Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
119. The Rise of Institutional Mistrust: Prof. Ethan Zuckerman (Author of "Mistrust" and Associate Prof. @ University of Massachusetts at Amherst)
Throughout the 21st century, mistrust in our societal institutions has become commonplace. Regardless of your political leanings, we’ve become skeptical and suspicious of the governmental, educational, and religious institutions meant to support and protect us. How did this happen? What should we do about it? Perhaps, this mistrust is the very catalyst for reform? In today's episode, Prof. Ethan Zuckerman dissects this phenomena.
Topics:
- The rise of institutional mistrust
- Is influencer culture a response to mistrusting institutions?
- How to transform institutions
- Social media and worldview differences
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?"
Bio:
Prof. Ethan Zuckerman is an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the founder of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure, a research group that is studying and building alternatives to the existing commercial internet. Prof. Zuckerman is the author of two books: Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, both published through W.W. Norton. He is also the co-founder of global blogging community Global Voices and works with social change nonprofit organizations around the world. He is an alumnus of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Geekcorps, and Tripod.
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Regardless of your political leanings, we become skeptical and suspicious of the governmental, educational and religious institutions meant to support and protect us. How did this happen? What should we do about it? Perhaps this mistrust is the very catalyst for reform?
Speaker 1:This is the Aiming for the Moon podcast, and I'm your host, taylor Bledsoe. On this podcast, I interview interesting people from a teenage perspective. In today's episode, professor Ethan Zuckerman dissects this phenomena. He is an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and founder of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure, a research group that is studying and building alternatives to the existing commercial internet. He is the author of two books Mistrust why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform them and Rewire Digital Cosmopolitans in the age of connection.
Speaker 1:If you like what you hear today, please rate the podcast and subscribe. You can follow us at aiming the number for moon on all the socials and stay up to date on podcast news and episodes. Check out the episode notes for Professor Zuckerman's full bio, as well as links to his book Mistrust, our website aimingforthemooncom and our podcast sub stack Lessons from Interesting People. All right, with that. Sit back, relax and listen in. Thanks again to Paxton Page for this incredible music. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been really-.
Speaker 2:It's great to be with you.
Speaker 1:I've been looking through your book Mistrust and doing research about, basically, how do we? We have this culture where we're very nervous about institutions and so you have a culture, as the book implies, of mistrust, both left, right-wing, institutionalist and then insurrectionist, and we saw this all through COVID. So you and it's we see, we saw this all through covid so you have the vaccine and then you have um, the response to that and then, of course, just general other if you want to call them culture war issues where you get worried about institutions as well. So how did we get to this place of mistrust? Could you kind of back it up to like, because, of course, my generation being gen z, like this has always existed. Everyone, everyone's always upset at institutions. So where did this come from?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I'm a Gen Xer. I'm 50. So a lot of this comes from my parents who were boomers or sort of right on the edge of boomers. That's a moment where trust in institutions in the United States is really high. So my father graduates from college in 1964.
Speaker 2:That's the year when trust in government is at its highest in the United States. At that point four out of five Americans, if you interview them, say they trust the government to do the right thing all or most of the time. You ask Americans the same question right now, do you trust the government to do the right thing all or most of the time? You ask Americans the same question right now, do you trust the government to do the right thing? You get fewer than one out of five. So that is a huge, huge, huge slide. So what happens? A bunch of things. Vietnam happens, richard Nixon happens the 70s and this is where I start to remember things. Jimmy Carter, the 70s and this is where I start to remember things. Jimmy Carter, the oil crisis, like that. Stuff happens.
Speaker 2:In many cases our institutions fail us, and this is pretty much the story that I start documenting in the book. When people lose faith in institutions, it's often that they can point to a moment where those institutions really screw it up. Faith in the church falls really sharply when the Boston Globe reveals the fact that the Catholic Church is putting pedophiles, moving them from diocese to diocese. Faith in the banking system goes down during the 2008 banking crisis. So when you're coming along as a Gen Z-er, you're sort of inheriting this slide. That really sort of starts, you know right about the time that I'm born and has been going on for 50 years to the point where you're coming into it. You're looking at this and going why would anyone trust any of these institutions?
