11 ms·

Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

230 points by noir-york 6y ago

cujo 6y ago
Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" The article references a paper that hasn't yet been peer reviewed either. This isn't much. "In general, people’s confidence in their leaders declined after getting 3g. However, the size of this effect varied. It was smaller in countries that allow a free press than in ones where traditional media are muzzled, and bigger in countries with unlimited web browsing than in ones that censor the internet. This implies that people are most likely to turn against their governments when they are exposed to online criticism that is not present offline. The decline was also larger in rural areas than in cities." They bang on the 3g access, but gloss over the rural vs urban part. It could be reframed to something like "people who are isolated from information are less likely to question their assumptions about their government."
- zepearl 6y ago
  > Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" I agree. I think as well that nowadays we're at a crossroads: we get many more informations than in the past AND at the same time we can dedicate less time to evaluate those informations (because we have to dedicate more time to digest all those extra inbound informations => circular cause/effect?). Interesting times & theme (& complicated discussion) - going to be interesting to see how this turns out, if people will find a good way to deal with this. I just hope that humanity won't fall into any kind of extremes.
- EliRivers 6y ago
  "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" Is that true? I see a lot more people trusting blindly in batshit crazy nonsense than I used to, and they seem to be getting it through constant feeds on their phones.
- mhoad 6y ago
  “People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly“ seems like an odd takeaway without also talking about the firehose of misinformation that is social media.
  - adrianmonk 6y ago
    Valid point. I think there are two totally different reasons it could erode trust in whatever ideas were in wide circulation before the introduction of the new medium: (1) People could get better at critical thinking. This is a kind of enlightenment. Enlightenment usually requires effort, so it's not automatic. But some people will seize the opportunity that they didn't otherwise have. (2) People are just exposed to more ideas. They don't take the (old) default views anymore because now there are more choices readily available to them. This can happen without people getting smarter. The paths of least resistance have been rearranged.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    It is my experience that the people who are most susceptible to misinformation are the same ones who where uninterested in valid info about Gov wrongdoing.
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago
    I think the agrument is against slanting the conclusion as creating distrust without significant evidence. Voting out incumbents does not necessarily equate to lack of faith. Less people voting would indicate lack of faith, yes? Perhaps the better headline is: "Status quo incumbents (who have lost track of market forces) more likely to lose to internet savvy challengers when internet is introduced"?
  - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
    With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though. Or a chance of knowing what you were taught in school was wrong or biased (I was taught that the civil war wasn't really about slavery and that Hawaii really wanted to be part of the US without mentioning the colonialism bits, for example). Pre-internet, if your misinformation came from the state, a biased news source, or your school teacher, it was much harder to find an alternative storyline, even if you question the truthfulness of something. Now, I know folks are believing the misinformation, but to be fair, so many of us weren't taught how to sort out this stuff in school. The internet existed for me in high school, though we didn't have it at home save for a short time with dial up. My sister, 6 years younger, had internet most of the time she was in school and my brother, 11 years younger, had internet for most, if not all, of his teenage years. Schools hadn't updated curriculum all that much in no small part because the teachers weren't as internet savvy as the children. Attitudes ranged from "no internet sources" to "no wikipedia" but not so many restrictions outside of that. Entire generations of folks have had to just figure it out on their own, and some of us haven't taken the road of truth.
- Juliate 6y ago
  Or "People with access to more information but with less education how to discriminate and make something of it become less likely to trust anyone." The issue is not that people get manipulated into believing this or that side. It's that they don't trust anyone anymore. So they rally what they like, or what they fear less. Reminds me also this tweet from a few days ago: "Expanding upon Hannah Arendt’s “common present”, Pankaj Mishra wrote in his “Age of Anger” that globalisation & internet has placed societies & individuals around the globe in a common present whereas these societies & individuals had very different & diverse pasts (n)" https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288 https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288
- baybal2 6y ago
  I will call this a "Elzin Effect": — When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake — Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA. — It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops: — “He commented that if the Soviet people, who often must wait in line for goods, saw U.S. supermarkets, ‘there would be a revolution.’ ” The Internet lets people experience pretty much the same, except do so while being on the other side of the public/government divide, and in fact, there are revolutions happening. What I myself believe that a lot of people in the West kind of realise how this work in basics, but only the people who grew in the unfree world will continue further to note that what matters even more is what he said later: — “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said. Elzin was said to be almost crying from this realisation. He saw it's impossible to recover the control of the party when, in a few years, it will be not only him, but tens of thousands of other USSR's officials visiting USA. The later made themselves to feel that they look like clowns in eyes of people who been there, and saw this. These officials will forever stop believing in the power of CPSU, because they saw who really have all the wealth, power, and political potency in this world. Those officials will stop wanting to be high ranking functionaries, and will want to do business themselves in hopes of achieving even a tiny fraction of wealth they saw in the USA, or even drop everything, and move to the West themselves (A huge portion of Russian immigration to the Brighton Beach in early nineties were, in fact, families of Soviet officials, and other elites.) Above, was what the third man in the power vertical, in the second most powerful world country at the time said. Now, imagine how much will this crash the worldview of some "big guy" official in a small town, or a village in the third world, and how they will feel. They too will stop caring for their duties, cash out the treasury, and run. The Internet is equally potent in erasing the faith in the government of both the governed, and the ones doing governing.
