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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. By now it's a cliche to talk about how the internet changed everything.
It upended our industries. It transformed our politics. It ruined lives. It made others. And I mean that literally. It introduced couples who now have babies, untold numbers of them. I mean, technically speaking, I met my wife on Twitter. And pretty much every element of that sentence simply would not have computed a few decades ago. Now it elicits little more than a shrug.
Every generation that has ever lived lives through change, but I'm not sure any change has been as vast or as fast as the one that we're now living through. Right now, I have a glass rectangle in my pocket that allows me to access all of human knowledge and just about every living human. Like, imagine telling that to your great-grandparents, let alone to your ancestors. That story is the story of our lifetimes.
More than that, it's the one that will go on long after you and I are dead. It's impossible to capture the fullness of that story in a single podcast episode. But what we can do is begin to tell the story of how the internet changed everything. In our pilot episode, I introduced you to a man named Majdi Wadi, and I spoke about who we are becoming. Today, I want to take a big step back and think a little bit about how exactly we got here.
The idea of the early web architects was that this thing was going to connect all of us, and that by connecting all of us, it would inevitably spread things like empathy and compassion and understanding.
As it turned out, connecting all of us digitally drained texture and meaning from our physical lives. Church and synagogue attendance was decimated. Some people stopped having sex and having kids. Political participation these days happens less through civic groups or volunteering than it does through posting hashtags. Local news collapsed, and as it collapsed, the national news became whatever was trending on Twitter that day.
And the rhetoric of the internet, the memes and the trolling and the catchphrases, the sheer decibel of it, that seeped into school board meetings and city councils and family dinner tables. In the old world, and by the old world I mean all of human history until about the past two decades, you were stuck with the people who were physically around you. Some of the people you were sitting around the campfire with agreed with you, and some didn't. Some of the people in your village annoyed you, and some didn't.
But to get along, you had to soften and compromise constantly. That's just not the case online. Online, there are infinite niche communities to join and leave at will.
Online, we can actually become the most distilled, hardened versions of ourselves, because the most extreme version of ourselves actually does better online. Rage goes more viral. Outrage keeps us more engaged. And so, for the first time in human history, we're all connected. We're able to transmit information instantly. But the thing that we're transmitting a lot of the time is outrage.
All of this helps explain why Fox News or MSNBC are incentivized to deliver political heroin all day, instead of actually reporting on the news. It helps explain why Trump was not an aberration or a singular event, but a symptom of something much, much larger.
The internet has completely and definitively swept away the assumptions and the institutions of the 20th century. And it did that by democratizing information. But whether or not that was good for actual democracy...
That's still an open question. It's entirely possible that you can come out of this migration into this digital world with far more democratic institutions. That doesn't mean liberal democracy can't implode. It can. That is my fear. And few people saw this larger context as early and as clearly as Martin Goury. Martin, I know that you're a humble guy and you've refuted the label before, but how did you predict the future?
Well, Barry, first thing I have to do is refute the notion that I may be in any sense or form a humble guy, right? I'm not.
In 2014, before there was a President Trump or Brexit or the Yellow Vests in France, he wrote a book called The Revolt of the Public. And even though he denies the title, it earned him prophetic status among both Washington insiders and Silicon Valley. I was perched in the CIA's unit that dealt with global media. For many years, he worked as an analyst for the CIA.
where he and his team monitored the impact of technology in global media. It's probably the least glamorous spot in CIA, but at that particular moment, the most significant place. He says it was a super unsexy job. Then came the early 2000s. And suddenly we were slammed by this tsunami of digital information. Is the tsunami the internet? Yeah.
And as the tsunami was rolling around the world, we could see behind it ever-increasing levels of social and political turbulence.
We were seeing, for example, in Egypt, the Egyptian media was this incredible desert. I mean, to call it a trickle of information would be flattering it. It was all Mubarak all the time. And suddenly you see these bloggers who are making fun in the very hilarious ways of the government. And everybody who came online seemed to be in opposition, which you never saw before. And we were told by CIA was, well, what are they going to do when the secret police comes knocking on their door? Hit them with their laptops. At
At first, he says, the people in charge, they just didn't think these funny bloggers and angry Twitter users meant anything of consequence. And so there wasn't an idea that this was a serious, organized, structured, radical group such as we knew in the 20th century, and therefore not to be taken seriously. And then...
Either this is the first Arab revolution of the 21st century or it will be brutally suppressed. A movement began. After a day of mass protests in Egypt, the government has banned any further demonstrations. In a way that we couldn't comprehend. Mubarak deposed. Egypt's 18-day revolution defies all expectations. They started to notice that everywhere the tsunami spread, it seemed to bring political turbulence.
It was giving different people voices. It was pushing back on narratives being told by the powerful. And over the next several years, Guri looked at the overlapping features of the early social upheavals. He was able to see, like no one else, what was coming. And to see the way that so much happening in the world right now is deeply connected.
Guri believes that what we are witnessing is the early stages in a profound revolution, led by those he calls the public, and that that revolution is utterly reshaping everything.
So when most of us think about a story like the Arab Spring or a story like the Chaz or Chop district in Seattle or the Capitol riots or Occupy Wall Street, we think of those as separate stories, totally separate stories. But you see them as connected. And I'd love for you to explain how they're connected, what those seemingly disparate stories have in common.
