  The resulting transparency is a much older cultural ideal than privacy:  it harks back to the classical republics, which placed the town square at the center of the citizen’s existence.

Today, of course, publicness is powered by social media.  The town square has become a virtual space.  This changes dramatically the character of the community which gathers there:  compared to, say, the citizen’s assembly of ancient Athens, it is less rule-directed, more fleeting, more heterodox.

A great advantage of the transparent life, Jarvis maintains, is the ability to connect with such ad hoc communities for information and support.  He cites as an example his own bout with prostate cancer.  Jarvis blogged fearlessly about his condition, his treatment, his questions and anxieties, and he received from his readers much reassuring information and comfort which was not forthcoming from the medical profession.

The Jarvis support group was called into being by the public exposure of a very private condition.  This works for extroverts, of which Jarvis appears to be an extreme case.  However, such suffering in public would feel like a nightmare to an introvert like me.  It would multiply my misery by the size of the observing audience, regardless of the latter’s intent or information.  More importantly, in the digital universe the extrovert-introvert divide is replicated objectively by the choice between true identity and anonymity.   The new communication technologies might make it possible for the private person to live out his life in public, but they also allow for the identity of public actors to be shrouded in mystery.

Like transparency, anonymity has a long tradition in Western cultural life.  It is a peculiar form of publicness, both open and secretive, often associated with fear of censorship or punishment.  Thus the Egyptian with the charming nom de blog of Sandmonkey revealed, to an English-language audience, many of his social and political activities over years of blogging – but he concealed his true name, Mahmoud Salem, until after the fall of the Mubarak regime.  Public Parts has little to say about the digital reinvention of anonymity:  maybe Jarvis can take up the subject in his blog.

In any case, Jarvis practices what he preaches.  I learned more than I ever wanted to about the state of his penis (“my limp and leaky dick,” in the words of its owner).  While, curiously, Jarvis refuses to reveal his total income, he hints broadly enough to plant a suspicion of bragging.  My own reaction to these revelations – to be sure, an introvert’s – makes me think that effective publicness depends on adequate signaling of motive by means of style.  If, like St. Francis, I strip off my worldly garments in front of the crowd, I can be taken for a totally honest person or an exhibitionist.

A key claim put forward by Jarvis is that publicness generates trust.  Here Public Parts charges into the Armageddon of the digital revolution:  the semi-apocalyptic conflict of accredited authority against a host of critical amateurs.  This was always an unequal fight.  Armed with the new information technologies, the public has advanced on the sacred precincts once reserved for experts.  The great top-down institutions of modernity – government, universities, corporations, mass media, science – have lost the power to inspire reverence, and are now held in contempt.  The moment belongs to the public, and the public is motivated by an almost cosmic disenchantment.

This creates a problem:  how to discriminate between alternatives in a landscape stripped of authority.

The solution, for Jarvis, entails a radical transparency and greatly increased collaboration with the public.  In business, transparency about a company’s internal workings becomes the antidote to the pseudo-manipulation of marketing and PR.  Enlisting the customer’s participation counters, and may even dispel, the pall of disenchantment.  The “radically public company,” Jarvis believes, will earn a reputation for sincerity and a loyal following for its brand.  Trust will replace authority:  a successful strategy for the new environment, but also, Jarvis makes clear, a moral gain.

Similar principles apply to government.  It has grown too opaque and fond of secrets; it is also fearful of failure and thus intolerant of change.  Jarvis would sweep away self-protective barriers:  “outside of war, crime, and protecting the individual,” he writes, “there is no reason for public officials to hide what they know and do from their publics.”

In the existential struggle between the public and the old structures of authority, Jarvis is a participant, not an observer.  At times, he makes it sound as if the public can bypass authority and strike out on its own.  The larger argument of Public Parts, however, is that the conflict can only be resolved when authority regains the public’s trust by aligning its practices with those of the new information environment.  Though optimistic in tone, Jarvis doesn’t directly venture an opinion about the cost of this transformation, possibly because he views it as inevitable.  In the manner of a conqueror he proclaims, “Resistance is futile.”