  - netsharc 6y ago
    At least Yeltsin's (why Elzin?) observations are probably quite accurate. But nowadays it seems like people are getting mad based on partial information (sometimes just 140 characters) or lies and misinformation. For example the paranoia against Muslims is based on incorrect perceptions of how many Muslims there are: https://www.statista.com/statistics/952909/perceptions-on-religion-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/952909/perceptions-on-re... , and this on top of the perception that having Muslims in the community is a negative thing. Maybe it's also a lot of the "grass is greener on the other side" or "in the future". US voters heard Obama's message of hope and attached to it everything they wanted to be better in their lives. And the same with Trump's message of "Great Again".
- Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  Don't assume the information is good or correct or the full story.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  It is also possible that people in rural areas tend to have less contact with the government in general - after all, most government activity takes place in the capital and other big cities. And in absence of contact, people do not really have strong opinions. But once information arrives, things change. Prior to mass media, few Americans would be strongly opinionated on the internal dealings of Washington D.C. Simply said, they never set their foot there and the distant federal government was not a major influence in their lives. With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it.
  - FpUser 6y ago
    >"With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it." Problem with this is that modern reporting is so f..d up that the picture they paint often has little to do with reality. Instead of trying to adequately address the reality media is trying create one and / or doing plain propaganda.
  - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
    I don't know. Rural areas have farms, and there are plenty of government regulations about farming - and your money is tied to these. Government is less convenient too: Just a trip to the DMV or courthouse might take 30-60 minutes of driving. I think the parent was correct: Cities tend to have more diverse populations. Rural areas tend to have less, which means less folks to challenge your notions of the world (and more chance that you'll write some of the folks off that do so).
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      And pretty much all developed nations have subsidy programs for farmers who are a well organised political bloc.
      - 082349872349872 6y ago
        Farmers can also signal honestly when demonstrating. Hoodies and backpacks may be cheap, but it's much less likely anyone would acquire a whole tractor even if they wished to discredit a farmers' protest.
- _visgean 6y ago
  You are ignoring thatthere are active campaigns to spread misinformation.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I'd question the notion of information, and how it used to be before free high bandwidth communications compared to now. I feel we're sinking in a flood of noise dressed as information. There's more doubts and paradox of choice at every level. Add to this the fact that most people have only access to 'some' information .. they're not informed about some principles (like the paradox of choice) and will not be able to filter or integrate that much thus react on wrong information. The old system was foggy and absolute truth was surely impossible but it feels structurally more sound to me.
- x87678r 6y ago
  I think about this a lot, esp with wars. In the old days it seemed easy to get everyone to sign up and attack some other country where now people are more likely to know someone from other countries/races/religions and get to see what is actually happening.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" This is contradicted in dramatic fashion by the QAnon movement. People are happy to trust just as blindly, they're just trusting different people.
- xtiansimon 6y ago
  > “Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly"” Alternate headline: “Higher meme transmission rates strengthen cultural immune systems”
Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-of-the-public/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-...
fuoqi 6y ago
The Lack of Pirates Is Causing Global Warming?
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
Isn't this a modern version of Plato's Cave Allegory[1]? People being deprived of the truth and free information have no alternative but to blindly believe whatever you(the government) will tell them, North Korea style. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
- vmception 6y ago
  Doesn’t seem like it, no. The allegory of the cave is about having choice and ignoring it. This is about obtaining choice and everyone seeing the folly of their masters. The people that don’t would be closer to that allegory.
- romanoderoma 6y ago
  except in North Korea they are forced to believe. With the use of force.
- netcan 6y ago
  I don't buy it. Even in North Korea, I'm pretty sure people know quite a lot. Hitchens did interviews in the eastern block during the 80s. Everyone knew Kafka, it turned out, once they felt safe letting you know they knew it. Vice news did a tour of Assad's territory at the height of the civil war. Propaganda at the highest levels, with people expected to believe a fiction in extreme contrast to reality. A policeman said to the journalist: "this is 1984 and I am Winston Smith." It's not easy to put people into Plato's cave. Reality is more complex than this. When people learn the truth, get woke, take the red pill (note these are all modern references to the cave)... it almost always involves shaking or adopting a complex worldview. Facts play a part, but narrative plays a bigger part. So does emphasis, etc. Or maybe we're all still in that cave, and the internet just projects some new shapes we haven't seen before. New shapes, new shadows, new wisemen telling us what they mean.
op03 6y ago
Dont we see this with open source? More people show up. More people can find issues. Many more people can find issues than can fix them. The bug tracker bloats. Core team members get called incompetent every 2 hrs. As a counter reaction some core team members get it into their head, to share less or react in unhelpful ways that have long term costs and things go back and forth in waves. We have a few rules at work. 1. Focus on solutions over reactions. 2. It becomes easy to take advantage of weaknesses in people and squander their strengths, so try as much to do the opposite. 3. Have a plan to handle highly ambitious people before they show up. Don't start wondering what to do after someone with more energy/drive/talent/resource shows up and wants to take over everything, which will keep happening as networks expand. For this we treat things like sports teams, which have to deal with a whole spectrum of highly driven people and get them to work in sync. Works out some days and blows up in our face on others. There is no free lunch with transparency and growing networks. Just lot of tradeoffs.