Well, almost every one of them. I would say every one of them. I can't think of one that hasn't began online. And they acquire...
characteristics of digital culture. He says that when you look at the common elements between these groups, they have no leaders, they have no programs. What jumps out at you isn't really politics, at least as politics was once understood. They don't have coherent ideologies. They may be sort of vaguely left-wing, vaguely right-wing. You can make a case of that for, say, Occupy Wall Street being vaguely left and Tea Party being vaguely right.
But mostly they are against. They're against. It's more a revelation of what the internet's incentives produce in people about how they find meaning through what they see on their screens. Online culture fractures opinion, kind of like a fallen mirror just fractures opinion. And the public lives on all the broken pieces. And if it were to promote...
a positive program, it would disintegrate. Basically, there are too many opinions. So the only way that the public can unify and mobilize is in the act of repudiation by being against. That's true of all those. Every last one of those groups you mentioned, some won to some degree. You know, the protesters in Tahrir Square got rid of Hosni Mubarak. But then what?
Every one of those other protests up to and including the QAnon people and Black Lives Matter, they had some success. They took over the Capitol building. They took over several chunks of cities. But then what? What happens then? I think a lot of people would hear you grouping together something like BLM with the Capitol riots and say, that's ridiculous. Those two things are on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. They have nothing in common. What would you say to that?
What is the political spectrum today? I mean, let's march our minds out of the noise of American politics and, for example, look at the world. The Yellow Vests in France are a good example, or the indignados in Spain in 2011. Were they right? Were they left?
What ideology were they based on? What programs were they advocating? If you come back to American politics and you look at what happened with Black Lives Matter, my favorite incident, I mean, that was not a happy moment, but my favorite incident was Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, basically pleading with the protesters who had occupied midtown Manhattan. And what he said was, You don't need to protest.
You won. You don't have to protest. You won. You won. He said it twice. You won. You accomplished your goal. Society says you're right. The police need systemic reform. And then? Now, what reform do you want? He asked, what do you want?
And what the BLM protesters wanted was repudiation, rejection. We don't want your crumbs, Governor Cuomo. We want the whole damn cake. And they had a lot of slogans that they could throw at the established order. Don't shoot! Don't shoot! Defend the police! Defend the police!
Because the web is just an incredible factory of slogans and memes. But there was no program. So what these groups have in common, you say, is a repudiation. I've also heard you say that contempt is at play here. I'd love if you can explain a bit more what they're rejecting and what they're contemptuous of, in your view.
Yeah. And let me put it out in front. The mainstream explanations all tend to be about economic inequality and they blame things like globalism and neoliberalism and nationalism and whatnot. There may be some truth to that.
When you listen to the protesters themselves all over the world. We've been lied to and lied to and lied to all along. To say we are spitting mad is putting it mildly. We're not supporting anybody. We just want people to listen to the people. You get too much.
main lines of argument against the elites and the institutions. Because there was a point in time where I think that she was in this for the right reasons, and yet she's climbed a ladder and then forgotten where the ground was. One I guess you would call distance. And I think that she's committed to appearing as though she is genuinely meeting with and understanding the demands of people. And to understand her history is really disappointing. There's a sense that we elect our representatives,
And suddenly he goes to Washington and he starts talking differently. He's my representative, but somehow he's now become a celebrity and he seems to be representing only himself. The second is failure. In the last 20 years, our financial elites and the political class have taken care of themselves and led our country to the brink of ruin. Amen! Amen!
The sense that the elites have failed at their job, which is running their country. The culture of Washington is totally and completely corrupt and that the country is ruled, and I know this sounds radical but true, by a very intense financial oligarchy that basically has purchase on both parties. And that failure is invariably interpreted not as incompetence but as corruption. We have a political elite, and they're Republicans and Democrats, who think that the country's there to run as they please.
and we the people have sat on our tails and let them do that. Every single one of these members is talking to people from Wall Street every day and raising money from them and having them whisper in their ear. The system squeezes the public and enriches the people at the top. We put out appeals to the left, to the right, to the middle, to whoever. This is an issue of transparency. This is an issue of corruption. This is an issue of double standards in society that we're so sick of seeing.
So many people I know, so many smart people that I know, seem to think that the primary conflict in this country is between red and blue, between Republicans and Democrats, the left and the right. And that's certainly the story that the mainstream media tells us. And I think, frankly, it's the story that a lot of people still believe. But you, I think, would argue that that's just a horribly outdated story. Is that right? Well, I mean, look, what do you mean by outdated?
Democrat. What do you mean by Republican? These are war bands in each one of those labels that are fighting each other constantly to be the one that represents that name, right? I mean, the, let's say, establishment side of the Democratic Party barely nosed out the Bernie Sanders anti-establishment side. The American people are tired of establishment politics.
They want a political revolution in which millions of Americans stand up, come together, and say, you know what, in this great country, we need a government that represents all of us
not just a handful of wealthy campaign contributors. With the Republicans, of course, the opposite happened. The anti-establishment side that Trump represented beat up on the establishment side. The American people are the victims of this rigged and corrupt system in every way. Even that is a simple scheme. There are many, many groups, many, many flavors.
