“We could see fierce old dictatorships losing control over their own stories. A surprising number of them collapsed. Democratic governments became terrified of the public, and with good reason. The wave of information resembled an acid bath of negation.

Information, it turned out, has authority in proportion to its scarcity – the more there is, the less people believe.”

[…]

“These groups are born in negation – friction with the status quo brings them into being, and they exist to attack, condemn, repudiate. Negation binds a network and transforms it into a political force. You stand against Mubarak, for example, or Obama, or capitalism. Once the oppositional impulse is spent, there’s very little left. If you asked an indignado or an Occupier or a Tea Partier what they stood against, you would get long, long lists of grievances. If you asked what they stood for, you’d get throat-clearing noises and generalities like “social justice” or “the Constitution.””