Reviews and Comments

If you're thinking of reading this book for its philosophical insights, I recommend playing "Disco Elysium" and then reading David Chapman's Meaningness.com. Both hit the same beats with better precision and entertainment value.

As a cultural slice of life, it has considerably more value. The book captures the spirit of the early '70s — an era in which top-down systemic thinking had passed its zenith, yet the childish nihilism of the hippies offered no useful alternatives. The author, a former technical writer, tries his best to synthesize the zeitgeist, blending half-remembered pieces of Buddhism, bits of misremembered Greek philosophy (Lycus, not Phaedras, is named after the wolf), and a rebellion against academia into the world's first LessWrong post.

It would be the longest until HPMOR was authored decades later.

Given everything I said above, it may seem odd to give it three stars instead of two or only one. As I said earlier, however, it accurately captures the spirit of the '70s. It was popular — incredibly so. The bits of philosophy, musings on mental health, and surprisingly sparse instructions on how to maintain a motorcycle (they don't build them like they used to and thank goodness for that) are a snapshot of an age that still echoes into the present day.

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.

In 1970, Albert O. Hirschman set his thoughts towards organizational decline — a trenchant subject following the summer of 1968, the obvious decline in quality and reliability of American-made automobiles, and the beginning of the collapse of the institutions of the New Deal. To hold organizations accountable, he identified two critical directions for the public to adopt — exit (choose a different provider) and voice ("I want to speak to your manager").

Hirschman warned his readers, however, that both of these approaches on their own created problems. "Exiting" by choosing among equally unreliable automobile manufacturers, for example, simply masked the collective dysfunction of the entire sector (Japanese imports wouldn't start to solve this problem for another few years). Voice, on the other hand, required trust from those working within the institution — a library board has no reason to internalize someone's complaints about libraries, for example, if the complainant is opposed to the existence of libraries more generally.

The solution Hirschman recommended was to add Loyalty to the mix. By combining voice and loyalty, with exit kept available as a safety valve, organizations could receive valuable critiques enabling them to better deliver the goods and services they were designed to deliver — and, if they failed to listen, organizations would find themselves out of customers and out of business.

In many respects, the book proved to be prophetic.

That said, 55 years from now, we now clearly live in Exit's shadow — a world where loyalty is impossible to observe in the space of 240 characters or less, where voice is fractally cacophanous, and where everyone is overwhelmed with an infinite sea of choices in the providers of all things.

Martin Gurri's "The Revolt of the Public" can be thought of as an unofficial sequel to this book.