Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them

If thick voice-based activism can add a potent layer of humanity to abstract policy issues, thin voice-based activism runs the risk of “slacktivism,” the critique that writer Evgeny Morozov and others have offered about activism that’s more about virtue signaling and unconsidered participation than about making change.

On the left and the right, people are losing trust in their institutions. It’s this loss of trust, both in our institutions and in our ability to change our societies, that should worry us more than the rise of any specific leader or movement.

In other words, citizens care less about civic duty—the obligation to engage in political life in a particular, prescribed way—than about efficacy, their ability to make meaningful changes on issues they care about.

Within a week of the Parkland shooting, it was significantly harder to buy an assault rifle in the United States—and legislators had nothing to do with it.18

“crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”

Individual citizens have two powerful roles within this new model. First, they can create their own media, which sometimes competes with professional media producers for attention and is sometimes amplified by those professionals. Second, they can influence the distributors by voting content up and down with their attention, helping amplify some st

Unpacking how these movements work requires us to understand a much broader range of actions as civic participation. As Norton urges, civics becomes how we speak, how we spend, how we work, and how we treat each other.

Turkopticon, a system that helps workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system share information about employers and tasks to improve their income,

But “people don’t experience life in an issue-specific way,”