An Interview With Martin Gurri

In Which We Continue Our Interview Series

Dear Republic,

For my money,

Martin Gurri

is the most important thinker of the 21st century. His self-published The Revolt of the Public (2014) established a framework for thinking about politics and society in the internet age that has, with very, very little exaggeration, been right about everything.

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-The Editor

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN GURRI

1.What can you tell us about your job at the CIA?

I had access to all the media in the world, assisted by the deepest bench of translators in the world. I was a manager for a time but I far preferred being an analyst. My sweet spot was helping design new analytic methodologies — for example, decoding the rhetoric of visual (as opposed to textual) persuasion.

2.You have this charming kind of just-so story about how The Revolt of the Public came to be. That you're with the global media analysis team and your job is basically to read the newspaper every day and then at some point you just can't do your job — there's this tsunami of information emerging with the world wide web and the blogosphere (this is the 2000s). It's affecting everybody's life at this time, but because your job is dedicated to reading the news, you're able to see what's happening a bit more clearly and also to assign significance to it where most people would just kind of tend to think of it as background noise. Is that a fair assessment of how The Revolt of the Public came to be — or is this a bit simplified?

The just-so story is arrived at by eliding past all the doubt and incomprehension in the process. I really did stand in a privileged place to watch the internet roll out around the world. I really did see how the internet seemed to be disrupting everything in its path — particularly, in that early moment, politics and media. Eventually, I really did connect the disruption to the loss of legitimacy of our industrial-age institutions.

But at every step there was a lot of “What the fuck is going on?” that I had to get beyond before I could even come up with a hypothesis. Since nobody cares about the intellectual tribulations of analysts, I tend to leave that part out of the story.

3.You say, “a group of us [in global media analysis] were obsessed with the same drama.” Is this one of these books that anyone who was with you at the CIA at the same time could have written, or did your analysis differ in significant ways from your colleagues'?

No author will ever admit that his book could have been written by anyone else!

There was a group of us that witnessed the sociopolitical disruption of the early web and knew that the old regime of “authoritative” media was doomed. There was no significant difference in analysis among us.

The loss of legitimacy of the institutions and the global conflict between the public and the elites emerged later, from my research.

4.When I've quoted you in different places, I've tended to think of the CIA as just a job you had at one point and then you moved on to your writing career, but recently a voice flashed into my head that ‘nobody ever leaves the CIA.’ Does that work and experience continue to shape you?

It was just a job I had, though I worked with some brilliant people and had access to fascinating material.

It’s pretty easy to leave CIA, actually. I just turned in my badge and walked out the door.

5.Can you talk a little bit about how being Cuban-American has shaped your political thought? By the way, I wasn't able to find it online — did your parents flee Castro or they left Cuba before Castro? I've had the feeling that your willingness to vote for Trump in 2024 and your deep aversion to progressive politics — you call it the politics of 'overstimulation' in one essay — has a lot to do with living through the ascendance of Castro.

In many ways, you are what you come from. Before I was 10, I had experienced two dictatorships — not just Castro’s, which admittedly was the most total and controlling, but also that of Fulgencio Batista, the man Castro overthrew, a thug in his own right.

When you experience unfreedom at that young age, you develop a sense for the tricks played by authoritarians. One of those tricks is stripping all sense from language, something George Orwell has written about. Words mean the opposite of what you think. The “German Democratic Republic,” for example, was the most tyrannical of the Soviet satellite nations. The “People’s Republic of China” is ruled by a narrow aristocracy of birth.

So yes, that did influence my vote in 2024. Suddenly I found “equality” replaced by “equity,” “freedom of speech” hedged by “disinformation,” while “our democracy” meant “only our side can rule legitimately.” I recognized the symptoms, and I voted accordingly.

6.Can you remember the first moment that The Revolt of the Public popped into your head — or the first note you wrote down for it?

Not really. Writing the book wasn’t a beginning but the end of a long process of asking questions. The research took me to places I hadn’t expected — I thought I was on the side of the public against the elites, for example, but the nihilism inherent in all web-inspired revolts persuaded me that my job was to explain, not advocate.