It’s an easy guess that the collision with the public will transform the old institutions.  The question is the social and political pain involved:  whether the process will resemble gradual evolution or, as I suspect, an extinction event.  (There are those who theorize that such a cataclysm has already struck the global economy.)

Because of their immense inherited weight, business and government have a vested interest in inertia.  In this context, resistance may be futile in the long term, but rational for the moment.  As an old government hand, I can attest to the accuracy of Jarvis’ portrayal of the bureaucracy – but he fails to note the profound emotional investment in existing institutions by the people who inhabit them.  Even the most up-to-date bureaucrats, in my experience, will resist the advance of the public until retirement day.

Bending the massive structures of authority to the ideals promoted in Public Parts may well be impossible without a traumatic fracturing of the status quo.

I also confess to uncertainty about the central thesis of the book.  Does publicness really engender trust?  It’s intuitive that it should, but counterfactuals can be easily produced.  For one, the present age of distrust rests uncomfortably atop a mountain of data bits:  it’s as if the more we know, the less we like.  Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky have argued that the scientific accumulation of knowledge multiplies the number of possible questions, and “expanding measurement only increases the area of ignorance.”  If this is the case, transparency will inspire bewilderment and frustration instead of trust.

Particularly unsettling are the prospects for government.  The extraordinary outcomes today demanded from politics, Paul Ormerod has shown, lie beyond the reach of human power.  We simply don’t know how to “solve” unemployment or inequality.  The more we expect to impose such outcomes on a complex world, the deeper our disenchantment will be.  Transparency and citizen participation, in such circumstances, will only aggravate the friction between a triumphant public and its failed institutions.  Modern government, outwardly so imposing, will be revealed in its nakedness to be a feeble and incapable organ, unable to rise to the hopes of the citizenry.  The consequence is likely to be turbulence for every ruling principle, including liberal democracy.

St. Francis goes public

Democracies have fared no better.  Protesters are assaulting political establishments from Spain to India, as this New York Times piece observes.  It makes little difference whether a nation faces economic collapse in the manner of Greece or enjoys economic growth like Israel.  In each case, the public has judged government to be the plaything of selfish interests, and seeks to punish the ruling elites.

A chasm of distrust has opened up between the public and government:  arguably, the most powerful source of turbulence in the world today.  That the rupture has attracted such limited attention is astonishing.  Thinkers, commentators, and journalists across the globe, one suspects, have been unable to look past their local dramas.

The public’s quarrel isn’t with a particular administration, party, or ideology:  it is radical and systemic, implicating most of the great enterprises of the modern nation state.  The crisis concerns government as such, the perceived failure of this colossal machine to deliver what it has promised.

Critiques of the status quo favor conspiracy theories and the exposure of scandals over specific proposals.  The public, it turns out, is driven by fundamental grievances yet has no idea how to redress them.  Egyptians who faced down Hosni Mubarak’s violent repression now bicker without a clear vision of the way forward.  Spain’s indignados have rejected capitalism and representative democracy, but are vague about what will replace these deeply-rooted institutions.  Protesters in Israel far outnumbered our own Wall Street occupiers, but needed weeks to articulate a set of positive demands.

Lack of a coherent program generalizes the friction between public and government to every point in the political landscape, and magnifies the unpredictability of the consequences.  Energized into action, the public has lurched left and right with the erratic motions of a broken pendulum.

Wreckage from such mood swings lies all around us.  The public plucked Barack Obama out of relative obscurity and swept him to the presidency, crushing the Democratic and Republican establishments along the way.  A year later the Tea Party coalesced around opposition to the president’s programs, and in the 2010 elections shattered his governing coalition.  Today the Occupy Wall Street protests may signal a new lurch to the left.