If you look at France, it's very difficult for the United States to create new parties. I think structurally we have set it up that way. But if you look at France, which used to be until very recently a very staid country in terms of politics, same parties with different names would change constantly, but the parties wouldn't.
Suddenly, there's an explosion of different individuals representing a bunch of different points of view, originally without any structure, not even any party, including Macron when he ran way back when. He was just an individual that had created a party around himself. So I think looking at politics in terms that were coined 300 years ago, 200 years ago, left and right, we're talking about
The Constitutional Convention in revolutionary France, okay? Conservative and liberal, we're talking about British parliamentary politics of the 19th century. It's not like they're devoid of meaning. There's still that flavor, but what's going on right now is a lot more complicated than that.
I think one of the challenges in describing these groups as war bands or tribes, it sounds a little bit abstract. Can you give me an example of the person that's joining the Yellow Vest, the person that's joining the Reddit revolution of Wall Street bets, the person that's joining Occupy Wall Street? What's the profile of that person? And what do they think that they are doing in joining movements like this?
That's a really good question. And it will be hard for me to answer in this sense is that there probably isn't a single profile. They tend to be very young.
They tend to be fairly educated, usually university educated. Are they usually middle class? Yeah. They create this atmosphere of mutual meaning by markers of identity that you have to obey or you get cast out. There are certain words that are taboo and certain words that are mandatory that you have in certain circumstances. I mean, it's very ritual, very ritual. And what do they think they're accomplishing?
Well, they are opposing evil.
The system is evil. And they're doing so by going into the streets and protesting, by taking over some occupied zone, or by trying to take down the hedge funds, if you happen to be the Wall Street vets type people. In the end, it's that sense that, you know, there's a gigantic amount of distance, number one, between the people who run the system and us. And number two, they are failing me. I mean, they may be succeeding for themselves, but they are failing me.
And whether the actual response by these groups actually changes any of that seems to be almost not important. It's the doing that matters. It's a lot of meaning, a lot of significance. It's almost, it is what I call sectarian. I mean, it's a sense of banding together and doing something that feels like it's important.
Given how closely you covered revolt movements, some would say democratic movements in the Arab world, do you see that tendency playing out on the streets of America? It's almost like the politics of the Arab world have become, have been imported to us rather than the other way around. Yeah. I mean, I just think that, like I said, information is,
changes minds and channels actions. And I think we're all being channeled in the same direction, right? I mean, you're being, the information environment, mixed metaphors, it's like a gigantic river and you can always swim upstream, but it's hard. And if we just kind of left ourselves drift, we will find that the people who are protesting on behalf of Black Lives Matter or QAnon or anti-Mubarak,
are being driven along the same stream and being shaped, the groups are being shaped by the same forces and have very much the same characteristics, very much the same. I'm struck by the word that you mentioned before, which is a word that is just powerful, is the word evil. And
This opposition to injustice, to evil, that these groups feel they can play this important role in stopping. I imagine that the way they're understanding and learning and sort of hardening around the question of what evil is, that that's taking place online and on social media. Oh, totally. One of the developments that has really surprised me a lot is
is that what I had originally observed as part of that digital environment, which is that it's a tremendous fracturing of opinion,
There seems to be, on the other hand, and this is just the last few years, a tremendous conformism, tremendous fear of deviating from accepted opinions, as such as the web provides. And the web has its own policemen that will come and bite you in the butt and maybe get you to lose your job if you don't adhere to these opinions. So I don't really think, honestly...
I don't want to be disparaging of these mostly young people, but I don't really think there's a whole lot of reflection that goes on. There certainly isn't a whole lot of original political thinking about what the future should look like. There are just, again, these slogans and these ideas that
We are virtuous. And the way you, a good sectarian, demonstrates virtue is not by making a proclamation or taking power and passing laws. No, it's by modeling, modeling virtue. If you go, I mean, there are hours upon hours of young people, by the way, almost all of them, young, white, middle-class people in all those autonomous zones in Portland and Seattle, and
you could find on YouTube today. This is a real democracy. This is what it means to be an American in the true sense of being in a democratic place. I think it's important within this movement to remember that this is historical.
and what side of this you're going to fall on speaks to your character and where you were during this time. What you get is a sense of something is happening here that's really important. We're modeling a new way of being that's very different from this greedy and unjust society. It's such a powerful paradox because on the one hand, I think that these online communities, they give isolated, lonely people
Yeah.
And it's sort of like, on the one hand, these communities are giving people a sense of wholeness and a sense of meaning that they don't get in other places. And on the other hand, the condition of becoming a part of these online war bands or online communities is cutting off a part of who they are. That's totally true. And it shouldn't surprise us in a sense. If you look at original tribal groups, you would quickly learn that
initiation into the information set, the mysteries of the tribe, usually come with some sort of mutilation. You are taken somewhere and you are cut and you are brutalized and maybe a few days later somebody whispers to you the things you're supposed to know and then you emerge as an adult and that's your initiation ceremony in many of these groups.
And I think the same thing happens online. You're asked to give up a whole lot of who you are, what your personal preferences may be, what your personal speaking style may be, insofar as it conflicts with this conformist cultural identity marker.