Speaker 1:From my generation's perspective, it's almost like wait, people even like listen, people enjoyed the media. Like what's going on exactly? You have both sides who are like don't listen to that guy, that guy has no idea what he's talking about, and then the other person has no idea either. Quote, unquote. And so, yeah, it's definitely a culture where we're very skeptical about a lot of stuff. It's yeah. So you talk about, of course, institutions on your book and I'm curious, what exactly is your definition of institution? Because, depending on your geography, you might think, okay, that's the government, obviously, or that's a university, or is that a school? Like, what exactly do you mean when you say we mistrust the institutions?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for me an institution is anything that doesn't have a face and it's anything where the people behind it are sort of interchangeable. So think of it this way I've got a restaurant in my neighborhood and I know the owner, kirk, and if Kirk wasn't there it wouldn't be that particular restaurant anymore. It might be a restaurant, but it wouldn't be the old Forge. So that's not an institution, that's a very personal sort of project and my relationship there is very much a relationship with a person.
Speaker 2:But if I go further down the road and I go to McDonald's, it sort of doesn't matter who the general manager is at McDonald's. Maybe I like the person at the counter, but at the end of the day they're working from a three ring binder. They have a set of processes and such and those processes survive beyond the individual. So institutions are things that have a memory, a set of processes, a way of doing things, a logic behind it. That's beyond any individual, that's beyond any sort individuals and their decisions. In some ways it's almost a 180 from things like influencer culture, where what you're dealing with is an individual who sort of turns into a brand. This is a brand that is so big that the individual sort of disappears. That's what institutions are.
Speaker 1:Is kind of influencer culture. Do you think that's a response at all against kind of mistrusting these institutions, right?
Speaker 2:Your you know Human Rights Watch. For the love of God, don't speak as Human Rights Watch. Don't give us the voice of Human Rights Watch. Show us one of your Gen Z staffers who's working for Human Rights Watch. Show us one of your millennial research experts who knows everything about Darfur. Speak in that individual voice.
Speaker 2:Don't speak in the brand voice and so that notion of authenticity coming out of an individual voice rather than coming out of sort of an official voice. That's one of the things that I think smart organizations are learning how to do. I think influencers have figured out how to hack this right, like I think they've figured out how to do something that feels authentic and personal, but, of course, in many cases, it's just as thought and planned as a brand. So it's almost like the two sort of coming full circle. It's almost like, in trying to evade the institution, individuals have gone over the top and become institutions. It may just be what happens when you're trying to speak to 10, know, 10,000, 100,000 people. You end up taking on that institutional voice, but I do think that the impetus of helping people feel like they were dealing with actual individuals was right and worthwhile.
Speaker 1:The other question that we kind of get into, of course, with every generation, they look at the world and they see all the problems in it, as well as all the futures that could possibly happen. And so my generation is looking at the world like, oh dear, there's injustice there, there's the world's on fire over there, there's probably an incoming meteor over there, and so we look at it and then we kind of find these, we try to find these ways to change the systems or change society and change culture, but then we get nervous because it seems like, well, maybe that's not actually going to work. What is your words of advice? For, of course, as your book implies, how do we go about changing these systems?
Speaker 2:Well. So I think the first word of advice would be of course it's not going to work Most things don't work but what you have to be careful about is getting paralyzed and not trying something. One of the really interesting things is that when systems fail, there's an opportunity to build something else back. I've spent most of my career researching the internet. Lately, I'm spending a lot of time researching cities, and not like the big sexy cities like New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco. I'm researching like Utica, akron. I'm researching cities that have sort of hit some hard times, and what's really cool about these cities is that there's enormous appetite for individual small groups to try something new and all sorts of different people. Some of these cities are really being transformed by refugees, recent immigrants who want to sort of try things out.
Speaker 2:So I actually think there's a lot to be said for saying here's a system that looks badly broken. We can all agree that this isn't working right now. Can we try something? Can we try something different? Part of what's so overwhelming about it is that so many huge systems seem broken, but one of the really interesting things is that a lot of those huge systems have little small parts, and those little small parts can change much faster than we might think. For all of my utter loathing of Elon Musk, I've been kind of amazed at how fast electric cars have been coming on and changing things, and transportation emissions is one of the major sources of carbon emissions in the US. That looks like a space where we might actually change things.