- Super_Jambo 6y ago
  Can you expand upon point 3? I do not really follow sports.
  - op03 6y ago
    There are a lot of different things but basically in Team sports its "easier" to get agreement on division of labor, on leadership, coordination and communication, individual strengths and weaknesses etc because the group has someone external to beat or atleast there is agreement on what a team "win" is. So we try to nail that down and keep having conversations about it. It then has effect on how we coordinate, give and take, decide who leads etc Without those conversations to provide some framework, it turns into a free for all, which reduces trust/faith in the group, esp when some new group or individual joins that have their own ideas and goals.
    - Super_Jambo 6y ago
      Aha, thanks.
  - 6y ago
netcan 6y ago
It's kind of ironic that people educated in social science tend to have idealistic or just legible, few factor theories about something this complex. I mean complex in the strong sense. Early theories were about "access to information unleashing a wave of democratisation." Current theories are about foreign and domestic intelligence manipulating social media. The internet is an era. Eras have a lot going on. The way we should (IMO) be thinking about this stuff is as complex systems, where the mechanisms can't really be understood to the point of predictiveness. Just like printing presses, mass literacy, radio and television broke political equilibriums... the internet breaks political equilibriums, for better or worse. The internet is, OTOH, obviously structurally inclined to being an agent of chaos. Despite all the centralisation, the facebook, twitter, google and such use extremism like an exploitation film uses sex and violence. If something is dangerous, sexy and naked... people are going to look.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  >>The internet is, OTOH, obviously structurally inclined to being an agent of chaos. Decentralization != chaos. On the contrary, it can be far more stable for the forces of coordination, allowing for greater production of knowledge and intelligent action. See Wikipedia.
  - netcan 6y ago
    I meant chaos in a more casual sense of "disruption of status quo." Old media was a lot less inclined to get behind any old revolution that comes along.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
      Not permanently though. A new status will emerge from the internet, and that may prove to be more stable than the more centralized one it replaced. Distributed power structures can be less fragile than centralized ones.
      - netcan 6y ago
ergl 6y ago
Authority rests on information control. High status roles generally depend on access to and control over the dominant communication channels of the time. [...] Of all social roles, those of hierarchy are affected most by new patterns of information flow. The loss of information control undermines traditional authority figures. Further, because information control is an implicit rather than an explicit aspect of high status, the changes in hierarchy are surrounded by confusion and despair. [...] Many Americans are still hoping for the emergence of an old-style, dynamic "great leader." Yet electronic media of communication are making it almost impossible to find one. There is no lack of potential leaders, but rather an overabundance of information about them. The great leader image depends on mystification and careful management of public impressions. Through television, we see too much of our politicians, and they are losing control over their images and performances. As a result, our political leaders are being stripped of their aura and are being brought closer to the level of the average person. – From Joshua Meyrowitz's No Sense of Place, 1989
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  It's also important to note that many of the people responsible for the Internet as we know it had known left- or right-libertarian leanings. The Internet destroys people's faith in government because the people who created the Internet fought long and hard to ensure it would do so.
- classified 6y ago
  That's very insightful. He practically predicted The Donald and his wrestling with social media over how much he can lie and spread hatred online unchallenged (although that latter part is very much explicit).
  - war1025 6y ago
    I would flip it the other way and say he predicted the mainstream media's need to discredit his use of social media since social media is threatening their position as the dominate communication channel with the masses. Trump lies, but I have seen very little evidence that he lies more than any previous president. The things he lies about are precisely the "Great Leader" style attempts to improve his image. To me, that is much preferable to lying in order to push us into another Middle East war.
hownottowrite 6y ago
https://archive.is/kPcjI https://archive.is/kPcjI
yadco 6y ago
The only faith I have in government is their ability to mess up things in the stupidest way possible.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith. We have elevated tiny mistakes to headlines, and politician's character flaws to some systematic issue with the whole of government. This has profound issues for governments actually being able to, eg., manage a pandemic. If no one trusts, you cannot coordinate. And trust is often warrented and needed.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    We also have no interest reading about when government performs a task ahead of schedule or under-budget, and almost nobody takes the time to actually look through government reports, budgets, etc. to see what’s going on, even though almost all of it is public.
  - Anka33 6y ago
    These things does not work due to the government but despite the government.
  - cortexio 6y ago
    Most things do not work because of the government, it's because you have long standing organizations within the government that is being run by people that do not want to lose their job. These people keep our countries working. But politicians... they sell their power and in general work for their own interests. This where people lose their trust. It's not mobile internet that declines government trust, it's just the internet. Because on the internet, you can have discussions and truth wins.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith. That depends on the definition of "working", I think. I don't doubt the good faith of those involved, but "some form of train service between two locations" is a very low hurdle for "working" if that train is late, slower then advertised, only half the size it was announced to be, or running it costs three times as much as trains elsewhere. If you consider quality and price, not just binary functionality, "working" becomes a lot fuzzier. It's hard to compare public services and government actions because we don't have competing government in the same locations, but "something happens" isn't necessarily "everything working almost all of the time".
deleted 6y ago
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daleharvey 6y ago