I had written the first chapter of Revolt twenty times over in my head before the first word appeared on my laptop…

7.You're pretty adamant in the book that what you're writing is not very novel, that you're just kind of reconfiguring the work of other thinkers. You mention Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Glenn Reynolds. Clearly, you get a huge assist from Wildavsky and Douglas in their idea of the ‘center’ and the ‘border.’ Where do these other thinkers end and where does Gurri begin?

I ask questions, and if I’m lucky I read the work of other thinkers who have answered my question from a different perspective, for their own purposes. I adapt their answers to my perspective, and my own purposes.

BTW, I would include Ortega y Gasset in that list of intellectual lenders to whom I owe a big debt. I cribbed his title, The Revolt of the Masses, and borrowed his theory of how elites and the public interact from Invertebrate Spain.

8.What was your mood as you were writing the book? Did you feel that you were really onto something, that it would go on to have the impact that it eventually did?

I’m an introvert (“off-the-scale introvert,” is what the CIA shrinks told me). I wasn’t dreaming of the book’s success while I was writing it — as I say at the end of the book, I felt like I was in a crowded room with a fire only I could see, and I wanted to draw attention to the danger.

That was my highest ambition: to wake people up to a world-historical change that, at the time, few seemed aware of…

9.I want to go through a few of the key ideas in the book. Part of what's so attractive about your argument is that it’s very simple and very literal. The starting point is literally the quantity of information. And then what really matters is the mode of transmission. Everything from the printing press through to radio and television follows the “I-talk-you-listen” mode with one person on stage and everybody else reduced, for the duration of the performance, to an inert mass. Once we're in the internet, we suddenly have two-way traffic and decentralized distribution networks. That's so intrinsically different that it has to make an immense difference in how information is communicated across the society. I think part of what's so interesting in your argument is that people just don't notice what a structural difference it is in how information is communicated. You open the book up with a sense of wonder that in the heyday of industrial media nobody — yourself included — would stop to think that there was something strange in Walter Cronkite concluding a broadcast by saying “and that's the way it was.” So I guess the question is how did you cross this Rubicon in your mind — from seeing the internet as being just more information to being a different kind of information and that therefore the entire society is going to change as a result of this structural transformation?

It's less a different kind than a different structure of information. That structure is an environmental factor that guides and shapes human behavior. As my friend

Andrey Mir

says somewhere, you can’t write Plato’s Republic using smoke signals. Our Founding Fathers would never have written the Constitution we now have if there had been TV cameras in Philadelphia.

I am a creature of the 20^th century. My head was once cluttered with all kinds of categories of information — for example, “news,” or “presidential press conferences,” or “fiction versus nonfiction.” I guess my Rubicon was crossed when I realized it was all stuff, all information that washed over us and pushed us in certain directions. That revelation literally happened at the mountain-top, in scenic Lugano, Switzerland. Once I could see the big picture, the nature of the structural change brought about by the internet became pretty clear.

10.You have this line that I've been quoting up and down, “We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world, which is not yet born. Given the character of the forces of change we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture.” I'd just like to hear from you a little bit of what that line means to you?

The industrial model of organizing humanity is doomed, yet all the institutions of modern life are based on its principles. Digital turbulence is about to go supernova with artificial intelligence, yet we lack a vision of what a digital or AI society would look like. So we’re staring at the clock, certain that some radical transformation is going to overtake us, but the clock is stuck at one minute before midnight.

I do suspect that the introduction of AI may be the tipping-point. Since AI will revolutionize industry itself, it will be nearly impossible for the old 20^th-century industrial mindset to survive. That, of course, will only introduce a new set of urgent questions.

11.You don't talk that much about McLuhan in your book, even though it seems like your mode of argumentation is deeply McLuhanite, that the medium has a logic of its own and shapes the discourse without anybody being able to do much about it. Did you not mention McLuhan because the link is sort of obvious or is that you part company with McLuhan at some point?

