The Revolt of the Public

by John Maudlin,

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

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

The above quotes refer to a powerful must-read book by Martin Gurri called The Revolt of the Public. No less than Marc Andreessen made this his number-one book suggestion. If you recognize the name, and how important he is to technology, you will understand the significance. What he thinks matters.

I have been writing about cycles in the coming crisis for well over a year. I began to read reviews of the book. The more I read, the more I began to drill down. When my partner Ed D’Agostino interviewed Gurri, I realized that I had to read the book. I ended up with 27 pages of Kindle notes. This is an important book and I want you to know about it.

Four Questions, Same Answer
In my cycles book I’m reviewing the forecasts of Neil Howe, Peter Turchin, George Friedman, and Ray Dalio. For different historical reasons and patterns, all see a crisis culminating at the end of this decade. Some readers have legitimately pushed back, saying no one knows the future. As fund disclosures always say, past performance is not indicative of future results.

These four different forecasts, based on different readings of history, all lead to the same dénouement. My own contribution is to suggest that the trigger for this crisis will be the accumulation of debt in the US, which has the global reserve currency and is still the world’s only superpower.

The bigger question is why. What makes this time different? Yes, you can see analogies in the past but why the end of this decade?

As I reached the end of Gurri’s book, it began to click. He gives us the “why.”

Neil Howe views history through four generational archetypes that repeat roughly every 80 years.
Turchin doesn’t see such a precise timeline, focusing on elites and overproduction.
George Friedman thinks in terms of geopolitical patterns forcing a change of institutions.
Dalio sees it in terms of economic and business cycles. I think a crisis will be triggered by a cataclysm in the bond market, which will force a restructuring of the social compact between government and citizens.

[Sidebar: Whatever you thought of the presidential debate this week, the $2 trillion deficit and $35 trillion of national debt on the way to $50 trillion in less than 6–7 years was not on the agenda. What do we make of $1 trillion in interest payments every year?

Crickets. The silence of space.

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