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> The conclusion of this WSJ piece [...] is that we need better media literacy.

> My conclusion is the opposite: we need better reputational and accountability systems and institutions.

I've noticed that on issues that provoke strong feeling, folks often put things in opposition that really aren't opposed. This is a great example. These aren't opposites. They're simply two different approaches to the same problem. They're not mutually exclusive in the least. Nothing about teaching people to think critically harms or opposes holding media institutions to account for what they say or vice versa.

Anyway, I don't think more accountability for media institutions is a bad idea, but I can't help thinking it alone won't fix the problem. The internet isn't going away, and it's fundamentally a many-to-many medium. Unless some authority systematically censors and reviews public fora --- I'm talking about everyday conversations and posts on Facebook, reddit, chatrooms, HN, Slack --- we're not going to be able to go back to the days when fact-checked journalism could keep misinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theorizing at bay. (Hell, I guess those days never existed, but I think these problems have gotten worse.)

Perhaps the best point of comparison for the effect of the internet as a new medium is the invention of the printing press. Generally regarded as a good thing in the long run, but it led almost directly to centuries of religious warfare in Europe. Not a heartening thought.

My point is that:

WSJ put the onus elsewhere than themselves.

That this is a long-established tendency of the empowered. See Annie Leonard on "anti-littering" campaigns (responsibility dodging by manufacturers of disposable packaging and goods so packaged): http://www.worldwatch.org/system/files/AlterNet-SOW13-AL-102... (PDF). It's very much a blame-the-victim approach.

That there is no mention at all of accountability for the distributors, amplifiers, curators, and promotors of disinformation.

Once you start looking for such patterns, they become painfully apparent. I've taken to calling them out.

>Once you start looking for such patterns, they become painfully apparent.

Wouldn't it be great if we could help train others to be able to do that too?

It's taken me most of five decades to pick up the skill.

That bodes poorly for generalised skillsets.

There's a generalised rebuttal to calls for greater intelligence / education as a solution to problems: All the children aren't above average. And if your solution to some circumstance is to make them so, or pretend that they are, you are going to be having a bad time.

I'm not against education. I'm against having it be the only suggested remedy. Particularly from a party with a vested interest in both deflecting responsibility and creating the problem in the first place.

Seems like trying to take away or limit the first amendment rights of multi billion dollar corporations would be far more difficult than trying to implement a media literacy course in school curriculums.

Furrhermore I’d argue that media literacy is a critical skill nowadays. However the conclusion is also true: there needs to be a national press agency which acts independently and is allowed to issue fines and force corrections on factually false statements. If a newspaper lies about something, they have to print the correction on the front page. If the front page has not enough space, tough luck.

This sounds like an initiative I’d hold signs for in the street, if there were an actual plan for it. How do we make sure this agency doesn’t become a cudgel for the government to wield for itself? Who gets to run this ministry of truth?

Obviously they could challenge such calls if they are sure they didn’t get it wrong and then it is a matter for the courts.

You make some excellent points, but your dig at Murdoch undermines your point. The fact is that we live in an age of pervasive advocacy. Everyone has a side and everyone musters the best arguments for their side. It’s something we expect of lawyers—to make whatever arguments on behalf of their client that can be made within the threshold requirements of good faith and plausibility. But now we see it everywhere. News media, public interest organizations, academia, etc. It’s not just WSJ or Fox News, but the NYT, ACLU, EFF, etc. And people find that disconcerting. People don’t really expect when reading content from such organizations, that they’re being lawyered. But every time I read an ACLU blurb in my email and dig into the facts to see how much spin there was on the story, it makes me feel like when I was clerking first a judge and would see the amount of spin with which the trial record was portrayed in the briefs. Even when it comes to organizations I respect a lot (I rag on the ACLU, but I’m a member) it’s tiring. I feel like I’m engaged in a mental joust rather than being educated.

Part of this is, I think, the degree to which electronic media and modern society has allowed us to self-segregate. Increasingly, our communications are directed to people who already agree with us, which allows us to communicate in a code of canned talking points. Given the self-selection in media consumption, that applies to media organizations as well.

Some advocate.

Some advocate, knowingly, willingly, and with great compensation, for the Devil.

Which would you do?

You are grouping lobbying organizations with what were traditionally considered news organizations. So sure, I agree that is an appropriate description of the end result of the fourth estate arbitraging its trust away. But it doesn't really address the general problem with that trust having been sold off.

If everything in mainstream media is modulated by advocacy for one commercially-expedient policy or another, then a person might as well throw a dart and choose a random authority on the web. At least there is a better chance that the wrongness will be uncorrelated (flat earthers) rather than deliberately malicious in support of some corporate agenda.