The arrow of causation actually moved in the opposite direction. I sort of groped my way to McLuhanism in Revolt, without giving it much thought. Later, in conversations with friends like Andrey Mir (who is the leading McLuhan interpreter today), I came to see that logic of the medium — or structure — that you mention. McLuhan was an eccentric author who wrote a lot of nonsense, but when it comes to the big picture, the medium dominating the message, I consider myself a disciple.

12.You name your book after Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses. When I read that I was a little struck that it seemed on the surface to be pretty different — not so much about media studies. And then it occurred to me that there are couple of places where you and Ortega y Gasset dovetail. One is just about the sheer literalism of quantity — Ortega y Gasset is arguing that an increase in population, and particularly crowding in cities, fundamentally reshapes social dynamics. And then the other is the notion of a break with the past — that the Industrial Revolution introduces basically a new reality into people's lives and we have to dance with that as opposed to looking to the distant past for guidance. It seems like a lot of what you're saying is that the epoch of the Industrial Revolution is finished, almost as quickly as it began, and we're now in this totally different era, post-industrial, mediated by screens, and have to adapt to that. Is that broadly right in your relationship to Ortega y Gasset?

Ortega sought to explain the dynamics of the industrial age. Millions of people had suddenly entered history. They were relatively affluent and better educated than their ancestors, and they had to be organized in some way. This was done by placing them in steeply hierarchical mass institutions: mass movements, mass political parties, mass media, mass production. From this arose Ortega’s concept of Mass Man, a type of humanity totally detached from everything that had gone on before.

Mass Man takes all the wealth, comfort, and technology of modern life for granted — for him it happens naturally, the way the grass grows. But every impediment to his desires — every encounter with reality — enrages him and drives him to destruction and revolt. The revolt of the masses is essentially a fruitless uprising against the human condition.

I thought our digital nihilists — the random shooters and bombers, the ISIS beheaders — shared a great deal in common with their progenitor, Mass Man.

13.You're very hostile to Obama, and in a way that surprised me. What was it that you were objecting to so strongly?

I never felt hostility towards Obama, whom I found to be a fascinating political figure — our first revolt of the public president, who won the 2008 election to a considerable extent because of his mastery over the web. And I found it remarkable how he could fulminate against the injustice of the institutions over which he was presiding.

In the end, his goal, it became clear, was to take over the Democratic Party establishment, not overthrow it (as Bernie Sanders might have done). At that point, Barack Obama took his place next to Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, and other monotonal elite talking heads.

14.Is there much room for agency in your model? It feels very McLuhanite in the sense that a technology develops and then the content produced by that technology inherently follows the form. It's like, if you have the printing press, you get the 95 Theses; if you have the internet, you get Trump. Is that fair or am I missing a degree of nuance — or ways of rerouting the river of the internet?

Nothing in human affairs is predetermined — and those who say otherwise should be made to predict, in detail, the next six weeks. I worked at CIA. Prophecy is its business model. Yet on every important discontinuity — the Soviet bomb, the Sino-Soviet split, even the collapse of the Soviet Union, our number one geostrategic enemy — they got it wrong. If human life is determined by media structures or in any other way, prediction should be easier…

The information structure sets the stage and arranges the props. Certain possibilities are eliminated (no Plato’s Republic among smoke signalers). Other possibilities are promoted (mass media encouraged pushing elite narratives to the masses). But it’s all potentiality. The rest is up to us, the players in the drama of history — and we can choose from many scripts.

15.You say that your concern is about the preservation of democracy in the age of the digital tsunami. Can you say more about what you perceived the threats to democracy to be? By the way, your tone now about democracy — that "we have never had one" — is a bit different from how you were writing in The Revolt of the Public. What accounts for the discrepancy?

I was being more nitpicky in the article than in the book, but I meant the same thing. True democracy, rule by the people, might be possible in a city-state like Athens, but not in a continental nation. We can’t all gather in one place to debate policy. The Founders built a representative republic with democratic validation (elections, trials by jury) and individual protections from abuse by the state (freedom of assembly and speech).