I remember back in the AOL days being excited about the internet and choosing it as a career because I was convinced that when it was possible for everyone in the world to openly communicate and share information that things like corruption and inequality couldn't possibly survive. Funny how that turned out.
- anaganisk 6y ago
  Greed always finds a way in, everything evolves with time.
- chasd00 6y ago
  technology can't fix the refined brutality in humanity's DNA overnight. Deep down at a very basic level humanity probably perceives this level of connectedness as a threat and that's a very bad spot for anything in the universe to find itself in.
0xmohit 6y ago
> A new study finds that incumbent parties lose votes after their citizens get online. It appears that the study doesn't factor in cases where the governments indulge in mass propaganda. Mobile internet helps disseminate information at scale instantly, and people usually don't tend to ascertain authenticity of information. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter also do little do prevent spreading misinformation. If a government is "committed" to spreading misinformation, mobile internet makes it much easier to have a much wider reach that would be easily possible otherwise.
LatteLazy 6y ago
People have faith in things because they need to, not because those things work. This is why people refuse to accept that prayer doesn't work. This is why in the 50s governments were corrupt, incompetent, wasteful, racist (plus all the other prejudices imaginable) and yet people had huge faith in them. When you live in a rural village and can't really communicate or interact beyond the village, you NEED to believe there is a government out there keeping things working, keeping the enemy away and running stuff. So you do. When you get a mobile phone and need to complain about something and talk about how you're a self made person and how those bozos in <capital city> are IDIOTS, and it seems like you can access more resources by complaining louder, guess what you believe then? That's a big part of the rise of neoliberalism: the modern economy requires us all to be self starters and entrepreneurial (or at least to switch jobs regularly and make out own way in the world). To do that, it really helps to think of government and other people as morons and obstacles and yourself the a randian hero of you're own story. So we believe that. Because belief isn't based on evidence, its based on utility.
aaron695 6y ago
If you bother to read it, the conclusion contradicts what's expected . Faith in government only declines if they are corrupt. "The 3G expansion decreases government approval if there is at least some corruption. In few noncorrupt countries, the effect of 3G on government approval is actually positive." So the internet is good for democracy even at the maxima? Also censorship works well "Government approval falls with the expansion of 3G only when there is no internet censorship." Neither I believe to be true. Censorship allows management of the population and will work, but it's hard, there should be some drop. Anyway for corrupt governments without censorship I agree with the document and Starlink will sort it all out soon and bring in a few revolutions
charliebrownau 6y ago
Can anyone be free as long as the STATE , Police and TAXATION exist ?
api 6y ago
The decline of classical pirates is also correlated with a rise in global temperature. Arr! Mobile also arrived right around the time we really got confirmation there were no WMDs in Iraq.
gigatexal 6y ago
Imagine if China’s firewall was broken and people could see the truth and not what the CCCP wanted them to see and read.
miguelrochefort 6y ago
Governments are centralized means of coordination, which aren't necessary once we have decentralized means of coordination.
deleted 6y ago
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vaccinator 6y ago
Nice colors in that graph /s... all they could think about for colors is different shades of blue? Cannot think of anything more contrasted?
mariodiana 6y ago
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant"? I find it interesting that we refer to "faith" in government, as opposed to "trust." When cheaply printed books and pamphlets arrived on the seen, thanks to the printing press, we saw another kind of faith shaken. What followed, eventually, is what we call "The Enlightenment." I'm not sure the decline in government is a bad thing. Here I will disclose my political leanings. I lean very heavily libertarian. I'm something of a classical liberal, in favor of what's derided as a "night watchmen" government. I am not for getting rid of government. I just think it should do a lot less. The scope of government increases only because of the "faith" people place in it, because its track record by comparison isn't all that good.
hirundo 6y ago
> Among 102 elections in 33 European countries, incumbent parties’ vote-share fell by an average of 4.7 percentage points once 3g arrived. That's not a loss in faith in government, it's a loss in faith in the current government. A loss of faith in government would be voting for those who want a smaller government with less power, but the movements in Europe and elsewhere are hardly libertarian. Perhaps mobile internet is driving a desire for change, but for different, not less. Why would you desire that if it's government in general that you've lost faith in?
andy_ppp 6y ago
I would love for there to be an actual open source/wiki government model that we could try. I haven't done much research on what is the current state of the art thinking about this. I bet people here know loads about it - where should I start after the wikipedia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance
- mam2 6y ago
  even wikiepdia has a hierarchy. there's no easy way
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    But so could open source government?
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Compare the "iron law of oligarchy" (1911) mentioned in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714898
scottlocklin 6y ago
Innovation has also decreased with increased government R&D spending. Everyone knows you don't do linear regression on one point. Everyone but ... economists.
known 6y ago
https://archive.is/kPcjI https://archive.is/kPcjI
known 6y ago
Mobile internet dilutes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
srsQtho00 6y ago
It have a hard time taking this at face value. It says nothing about government as a concept and everything about “incumbent parties”. In other words, people from another generation, with ideas that don’t align with modern life aren’t trusted by the remaining population. For years, prior to mobile gadgets, one incumbent party has failed to expand its base as it dies, the other has absorbed it, while pushing away progressive voices. That has little to do with mobile internet, and the entire premise that a new technology has done what humans have been doing for generations is nonsense. Maybe the technology kicked it into overdrive but the historical record shows it’s been held to an arbitrary check based upon flimsy rhetoric, delusions of grandeur, mass indoctrination behaviors. The need for governance isn’t in question. That isn’t going anywhere. It’s the benchmark for what that governance should look like that’s being challenged.

