[carimura]

Martin Gurri in The Revolt of the Public had a pretty good explanation of this. Leaders used to be the gatekeepers of information, and thus maintained control. Now the Internet has lifted the curtain and opened the floodgates of information, causing a loss of control, thus pushing many leaders to double down on attempts at controlling the narrative. When control gets too strong, we see revolts.

[jruohonen]

I too love Gurri, but I don't think this is at all what he is saying. The Internet and particularly the social media have certainly something to do with it, but to my understanding he is talking about the erosion of knowledge-creation and the collapse of "elites". (Note also that everyone in this forum probably belongs to the latter category in a way or another.) His takes correlate with those from political scientists who talk about institutional decay and such things.

[carimura]

In his own words:

> And the legitimacy of that model [traditional institutions] absolutely depends on having a semi-monopoly over information in every domain, which they had in the 20th century. There was no internet and there was a fairly limited number of information sources for the public. So our ruling institutions had authority because they had a very valuable commodity: information. [1]

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the...