I haven’t in the least changed my deep belief that the worst democracy is infinitely better than the most effective tyranny.

The great threat to democracy in the digital era is fragmentation and disintegration. Things fall apart. Nations fall apart. Systems fall apart. There’s no valid ideological alternative to democracy any longer, but there’s always barbarism and chaos. The Roman Empire, after all, wasn’t replaced by a fully-fledged ideological system, but by wandering tribes of illiterates…

16.Did you try to find a mainstream publisher for The Revolt of the Public?

I did not. I dumped the book on Amazon as an e-book in 2014. A few years later, in 2018, Patrick Collison, founder and CEO of Stripe, asked me whether he could publish it in the newly-created Stripe Press.

After thinking it over for about a nanosecond, I said yes.

17.What kind of audience did it get when it first came out? My understanding is, not very much?

The sad reality is that I’m a Trump profiteer. When I first dropped Revolt into Amazon, sales were far from brisk. Once Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, I started getting interviews, which gave the book some publicity. When Trump won in 2016, everything changed. I remember looking at Twitter on election day and seeing, “Martin Gurri won this election.” I had no idea what that meant.

18.What happened after Trump was elected? How did people find their way to it?

Word of mouth as much as anything. I did a lot of podcasts. I wrote a lot of articles (still do, alas). There was never an advertising campaign. Revolt of the Public, weirdly, is a revolt of the public book.

I think a lot of people desperately needed an explanation for political events that simply didn’t fit any pattern inside their heads. The book gave them that pattern.

19.The book seemed so perfectly to explain what had happened with Trump — that "it's the internet, stupid." He figured out how to run for president on Twitter, and how to use the language and grievances of the Fifth Wave. Is that your view as well of what happened?

We’re back to the information structure facilitating specific kinds of behavior. Obviously, being a genius at trolling on Twitter is one such behavior. The internet is informal, profane, egalitarian — it’s attention-devouring and therefore entertaining even when dealing with life-or-death questions — and Trump embodied all these qualities. And in a medium Jonathan Haidt calls “the Tower of Babel,” the loudest and angriest voice will attract the most support…

20.I imagine that for the last 10-15 years, you've been like a proctor sitting at the front of the class with the answer key while everybody else takes the test. Is that how it's felt? Almost everything that's unfolded — Trump's election, the pandemic response, the rise of nihilism across the culture, the fraying of the public sphere ± seems perfectly predicted in The Revolt of the Public. Is there anything that's really surprised you? That's made you question your own framework?

I have an explanatory framework. That framework has made it easier for some to understand certain events in a turbulent age. But I have never felt I had all the answers. I spend most of my life in a state of utter perplexity.

The biggest surprise for me was the speed with which the digital dispensation has disrupted the old regime. I think I got the framework right — much of the current craziness can be explained by it — but I failed to notice how fast we were coming to a crisis point.

21.What's your view of the rhetoric of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’? Should we understand this entirely as the ‘center’ fighting back?

Don’t get me started. I have written about this at length, so I won’t dwell on it here, but in essence “disinformation” means “Shut up, peasant.” The elites want the 20^th century back. They hate having the public talk back at them. So they have come up with elaborate justifications why the peasantry shouldn’t be allowed to express certain disfavored opinions.

The CIA did disinformation. It never worked. It still doesn’t. The only way to grope towards the truth is to allow a lot of bullshit and noise into the system. The alternative is to have a Vladimir Putin or a Xi Jinping make the call as to what pure Platonic “truth” is.

22.If anybody is in position to answer this, I feel like you would be. How do we understand the migration of the CIA term ‘disinformation’ into being a broad term that the ‘center’ uses for anything it dislikes? To what extent is a shift like that coordinated?

Disinformation, like propaganda, assumes that the public will be exposed through media to some opinion, and be persuaded of its validity. There’s zero evidence that this ever happens. Human minds are very hard to change. Even in advertising, where billions are spent to promote products, the results are extremely fuzzy. In politics, where individuals hold strong opinions, it would take a major event, a 9/11 or a botched Afghanistan withdrawal, to move the needle on public opinion. An article on the web won’t do it.