Speaker 2:I also think there's a lot to be said for looking at history and looking at things that seemed unchangeable. When I was growing up, the thing that was unchangeable was acid rain and that came from massive coal-fired power plants polluting the environment and sulfuric acid raining down on us. We don't talk about that anymore because we largely took coal plants offline. My generation actually is a few IQ points behind your generation because we grew up with leaded gas in the air and so we all have lead toxicity. We're all actually slightly brain damaged from lead toxicity. We managed to stop that and you guys aren't suffering from that in the same way that we end up suffering from that.
Speaker 2:This sounds hard to be hopeful about, but there really are things where we've been able to identify a problem, start putting into place a solution and, over the course of 20, 30, 40 years, watching things heal. What's really hard is when things are as acute and difficult as they feel right now. It's often really hard to see progress in three or six months. Sometimes what you have to do is have faith that it's the right solution and that you may not actually be seeing the benefits until 10 or 20 years further down the road what are some of the ways that we can go about changing these institutions?
Speaker 1:Let's take one particular problem, and I don't know name it, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So let me. Let me talk on climate change just for a sec. So the heart of the book is this argument that there's basically four categories of ways to try to change the world. You can try to change laws right, so you can go and pass a law and the government has to enforce it. You can go and change social norms. You can make it really cool to do something or really uncool to do something, and that's surprisingly powerful. You can try to make good things cheaper and bad things more expensive. And you can try to change the technologies behind things. So let's take two examples on this Smoking.
Speaker 2:Smoking when I was growing up happened in restaurants. It happened, believe it or not, in airplanes. We had a bunch of laws that basically said you can't subject people to secondhand smoke. Suddenly, smokers have to be outside. You can't be in indoor spaces anymore. Smoking also becomes more expensive. States put heavy taxes on cigarettes. Cigarettes are about $2 a pack when I'm growing up. They're about $10 a pack now in Massachusetts. That's a really expensive habit to pick up. You might think twice about that.
Speaker 2:There have been attempts at code changes. One code change is the nicotine patch. People who are addicted to nicotine don't have to keep smoking. They can patch. Maybe vaping is just as bad for us. Hard to say, but that's a technology change. But then there's a norms change. Smoking was cool. My sense is that smoking is nowhere near as cool. It's now sort of an addiction. Why would you sort of pick that up but you'd apply the same things to climate change?
Speaker 2:I've got solar panels on my house, despite the fact that I'm in Western Massachusetts. It's not as good an investment as it would, be say, in Texas, but there's laws here that make solar panels cheap. There are market incentives. I can sell my power back to the grid and the grid has to buy it. Solar panels are way better than they used to be 10 or 20 years ago, which is a technology change. And solar panels advertise themselves. I can look around and see my neighbors putting them up and over time that changes norms. So the answer to all of this is find something you care about and then think about different ways to make a change around it, because one change almost never does it. It almost never works to pass the law. You got to change people's minds. You got to change their hearts. You got to change business. You got to change markets. Those things all have to change simultaneously to get really deep social changes.
Speaker 1:I'm curious. So I'm into kind of as the philosopher next to me probably implies philosophy and how different philosophies and worldviews kind of interact. I was brainstorming questions for this interview and I was curious do you think some of this mistrust in institutions is because you have very different worldviews, you have the left and the right perspectives and oftentimes you have different moral structures that people kind of refer to when they look at political issues as well sex, institution and then the person who's looking at them is like, oh, they don't have the same moral framework that I do. So you both look at the same maybe problem or same event and you're like, oh, no, that's awful. Then the other guy goes, oh, that's great, and so how do we deal with that? Is that a problem?
Speaker 2:So there are a lot of issues where moral frameworks can come into play, and you'll see it around things like spending. If you lean to the left, you're probably more inclined to have the state spend on things. If you lean to the right, you're perhaps more likely to have private individuals spend on things. But there's a saying about local politics, which is that there's no Democratic or Republican way to fix a pothole. No-transcript, no easy left, right way to sort of break down around it. If I were going to put my finger on any one thing, it would be cable news. Cable news has to create conflict. It's the cheapest way to fill airtime, and so what you really need are either people yelling at each other about values conflicts, or what Fox News figured out is you don't even have to have both sides, you can just have one side beat up on the other side in absentia.
Speaker 2:And so there's this argument that all of our politics has become national, and this is true to a certain extent.
Speaker 2:When you look at people coming out to vote in the 2022 elections, it had a lot to do whether a woman's right to choose was threatened in their state.
