The Gurri-Kuran Dynamic: Information Wars, Part II

Martin Gurri’s revolt of the public seems to be gaining steam. In 2014, the former CIA media analyst offered a thesis to explain not only the Arab Spring protests but also a larger wave of public dissatisfaction and defiance. The internet, he wrote, was fundamentally shifting the balance of power between governors and the governed. Then came, as if on cue, Brexit, the surprising 2016 US election, the yellow vests in France, and Chinese crackdowns in Hong Kong. Now, American protests and riots. 

Public protest isn’t new. But why the shift into a higher gear? The speed and transparency of the internet, Gurri postulated, more ruthlessly exposes the real (and perceived) failures of public officials, experts, and elites. For individual citizens, meanwhile, the cost of challenging their leaders goes down. Acts such as writing a private letter to a member of Congress or a letter-to-the-editor which would at most be read by a few neighbors have been replaced by tweets, Instagram stories, or YouTube videos that can be seen and forwarded by millions.

In the case of George Floyd, social media exposed a grave injustice. For protesters, the internet allowed coordination of instant rallies across the nation. Speed, however, may also have a downside. Riots spread before people have a chance to think, too quickly for police to prepare.  Likewise, digital mobs viciously swarm targets online.

Gurri’s thesis is a subset of the path-breaking work of Timur Kuran, who in 1994 published “Private Truths, Public Lies.” Kuran showed how various forms of public pressure and difficulty storing and transmitting information prevent people from airing their true preferences, thus allowing injustices to persist. That’s why communism, in Kuran’s canonical example, could linger for so many decades after its failure was widely understood. 

But Kuran also showed how once some critical mass of support for a publicly disfavored (but privately appealing) idea emerged, a preference cascade could swamp the previous order. The sudden societal switch to support for same-sex marriage comes to mind. 

Early in his book, which arrived just before the World Wide Web came along, Kuran said a central variable in his argument was the “individual’s ability receive, store, retrieve, and process information.” Then the internet hit and only amplified and sharpened his insights. 

For many, including some ingenious anonymous users (Federalist Papers, anyone?), the cost of speaking has dropped precipitously. So, too, communication. Say, with fellow enthusiasts of some niche hobby . . . or far more serious pursuits. Kuran recounted how as late as 1989 “members of the public opposition” in communist Czechoslovakia “found it difficult to communicate with one another and to recruit additional supporters.” Now it’s easy to find and organize fellow dissidents. 

The democratization of knowledge, expertise, and opinion is a fundamental and mostly welcome shift. Over time, it should allow us to learn faster and better stumble our way toward the truth. Ideally, preference cascades that expose falsehoods and improve the world won’t take decades to emerge. 

But not everyone is happy with this new transparency. Information threatens the totalitarian mindset and its programs. As the internet breaks down the old barriers which hid private truths, the central goal of authoritarians is to erect new structures to maintain public lies. 

Just last week, The New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer both fired their opinion editors for publishing unorthodox views. Teenagers threaten with ostracism friends who do not post the officially sanctioned social media memes. On all of today’s important issues, from the pandemic to urban policy, opposing or merely nuanced views are not just wrong but unspeakable, worthy of total banishment from the public square.

The paradox is stark: The expansion of heterogeneous channels, voices, and ideas is met with ferocious insistence on homogeneous expression. In Kuran’s model, the individual’s ability to achieve higher “intrinsic” and “expressive utility” through lower-cost speech must be crushed by imposing ever more ridiculous constraints on their “reputational utility.”

Because the internet’s tools are so fundamental to the spread of information, these knowledge hubs — Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — are the key targets of authoritarian activism. These private truth machines must block alternative speech at all cost. 

When one side’s speech is blocked, however, everyone suffers. Kuran showed how preference falsification — the failure to speak out — can lead to “knowledge falsification.” When we “conceal from others facts we know to be true,” we “distort, corrupt, and impoverish the knowledge in the public domain.” This can lead to “widespread ignorance of the status quo’s disadvantages.” I think the madness over differing perspectives will pass. But it’s no comfort that the current moment reminds many of China’s Cultural Revolution, in which Mao’s nonsensical ramblings and struggle sessions swept away the Middle Kingdom’s history along with its landlords and merchants. As Kuran pithily summarizes, “political hypertrophy” brings “economic atrophy.”