When social media ruled the world
3 stars
In 2014, Martin Gurri wrote a book about how social media and the Internet more generally stripped the legitimacy of the elites away, leaving the public with nothing more than endless rage and nihilism in their disgraced wake.
Then Trump and Brexit happened — so he added an afterword in 2017 detailing how everything he predicted a few years prior had happened.
As a slice of '10s political and social life, this book is incisive. My main complaint is that the loss of trust in elites started decades earlier following the Vietnam War, Watergate, the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, and so on. Perestroika and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union is another example of pre-internet elite collapse. Arguably, the development of neoliberalism during the '70s — of conservative and progressive voices both demanding the government to better regulate itself, if no one else — is another example.
With …
In 2014, Martin Gurri wrote a book about how social media and the Internet more generally stripped the legitimacy of the elites away, leaving the public with nothing more than endless rage and nihilism in their disgraced wake.
Then Trump and Brexit happened — so he added an afterword in 2017 detailing how everything he predicted a few years prior had happened.
As a slice of '10s political and social life, this book is incisive. My main complaint is that the loss of trust in elites started decades earlier following the Vietnam War, Watergate, the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, and so on. Perestroika and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union is another example of pre-internet elite collapse. Arguably, the development of neoliberalism during the '70s — of conservative and progressive voices both demanding the government to better regulate itself, if no one else — is another example.
With the increasingly overt political control exerted by social media company owners over the content visible to their products — the eyeballs sold to advertisers — it will be interesting to see how much of this book remains timeless over the next decade.