230 points by noir-york 6y ago

cujo 6y ago

Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" The article references a paper that hasn't yet been peer reviewed either. This isn't much. "In general, people’s confidence in their leaders declined after getting 3g. However, the size of this effect varied. It was smaller in countries that allow a free press than in ones where traditional media are muzzled, and bigger in countries with unlimited web browsing than in ones that censor the internet. This implies that people are most likely to turn against their governments when they are exposed to online criticism that is not present offline. The decline was also larger in rural areas than in cities." They bang on the 3g access, but gloss over the rural vs urban part. It could be reframed to something like "people who are isolated from information are less likely to question their assumptions about their government."

zepearl 6y ago
> Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" I agree. I think as well that nowadays we're at a crossroads: we get many more informations than in the past AND at the same time we can dedicate less time to evaluate those informations (because we have to dedicate more time to digest all those extra inbound informations => circular cause/effect?). Interesting times & theme (& complicated discussion) - going to be interesting to see how this turns out, if people will find a good way to deal with this. I just hope that humanity won't fall into any kind of extremes.
EliRivers 6y ago
"People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" Is that true? I see a lot more people trusting blindly in batshit crazy nonsense than I used to, and they seem to be getting it through constant feeds on their phones.
mhoad 6y ago
“People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly“ seems like an odd takeaway without also talking about the firehose of misinformation that is social media.
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  Valid point. I think there are two totally different reasons it could erode trust in whatever ideas were in wide circulation before the introduction of the new medium: (1) People could get better at critical thinking. This is a kind of enlightenment. Enlightenment usually requires effort, so it's not automatic. But some people will seize the opportunity that they didn't otherwise have. (2) People are just exposed to more ideas. They don't take the (old) default views anymore because now there are more choices readily available to them. This can happen without people getting smarter. The paths of least resistance have been rearranged.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  It is my experience that the people who are most susceptible to misinformation are the same ones who where uninterested in valid info about Gov wrongdoing.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  I think the agrument is against slanting the conclusion as creating distrust without significant evidence. Voting out incumbents does not necessarily equate to lack of faith. Less people voting would indicate lack of faith, yes? Perhaps the better headline is: "Status quo incumbents (who have lost track of market forces) more likely to lose to internet savvy challengers when internet is introduced"?
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though. Or a chance of knowing what you were taught in school was wrong or biased (I was taught that the civil war wasn't really about slavery and that Hawaii really wanted to be part of the US without mentioning the colonialism bits, for example). Pre-internet, if your misinformation came from the state, a biased news source, or your school teacher, it was much harder to find an alternative storyline, even if you question the truthfulness of something. Now, I know folks are believing the misinformation, but to be fair, so many of us weren't taught how to sort out this stuff in school. The internet existed for me in high school, though we didn't have it at home save for a short time with dial up. My sister, 6 years younger, had internet most of the time she was in school and my brother, 11 years younger, had internet for most, if not all, of his teenage years. Schools hadn't updated curriculum all that much in no small part because the teachers weren't as internet savvy as the children. Attitudes ranged from "no internet sources" to "no wikipedia" but not so many restrictions outside of that. Entire generations of folks have had to just figure it out on their own, and some of us haven't taken the road of truth.
Juliate 6y ago
Or "People with access to more information but with less education how to discriminate and make something of it become less likely to trust anyone." The issue is not that people get manipulated into believing this or that side. It's that they don't trust anyone anymore. So they rally what they like, or what they fear less. Reminds me also this tweet from a few days ago: "Expanding upon Hannah Arendt’s “common present”, Pankaj Mishra wrote in his “Age of Anger” that globalisation & internet has placed societies & individuals around the globe in a common present whereas these societies & individuals had very different & diverse pasts (n)" https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288 https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288
baybal2 6y ago