This is something that's hard to prove empirically, and so it kind of hurts my head as an analyst because I've been talking about it, but I feel like I wish there was a way I could phrase this in a falsifiable way. But it seems to me that today, all the great sources of meaning of just like a generation ago, I'm not a young guy, so the ones that I was born with, and you're talking about religious
religion, you're talking about community organizations like the chambers of commerce, sports leagues, all those kinds of things. Even the family, all these are in various states of disintegration. So
The individual is left to manufacture meaning for himself or herself. That's impossible. I mean, all of us can't come up with all that cultural baggage individually. So you gravitate to these groups and they provide you a kind of a sectarian experience. You know, we'll initiate you by cutting off these parts of your body. And now you're one of us, right? You look like us, you sound like us, and there you are. And then when you read it,
I mean, Wall Street Bets to me is one of the best because it's so pure. There's hardly any real politics in it. Just before we get there, I just want to say on this language you're using that is so visceral and powerful, this idea, it's like you're describing to me
or describing to me branding or something like that, things that we would cringe at if they happened in the physical world, but that are happening regularly online. And I'm just wondering if you can give me a specific example of what that online initiation ritual looks like and what the language change that you're describing looks like. Is there one example that comes to mind? I mean, the example I would give, and again, it's Wall Street beds because I love them so much, is...
the constant retelling of stories about 2008. These were people who were kids in 2008, all right? And I have no way of knowing to what degree this is, and they have been written up as this was what imprinted that generation, that's why they're so angry.
I don't know that that's even true. Maybe it is. I can't say that it isn't, but the way that it's told is with a lot of drama, right? And usual memories like that are not that dramatic. They're, they're raw and they're personal. And, um,
And I think that would be an example for me of, you know, you go into a Wall Street bet, you are expected to have a powerful memory of 2008 or at least a powerful opinion of it, whether you have it or not. Most of us, I mean, when you look at the economy, it's gone way beyond. Even with COVID, we seem to have gone way beyond that dip that had a terrible dip of 2008. So empirically speaking,
Okay, so we had that and now we have moved on, but they have not moved on. And part of being part of that group is, no, no, no, that was a determinative incident. That proved the injustice of American finance and of American economy.
I guess I want to understand if the conflict is between the public versus the elite, how do you understand what those two groups are? Or put it another way, what is the nature? If this conflict is fundamentally between the outside and the inside, what is the nature of the inside and what is the nature of the outside? Well, actually, I think what has changed is
with the digital world is the insides are outside and the outsides are inside. And everybody's terribly uncomfortable with each other to the point of loathing, right? Wow, wow. What do you mean by the insides are the outsides and the outsides are the insides? Well, I mean, I...
for many, many years in one of these hierarchical institutions, CIA. And like I said, it was, I mean, the place was chock full of brilliant people, dedicated, courageous, okay? But it was that kind of an institution. And if people knew how CIA arrived at its,
final product, you know, the hair would stand up and then, because it was all, in the end, it's totally political, subjective, sometimes even arbitrary, how you get to what gets put in front of the president. This is, of course, a secret organization that maybe doesn't apply quite as well, but that was where I come from my personal experience of that. So these organizations were all the same. Every hierarchical organization, you know, the State Department, NPR,
Every government agency, political parties, they all have this inside process that is very messy and very subjective and not particularly rational or logical. But
The output used to sound very authoritative. This is what we all agreed is so. This is the truth. And so by the time it got to the public way back in the old days, it sounded rational. What has happened now is the insides of those organizations are outside. Everybody can see what's going on because everything is leaking all over the place. And on the other hand, the public...
which was before totally on the outside, it wasn't even a public, it was more of a passive, silent mass audience. The public now has that platform and the public has leaped on the political stage because of all these platforms that allow it to do so and become a leading actor there. So the insides are outside, the outsides are inside, and believe me, the top and the bottom, when they mingle together, there's a lot of dislike there both ways.
So when people see, for example, and lots of people other than me have noticed this, that the New York Times is sort of following trending topics on Twitter, following firestorms on Twitter instead of leading the news...
Is that an example of what you're talking about? Yeah, I think in the olden days, let's put it that way, all we had was the news. It was the New York Times. And the New York Times was, of course, literally the agenda setter for the entire United States of America. I mean, every other newspaper and every broadcaster set its agenda by what the New York Times published in its front page. I mean, that's a fact.
Today, it's just one voice in this uproar, this battle of voices, right? And so it's got to find its way in that if it can. But even if it can't, it will never be what it was in the 20th century.
So the revolt is really against this 20th century model, this kind of top-down, hierarchical, I talk and you listen model. And you're saying the mode of the 21st century is that everyone not just wants to be heard, but demands to be heard. Is that right? The model of the 21st century is there is no model. The model of the 20th century is there is this tsunami of information that is battering everything that stood before us.
There's a new world struggling to be born, but man, the struggle looks long. I mean, my parallel for what's going on right now is not anything political, because this is all about information. It's the printing press. When the printing press first came out, it was a terribly disruptive, terribly disruptive press.
far more than the internet. Far more people died because of the printing press than have ever died because of the internet. And it took about 150 years for the human race to figure out, so what the heck do we do with this that doesn't end up killing one another? And we are at the very beginnings of the tremendous transformation from the industrial world and the mass media printing press model to something that doesn't even have a name yet.
