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Are we living in the age of info-determinism?

Increasingly, our networks seem to be steering our history in ways we don’t like and can’t control.

In the old days, he argued, it had been possible to read a newspaper or watch a newscast and feel that you’d got a good grasp of “the news.” The Internet, however, created the sense that there was always more to know—and this was “an acid, corrosive to authority.” Now “every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor.” Meanwhile, because everyone could read only a slice of the Internet, the traditional mass audience was splitting into “vital communities”—“groups of wildly disparate size gathered organically around a shared interest or theme.” These communities, Gurri thought, had a characteristic mood: they revelled in the destruction of received opinion and the disassembly of arguments from authority. I disagreed with Gurri, who has a libertarian sensibility, on many points, including the character of the Obama Presidency and the nature of the Occupy movement, and felt that the book downplayed the degree to which the American left has remained largely allied with its institutions while the right has not. Gurri offers a few suggestions, most aimed at healing the breach between institutions and the public: government agencies might use technology to become more transparent, for example, and disillusioned voters might adopt more realistic expectations about how much leaders can improve their lives.

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