I will call this a "Elzin Effect": — When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake — Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA. — It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops: — “He commented that if the Soviet people, who often must wait in line for goods, saw U.S. supermarkets, ‘there would be a revolution.’ ” The Internet lets people experience pretty much the same, except do so while being on the other side of the public/government divide, and in fact, there are revolutions happening. What I myself believe that a lot of people in the West kind of realise how this work in basics, but only the people who grew in the unfree world will continue further to note that what matters even more is what he said later: — “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said. Elzin was said to be almost crying from this realisation. He saw it's impossible to recover the control of the party when, in a few years, it will be not only him, but tens of thousands of other USSR's officials visiting USA. The later made themselves to feel that they look like clowns in eyes of people who been there, and saw this. These officials will forever stop believing in the power of CPSU, because they saw who really have all the wealth, power, and political potency in this world. Those officials will stop wanting to be high ranking functionaries, and will want to do business themselves in hopes of achieving even a tiny fraction of wealth they saw in the USA, or even drop everything, and move to the West themselves (A huge portion of Russian immigration to the Brighton Beach in early nineties were, in fact, families of Soviet officials, and other elites.) Above, was what the third man in the power vertical, in the second most powerful world country at the time said. Now, imagine how much will this crash the worldview of some "big guy" official in a small town, or a village in the third world, and how they will feel. They too will stop caring for their duties, cash out the treasury, and run. The Internet is equally potent in erasing the faith in the government of both the governed, and the ones doing governing.
- netsharc 6y ago
  At least Yeltsin's (why Elzin?) observations are probably quite accurate. But nowadays it seems like people are getting mad based on partial information (sometimes just 140 characters) or lies and misinformation. For example the paranoia against Muslims is based on incorrect perceptions of how many Muslims there are: https://www.statista.com/statistics/952909/perceptions-on-religion-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/952909/perceptions-on-re... , and this on top of the perception that having Muslims in the community is a negative thing. Maybe it's also a lot of the "grass is greener on the other side" or "in the future". US voters heard Obama's message of hope and attached to it everything they wanted to be better in their lives. And the same with Trump's message of "Great Again".
Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
Don't assume the information is good or correct or the full story.
inglor_cz 6y ago
It is also possible that people in rural areas tend to have less contact with the government in general - after all, most government activity takes place in the capital and other big cities. And in absence of contact, people do not really have strong opinions. But once information arrives, things change. Prior to mass media, few Americans would be strongly opinionated on the internal dealings of Washington D.C. Simply said, they never set their foot there and the distant federal government was not a major influence in their lives. With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it.
- FpUser 6y ago
  >"With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it." Problem with this is that modern reporting is so f..d up that the picture they paint often has little to do with reality. Instead of trying to adequately address the reality media is trying create one and / or doing plain propaganda.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  I don't know. Rural areas have farms, and there are plenty of government regulations about farming - and your money is tied to these. Government is less convenient too: Just a trip to the DMV or courthouse might take 30-60 minutes of driving. I think the parent was correct: Cities tend to have more diverse populations. Rural areas tend to have less, which means less folks to challenge your notions of the world (and more chance that you'll write some of the folks off that do so).
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    And pretty much all developed nations have subsidy programs for farmers who are a well organised political bloc.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Farmers can also signal honestly when demonstrating. Hoodies and backpacks may be cheap, but it's much less likely anyone would acquire a whole tractor even if they wished to discredit a farmers' protest.
_visgean 6y ago
You are ignoring thatthere are active campaigns to spread misinformation.
agumonkey 6y ago
I'd question the notion of information, and how it used to be before free high bandwidth communications compared to now. I feel we're sinking in a flood of noise dressed as information. There's more doubts and paradox of choice at every level. Add to this the fact that most people have only access to 'some' information .. they're not informed about some principles (like the paradox of choice) and will not be able to filter or integrate that much thus react on wrong information. The old system was foggy and absolute truth was surely impossible but it feels structurally more sound to me.
x87678r 6y ago
I think about this a lot, esp with wars. In the old days it seemed easy to get everyone to sign up and attack some other country where now people are more likely to know someone from other countries/races/religions and get to see what is actually happening.
AlexandrB 6y ago
> Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" This is contradicted in dramatic fashion by the QAnon movement. People are happy to trust just as blindly, they're just trusting different people.
xtiansimon 6y ago
> “Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly"” Alternate headline: “Higher meme transmission rates strengthen cultural immune systems”

Wolfenstein98k 6y ago

Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-of-the-public/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-...

fuoqi 6y ago

The Lack of Pirates Is Causing Global Warming?