More with Martin Goury after the break. Evidence mounts that the actual problem is the corrupt and decadent and resolutely stupid leadership of our own elites. We have a system that is fundamentally broken. Tired of the lies that are going on and we want to take our country back. We have to stop the nonsense and take back our community. This is blatant corruption. This is theft. This is fraud. This is collusion. We've got to come together.
As a people. And declare that I'm not tolerating this anymore.
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I'm very curious to ask you how those on the inside, those who are kind of at the top of the tower, those at the receiving end of the contempt and the repudiation and the revolt, how are they taking it? Are they coping? Are they fighting? Are they themselves revolting back? Diagnose for us their strategy so far and how you think it's working or not working.
Well, I mean, you can make a case that they're winning right now, right? I mean, if the revolt of the public was the original movie, this could be right now, this very moment, could be the establishment strikes back, right? We have now that Trump has been defeated and the pandemic came up with some very interesting methods of control, right?
particularly in the digital platforms where content was sort of routed so that only authorized answers on COVID would arise when you made searches or whatever.
So I think if you ask how they feel, they feel, number one, very demoralized and very terrified. I mean, that's pretty clear. Number two, they want their 20th century back. That's very clear, too. And number three, right now, they're in a bit of a role. They are in charge. I mean, what does Joe Biden have to recommend him? I mean, I say this often.
I guess you might say with all respect. What does he have to recommend them other than he is a member of the establishment? I mean, he's a man who was 78 years old and had failed at presidential politics a couple of times already. He would have never gotten the nomination, except he was a stopgap for the anti-elite
He probably wouldn't have even won the election. That's a little more problematic, except for the four-year exorcism that the establishment conducted on the anti-establishment Donald Trump. So we have a guy who probably his chief...
attribute is he's comfortable at the top. You can't go back, as I said before. If you read the history after the Congress of Vienna, you realize that the reactionaries are always infected with the present and carry it with them as they try to go back. So it doesn't ever work, but they're trying. When I think about how the elites are coping, I can't help but think about
You know, the 2016 election and how the Democratic Party and the kind of media establishment in the face of his shocking win basically couldn't face reality.
And looked to blame any ulterior actor or motive. So you had Russian meddling. You had the idea that anyone who supported Trump was evil or motivated by bigotry. Is that an example of what you're talking about when you think about how the elites are panicking?
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, honestly, it cuts both ways, right? I am asked a lot, what about these crazy people who don't believe that Biden really won and that they trust Trump that he won 60% of the votes or something? And I'm going, well, they're no crazier than what you just said, Barry, which is that everybody thought that somehow or another some vast Russian conspiracy combined with vast deceit in media had produced Trump. So we are now at a moment where...
Truth is up for grabs. I'd love to get deeper into the subject of the press with you. The people are not fooled. We've watched the media who continues to lie to us and hide information. We don't get our information from you all anymore. We get our information directly from the people online, from their accounts. We're able to follow the people that tell the truth and report honestly. In the latest polls, we have something like 54% of Americans say that they believe reporters are intentionally misrepresenting the facts.
28% of people say they believe reporters are just completely making up stories out of thin air. I think that the news today, unfortunately, is enormously problematic. And I guess I want to start by asking you what you think is at the root of this distrust that only seems to be growing. So...
I think the distrust is based on the fact that not everybody agrees with their point of view. I mean, many people agree with The New York Times. Many people disagree with The New York Times. The New York Times published thousands, thousands of articles that portrayed Trump or his inner circle as essentially in a culpable, legally culpable conspiracy with the Russians.
to subvert the election. After the Mueller report, there were zero, oh my gosh, we have spent all this time and money publishing something that had absolutely no substance to it. Now, during that same time, millions of people subscribed to the New York Times who wanted to be reassured that
That Trump was culpable. So that's post-journalism. It was basically a business model that lured people in. And the truth or falsehood of the propositions are less important than are we stoking the fears and then taking care of a certain niche audience that then is going to come into the sacred garden behind the paywalls.
and sustain us. And of course, the numbers are there, right? I mean, when the 2016 presidential season began, the New York Times digital subscribers, they were drifting along at under a million and flat, okay? Today it's like seven and a half million. I mean, they profited from Trump.
Well, I think that one of the reasons that people distrust the press so much is because of the fact that information is easily available in other places. And people are being asked, it seems to me, to sometimes disbelieve what they can see with their own eyes. And a great example of that to me is Joe Biden. You know, a guy that I worked with at the Times, I
I remember him telling me about this during the election. He was constantly pitching stories on the noticeable changes, just even in the way that Joe Biden talked between his previous runs for president and sort of his difficulty speaking and thinking out loud in the 2020 election. And he was on the campaign trail in really important states like Iowa. And that was the subject that tons of voters were talking about. But that
subject, which was obviously very interesting to voters, he was told repeatedly was not something that was going to make it into the pages of the New York Times. Yeah.
If you read Andre Mir's book Post-Journalism, you come away realizing that this myth that we have formed, that our information environment is divided between this fact-bearing, democracy-saving traditional news media and this nihilistic social media is crap, basically. When you weigh them both for very different reasons, they both tip on the side of nihilism. Social media, because it promotes engagement,
But traditional media or at least a few big brands like the Times and the Post and some of the cable news channels, they promote nihilism because the people who believe in a certain side want to sign up to that side and be told the story that they want to hear.