Speaker 2:That seemed to be what drew people out, but the truth is there's all sorts of other things going on that don't necessarily have to be reduced to moral issues.
Speaker 2:There are Democrats and Republicans who have people in their family who get addicted to opiates, and if you have someone who's going through that struggle, you can get into an ideological you know argument. You know God has to step in and save you. It's your own responsibility to work this out. But if you really have someone in your life who's suffering, having a program for safe injections, having a program to get people off the streets, having a program to test drugs, those start making a lot of sense. And I'm finding here, where I live, you know, in an area that actually is pretty politically mixed not my state so much, but once you get over into New York we're actually finding a lot of common ground around addressing things like opiates. So I think if we can find the issues that haven't already been taken over by Fox News, by CNN, by the pundits, you know, sort of arguing here's what the left thinks, here's where the right thinks there's actually possibility for solidarity instead of working through these things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the interesting thing about these political issues, especially being a generation that's always on the internet, connected through social media and just media in general, you look at the world and you look at it in headlines and then oftentimes stereotypes because of you're looking at the world on headlines and it's actually it's very hard to see some of these issues as nonpartisan, non whatever things, and so here's a weird piece of that.
Speaker 2:You have been encountering a very particular sort of social media, which is what we might call big room social media. Right, everyone is in the same big room on Twitter or on Instagram and everybody's sort of shouting for attention. You've got the influencers waving their hands and saying you know, come, pay attention to me. Right, those rooms can be really powerful. They're really important for things like Me Too or Black Lives Matter Movements can start in those spaces, but they're really toxic. It's mostly a lot of people yelling and asking for attention. There's also small room spaces.
Speaker 2:The one that people probably know the best is Reddit, where people might get in and actually have a serious discussion about you know what it's like living in Cleveland, or what it's like working for an Amazon warehouse center, or what it's like being a person dealing with depression or alcoholism, and those spaces tend to have very different conversations. They're not as much about hey, everybody, look at me. They're really much more about what could we learn from one another about these conversations? Now, obviously, reddit is going through its own crisis their CEO is having his Elon Musk moment but I think the broader shift away from these big spaces to these small spaces might actually be really healthy for us as citizens. We might find ourselves in more spaces where we end up interacting with people who are coming from a different point of view than we are politically, and finding common ground because we're engaged in a common project.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the reasons I started this podcast actually in 2020, when everything was kind of shut down and everyone was bored at least I was podcast actually in 2020, when everything was kind of shut down and everyone was bored at least I was um is basically to kind of create a common ground to work, to discuss interesting ideas with the next generation and then successful people, um, who have their own ideas, like yourself, and books and stuff like that and it's been very interesting to see the reaction both in teenagers and in guests who have like just the interactions and conversations that we have are very unique, I believe, and it allows you to facilitate a conversation that maybe, of course, in these big spaces that you were talking about, you can't have on Twitter.
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting. In our case, we're having sort of an intergenerational conversation. Right, I've got a kid who's a middle school student, who isn't that far in age from you and I'm probably older than your parents are and you may be having that with some of your guests. There aren't necessarily a ton of spaces for that to happen. The workspace is one of the few spaces where that tends to happen and, of course, the pandemic has knocked the workspace virtual for a lot of people, so that sort of intergenerational piece of things comes into play.
Speaker 2:We almost certainly live in different parts of the United States. We don't always necessarily encounter each other that way. A I'm going to speak up for my part of the world. Here's what I think is a New Englander, so on and so forth. When we have something else, when we have a topic, when we have a joint project, which is part of what happens with an interview, an interview is always a joint project. It leaves the opportunity for some very different sorts of conversation.
Speaker 2:I think what you were feeling in 2020, a lot of people have been feeling. I started doing a podcast in 2020 as well. For me, it was a chance to reach out to some of the people that I was reading in my scholarly work and, more than anything else, actually tell them how great I thought they were and then have them sort of explain what I loved about their work, and it's been for me one of the best things I've had the chance to do. I have to think that, despite the joke that everybody has started the podcast, I actually think it's probably not bad. I think anything that is inspiring more conversation at this moment in America's history is probably not a bad thing.
Speaker 1:Well, obviously I would tend to agree with that. So, wrapping up our interview with the last two questions, the first one is what books have had an impact on you?
