1p Sat. Nov. 9: we discuss 11 pages from book "Revolt of the Public", @ our PJ's

# Join us Saturday November 9th, 1p to 2:30p at PJ's Coffee on Canal Blvd. (not Canal Street) by the railroad tracks and Navarre Ave. We'll be inside or outside.

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# We'll discuss 11 pages from the 2018 book "The Revolt of the Public" by Martin Gurri. [See review below.] Scanned at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pFywe3UxSst_6R36qYcv0l3e3zJ84R3W/view?usp=sharing

# 7 sheets if you print out.

# Optional viewing: 10-minute 2020 Youtube video by author at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhSaPi_zAyY

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# You must RSVP. No drop-ins. Do change your RSVP to NO if you end up not coming. For the purpose of our discussion, you must have read the material. It's OK if you are new to our discussions. All opinions are treated with respect. We meet to listen to others and their understanding of the material.

# For more info, contact Guy Henoumont anytime at 504-460-9049 or at guyheno@gmail.com

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About the book, one Amazon reviewer wrote:
Originally released without much fanfare in 2014, this book got a second life in the early years of the Trump era, as word spread among legacy media types that it had predicted the rise of Trumpism. That led to this 2018 edition with the lengthy new chapter updating the book for the Trump era. The thesis that was credited for presciently envisioning things like Brexit and Trumpism is important, and while the reviews saying it's long-winded and not especially original have some merit, I think they're overblown. I haven't seen the thesis put forward with quite this level of clarity in any earlier books, even if similar ideas were in the air [...]
To summarize the useful thesis: all societies are managed by an elite class who must control the flow of information from which people can build their explanatory narratives about the world and politics. In modern societies, this is a loose coalition of academics, journalists, and career politicians that people have long called "the deep state," though that term has now taken on resonances of far right conspiracy theory that it didn't used to have. Gurri's insight as a CIA analyst is that the internet has basically exploded the elite's ability to manage the flow of information, and so the public of various societies are now able to form new narratives of the world and politics at will and by whatever principles they choose undermining the population's trust in the credibility of scientists, journalists, and government experts. But far from creating the sort of unifying vox populi envisioned by tech utopians in the 90s, the public fractures into a mosaic of niche communities of interest. Any story you want to find is out there, so the anti-vaxxers have their channels of information, the anarchists have theirs, the blue wave Russiagate people are siloed off in their communities, etc. The effect is that the elites lose their ability to manage society because they're constantly fending off revolt by coalitions of different interests that constantly shift, dissolve, and remerge as the whims of various micro-communities align and drift apart. This leaves the public unable to replace the elite as managers of society, and the result is just constant destabilization of social institutions.