These American examples of the public in revolt have in common an unprecedented revulsion against government in its entirety, reflected in recent polls.

The crisis of government is part of a general collapse of authority in the wake of the digital revolution:  what I have termed the fifth wave of information.  A generation ago opposition needed a hierarchy, funds, a program to rally around, a printing press, a captive audience of supporters.  The public as public was excluded. Today the public has seized control of the means of communications, and desperate attempts by authoritarians to shut down the internet, or by the US government to prosecute the Wikileaks source, cannot reverse this revolution in the balance of political power.

Virtually every protest movement now agitating the world began online before spilling into the streets – and the character of the protests betrays their origin.  Networks have replaced hierarchy.  Programs and ideologies are treated like useless baggage.  All that is required to turn out vast numbers of oppositionists is an accredited villain:  something or someone to be viscerally against.  In extreme moments, the rebellious public regurgitates the nihilism found in certain corners of the web.

But there is also an opposite extreme – another lurch of the broken pendulum.  When groping toward solutions, protesters tend to propose extraordinary increases of state power.  The indignados, for example, have called on the government to expropriate all unoccupied housing in Spain.  Exceptions exist – notably the Tea Party – but by and large the protesting public seems willing to supersize the very institutions it despises.

The chasm between protesters and their own demands mirrors that between the public and government.  Both begin with a romantic faith in human problem-solving:  and in the persistence of this faith, and its assumptions about democracy, we come to a fundamental source of the crisis.

Ruling elites have shared with much of the public a vision of government as a powerful machine constructed to “solve” social and political “problems.”  From obesity to inequality, from childhood bullying to global finance, no state of affairs is too minute or complex to fall beyond the possibility of solution.  In his brilliant Why Most Things Fail, Paul Ormerod draws up a list, here partially reproduced, of motions under consideration by the British Parliament on a random day in 2004:

The British government was urged . . . to hold a full inquiry into political opinion polls; give air quality a higher priority; take firm action against ‘disablism’; . . . introduce North Ireland-wide standards for care and access to arthritis treatments; press for the introduction of regulations to improve safety standards in European holiday resorts; increase the amount of funding to hospices; not bring back the poll tax; . . .

This is the romance of perfection:  once all problems have been identified, and all solutions implemented, the peaceable kingdom will arrive.  Hence the 2,500 pages required by President Obama’s health care law, the similar bulk of regulatory fixes produced by the Dodd-Franks financial overhaul.

Disgust over government failure follows inevitably from such heightened expectations.  The moment of disenchantment – Pierre Rosanvallon’s term – marks the emergence of the public as a political force.

Because corrupt cabals are assigned the blame, the first reaction is always a cry for more democracy.  Yet elections are a procedural business, and procedural rules, as Egyptians and Tunisians are learning, must favor some groups at the expense of others.  Liberal democracies over the last century extended the vote to women and minorities, and tinkered with proportional representation to empower slivers of political opinion.  Democratic expansion of the electorate has only intensified public disenchantment with government – the suspicion of corruption, the perception of radical failure.

Ormerod makes a compelling case that, objectively, government not only has failed but must fail in its more ambitious “solutions,” such as the elimination of inequality.  Most human plans, he argues from strong evidence, simply fail to achieve their intended outcomes.  Intention itself – planning, constructing strategies, policy-making – appears largely disconnected from the outcome.  Setting aside the different timelines, company failure rates track closely with species extinction rates, even though the latter are innocent of purpose or intent.

Most plans fail because they are enmeshed in complex environments in which causation works mysteriously and the future is concealed behind an impenetrable veil of uncertainty.  The only path to progress is trial and error, and error will always outnumber success.  This is true of business as well as government, but there are structural differences between the two types of organization.  In business, the company is the unit of trial and error:  failure means replacement by another company representing a different approach.  (In science, the hypothesis plays the same role.)  Government lacks a unit of trial and error.  It can, and often does, argue that failure is the consequence of not embracing the failed policy enthusiastically enough.