And in the words of Forrest Gump: That is all I have to say about that.

23.You seem to have taken a turn at some point during the pandemic or Biden administration, to being really livid about the ‘liberal establishment.’ And the tone you have is pretty different from the cool cat watching from the bleachers vibe that you have in The Revolt of the Public. What were the turning points for you? What accounts for the change in perspective?

I wasn’t livid. I was worried. As I have explained, the Biden administration seemed to sink into a bog of words laden with double meanings.

The turning point for me were the revelations of the Twitter Files. It turned out that the federal government, sometimes directly through the White House, sometimes through DHS or the FBI, was dictating to the digital companies what was allowed to be said on their platforms. This was state censorship, pure and simple. And in my experience, that never ends well.

24.You kind of put a lot of your reputation on the line with your endorsement of Trump — and, to be honest, you're a little dead to me because of this. I understand the grievances with the Democratic establishment, but what about all the obvious problems with Trump — the instability, the narcissism, etc? Are you having some buyer's remorse now that we're a few months into Trump II?

You know, I believe that readers should understand an analyst’s perspective. For two successive presidential elections I said, out in the open, “A plague on both your houses” — and I took some flack for that. Honestly, that’s fine. I just wanted any potential readers to know where I was coming from.

I think I’m going to die a little bit more with you — I have no regrets about the way I voted in 2024. By the way, that was the easiest election in which to predict the consequences. Trump had been president 2017-2021. Biden was president 2021-2025, during which time Harris was on display as an even sillier version of him. We knew what these politicians were like, what they wanted to do, and how they were went about it. The shocking thing to me is how many people feel shocked by Trump today. Either they are pretending to be shocked or Trump really is the ultimate troll…

25.I think you'd be one of the few people able to really speak to this. What do you make of the — broadly speaking — Yuri Bezmenov position, that what really matters in public discourse is large entities, intelligence agencies among others, manicuring public opinion, that the intelligence agencies put significant resources into this and that public opinion is largely choreographed?

Ask yourself, “Are my opinions about religion, politics, or right and wrong, placed inside my head by the intelligence agencies?” If the answer is “No,” then why would this be true for anyone else? Because you’re smarter or more sophisticated? That way lies perdition.

One could make a tenuous case for “manufactured consent” in the industrial age. But we are now living through an extinction event for narratives of all kinds. This is the era of disintegrating consensus, as devoid of binding ideologies as it is of trust.

26.Do you think there's more coherence to the ‘border’ than there was when you were writing The Revolt of the Public? Is ‘the new world’ on its way to being born? Or is it the nature of this dynamic that the border will always be inchoate and always in a position of opposing the center?

That’s a good question. I think the Border is always sectarian, always primarily against. But it may be that Javier Milei in Argentina has stumbled onto the keys to the “new world”: tame the administrative state that has been the most powerful weapon (because it is outwardly technical and thus supposedly neutral) in the hands of the established elites. Elon Musk and DOGE, of course, have been trying the same thing here at home.

But these are first steps, and they may lead nowhere.

27.What's your day-to-day life like now? Intellectually speaking, what's exciting/interesting to you?

I write, I read, I walk, I travel. I have been married to the same amazing woman for more years than most people have been alive, and every day I wonder what lunatic deity awarded me this undeserved prize. I have two sons, a daughter, two grandkids, any one of which can gin up a better conversation than all the intellectuals I know.¹

Everything is exciting. Everything is interesting (with the possible exception of television). Substack has enabled wonderful writers,

Matt Taibbi

and

Bari Weiss

, for example. AI is hurtling towards us at the speed of light. That collision may make all the troubles of the internet age seem like the Eisenhower years by comparison. The business models for “news” of every kind — newspapers, cable, network — are broken and failing, so what comes next?

I deal in questions, and I’m living through a period when that appears to be all we have…

1. No offence taken! - the editor