An old order is passing away — and nothing has yet replaced it.

Online universities and Arab uprisings are connected.

Gurri opens with things that seem unrelated: companies churning in and out of the S&P 500, the death of the newspaper, failing political parties, the global advance of Facebook and Google, the mobile phone, online universities, Arab uprisings.

His claim is that they are one story: symptoms of a single change in how information moves, which together amount to a crisis of modern government — and of democracy.

And nobody saw it coming. The experts paid to foresee such things missed them: the CIA the Soviet collapse in 1991, the Federal Reserve the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

When information is scarce, its sources become authoritative.

Gurri starts from a simple rule: when sources of information are few, the ones that exist are believed. A century ago the New York Times held a near-monopoly on what counted as a public topic.

His emblem is Walter Cronkite, the CBS newsreader who ended each broadcast with “And that’s the way it was” and was voted the most trusted man in America. When Cronkite wavered on the Vietnam War, Washington shook.

Then information exploded.

Then the scarcity ended. Satellite channels such as CNN (1980) and Al Jazeera (1996) broadcast around the clock and across borders: a Cairo resident with two state channels in the 1980s had more than 400 by the 2000s.

The web followed — the first server in 1990, then MP3s, blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook — and anyone could publish.

For scale, Gurri cites a UC Berkeley study: more information was produced in 2001 than in all earlier human history, and 2002 doubled it, adding about 23 exabytes — roughly 140,000 Libraries of Congress.

Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority.

Why should more information weaken authority? Because nobody can read all of it. An analyst or editor once surveyed a small, known set of sources and could claim the whole picture. Now they can only sample — and when evidence for and against any claim approaches infinity, every CIA assessment or presidential statement looks cherry-picked.

The flood also showed how narrow the old agenda had been. The news business, losing its audience, blamed the audience.

Gurri’s image for the lost stature: the grave evening newsreader, Cronkite, gave way to the chatty morning-show host — in his example, Katie Couric.

The mass audience unbundled into the public.

The daily newspaper was never a natural object. It was a bundle held together by the economics of printing — government announcements, box scores, comics, horoscopes, advertisements — sold to an audience with nowhere else to go.

Online, each piece could be had separately, and the bundle fell apart. So did its audience: the passive mass broke up into what Gurri calls vital communities — groups that form around a shared interest, from technology to cute kittens — whose members publish as well as read.

The elites reacted, he notes, with moral outrage and sometimes calls for repression.

The epochal change isn’t the volume of information — it’s the relationship between the public and authority.

For Gurri the volume of information is only the cause. The effect that matters is a change in who is believed. A century ago Walter LippmannAmerican journalist and critic of democracy; The Phantom Public (1925). dismissed the public as a “phantom,” unable to act. It has now become an actor.

Authority, for Gurri, means credentialed experts inside institutions — government, the military, corporations, finance, universities, media, science — each of which once held a monopoly over information in its field, so its word went unchallenged. Those monopolies are shrinking.

We stand at the first moment of the Fifth Wave.

To name the age, Gurri looks back. Information has advanced in great waves, each rearranging who could rule; we are at the start of the fifth. He describes our time as a slow-motion collision between a hierarchical, top-down order and a networked, bottom-up one — so far a “sterile back-and-forth of negation.”

We are caught between an old world that can no longer sustain us and a new one not yet born — perhaps for decades.

Landmarks of the old regime — the newspaper, the political party — are disintegrating. Things we value, like liberal democracy and economic stability, are threatened. Each side has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial order, the public for the new. The disturbing agent between them is information. Gurri’s fear: “the worst of all possible worlds.”

Hierarchy has a hard exoskeleton; the network can swell into millions or vanish in an instant.

The two sides are organized in opposite ways. Hierarchy — “from Rameses to Mubarak” — runs from the top down. It is slow, obsessed with procedure, fond of five-year plans and contemptuous of amateurs. Its strength is that it lasts.

The network is the public’s form. It has no ranks and wants none: it is egalitarian “to the brink of dysfunction.” It can gather millions in days and vanish as fast, because all that holds it together is one shared point of reference — almost always something it is against. Hence its “streak of nihilism”: it knows what it wants to end, not what should come next.

The Center cannot hold — and the Border has no clue what to do about it.