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

Isn't this a modern version of Plato's Cave Allegory[1]? People being deprived of the truth and free information have no alternative but to blindly believe whatever you(the government) will tell them, North Korea style. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

vmception 6y ago
Doesn’t seem like it, no. The allegory of the cave is about having choice and ignoring it. This is about obtaining choice and everyone seeing the folly of their masters. The people that don’t would be closer to that allegory.
romanoderoma 6y ago
except in North Korea they are forced to believe. With the use of force.
netcan 6y ago
I don't buy it. Even in North Korea, I'm pretty sure people know quite a lot. Hitchens did interviews in the eastern block during the 80s. Everyone knew Kafka, it turned out, once they felt safe letting you know they knew it. Vice news did a tour of Assad's territory at the height of the civil war. Propaganda at the highest levels, with people expected to believe a fiction in extreme contrast to reality. A policeman said to the journalist: "this is 1984 and I am Winston Smith." It's not easy to put people into Plato's cave. Reality is more complex than this. When people learn the truth, get woke, take the red pill (note these are all modern references to the cave)... it almost always involves shaking or adopting a complex worldview. Facts play a part, but narrative plays a bigger part. So does emphasis, etc. Or maybe we're all still in that cave, and the internet just projects some new shapes we haven't seen before. New shapes, new shadows, new wisemen telling us what they mean.

op03 6y ago

Dont we see this with open source? More people show up. More people can find issues. Many more people can find issues than can fix them. The bug tracker bloats. Core team members get called incompetent every 2 hrs. As a counter reaction some core team members get it into their head, to share less or react in unhelpful ways that have long term costs and things go back and forth in waves. We have a few rules at work. 1. Focus on solutions over reactions. 2. It becomes easy to take advantage of weaknesses in people and squander their strengths, so try as much to do the opposite. 3. Have a plan to handle highly ambitious people before they show up. Don't start wondering what to do after someone with more energy/drive/talent/resource shows up and wants to take over everything, which will keep happening as networks expand. For this we treat things like sports teams, which have to deal with a whole spectrum of highly driven people and get them to work in sync. Works out some days and blows up in our face on others. There is no free lunch with transparency and growing networks. Just lot of tradeoffs.

Super_Jambo 6y ago
Can you expand upon point 3? I do not really follow sports.
- op03 6y ago
  There are a lot of different things but basically in Team sports its "easier" to get agreement on division of labor, on leadership, coordination and communication, individual strengths and weaknesses etc because the group has someone external to beat or atleast there is agreement on what a team "win" is. So we try to nail that down and keep having conversations about it. It then has effect on how we coordinate, give and take, decide who leads etc Without those conversations to provide some framework, it turns into a free for all, which reduces trust/faith in the group, esp when some new group or individual joins that have their own ideas and goals.
  - Super_Jambo 6y ago
    Aha, thanks.
- 6y ago

netcan 6y ago

It's kind of ironic that people educated in social science tend to have idealistic or just legible, few factor theories about something this complex. I mean complex in the strong sense. Early theories were about "access to information unleashing a wave of democratisation." Current theories are about foreign and domestic intelligence manipulating social media. The internet is an era. Eras have a lot going on. The way we should (IMO) be thinking about this stuff is as complex systems, where the mechanisms can't really be understood to the point of predictiveness. Just like printing presses, mass literacy, radio and television broke political equilibriums... the internet breaks political equilibriums, for better or worse. The internet is, OTOH, obviously structurally inclined to being an agent of chaos. Despite all the centralisation, the facebook, twitter, google and such use extremism like an exploitation film uses sex and violence. If something is dangerous, sexy and naked... people are going to look.

CryptoPunk 6y ago
>>The internet is, OTOH, obviously structurally inclined to being an agent of chaos. Decentralization != chaos. On the contrary, it can be far more stable for the forces of coordination, allowing for greater production of knowledge and intelligent action. See Wikipedia.
- netcan 6y ago
  I meant chaos in a more casual sense of "disruption of status quo." Old media was a lot less inclined to get behind any old revolution that comes along.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    Not permanently though. A new status will emerge from the internet, and that may prove to be more stable than the more centralized one it replaced. Distributed power structures can be less fragile than centralized ones.
    - netcan 6y ago

ergl 6y ago

Authority rests on information control. High status roles generally depend on access to and control over the dominant communication channels of the time. [...] Of all social roles, those of hierarchy are affected most by new patterns of information flow. The loss of information control undermines traditional authority figures. Further, because information control is an implicit rather than an explicit aspect of high status, the changes in hierarchy are surrounded by confusion and despair. [...] Many Americans are still hoping for the emergence of an old-style, dynamic "great leader." Yet electronic media of communication are making it almost impossible to find one. There is no lack of potential leaders, but rather an overabundance of information about them. The great leader image depends on mystification and careful management of public impressions. Through television, we see too much of our politicians, and they are losing control over their images and performances. As a result, our political leaders are being stripped of their aura and are being brought closer to the level of the average person. – From Joshua Meyrowitz's No Sense of Place, 1989