It's essentially, on the one hand, it's a scare tactic. Trump is the monster that's going to gobble the world. Every time he tweeted, it was like the end of the world as we know it. But on the other hand, it's like, well, he's going to get overthrown. And here's all these stories you're going to read about that. So if you are a very disturbed person because of Trump as president, you're going to subscribe to the New York Times and you wouldn't have otherwise. So it's a political decision. It's a political model. But in the end, it's a business model.
I guess I want to just ask why. If the public is revolting against the elites, what are we to make of a case like the New York Times, which seems to be following the crowd, following the Twitter trends, instead of trying to fight for their principles? And I guess a connected question for me is that there are people who are getting paid a ton of money to run these institutions and ostensibly to protect their
the institutional legacy or the trust or the authority that these brands or these institutions have built up and that took so much work and effort and time to build up. Why are they buckling to this pressure? Why are they throwing it away so easily in your view? Well, there's a whole lot of reasons for that. I can mention Yuval Levin's idea, which I think is 100% true, which is that in those institutions you mentioned,
in the olden days were formative. You went to an institution, you were formed by it. You spoke a certain way, you wrote a certain way, you even almost thought a certain way, and that gave coherence and discipline and integrity to whatever was coming out of those institutions.
Today, they are performative. They are platforms for personal branding and personal performance and self-expression. I think that's what's happening in The New York Times. I think another pressure is there are many, many young people who believe that it's the opposite of what you just said.
These institutions in the past were not fountains of integrity and they did not earn their place in society by doing necessary things. No, they were the opposite. There were sources of injustice and of racism and of economic inequality and of justifying evil people in evil systems. So you look at the newsroom of the New York Times,
That is the generation that's driving a lot of what you're talking about, right? I mean, there are a lot of young people there who just feel that American history is one unrelieved story of oppression and injustice. And by the way, when they look at, you know, Dean Buke and all the institutional heads in the New York Times, they look at it very judgmentally. They're saying, well, are you among those or are you going to help us move beyond that?
So there's this knocking of heads and this pressure between this generation that has been raised on the internet. This is the generation that was born with basically cell phones in their hands and has existed online from day one and has no sense that anything exists beyond that.
And so why bother to learn it? Why would you learn about something that was based on injustice? They don't know a lot about history, and they're happy with that. And they are happy to batter even at their own institutions. That's what they're doing in the New York Times. They're tearing it apart bit by bit. They're trying to right that, I think, in the post-generalism business model. But you wonder how long that can last.
So you're saying the pressure is not just coming from the outside, from Twitter storms and the rest, and subscribers who are overwhelmingly, in the case of The Times, I think more than 95 percent identify as liberals and Democrats. You're saying that the pressure is also coming from within.
from these younger reporters, journalists, editors, coders, who just have a different view of the world, a different view of America, and a different view of journalism. And are totally connected, which the upper echelons of those institutions are not. So they are at tremendous advantage whenever you have one of these flaps,
about somebody saying something like that science writer that basically got fired for having used some taboo word. They themselves, you can see them go to Twitter and they themselves together with the audience, the subscribers, there's a mutual agitation there, but it's not like these people are innocent. They're out there agitating and they can use that when they turn to their own bosses and say, well, look, the subscriber base is pissed. So why are you accepting this? The guy's got to go.
It's hard for anybody not of that generation to see it. I have trouble seeing it. But there is no distinction between being online or being in the newsroom of The New York Times. This is the same continuum. It's the same thing. And you use both things to achieve certain personal ends. And those personal ends are very conformistic. It's not like you are a rugged individualist. No, you are part of some group that has some very clear identity markers.
One other question I just want to ask you is the kind of parallel between the way that The New York Times caves to Twitter, which they do all the time and which I witnessed on many occasions, and the way that the Republican Party cave to Trump and Trumpism. Is there a parallel there or is that a wrong comparison? Yeah.
Gee, that's a good question. That's a good question. I mean, anything I say is going to be very tentative, but I say, yeah, I think it's a parallel. I think there are these profound chaotic forces that seem to be the leading edge of our society today and that some people ride better than others and that some people are afraid of being left behind by, okay? And I think in that case, you can make the parallel that, yes,
New York Times doesn't want to be left behind by the Twitter mob. And the Republicans looked at Trump and thought, well, he won. What do we do? I mean, I'm just going to stand here and be old fashioned or join this craziness and maybe I can get something out of it. Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's a Darwinian process. It's natural selection applied to culture and politics. And I think a lot of forms are dying now.
A lot of forms are maladapted. And everybody's wondering, well, what's the form I should be assuming so that I survive? And when these weird things happen, like Twitter or like Trump, they go, well, maybe that's the one. One thing I think is really interesting, like if you look at the New York Times homepage, every Sunday there's a section that looks at the week and late night comedy. And if you combine the audience of Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, I think it's Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel and even SNL,
You don't get anywhere near the audience of people that week that consume a podcast like Joe Rogan, who has something like 50 million downloads per week. And it's just completely ignored by the elites who cover what they consider to be the culture. So I guess just even from a purely economic perspective, putting ideology and politics to the side...
Isn't it strange to you that they're leaving so much money on the table by ignoring all of this interesting stuff that's happening and that massive numbers of people seem to be interested in? Oh, totally. Totally. I mean, this is why I keep talking about the elites having a very narrow mindset. Yeah, absolutely.
