THE DIVISION OF LABOUR IS LIMITED BY THE EXTENT OF THE MARKET.

Change the extent of the information market, by making information easier to acquire (assessing it might be another matter) and the division of labour among experts, rulers, and the ruled changes.  It never was omniscient expertise, and it transpires that a CIA analyst, Martin Gurri, wrote a book, The Revolt of the Public, that suggested the transition from a siloed to an open administrative architecture might have been messy.  That led to an interesting conversation between Mr Gurri and Vox columnist Sean Illing.  The key observation appears almost Coasian.

When you look at the form of modern government, when you look at our structures of power, our institutions, we tend to think of government as something that was created in the 18th century by the founders. But the truth is that it was shaped in the Industrial Age. It has an industrial form and it’s very top-down. It is very hierarchical. It has an almost religious faith in science and expertise.

And a system like this requires a semi-monopoly of information for the domain of each institution. Government needed to control political information, and the politicians and the media all kept a pretty tight circle of information. These are the gatekeepers that decide what’s worth knowing and how it’s known, and for all the downsides of this system, it did keep a lot of ignorance and error at bay.

The first paragraph elides a lot of history, in the transition from departments of Treasury, State, War, and Justice plus the Post Office to whatever the current administrative state is; and yet in a world of costly information perhaps there is a case for those semi-monopolies to circumvent both voting and the price mechanism.  Substitute the administrator for the entrepreneur.  But in the same way that market tests could sweep away tightly-integrated firms with layers of management, tightly coupled administrative states could be swept away when they lost legitimacy.

People can’t organize around a common idea or worldview, but they all seem to agree that they’re pissed off and they’re against ... the system.

So this 20th-century Industrial Age-model of democracy, where rulers are at a distance from the public, is gone. Now it’s embarrassingly clear that the rulers, the elites, don’t really know what’s going [on] or what they’re doing. And at the same time, the public has no shared organization, no common leaders, no ideology.

Instead, we have a divided populace united only by its disdain for the status quo. That’s a very destabilizing situation, and it’s what I was anticipating when I wrote my book.

Emergence is often like that. What could the buggy-whip makers do about the motor-car, or the integrated steel mills about thin slab casting?  They couldn't make it go away, although they could engage in rent-seeking or blaming it on imports or something, and consumers could still vote with their money.  Now consumers are in a position to vote with their votes, and they have (as the conversation is noting) evidence that the current crop of policy entrepreneurs aren't doing so well.

I’m increasingly frustrated with the elites. Look, you can’t run a modern society without some sort of hierarchy. Let’s get real. It can’t happen. So that means that you cannot run a modern society without some sort of elite class. So whatever the public is doing, it’s never going to end up in a perfectly flat society in which we all rule ourselves in some protesting way.

So we need structure, we need institutions, we need elites. But I’ve been astounded by how clueless so many of these elites are. Because of what I do, I’ve interacted with lots of important people, and they simply don’t get it.

The 20th century was so comfortable for them. They stood at the top. They talked down and nobody talked back. They want to return to that world and it can’t happen. So the elites are in a reactionary mode. They feel like the internet is this horrible thing. It has to be regulated back into the 20th century.

But that’s pure fantasy.

Emergence is like that, and it takes a columnist for a site run by and for self-styled progressives and aspiring technocrats to an interesting place.  Mr Illing goes first.  "People obviously want change, but most have no idea what that would look like. There are no serious alternatives to the global liberal order — at least no serious democratic alternatives — and so we seem stuck in a highly unstable period of transition with no sense of what’s on the other side."  That "no serious democratic alternatives" is the not unreasonable fear that more than a few technocrats might end up with their head on a pike pour encourager les autres.  Mr Gurri responds.

It’s so important to remember that we’re in the very early stages of a profound transformation from the Industrial Age to something that doesn’t even have a name yet. These things take time, and you or I may not even be around when this transition is finally complete.

But yes, the danger is that right now the public only has one modality: negation. We’re saying “no” to the system. But if you push hard enough without a vision of what comes next, or even any interest in what comes next, then it becomes nihilism, destruction for destruction’s sake. And that can sometimes seem like a form of progress, but it’s very dangerous.

So a lot of people today fear fascism or authoritarianism, but what I really fear is nihilism. And yet we’re still at the very beginning of this era. While it may seem disastrous and destabilizing now, in 50 years or 100 years it might look totally different.

Mr Gurri compares this era to the late 1840s in France and Germany, only this time world-wide, and the struggles between those continental powers ended with the United States triumphant.  Then, though, and perhaps now, the framing architecture of governance might have been robust enough to the secular challenges to create an administrative state suitable to the era of cheaper steel and more costly information.

The gut feeling I have is that we will get new elites. And I think the dynamic between the public and elites will change because the new elite will understand that there is advantage to be had in being closer to the public and not in disappearing at the top of the pyramid.

The only thing we can be sure of is that things will change. And look, it’s entirely possible that things will end up in a better place. Whatever one thinks of Industrial Age democracy, the truth is that it wasn’t all that democratic. There were hundreds of layers between the average person and people in power.

That’s not how democracy is supposed to work, but we accepted it. It worked well for a while. But the informational environment today is such that that kind of system can’t survive. This is a different era and it will require a different model of democracy.

Perhaps I can, at the end of the year, cycle back to the meditation that opened Advent.  How many layers of administration were there between Joseph, carpenter of Nazareth, and Caesar Augustus, enrolling what he thought was the whole world?  In the intervening years, there has come, for example, the Roman Catholic Church, on the one hand a corrupt self-dealing establishment laid low by the modern information technologies of that era; on the other hand, there are only four layers of management between parishioner and Pope.