> Some recent tools -- Bitcoin comes to mind -- are expressly founded on removing the role of trust within sectors of activity. This is a bad idea for multiple reasons, two of the principle ones being that trust itself has an extreme function in improving efficiency, and that its removal proves instantly and deeply toxic socially and institutionally.

This analysis reverses the causality. The point of privacy systems isn't to remove trust, but rather to be able to operate in an environment in which trust has been removed.

Bitcoin arose from a lack of trust in the Federal Reserve, and even deeper, a lack of trust in the rule of law from what happened to E-gold and Liberty Reserve. We seek private communication tools due to a lack of trust in network operators and in governments - a paranoia that is continually rejustified by ongoing domestic spying and commercial deep packet inspection.

People that operated by "trust but verify" were able to see this crisis coming down the road as, unfortunately, many of our society's institutions have shirked their duty to be verifiable. And as public trust has waned, these institutions have simply doubled down on their authority rather than reforming themselves to be beyond reproach.

Eliminating reliance on trust, hence, eliminating trust, is a stated aim of Bitcoin:

What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Sure, but it is only a selling point if people desire that property for preexisting reasons.

Before Bitcoin every other digital payment provider was either shut down or forced to move to reversible identity-based transactions. People were forced to trust them to transact, only to have that trust repeatedly betrayed - eg Paypal horror stories.

So I wouldn't say that Bitcoin itself is responsible for "[trusts] removal proves instantly and deeply toxic socially and institutionally", but rather that it's filling a niche created by traditional institutions' destruction of their own trustworthiness.

A destruction that ultimately came about because those institutions were unable to refrain from trying to police customers' business, after said business became more legible (no longer opaque) due to the rise of computing technology. Concretely, there would be much less demand for Bitcoin if say government et al didn't corrupt the banking system in an attempt to stop individuals from altering their own state of mind. But alas they couldn't resist pulling that lever, and when they didn't get the full result they wanted, they kept trying to force it until it broke.

The question wasn't selling points, but design foundations.

The principle of technology reducing trust is a general one I'd first considered a few years ago. Bitcoin is a specific instance, as are numerous other surveilance, manipulation, and scoring systems. Shoshana Zuboff beat me to the punch by a good three-to-four decades with her three laws of automation and information, in The Age of the Smart Machine (published 1988, based on research in the late 1970s):

1. Everything that can be automated will be automated.

2. Everything that can be informated will be informated.

3. Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-the-smart-machi...

Without the selling point, it wouldn't have been adopted and we wouldn't be talking about it.

I think we're talking past each other, and perhaps I didn't make my original point clear: Attributing a lack of trust to specific technologies themselves is a red herring that obscures the deeper cause for the trend. In fact I'd go further and say that the usual pattern is the adoption of insecure naive technologies, with demand for security features only occurring after bad actors arrive. (Interesting link, I'll have to check it out)

I think the bigger picture with transaction systems is that such trust was never scalable in the first place. Businesses took computing technology and naively tried to scale up the old way of doing things - knowing a limited number of people by face. Hence national ID numbers and surveillance databases with [social] credit scores - to keep it hard to "run away" as running away was becoming easier.

And that worked for several decades while that network was effectively small so nodes on it could be trusted. But rather than ever rearchitecting for the realities of the new environment, they simply attempted to fortify its fundamental flaws (hence "identity theft"), and now creative destruction here we go.

Attributing a lack of trust to specific technologies themselves is a red herring

And my case is that it's not. More specifically: advances in communications and information technologies inherently and intrinsically undermine trust mechanisms in institutions and human interactions. They do this, in part, by replacing that trust with technological surveillance and verification. Which is, I'll note, more scalable, and possibly more reliable. But also insidiously corrupting of the social mechanics which have been established over time.

I'm probably not expressing this well, for several reasons. One is that I'm still thinking through this, and I'm not entirely convinced of it myself, though I'm fairly confident of the relationship.

In geographically-distributed pre-technological societies -- any empire (Roman, Chinese, Persian, Hindu, British), you had institutions -- business, courts, religions, governments -- which opereated without anything remotely resembling high-speed communications. Letters would take weeks, or months, to cross oceans. High-speed communications involved couriers on horseback -- the Pony Express largely replicated a 2,000 year old technology first established on the Royal Road of Persia, in which messages could travel 1,600 miles in about nine days. More liesurely transits took three months.

Ships sailed only from May to November, and couldn't sail close to the wind. For six months of the year there was no effective communications. Explorations and even cargo voyages might take several years.

In all of this all parties had to trust the others. Perhaps not perfectly, but sufficiently. And there were numerous mechanisms in place to effect this.

