Oh, the Things You Can Think!

Staking Out Solid Ground in the Wash of Information

In 2014, Martin Gurri quietly self-published an e-book called The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2nd edition 2018). A former CIA analyst, he had specialized for years in global media, which meant that he monitored the internet and watched its effects around the world. At first, he said, people in power tended to dismiss bloggers as inconsequential nobodies. But that began to change after a series of eruptions, later collectively dubbed the "Arab Spring," led to the upheaval of long-held norms and authority structures in the Middle East and North Africa.

Gurri saw that these were all post-internet developments, and he predicted that more would come. Since then, we have witnessed (or experienced) such populist reprisals as Brexit, Trump, the French Yellow Vests, Hong Kong freedom rallies, Black Lives Matter, and WallStreetBets, the subreddit enclave that bought up GameStop to put the squeeze on hedge fund managers. All of these, says Gurri, are products of the internet's "democratization" of information.

But what appears to be runaway destabilization may not necessarily be the net increase in entropy it seems at first glance. Back in the "olden days," Gurri explains, decision-making within the CIA would be politicized and fractious, but the messiness was contained. To the public, the institution appeared composed, unified, and stable. Similarly, before the internet, the seemingly enduring and authoritative New York Times would tell us the story, and we might respond or react accordingly. Now the authority hierarchy has been reversed, and the messiness is on the outside. Major news stories follow what's trending on Twitter. Andrew Cuomo went out to protesters and said, "You won. What do you want?"

That turned out to be a question not so easily answered. The people's primary unifying force had been repudiation. They were long on angst but short on solutions or even workable narratives for making sense of their distress.

At Salvo, we believe the biblical picture of reality provides the best and most workable narrative for making sense of the world. And so we aim to deliver thoughtful, reasoned articles grounded in the unity of a few enduring principles we believe are true: that there is a self-existing, transcendent God; that he created the world good; and that even now he is firmly in control and in the midst of the melee is working out a full restoration of all things.

With these stakes in the ground, if you will, we seek to shed light on areas where biblical truth claims are met with fierce contention. And we seek to do so in such a way that even those who disagree with us might come away with a new angle on the subject. Sometimes that means spotlighting the marvelous intricacies of an everyday insect ("Meta­morphosis," p. 28). At other times, it means drawing out the irony of a moment, as when Robin Phillips shows how people decrying Dr. Seuss have themselves reenacted the very tale they protest, as they, like the Sneetches, run about in circles, branding and rebranding themselves, having altogether dispensed with their reason for protesting in the first place ("How the Woke Stole Tolerance," p. 16).

Whether for good or ill, democratized information is here to stay. It dumps on us a veritable tsunami of disjointed data every day, and it can take considerable effort just to figure out how to think about it all. But think about it we must. We hope what follows helps you chart solid ground beneath the flood, so that we all might resist being carried away by the winds of human cunning and crafty schemes. Happy thinking.