Here is Ormerod’s stark conclusion, which he applies universally to the human race, “whether acting as individuals or making collective decisions in companies or governments”:

We may intend to achieve a particular outcome, but the complexity of the world, even in apparently simple situations, appears to be so great that it is not within our power to ordain the future.

The premise of contemporary politics is that government exists to “ordain the future” in ways both minute and grandiose.  This is what competing politicians promise.  This is what street protesters demand.  If the reality of the world explodes this premise, and detaches government promises and programs, in principle, from outcomes, the public’s relationship to democratic rule will suffer a drastic and traumatic reorganization.  The present crisis, in such an eventuality, will become the preface to a much longer tale.

Muammar Qaddafi’s death yesterday in some ways resembles that of Mussolini in 1945.  Like Mussolini, Qaddafi was captured alive then executed by militias fighting his regime.  Like Mussolini, too, his body was exhibited with much rejoicing by the victors.  Let me suggest one rather large difference between the two events, however.  Mussolini died in a world ruled by the printed word.  Iconic photos exist of his corpse, strung up by the heels, but for his capture and last moments we must rely on textual accounts.

The death of Benito Mussolini

In contrast, Qaddafi spent his last moments in front of a battery of cell phone cameras, which produced a crazy quilt of videos and stills partially documenting the dictator’s panic, humiliation, and bullet-struck corpse.  Qaddafi died in the age of the image, and images of his death are now reverberating across the Middle East and the world.

One reason for a public death is to reassure the public that the death has in fact occurred.  Qaddafi had been defeated months ago, but his survival loomed monstrously over Libyan political life, and his death still packed immense political impact.  Not surprisingly, then, the early images were of a dead Qaddafi:  first, a gruesome portrait, scarcely recognizable, then a video clearly showing his lifeless face and upper body, covered by a sheet, prone on the ground.

The National Transition Council, a fairly anarchic umbrella group now attempting to govern Libya, never got out much of a story beyond the happy news that the dictator was dead.  Journalists at first wavered between reporting a capture or a death, but the video settled the matter:  by mid-morning Thursday, with Al Jazeera in the lead as usual, the news media proclaimed Qaddafi’s demise.

Almost immediately after, several cell phone videos surfaced showing Qaddafi captured and alive.

In this, his last performance as a public man, he appears in a different light from the bizarre and splendiferous divine king at whose feet millions once worshipped – and trembled.  Dazed and very much afraid, he cuts a pathetic figure.  In one video he is pinned to the hood of a truck, gut exposed, then he’s drawn up on unsteady feet while gesturing desperately at the shrieking crowd.  A second video shows him first stumbling through a gauntlet of mockery and retribution, later on his knees, surrounded, appearing to plead with his captors.  A third has him back in front of the truck, face now a mess:  he dabs at the blood and stares at it as if unable to register what it means.  All around him, in each video, young men bellow their joy and cry “God is great.”

It’s powerful stuff.  The jerky motion of the cell phone cameras conveys a feeling of violence and excitement which mirrors the action in the videos.  Objects swirl wildly around, fixed in their meaning by glimpses of the doomed dictator.  The background music of human screams is dizzying.  One never hears Qaddafi speak, only the strident voices of the young warriors from Misurata who hold him in their power.

We will probably never learn exactly what transpired outside Sirte that Thursday morning, but some of the stories now being told sound too good to be true.  Qaddafi, who had sworn to fight to the death, fled his besieged hometown instead.  Stopped by NATO air power, he hid inside a “drainage pipe” – essentially a sewer.  According to the young man who claimed to have captured him, he was carrying a pistol made of gold, another of silver, and a bag of charms.

“What’s happening?” he is reported to have asked of his enemies.

Good question.  What happened was the visual transformation of a once-feared and much-flattered despot into a frightened, helpless prisoner.  He had been one with the Assads and Saddam Hussein – the small circle of truly ruthless Arab rulers – but he became a creature crouching in a sewer.

It is still too early to know what effect the intermittent images of this metamorphosis will have on his fellow dictators and the Arab public:  how they will expand the range of the possible, how they will influence ideas and actions.  But this will happen.  Compared to Tunisia and Egypt, the Libyan revolt was a sort of experiment.  We didn’t know whether an autocrat willing to kill untold numbers of his citizenry could be overthrown.

We now have the answer on YouTube, can see it with our own eyes:  and visual information, though ambiguous, is always powerfully persuasive.

Readers of Duncan Watts’ Everything Is Obvious know that most attempts to analyze human events are shot through with fallacy and error.  This is true of ordinary persons watching the evening news, but also of the professional analysts in CIA and academia.  The great experts in world politics have been wrong often enough to put in doubt the whole concept of expertise, as Philip Tetlock’s remarkable studies have shown.  Analyzing events is, in principle, problematic.  We know much less than we think.

I won’t dwell on the reasons produced by Watts to explain this delusion.  In brief, we love to stretch common sense and Newtonian (or billiard-ball) causation beyond the breaking point.  When we fail, we take it for granted it was because of insufficient information.  This too is a failure of understanding.  It’s not that we lack enough information, it’s that no amount of information can ever be enough.

Human events unfold within complex systems governed by weird, nonlinear dynamics.  Prediction by means of billiard-ball mechanics is impossible, in principle.  Because each complex system develops in unique ways, events are also rarely susceptible to probabilistic analysis.  Rightly considered, a question like “Who will win the 2012 presidential elections?” refers to a single token.  There have been no previous 2012 presidential elections to average out with this one.

Of course, analysts persist in making predictions.  They are addicted to prophecy.  Tetlock proved that they guess right about as often as the flip of a coin, but it doesn’t matter.  This is what analysts do:  who they are.  The robe of the magus fits strangely on the scientist’s lab coat, but the point is clear.  These are the people who see into the future.  Unfortunately, to keep up the pose – to validate their expertise – they must insist that the future resemble the past.  They freeze yesterday, and imagine it’s tomorrow.  With an election, they point to polls.  They say things like, “Since FDR, no president has been re-elected with an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent or higher.”  Prediction, explicit or implied, rests on arbitrary statistics and the assumption that nothing in the future will perturb the infinite number of variables pushing and pulling at the data.

Hence the high rate of failure.  If we take seriously what Watts and other deep thinkers like Alicia Juarrero have shown, we must parse human affairs by very different methods than this.

An individual person, Juarrero has demonstrated, behaves like a complex system.  In a somewhat analogous manner, we can interpret complex events much like we interpret the actions of a good friend.  First, we need familiarity with the dynamics of the system.  Expertise does count.  Second, we assign a character to certain features of the system, based on a combination of factors but giving priority to the narrative by which the system explains and justifies itself.

Narratives capture much of the human intention in the event:  the fact that this particular system contains individual agents trying to impose their will.  Assigning a character is thus an act of imaginative interpretation.  I can say “John is a devout Christian, he won’t come with me to watch the X-rated movie” or “The Cuban regime holds the US responsible for all political opposition, so protesters will be treated like traitors.”  On the surface, such statements resemble mechanical predictions, but they are in fact accounts of intention.  They recapitulate the logic of the system, against which objective factors, like actual behavior, must be measured.

In fact, John may be false to his principles and watch the X-rated movie.  The Cuban regime, from weakness or calculation, may ignore or tolerate opposition.  The analyst must abandon the pretense that the future is a tableau vivant reenactment of the past, and embark on an exploration of the dynamics tugging at an event.

All complex systems are inherently unstable and tend toward disequilibrium.  Small perturbations can lead to great turbulence; sustained turbulence can result in phase change, a large-scale reconfiguration of the system and its dynamics.  The analyst’s job should be to call out potential drivers of disequilibrium – that is, of change – at every stage.