Way back when I wrote the book, my example was every play that comes out of New York or whatever gets reviewed by a dozen people, and it was being viewed by a few thousands. But there are these online games that millions play, some of which are amazing.
amazing. I mean, I don't do it, but my kids have done it and I've watched them sometimes. And it's like, holy mackerel, they literally are worlds that you go into and lose yourself into. And those, certainly when I wrote the book, and I think to some extent still, I mean, they get more credit now, but they are not something that the elites are particularly, nobody wants to grow up to be a game reviewer. But I'm sure to this day, there are people in New York City who want to be the New York Times Broadway play review.
They are leaving tons of money on the table, but it is in the end an ideological choice because it is ideology. It's kind of a mental construct of the world as it's supposed to be, which is supposed to fit reality. And these things exist outside of it. And if you accept them,
things start to unravel. If you accept that games are more important than Broadway plays, things start to unravel real fast and that they don't want that. They just don't want that. They're leaving billions on the table. I mean, and the Joe Rogans of the world are eating their lunch. Yeah. It's like the New York Times has people covering opera and tennis and more people will watch Twitch in a given week that will watch opera or tennis in a given year. So, um,
It used to be, right, if we go back to the supposed halcyon days that people are so nostalgic for, that there was a Walter Cronkite to unite us every night.
and that the New York Times and the Washington Post genuinely had access to special knowledge or secret information. Now that there is no unifying news structure, now that we all have access and can choose to live in whatever stream of information we want, and this is, I guess, the biggest question of all, what does that mean for the future of our democracy? Well, that's a good question. I think, of course, the Washington Post would insist that without them,
democracy would die in darkness. That was always part of the, I would say, the ideology of news is we tell truth to power and we give information to the public that the politicians want to either censor or spin. Therefore, we are essential for democracy. That was never true. That was never true. But today it's unfathomably false. The old days, I'm again old enough that I was
Part of a generation that was taught that you have to keep up with current events. You have to keep up. It's a patriotic duty. And so reading the newspaper, again, wasn't a consumer choice. It was a patriotic duty, right? You could say that in those days because the stream was so, so narrow. Today, the news chases us. Nobody tells anybody, go keep up with current events. Current events come and try and chase you. So let's put it this way. There's a marketplace today.
The hunger for information is going to be met the same way as the hunger for entertainment is going to be met. The death of news does not have to be a silence and probably won't be. It will probably be more like a Cambrian explosion of new informational forums. I think Joe Rogan and podcasting, and I think Sobstack and Barry Weiss are part of this, okay? At the very beginning, the very beginning. I think we're looking at a tremendous explosion of that.
There are some structural problems that are being created by the death of news as far as they are no longer what they used to be. And the main one being, I think, how do you arrive at a shared idea of what truth is? Because right now we can't. That entails a much more profound project, which is the restoration of authority for our institutions and for the elites that run them.
Well, I guess I want to pick up on this idea of the Cambrian explosion. I always love that phrase. And you wrote recently, and I think this sums up a lot of what you're getting at. You wrote, "...the web is nothing if not movement, a great host of shadows advancing blindly on the unknown. The urgent question is how to find true north. Truth by dissemination feels like a volatile and transitional state. We are headed somewhere, driven by a powerful yearning for community."
So we're all on this same train, the same boat, to use your metaphor of the tsunami. But where are we going? And how do we find that true north? Yeah. If I had that answer, I wouldn't be talking to you. I'd probably be sitting there counting my billions somewhere, right? Where are we headed?
We are headed for probably more turbulence because, like I said before, I think we're in the very earliest stages of this gigantic transformation.
We are headed for a place which could be far more democratic than before. I think 20th century democracy was not a particularly democratic structure. It created these enormous institutions, these mass movements and institutions where very few people decided what...
millions and hundreds of millions should do. I think we can now forge different institutions or the same institutions can be reconfigured so that the input and the give and take between the top and the bottom of the pyramid is far, far more productive, far, far heavier.
it doesn't take a genius to figure out that we're not there yet, right? We're not at that moment. But that is a possibility. The problem in part is structural, but in part is up to us. I mean, it depends on what each one of us subsidizes. Each one of us is some kind of sponsor of a way of life. If you sponsor nihilistic newspapers or nihilistic people online, well, then that's the world you're going to get.
If you refuse to do it, if you look at the books you buy, look at the movies you go to, look at the news you read, look at everything you do that is a marketplace decision, and you say, well, I can justify that not just by marketplace, but morally, because it's the right thing to do. I think things will change. There's a tendency nowadays to blame large forces out there. And I, of course, do that.
But in the end, all those large forces depend on a lot of individuals going along. So in a way, everyone is kind of a Medici with their $5 paid to whatever sub-stack or patriot. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Well, in that vein, just a few more questions left. You know, you write in the book a line that has really stuck with me. You say,
So you wrote that in 2014, and I guess I'm asking you, in 2021, are you optimistic or pessimistic that liberal democracy can survive in an age of the information revolution? And if it can survive, how? Well, I always say that I am short-term pessimistic, long-term optimistic.
The thing to look at, to flip your question around a little bit, is if not liberal democracy, then what? I mean, I suppose anarchy is a possibility. And at some moments, our cities and some parts of our country have lived through that. But what system is a serious competition to liberal democracy today?
