The End of Power (40 page)

Consider the case of statistics geek Nate Silver, who applied the skills he honed crunching baseball numbers to the 2008 and 2012 US presidential campaigns on his site
fivethirtyeight.com
. Using his own model to aggregate polling data, Silver was able to predict the outcome of the Super Tuesday primaries between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; he went on to predict Obama's defeat of John McCain as early as March 2008, and his detailed predictions on Election Night got forty-nine out of fifty states
right, and in the 2012 elections also predicted accurately the results. In the past, someone like Silver might have had a hard time being heard, for lack of an outlet. Instead,
fivethirtyeight.com
rose to cult status during the campaign, compelling TV channels to invite Silver onto some of their panels, and was licensed by the
New York Times
in 2010.

As different platforms converge, blogger-turned-analyst is just one of many mutations that have unsettled the traditional media work hierarchies. In addition to hiring more reporters, The Huffington Post in 2011 opened its own twenty-four-hour online news channel and announced in June 2012 that it would start a separate online magazine available only through the Apple Store.
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It has expanded internationally, launching operations in Spain, Italy, and France.

Meanwhile, newspapers and magazines have launched blogs and brought on board big-name independent bloggers. In Britain, for example, the major newspapers
(Guardian, The Times, Daily Telegraph)
have formed stables of dozens of online opinion and argument writers. Few traits or functions are exclusive to one type of media organization. News, opinion, and entertainment are all fair game; print, audio, and video outlets are increasingly working in one another's medium; and the combination of easy access to both content creation and distribution tools has torn down the barriers surrounding both the profession of journalism and the scope and specialization of any news organization.

So, less power for traditional news outlets even as the media industry grows more commercial and entertainment-driven? Not necessarily. In 2012, for example, the Nieman Journalism Lab profiled three European newspaper companies that are successfully pursuing different strategies to thrive in the digital age: Sanoma, Finland's largest news company, has pioneered new ways to profitably convert its print subscribers to digital access; Norway's Schibsted, the world's eighth-biggest news company, operates in twenty-eight countries and gets more than a third of its revenues from digital offerings, or about three times as much as the average newspaper; Switzerland's Zeitung Online is experimenting with “hyperlocalism,” winning readers by ignoring stories about President Obama and world affairs in favor of those about the town mayor and canton politics.

The rise of small, outsider, and citizen journalism and social networking in the media may prove complementary to some of the existing players. Among the new forces are also independent investigative groups with nonprofit funding such as ProPublica, an “independent, nonprofit newsroom”
(to use its own descriptor) whose partnerships with established newspapers in the United States have already begun to win awards (in ProPublica's case, a 2011 Pulitzer Prize). And one example of clever harnessing of social media by a major newspaper came in October 2009, when the
Guardian
got around a court injunction that prevented it from reporting a question raised in the House of Commons with the assistance of a timely tweet by its editor, Alan Rusbridger. The case concerned the oil trading firm Trafigura, which was implicated in a toxic-waste scandal in West Africa and whose lawyers had secured the injunction. “
Guardian
prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons,” Rusbridger posted, sparking an overnight flurry of online chatter that blew open the topic. In an industry experiencing as thorough a state of flux and technological revolution as the media are, the rise and relevance of all manner of small, decentralized participants are undeniable, but the traditional players may yet have the last word.
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The growing popularity of mobile devices, for example, has led not only to a spike in news consumption but also to a flight to quality, as consumers prefer apps and home pages of established news organizations with a reputation for objectivity.
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This chapter has focused on churches, unions, philanthropies, and the media. But it could just as well have been devoted to the power shifts in the academy, where online learning, for-profit schools, and growing global competition are intensifying the struggle to attract students and research funding and to stay on top of the pecking order for prestige. It could have explored the decay of power in scientific innovation, which has become more a global than a national enterprise, with collaborators across borders and emerging norms for greater sharing of data and knowledge. Or it could have zeroed in on museums, which have had to contend not only with new competitors—the establishment of world-league museums in far-flung places like Tasmania and Qatar, for example—and groundbreaking methods of cultural interaction but also with the increasing assertiveness of empowered developing countries seeking to retrieve their cultural patrimony. Or it could have highlighted sports, old franchises given new life by innovative methods and nouveau riche owners, or new national juggernauts seeking to translate their surging gross domestic products into a greater haul of Olympic gold or thriving entertainment industries.

No realm has been left untouched by the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions. And none is immune to the shifts that have made power easier to get, harder to use, and more difficult to hold on to. In religion, philanthropies,
and media—the arenas of conflict and competition for our souls, hearts, and brains—we see not only the interplay of new forces but also the fragmentation and polarization that are remaking our societies at all levels. We have more choices open to us in these areas than ever before.

But this raises the question of what happens when the mosaic of faith shatters into a thousand, a million jagged pieces. When the quest for common good devolves into bespoke kindness designed to advance a particular cause for a particular person. Or when citizens forsake all the news that's fit to print for only the news they want to hear. All of these amount to a challenge to efforts at collective action. And from climate change to rising inequality, the enormous challenges that we face demand collective action and a new shared way of thinking about the accretion and use of power. We will consider both shortly—after we examine, in the next chapter, whether this brave new world is really here to stay after all, and whether the decay of power has more benefits or more costs for society.