When we talk of technologies -- photographs, audio, video -- allowing us to "no longer rely on eyewitness testimony", what we're saying is that we are deprecating human testimony. Not without reason, but also not without consequence. And when the application of technologies presumes distrust, as social credit systems, email and keystroke monitoring, and pervasive closed-circuit video all do, the rot runs deeper.

If the trends aren't absolutely inherent and intrinsic, they're very, very close to that.

And another facet of that trust breakdown:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864659

There's a difference between saying that technology in general breaks down trust in general, and saying that a specific technology breaks down trust in something specific.

I agree the general case seems intuitive as you're describing. The trends are certainly correlated, and I don't know if it's even possible to refute.

But talking about specifics seems like possibly assigning undeserved blame, and can lead to ideas that if only we could prohibit a certain type of technology, that we could retain trust. But rather what a lot of technology is doing is exposing that perhaps that trust was never deserved in the first place.

If we're thinking about responsibility for the lack of trust in media, should we gripe about how better information availability allows people to check the mainstream narrative? Or rather, should we admit that perhaps they've been selling us paid-for agendas the whole time, and are only finally seeing the repercussions?

As I'd mentioned above: I'm still formulating this, so my arguments and evidence aren't as cogent as I'd like them to be.

A significant factor is the writings of Joanne Yates and James Beniger (independent books), both looking at the development and evolution of business writing and communications from the 17th century onward (Beniger goes back further, Yates largely looks at the late 19th century onward, principally via DuPont). The nuggets of the idea formed reading those.

The reasons I feel the tendency may be generalisable is that the trend appears to be independent from any given technology, far more dependent on the factors of scale (amount of comms) and rates (one-way and round-trip information), and how systems respond given informational, control, and feedback cycles matching these descriptions. That is: it's a fundamental cybernetics / systems effect, not a response to any specific technology.

Keep in mind that "oh, I can trust people far more who I can stay in touch with by mail / phone / email / chat / SMS / voice chat / Skype ..." is actually a form of the argument I'm making. Yes, if you can rely on technology then those you can keep tabs on are more trustworthy. But that gain is relative to those whom you cannot, which is to say baseline trust is lower.

Maybe.

Then there's the problem that technically mediated information is itself no longer trustworthy. Analogue transmission and recording formats (photos, phonographs, film, phones) were fairly trustable in that they presented analogous representations of a ground truth (subject to framing, editing, selection, editing, and other effects). Computers are enabling fabrication of perceptually realistic media and signals, close to or at realtime in cases, to the extent that we cannot trust records or transmissions. The fact that information can be tuned to us (whether we want it to be or not) makes it inherently untrustworthy. Reality, as a rule, doesn't bias itself systematically to our preferences or weaknesses. Digital media does.

Media intermediates. Screens are projections, of our biases, the sender's biases, and the system / intermediaries' biases.

> I can trust people far more who I can stay in touch with

Reading this made me think of a situation with a non-adversarial notion of trust. It used to be that you could make plans with someone a week or two in advance, and generally just expect to show up at a place and time, and they'd be there without further coordination. Whereas now with instant communication, personal plans can be easily altered at a moment's notice, and so they will. (Of course my own getting older is a confounding factor here too...)

The larger effect you're describing feels like a different way of describing model "precession", in that once a state of affairs becomes taken for granted, the head of the pack/smarter agents/attackers (however you want to think of them) move to playing off those assumptions. Everyone else who is still "playing by the rules" then feels like their trust has been violated.

I'm drawing the distinction between general trends and specific technologies, because I feel the only thing you can get out of the general trend is to predict that we will have ever less societal trust over time (barring using it to indict technology in general ala Kaczynski). But is there an inherent problem with less trusting, IF the same thing can be accomplished with verification? Keep in mind, we don't necessarily account for all the people that previously got swindled because they had no choice but to trust, and that trust was betrayed! So it seems like the real "trust" crises arise when something we traditionally trust has been undermined, but without a corresponding better way to verify.

Looking at the specific course of mass news media - everyone kind of came to just trust what they were saying, so that trust became an asset to monetize (propaganda). Then as more people saw through their bullshit, their remaining audience became less critical, meaning they can lower their standards even further, setting up a feedback loop. Now the TV is down to base disaster porn and a political sporting arena.

Granted I do think there is an abstract point to be made that even if mass media was pushing detrimental propaganda to eg go to war or further other entrenched-interest goals, having everyone united on the same page can be valuable in and of itself. I just think that has to be evaluated on its own topical merits - like considering all of those remote victims of economic wars - rather than generally lamenting about trust.

(This comment got lost in a tab, and I didn't necessarily cover everything I wanted to. But I might as well late-reply with what I did write)