Gurri borrows a second pair of terms from Douglas & WildavskyMary Douglas, anthropologist, and Aaron Wildavsky, political scientist: Risk and Culture (1982).. The Center is the world of large hierarchies: confident in its procedures, willing to sacrifice the few for the good of the whole, slow to notice new dangers.

The Border is made of “sects”: small voluntary groups of equals that define themselves by opposing the Center. They have “no intention of governing,” hold together by picturing the Center as a great evil, and settle disagreements by splitting.

The digital public, Gurri argues, behaves like the Border — except that online a sect can swell to millions. In each of his three earlier stories a lone figure of the Border took on an institution of the Center.

Wherever the Center thought it owned information, the network swarmed in.

Gurri sees one pattern in these stories. Wherever an institution’s power rested on controlling information, the network got in. The music business collapsed once songs could be copied. Newspapers lost subscribers and advertisers. Parties shrank. Even the US government lost control of its classified documents.

Political power was harder to take, because power is not a file that can be copied. Here hierarchy kept the advantage: Iran crushed its protests in 2009; China trained “internet police.”

But not absolutely — “not as scissors forever cutting paper.” Three times a network struck the Center hard: 9/11, Obama’s 2008 campaign, which beat the party establishments with online volunteers and money, and the fall of Mubarak in 2011.

Networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern.

None of those victories lasted, and Gurri thinks that is no accident: a network can gather against something but has no structure for deciding or building. Al Qaeda failed in its aims. Obama’s online movement did not survive into government; he lost his coalition in 2010. In Egypt the secular protesters were swept aside by organized forces — the Muslim Brotherhood, then the army.

Meanwhile the Center fails in public: rating agencies blessed the investments behind the 2008 crash; intelligence was wrong about Iraq. Each failure is mocked and magnified. The result is “paralysis by distrust”: the Border can neutralize the Center but not replace it.

Like the wars of religion, neither side will win — something different will evolve.

How does such a contest end? Gurri’s parallel is Europe’s wars of religion in the 17th century, when every principle was in dispute. Someone from that time would ask us: “Who won — Catholics or Protestants?” The question now means nothing. Both survived, neither won, and something different grew up in their place.

He expects the same of hierarchy and network. His advice to analysts: the fault line that matters runs not between parties but through them — in the US, between online activist networks (the left’s “netroots,” the right’s Tea Party) and the party organizations.

Liberal democracy became an institution of the Center — so it is under fire too.

Democracy does not stand outside this conflict. Early representative democracy grew out of distrust of centralized power. In the industrial age its machinery took the shape of everything else: mass parties, big bureaucracies, decisions at the top. It became an institution of the Center — “less a paradox… than a historical accident.”

So the public treats it like any other hierarchy. Citizens stop voting and leave the parties; angrier networks call the system Big Government tyranny or a farce staged by Big Business. Democracy will change under this pressure. How, Gurri writes, will largely depend on us.

Cyber-utopians, skeptics and pessimists — there’s less to their dispute than meets the eye.

First Gurri reviews what scholars say about how information changes minds: media plant “pictures in our heads” (Lippmann); we trust news once a friend endorses it; we hide in bubbles; media set what we think about, not what we think. Each is suggestive, he finds, and none conclusive.

The public debate has three camps. Utopians say the internet frees people. Skeptics say it hardly matters: GladwellMalcolm Gladwell, journalist; argued in 2010 that social media cannot make revolutions. argued in 2010 that revolutions need the strong ties of close friends. Gurri answers with Ghonim, who summoned Egypt’s protests from abroad under a false name; what bound the protesters was hatred of the regime. He calls Gladwell “a thinker of the Center.”

Pessimists warn that dictators use the same tools — “pointless and trivially true,” says Gurri, and telling: a despot must now pose as a member of the public. He sides with ShirkyClay Shirky, writer on the internet and collective action.: dissidents and governments both think these tools are powerful, and both are right.

Any spark can blow up any political system, at any time, anywhere.

The consequence reaches every kind of state. With a public made of people like Homo informaticus, no government has a reserve of goodwill left. Gurri calls it a “mass extinction of stories of legitimacy.”

Governments sit on a razor’s edge: any mistake or scandal can bring a networked public into the streets — in authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies alike.

Gurri’s answer: three hypotheses about information and power.

He closes the chapter with three claims, in close to his own words: