Some protests attracted tens of thousands of participants a few, hundreds of thousands. For months, they filled public squares, streets, and tent cities. In Spain, a vague formless group called the indignados (or Real Democracy Now, or Youth Without A Future) took to the streets. Gurri hits the relevant beats, but doesn't limit himself to the Middle East. We remember the Arab Spring, those few months in 2011 when revolts spread across various Arab countries and longstanding regimes were toppled by protesters with smartphones and Twitter accounts. Maybe the best we can do with it is read it backwards, as an artifact of the era when the public was only ambiguously revolting, to see how the knowledge of the coming age arose and spread. It's like that thing where someone who warned about the coronavirus on Mawas a bold visionary, but someone who warned about it on March 20 was a conformist bandwagoner - except about the entire history of the 21st century so far. Was writing it in 2014 a boring chronicle of clear truths, or an achievement for the ages? I find my memories are insufficiently precise to be sure. Anyone who wrote it in 2020 would have been stating the obvious. Anyone who wrote it in 2000 would have been a prophet.

In fact, I can't even really confirm whether it predicted anything accurately or not. It might as well just say 'open your eyes and look around'. I picked up the book on its 'accurately predicted the present moment' cred, but it predicted the present moment so accurately that it's barely worth reading anymore.

The book is about how social-media-connected masses are revolting against elites, but the revolt has moved forward so quickly that a lot of what Gurri considers wild speculation is now obvious fact.

It has a second-edition-update-chapter from 2017, which might as well be Beowulf. Martin Gurri's The Revolt Of The Public is from 2014, which means you might as well read the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Rebellion Book III by Grea Alexander