Perturbations are objective shocks which the system must account for.  A perturbation can be a “newsworthy” event like a military defeat and a sharp economic downturn, or a hidden development like a demographic imbalance and the slow decline of wealth.  Because the flow of causation in complex systems is nonlinear, a seemingly insignificant blip on the radar can be magnified into a transformative force.  Five years ago, a few dozen opposition bloggers in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt appeared to be little more than political background noise.  By January of this year, Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members coordinated the mass protests which overthrew Mubarak.  The rise of Egypt’s online opposition was not predictable, yet in hindsight assumed greater significance than many more attention-grabbing geopolitical developments.  This suggests that the analyst, instead of pursuing the obvious, must become a scout of the improbable, exploring change on the margins of the system.

Turbulence is perturbation gone pandemic and approaching disequilibrium.  As with all things complex, the causes are mysterious.  Some factors are objective, but among the most decisive, I suspect, is the perceived inadequacy of a master narrative to account for perturbing events.  Whether a regime can explain and justify its actions in the face of events, more than the events themselves, will determine the extent of the impact.  The horrendous March 2011 earthquake in Japan, for example, caused minor political aftershocks; while the less severe (though still devastating) 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua, because it reinforced popular perceptions of the Somoza regime’s callousness, helped drive that political system past turbulence into phase change.  Analytically, the fate of the ruling narrative looms even larger than usual at this stage.

On rare occasions, turbulence crosses the line to disequilibrium, ending in phase change.  The dynamics of the system are radically reconfigured.  An old regime dies.  A new one arises on its ashes.  This process is beyond mysterious:  it’s inexplicable.  The classic example is the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which caught most sovietologists by surprise – and the causes of which, proximate and ultimate, are still hotly debated.

Such disputes, Watts would argue, are sterile.  Phase change shows complex systems at their most nonlinear:  for all we know, the beating of a butterfly’s wing in Siberia caused the fall of the Soviet empire.  The analyst should turn the page and focus on the objective and narrative elements – including accounts of the transformation – competing for primacy in the still-turbulent environment.  His aim must be to gain sufficient familiarity with the emerging dynamics of the new system that he can begin to assign a character to some of them.

To sum up:  analysis of events, as conducted by professionals in places like CIA and the news media, has been theoretically confused and, on the evidence, a failure in practice.  If we accept the world described by Watts, a new model of analysis must replace the old:  one that is at once more modest and more adventurous.  Modesty pertains to prediction and probability.  We should give up the illusion that human events are like the orbit of Halley’s comet, and accept them as complex, historical, and brimming with group and individual intentions:  understandable, if at all, from within their own internal logic, their narratives of themselves, their character.  Adventure pertains to the nature of complex systems, which force the analyst to abandon tableaux vivant prophetic productions and become a rider on the open range of improbability, tracking the sources of change.

Implicit in this new model of analysis is a narrative form of communication.  Quantitative data must fit within a qualitative interpretation.  The analyst can explain an event only by imaginatively recapitulating its dynamics:  the eccentricities of the system, the “strange attractors,” constitute the plot of the tale.

This raises an interesting problem.  If the arguments put forward by Christian Smith are correct – and I am convinced they are – shared narratives must reflect the “moral order” embedded in every culture, institution, group, and person.  Nothing human is value free.  For the analyst of events, this means that familiarity with a system will entangle him in the moral assumptions of his subject matter about what is good, true, important, etc.

Of course, the analyst’s own insights and narratives will be entangled in a different set of assumptions.  Analyst and event, explanation and the thing explained – both are beset and constrained by value judgments intrinsic to every human system.  The ideal of an Olympian “objectivity,” we must finally agree, is puffery and self-delusion.  The typically Western belief that one can stand, like God, above events, is false and thus destructive of sound analysis.  The only way out of the dilemma requires large doses of honesty and humility.  To the extent moral and ideological constraints are made manifest in his description of events, the analyst will approach the only possible ideal of intellectual integrity.