Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

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>What is important is maintaining the institutions that have been wildly successful in mediating conflict between diverse groups...

Trust is what maintains societal institutions. Trust in the institutions. Unfortunately, trust has been eroded significantly all around the world. I suspect that this erosion was intentional, the result of highly effective propaganda campaigns being waged by different governments against each other. Ironically, these campaigns are so effective at eroding trust because of the efficiencies that our technological advances have contributed to their prosecution.

Personally, I'm not sanguine that trust will return. Couple these professional manipulation campaigns with the very real degradation of professionalism within many societal institutions and you can see the very clear challenges ahead. Without trust, you just can't get there. And in the face of these manipulation campaigns, without professionalism, you'll be challenged to get any level trust back.

It's just too easy right now for these campaigns to point out the lack of professionalism. (BTW, we should be shining a light on corruption etc. I'm just pointing out what I see as a problem with building trust.)

Excellent point. I find it notable that in spite of the trend you cite those who are empowered by the faltering institutions seem to feel no urgency to regain (or re-earn) trust.

Maybe this is the result of years of such institutions attracting those who simply wish to wield authority and gradually replacing the culture of earned authority with one of opportunistic, or “sold” authority.

The silver lining of this cloud is that it acts as a selection force on institutions, too: If people are harder to pacify, institutions have to step up their game and deliver, or failing that, market themselves better. And that parallels a broad trend that's been in place since antiquity: building sustainable institutions instead of succumbing to warlords and despots. Legal codes, religious orders, and so forth have built up a vast underlying structure to face the ordinary challenges of humanity at its worst. There's nothing to suggest that that trend ends because we have some new gadgets.

But it takes place as a reaction, a series of rapid cultural changes. I would say that we had such a shift take place post-2008: besides the economy, the smartphone era took off and everyone since then has contended with a new status quo of limited privacy, temporary status, broad-not-deep social networks, and a constant background noise of gossip and scandal. Have we gotten better at navigating this world since 2008? Absolutely, I would say. In the first four-to-five years we had a whole bunch of theories about a massively connected world get tested in reality, culminating in stories such as Anonymous, Wikileaks, Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and Gamergate. The years since then have seen various reactions to those stories play out as one major figure after another gets embroiled in scandal.

Even if this is fostered by state actors, the overall effect is one of "boiling down" institutions to their basic premise, where they are easier to challenge, as the arrangements that locked them in before get severed.

And I think the public recognizes that to some degree - the low empathy comes in combination with a renewed interest in a private approach to philosophy, rather than a collective one - a sense that existing institutions fundamentally don't have the right answers and something has to be done. We're merely acting in accordance with the times.

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