I mentioned recently that I somehow managed to go this whole time without reading a single Tom Clancy novel — or watching a single movie adaptation, except for The Hunt for Red October — and only just listened to the audiobook version of Patriot Games, which was originally published in 1987.
I’ve continued working through the Jack Ryan Universe — The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears — and a point Clancy keeps making is how much the intelligence community relies on the mainstream media for information, especially cable news, which was new and exciting at the time.
When Russ Roberts interviewed Martin Gurri on a recent EconTalk, I was naturally interested, since Arnold Kling has been mentioning Gurri regularly, but I wasn’t expecting a connection to Tom Clancy. Then Roberts introduced Gurri:
Today is February 20th, 2020, and my guest is author Martin Gurri. He is a former CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] analyst and the author of The Revolt of the Public. Martin, welcome to EconTalk.
Gurri explains his position:
Well, as you say, I was an analyst in CIA. I probably had the least glamorous job there. I didn’t have my 00 [Double-O] license to kill or the beautiful girls. I was an analyst of global media, and for the earliest part of my career, that was very straightforward. There was a trickle of open information and every country had its equivalent of the New York Times, a source that set the agenda. So, if the president wanted to know how his policies were playing in France, you went to Le Monde or you went to Le Figaro. Just, literally, two newspapers.
Then things went haywire: just the world turned upside down. A digital earthquake epicenter, say, somewhere between Mountain View and Palo Alto, generated this tsunami of information that just swept over the world.
And, ‘tsunami,’ I think is a good word. Numbers can be boring, but sometimes they can be illustrative. Some very clever people from Berkeley tried to measure how the information of the world had developed, and they came up with the fact that in the year 2001, as you just tip into this era, that year produced double the amount of information of all previous human history going back to the cave paintings and the dawn of culture.
So, 2002 doubled 2001. So, if you chart that you do get something that looks like a gigantic wave; and I call it a tsunami. Now, for those of us who worked in CIA, that was like, ‘Now what the heck do we do with this enormous amount of information? Where do we get our stuff?’ But, what really mattered was the effect of the information in different nations of the world. We could see, as the tsunami swept across the world at different speeds in different countries, tremendously increased levels of social and political turbulence. And, the question was why? So, that was the seed of the book.
After I left government, the question that haunted me was the one that my CIA masters always asked, which was, like, ‘So, what? Okay, so the people get–they start to write bad things about government in Egypt. So what? What are they going to do when the cops come? Hit them with their laptops?’ That was an internal CIA joke: Are they going to hit them with their laptops?
[...]
2011 is a year I call the Phase Change Year, where it really showed the effect of this tide of information could affect power. And you had, of course, the Arab Spring in the Middle East, probably misnamed. You had the Indignados in Spain. You had a revolt called the 10 People Revolt or Social Justice Revolt in Israel. You had the Occupiers here in the United States. And, these all had similar origin. So the question, now, was what was going on? What caused these eruptions from below?
And, to my thinking, it has to do with the kinds of institutions that we have inherited from the 20th century, from the industrial age. They’re all–how many people are aware of Frederick Taylor? He’s sort of a forgotten figure in history. But he was sort of the prophet of industrialism and scientific management. And, if you read his writings, everything happens from the top down: the top manager figures everything is going to happen, all the tools that you need, and essentially what everybody, every layer below you–and there are many, many layers below you–is going to do. Everything is scripted.
Well, our institutions, which we think or tend to think were created in the 18th century by the Founders, in fact are the product of the industrial age, and of political Taylorism, in essence. And, one of the things that they required, to maintain their authority–and they had, in their day, a great deal of authority: that they believe in expertise, they believe in science–one of the things that they were–the primary foundation was a monopoly of information in their domains.
So that, if you’re in government you have a control over a certain set of government information. If you’re in politics, you and the media, you as the politicians and the media share a certain set of information that nobody else had access to in the 20th century. Nobody talked back.
And, what that tsunami has done was destroy that monopoly. In brief, it has destroyed that monopoly; and it turns out these institutions can’t seem to function without that and have lost their authority. Where, before there was a sort of instinctive reliance–the President says something at the age of JFK [John Fitzgerald Kennedy], somewhere between 70% and 80% of Americans trusted the government. Today, if you’re the President, you are instinctively distrusted: somewhere between 20% and 30% today, trust the Presidency and the Federal Government.
So, I think it has been a crisis that these institutions have lapsed into. And, I think the elites that manage and inhabit these institutions have reacted pretty badly in the sense of not really being aware of what’s happening, and trying to pretend that somehow the 20th century is still amongst us and that the internet and the web and the digital universe has never exploded around them.
