The Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Information
Martin Gurri and Hannah Arendt on Authority
I’m delighted to share my latest podcast episode with polymath extraordinaire Noah Feldman. We spoke about theology, faith and spirituality, contemporary religion, pluralism, and legitimacy, and what Jewish thought adds to questions in American Civics. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please rate and review the show, which helps it find listeners.
Authority: Then and Now
Former CIA analyst Martin Gurri writes in Revolt of the Public (2018) that as sources of information multiply, the authority of any single source declines in authoritativeness:
In the age of social media, it’s not that news becomes “fake,” but that there are fewer barriers to entry in the “information space.” Information is no longer scarce. If authority is the market price where the supply of information meets the demand for it, the market is so saturated with information supply that the price is basically zero. The price of information is so low that our attention is now the thing in demand—media will pay us for our eyeballs (and re-sell them to advertisers). The constraint is no longer information, but attention. As the Silicon Valley adage goes, “If you are not paying for it, you are the product.”
Of course, the New York Times does retain an imprimatur of prestige that some random influencer on Instagram or Youtube lacks, but the value of that prestige matters far less. The internet has done to authoritativeness what Uber has done to taxis and AirBnBs to hotels. It has both capitalized on and exacerbated an environment of compromised trust. We now shop around for information and “takes” the way we do for a ride or a vacation rental. Like or dislike it, this is the situation.
In previous eras, knowledge was also decentralized. As Carlo Ginzburg describes in The Cheese and the Worms, the average medieval peasant was far removed from Church Orthodoxy. His beliefs were far more influenced by local culture than top-down prescriptions. Yet subculture or “folk culture” were recognized as such. What is new in the situation that Gurri describes is the obliteration of any clear distinction between institutional, top-down authority and fragmented, bottom-up authority. The medieval peasant did not directly influence the creed of the bishops, but today’s ruling class are as more like peasants of the internet than royals commanding it with their scepter. While the Church or the Crown had the power to accuse anyone of “misinformation,” today, anyone can play this game.
Hannah Arendt begins her essay “What is Authority?” (1958):
“In order to avoid misunderstanding, it might have been wiser to ask in the title: what was—and not what is—authority?”
For Arendt, it is a feature of the modern era that authority has vanished. To Gurri’s point, Arendt would say that the cause of the decline in authority is not the internet (which she did not live to experience), but a loss of faith in tradition—inaugurated since at least the French Revolution, certainly fomented by the work of Marx, and finally completed by the horrors of the 20th century. The twin horrors of Nazism and Communism—this is a cold-war liberal trope common in the 50s and 60s—has simply left us bereft of ideological certainty. Religion and other certitudes must become modest, lest they become totalitarian themselves.
Arendt connects the meaning of authority to the word author, which, she claims, is connected to the Roman concept of augmentation. To author is not to create from nothing, but to augment. Tradition is (was) authoritative because it both augments and calls out for augmentation. Critically, tradition was authoritative not because it was taken as true, but simply because its age, its longevity, gave it a prestige. In evolutionary terms, tie went to tradition, because it was considered “robust” and “resilient” in the face of change.
The Arendt - Gurri Crossover
It strikes me that Arendt and Gurri need not disagree about the meaning of authority, even if they do emphasize different factors in its decline.
For in Gurri’s terms, one reason the past has (or had) an authority over us is that it is scarce. There are only so many ancient tragedies in existence. We do not have all of Sappho’s poems. We can’t literally look on the cutting room floor where the Bible was edited (as it were). The result is that anything that has made it this far has a kind of monopoly. The oldest artifacts in existence have an advantage that cannot be upended—nothing is older than them.
But, in fact, they can be upended. They can be upended through the proliferation of forgeries. And they can be upended through destruction. When an archaeological dig is bombed, or an antiquity museum ransacked, the past becomes even more scarce. When fake fragments are “found” the past (or claims to it) becomes less scarce. Yet both pressurize the legitimacy of the past, the one by rendering it null and the other by rendering it banal.
Still, even in the age of Biblical criticism, in the age when Shakespeare is purported to be many authors, ancient texts and sites do have one thing going for them makes their monopolistic power hard to break: the sheer fact that so many treat them as authoritative.
Even in a world in which nobody followed Biblical precepts, but half the population reads the Bible, this would be a major achievement. The past may not command us as it used to, but in a world in which people get their news from social media, and where authority is felt to be scarce, this creates a premium on authority. Since the past cannot be replicated, or replicated at scale, in the way that the present can, it is possible that appeals to the past will become increasingly common—in backlash against the hollowing out of authority in the present.
One form that appeals to the past can and do take is revanchism. A culture in which the present is up for grabs is the perfect grounds for historical revisionism. The past is hard enough to guard, do to its non-present qualities, the epistemological shadow cast by its evidence, which, as time recedes, blurs into myth. Now add onto this a world in which, we are all habituated to follow the Big Lebowski, and say, “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Of course, we’re going to see an uptick in Holocaust denial. And litigating this problem as one of free speech vs. misinformation is too narrow—too legalistic—a frame for handling what seems to be a cultural inevitability, a movement of World-Spirit.
But revanchism and revisionism are not the only forms that appreciation for the past can take. The headline is not that people will seek to manipulate the past for self-aggrandizement, but that people will find in the stability of a canon or a set of inherited norms a sense of relief from the barrage of instant news and constant hot takes. No longer will the past simply be the homeland of cultural and psychological conservatives. Everyone will want a piece of the past, the way that, in an industrialized society, everyone wants to spend time in “nature.” The past is one of the few things we have not entirely destroyed.
Sure, the Bible is now taught as literature, rather than as the word of God. It is no longer looked at in the West as a document of wisdom, but it is also viewed with suspicion as a source of all kind of cancelable offenses. Still, it retains an aura.
Synthesis
I am writing this essay on Substack. The duration between the time it takes for me to write it and the time it takes for you to read it is nearly instantaneous. I bought Gurri’s book on Amazon Kindle yesterday, having first discovered him in the Twittersphere. I am a beneficiary of the eco-system I describe; and my point is not to lament for a time when people got their information from a few trusted places. Overall, the decline in cultural trust and the rise of conspiracy theories, in my view, is a price I am willing to pay for all the good that the internet brings.
The point I am making is more dialectical than “internet good” vs. “internet bad.”
The point I am making is that Arendt may have been right to diagnose a loss of authority in the 50s, and Gurri may be right to diagnose a loss of one now. But putting them together, we find a strange possibility—the declining authority of the present may make room for the authority of the past.
This authority will not look the same as it did in the pre-modern era, and will retain features of decentralization that come with more computing power and a more populous, interconnected world. Nevertheless, authority isn’t just the result of scarcity. Authority itself is scarce. And people of all stripes and political persuasions yearn for it. Even if the Bible is no longer viewed as godly, or Plato viewed as sagacious, I anticipate a rising demand for classics (old things) commensurate with the failure of institutions like Harvard or the NYTimes to constitute cultural “Schelling Points.”
The odd combination of decentralized, internet-based weirdness with some version of a return to pre-modern influences will produce a lot of new insights, cultural forms, and political experiments. A world in which QAnon and Holocaust denial spread, and in which all wars are waged on social media in the streets of public opinion, is also one in which we we will re-appreciate the sheer accomplishment of longevity, of rising above cultural trends, and speaking for generations.
If you care about long-termism (the topic of my previous post) don’t just study AI risk. Look to the classics. The ancients are far more likely to be long-standing than anything we do, especially if we ignore them.