Speaker 2:The books that I really love have been science fiction books that became my friends. So when I was my son's age, it was the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. It became William Gibson's cyberpunk books. It became Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash, and what I realized, kind of thinking about this, is I just read these books over and over to the point where they sort of became my friends, like it was kind of like hanging out with someone I really liked, and that's my relationship with books.
Speaker 2:Now my office at UMass has two massive bookshelves and I spend a lot of my time talking with students. I end up sort of reaching for a book and saying you got to read this. And I spend a lot of my time talking with students. I end up sort of reaching for a book and saying you got to read this. And what I'm really saying is I want you to meet this person, I want you to find out what she has to say, and my best shortcut to that is handing you her book. And so books are people, and it's not any one or two. That's particularly influenced me. It's sort of understanding that you might need to have a whole shelf and that that's the richness is being able to draw on a whole lot of different people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a very interesting, unique way of looking at books, but honestly, I really love the idea of it almost being a relationship between you and the author and then, of course, the community and how those books connect to each other as well, and as you write yourself it's the greatest trick as a teacher, because I lend you a book, I can explain what I wanted you to get out of it and implicit is the you're going to bring the book back and we're going to have a conversation about it and I've got little labels and all of them to increase my chances of getting the back. And you know, sometimes I do and sometimes I don't, but it's often a way that I can keep up a relationship with a student who I might, you know, only get to see for a semester or might only come to my office once.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what a great way to do that. Also, douglas Adams is. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of my all-time favorite series. It's just one of the best sci-fi works I think. Out there I am thrilled to hear it.
Speaker 2:It sort of bounced off my son, although he's introducing me to a lot of great sci-fi, I think honestly he's just so dark. He's reading the Ark of Asythe series, which I've thoroughly enjoyed, but it is way darker than what I was reading at his age. So I'm wondering if this is a Gen Z thing. I think you guys may have a bit of that dark tone in there.
Speaker 1:Quite possibly. It's definitely is a trend that you see amongst, yeah, teenagers and then other people in my generation. So the last question that we have is what advice do you have for Gen Z and then teenagers in general?
Speaker 2:So I actually have the privilege that I get to work with teenagers. Often I have undergrads, some of whom are just sort of coming out of their late teens and into their 20s. I work with folks in their early 20s in grad school. The thing that has worked really well for me is finding things that interest me and just shaking them as hard as you possibly can. Things that interest me and just shaking them as hard as you possibly can. I went through college without really doing a major. I've never really had a career. I've mostly just followed things that I was really, really interested in.
Speaker 2:Most of us have a hard time learning stuff that we should know but we're not particularly excited about. We also have a nearly unlimited capacity to learn stuff about something we care about, and so maybe the biggest thing is to figure out what you care about and then figure out what you might be able to learn from it. There's paths that are easier or harder for this. If what you really care about is video games, maybe you're going to spend a lot of time finding communities and sort of finding other people who want to play, but I am so fascinated by watching people sort of find the first thing that they want to research, that they really want to dig into, and sort of learning how to teach themselves. I think most of our teaching is teaching ourselves, and I think the biggest thing is kind of letting go of those expectations. This is what I'm supposed to learn. I'm supposed to be a computer programmer, I'm supposed to be a business person and instead, finding something you genuinely love and running after it, that's what's worked for me all these years.
Speaker 1:That's been a very comforting. Almost part of the podcast is seeing how many people who are writers, who are academics, who are thinkers just kind of had that similar philosophy of following what they were interested in and then how that has led to them having jobs. Oftentimes you kind of segment careers into just majors in high school, and so it's very comforting, at least for people my age who are like man. I guess the world can work out with some of the things that you're super interested in.
Speaker 2:After you are 22, no one is ever going to ask you what your major is Ever.
Speaker 2:Praise the Lord it will not come up again in your entire life and you can end up in really crazy places. I did a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1993. I've never gotten another degree and I now teach PhD students at a really good university. It's a long, complicated story how that worked out, but there are more than two ways to get anywhere in the world. To get anywhere in the world, and one of them's well-documented, one of them's less well-documented. If you follow the stuff you want to do, you're probably going to end up somewhere pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Well, with that, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation. Check out his book Mistrust. I'll have it linked below. And yeah, thanks everyone for listening.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, Taylor. What a pleasure.