The Chinese system? I mean, I don't think so. I mean, the Chinese system basically started out as Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism, then became cowboy capitalism. Now it's like a one-person cult of personality. And how the hell can you replicate that trajectory? You can't. Putinism? No.
So there really are no alternatives to liberal democracy. So let's look at it from that perspective to begin with. Now, that doesn't mean liberal democracy can't implode. It can. That is my fear, right? At the moment, there's no question that we are worse off than we were in 2014. We are more divided. We are more fractured. We are more angry and we are more intolerant. But, you know, these things have an arc.
They have an arc. One of the few joys of being a geezer like me is you've seen the same things come and go. Things that look terrible just pass on and suddenly everything, some balance is reached, some equilibrium is reached. And I think...
It's entirely possible that you can come out of this migration into this digital world with far more democratic institutions, far more democratic social relations between people, far more educated, well-grounded individuals than in the previous century. It's possible. There are structural pressures, and those are big, bigger than any individual, but those structural pressures are to a large extent necessary
an agglomeration of individual choices. So your individual choice really does matter. How much of your long-term faith in America and in liberal democracy more generally comes from your own life as someone who was born in Cuba and has lived in other kinds of systems of government? Oh, a lot. A lot.
I mean, by the time I was 10 years old, I had experienced a right-wing dictatorship and a left-wing dictatorship. And you get a nose. You get a nose. You know exactly what's coming with those kinds of things. So when everybody was talking about Trump being a dictator, and now I've had friends that tell me, oh, the Democrats are setting up a soft dictatorship. I'm laughing inside, all right? Because none of these people would last a minute if they tried to do such a thing. I know what it takes.
to form a dictatorship. You experience it in your blood. Anybody who's lived under one of those, it's like you have these antennae that are out all the time, right? And the United States is in a fairly dysfunctional moment, but fundamentally, fundamentally,
It's a sound country. My example always is we meet in the ballpark, right? I'm a big fan of the Washington Nationals. And part of what I love about that is being there, I can't tell who is a rabid Bernie bro or a
rabid Trumpist or an indifferent person or an immigrant or, you know, somebody who landed in Plymouth Rock. I know no idea, no idea. We're all rooting for the home team and we'll have certain rituals that we engage in and stuff. And, you know, that's the American people. I think there are many more of those kind of encounters that of the online encounters even today. And I think you can build on those.
I just think that's a beautiful connection to the top of our conversation with, we began sort of by talking about war bands online and the impulse to tear things down and the need to self-mutilate to be a part of those, you know, various tribes and war bands. But something like, you know, rooting for the Washington Nationals and sitting having a hot dog in the stadium and cheering for a game that's going to end after a few hours is maybe an example of like healthy tribalism. Yeah.
When I was very, very, very young, I dropped out of school for like a year. I was a janitor. I cleaned toilets. I always say that's probably the most socially useful job I ever held. And I would do this with people who were of very different backgrounds than me in every way, educational, racial, whatever. We talked about baseball and football.
We bonded on that. That was a strong glue. And we had conversations. It was like a three-hour job. And we started talking about it. And three hours passed, and we were still talking about it. It seems very trivial, sports, but it's a bond. It's funny, Martin, because you write about these vast networks that connect tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people around the globe. But one of the things I'm hearing you say is that for all...
of our connections that we didn't have half a century ago. It's still true that the most important people in our lives are within arm's length from us. Yes. Part of the delusion, if not at least the illusion of the web, is that it confuses where that line is. You start treating people like politicians as if they are part of your inner circle. And that inner circle is where all our powerful passions reside, all our deep loves reside.
other deep hatreds, right? You have a boss you hate or you have a spouse you love. And the internet makes it possible to confuse where that line is. You start looking at people who you don't really know very well, except as they're mutilated online versions.
as people you want to either love passionately or hate passionately. And I think that's a mistake. There are a lot of people I know, or maybe it's that I don't really know them, I just see their half-selves online, that seem to take the view that America is a fundamentally bad place, that we're just basically a pile of various systemic bigotries and oppressions.
And as someone that was born in another country, a very different kind of country, I'm wondering if you can respond to that and how you see America even with its flaws. I mean, every country, as we talked about, no individual is perfect. No society is perfect. No country has a perfect history of absolute justice and equity. But I am not alone. I am one of many.
millions of individuals who have left their homes and come to this country. And we didn't come here because we wanted to be discriminated against or abused. We came here because of the opposite reason, because there would be less of that that was back in the home country.
Everybody leaves a lot behind. I was a kid. I left less than most. But everybody leaves a lot behind when they leave their native country. The worst native country is a big part of you. And you don't leave that with a lot of wrenching pain. And you come here because you feel like life is going to be better. And I think I don't understand that point of view that there is this sort of like devil theory of the United States.
I mean, there are many countries in the world. If I felt that way, I would leave. I mean, honestly, I would leave. It's not like you can't, right? So to the degree that that is even honestly believed, and again, to the degree that this is just a rhetorical pose, it's kind of uncertain to me. But I believe that the American people are fundamentally sound, fundamentally just, fundamentally equitable. And
And the history that it states is one of painful, slow, and sometimes bloody progress. But there has been progress. Martin Goury, thank you so much for your time today. It was fun.
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