I AM AWARE THAT I AM ARGUING THAT POWER IS DECAYING EVEN AS
headlines regularly point to the contrary. Some governments are becoming larger. Within countries, wealth and income are indeed becoming more concentrated. The middle class in rich countries is shrinking, and a tiny set of people is accumulating unimaginable riches. Groups and individuals with huge wealth use it to gain inordinate political influence. In the United States, a billionaire casino owner, hedge fund managers, and real estate tycoons blatantly use their money to fund “Super-PACs” that advance narrow agendas or promote candidates who will defend their business interests. In Russia, China, and many other places, oligarchs in cahoots with government officials call the shots—figuratively and literally. Powerful media moguls use their influence to extend their media power to presidential palaces. The “99 percent” feel swindled, impoverished, and exploited by the rich and powerful 1 percent.

How, then, can it be true that power is decaying, spreading, and becoming more ephemeral? Or that the powerful are under siege? Because, as these pages have shown, the powerful today are more constrained than in the past, their hold on power is far less secure than that of their predecessors, and their tenures are shorter.

Vladimir Putin, for example, surely has enormous power, but he is increasingly embattled and his range of options has narrowed since his first term as Russia's president and, subsequently, as prime minister. Similarly, it appeared that the few bankers who came out on top after the 2008 financial crisis would rule the global financial system for a long time; yet, less than
four years later, several of them had lost their jobs while others were besieged by the discovery of their price rigging (Barclays), hidden trading losses (JPMorganChase), money laundering (HSBC), illicit dealings with Iran (Standard Chartered), insider trading by one of their board members (Goldman Sachs), and so on. These events did not extinguish the economic might of the large banks, and the banking lobby continues to wield enormous political clout. But some top executives have lost power, and the banks are surely more constrained in what they can do. Only the most naïve or blindly arrogant CEOs—and not just bankers—feel that their jobs are safe. Economic inequality—long tolerated and in some countries even celebrated—is becoming the focus of debate in many countries. From the United States and Europe to the streets of the Arab world or even China, the peaceful—or at least silent—coexistence with inequality is ending.

And as we have seen in previous chapters, many other arenas of human endeavor once dominated by traditional power players are now contested battlefields where entrenched incumbents are regularly challenged and, with growing regularity, ousted.

This is good news.

The undeniably positive consequences of the decay of power include freer societies, more elections and options for voters, new platforms for organizing communities, more ideas and possibilities, more investment and trade, and more competition among firms and thus more options for consumers. None of these consequences is universal, and we can find disheartening exceptions in each case, but the larger trend is demonstrably clear.

In politics, for example, the rise in political freedoms is obvious; authoritarianism is in retreat. Of course, the democratic boom is far from complete. Some countries (think China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Cuba, Belarus) have yet to experience it or, like Russia, are doing so only in partial, frustrating measure. Yet the forces that undermine authoritarianism are still at work in the public squares that have come to symbolize the Arab Spring and even in the streets of Tehran, on China's websites and increasingly in the streets of its cities, and in other societies governed by repressive regimes bent on controlling their people. We now see more and more scholarly articles with titles such as “Why China Will Democratize,” claiming that the autocratic days of the giant nation are numbered, and
predictions of the end of the Chinese Communist Party's grip on power are multiplying.
¹

And why not? Why should China be an exception? For much of the rest of the world, political power has grown consistently less concentrated. In recent decades, an unprecedented number of political parties and factions have credibly competed for electoral power, and governments in office have been more prone than ever before to fall or to change. Fewer influential political scientists are likely to argue, as some did in Asia as recently as the 1990s, the merits of political order and controlled transitions, or to caution that some countries are not robust and cohesive enough for sudden democratic opening.
²
Back in the 1970s, the celebrated Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington could point to numerous countries coming out of colonial rule or going through rapid social change and link the pace and scope of these changes to a pattern of violence, riots, insurrections, or coups. “Authority has to exist before it can be limited,” Huntington wrote, “and it is authority that is in scarce supply in those modernizing countries where government is at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students.”
³
Such views are hard to locate today, except maybe in the doctrine and official press of the Chinese Communist Party or among those who fear that the demise of Middle Eastern dictators is destined to bring to power even more repressive and obscurantist dictatorships. And we know that during transitions to democracy, nations often undergo political convulsions that make them hard to govern, thus feeding nostalgia for their old authoritarian order.

Economic globalization adds yet more reasons to celebrate the decay of power among traditional megaplayers. Small, faraway companies now strip market share from corporations that have been household names; startups pioneer new business models that send corporate giants reeling. As we saw in
Chapter 8
, in a telling example of the effects on power of the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions, venture capital investment models have spread from Silicon Valley to many other nations, energizing latent entrepreneurial skills in once-unlikely hubs of business innovation. And new multinationals have emerged from countries that until recently no world-class company viewed as breeding grounds of potential competitors.

We know that shifts in the pecking order of companies are as old as the modern market economy, and that a profound link between innovation and “creative destruction” is at the heart of capitalism's vitality. Yet, the massive global changes we now see go further.
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They could not have happened without the decay of power.