kmeisthax 6y ago
It's also important to note that many of the people responsible for the Internet as we know it had known left- or right-libertarian leanings. The Internet destroys people's faith in government because the people who created the Internet fought long and hard to ensure it would do so.
classified 6y ago
That's very insightful. He practically predicted The Donald and his wrestling with social media over how much he can lie and spread hatred online unchallenged (although that latter part is very much explicit).
- war1025 6y ago
  I would flip it the other way and say he predicted the mainstream media's need to discredit his use of social media since social media is threatening their position as the dominate communication channel with the masses. Trump lies, but I have seen very little evidence that he lies more than any previous president. The things he lies about are precisely the "Great Leader" style attempts to improve his image. To me, that is much preferable to lying in order to push us into another Middle East war.

hownottowrite 6y ago

https://archive.is/kPcjI https://archive.is/kPcjI

yadco 6y ago

The only faith I have in government is their ability to mess up things in the stupidest way possible.

mjburgess 6y ago
Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith. We have elevated tiny mistakes to headlines, and politician's character flaws to some systematic issue with the whole of government. This has profound issues for governments actually being able to, eg., manage a pandemic. If no one trusts, you cannot coordinate. And trust is often warrented and needed.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  We also have no interest reading about when government performs a task ahead of schedule or under-budget, and almost nobody takes the time to actually look through government reports, budgets, etc. to see what’s going on, even though almost all of it is public.
- Anka33 6y ago
  These things does not work due to the government but despite the government.
- cortexio 6y ago
  Most things do not work because of the government, it's because you have long standing organizations within the government that is being run by people that do not want to lose their job. These people keep our countries working. But politicians... they sell their power and in general work for their own interests. This where people lose their trust. It's not mobile internet that declines government trust, it's just the internet. Because on the internet, you can have discussions and truth wins.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith. That depends on the definition of "working", I think. I don't doubt the good faith of those involved, but "some form of train service between two locations" is a very low hurdle for "working" if that train is late, slower then advertised, only half the size it was announced to be, or running it costs three times as much as trains elsewhere. If you consider quality and price, not just binary functionality, "working" becomes a lot fuzzier. It's hard to compare public services and government actions because we don't have competing government in the same locations, but "something happens" isn't necessarily "everything working almost all of the time".

deleted 6y ago

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daleharvey 6y ago

I remember back in the AOL days being excited about the internet and choosing it as a career because I was convinced that when it was possible for everyone in the world to openly communicate and share information that things like corruption and inequality couldn't possibly survive. Funny how that turned out.

anaganisk 6y ago
Greed always finds a way in, everything evolves with time.
chasd00 6y ago
technology can't fix the refined brutality in humanity's DNA overnight. Deep down at a very basic level humanity probably perceives this level of connectedness as a threat and that's a very bad spot for anything in the universe to find itself in.

0xmohit 6y ago

> A new study finds that incumbent parties lose votes after their citizens get online. It appears that the study doesn't factor in cases where the governments indulge in mass propaganda. Mobile internet helps disseminate information at scale instantly, and people usually don't tend to ascertain authenticity of information. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter also do little do prevent spreading misinformation. If a government is "committed" to spreading misinformation, mobile internet makes it much easier to have a much wider reach that would be easily possible otherwise.

LatteLazy 6y ago

People have faith in things because they need to, not because those things work. This is why people refuse to accept that prayer doesn't work. This is why in the 50s governments were corrupt, incompetent, wasteful, racist (plus all the other prejudices imaginable) and yet people had huge faith in them. When you live in a rural village and can't really communicate or interact beyond the village, you NEED to believe there is a government out there keeping things working, keeping the enemy away and running stuff. So you do. When you get a mobile phone and need to complain about something and talk about how you're a self made person and how those bozos in <capital city> are IDIOTS, and it seems like you can access more resources by complaining louder, guess what you believe then? That's a big part of the rise of neoliberalism: the modern economy requires us all to be self starters and entrepreneurial (or at least to switch jobs regularly and make out own way in the world). To do that, it really helps to think of government and other people as morons and obstacles and yourself the a randian hero of you're own story. So we believe that. Because belief isn't based on evidence, its based on utility.

aaron695 6y ago

If you bother to read it, the conclusion contradicts what's expected . Faith in government only declines if they are corrupt. "The 3G expansion decreases government approval if there is at least some corruption. In few noncorrupt countries, the effect of 3G on government approval is actually positive." So the internet is good for democracy even at the maxima? Also censorship works well "Government approval falls with the expansion of 3G only when there is no internet censorship." Neither I believe to be true. Censorship allows management of the population and will work, but it's hard, there should be some drop. Anyway for corrupt governments without censorship I agree with the document and Starlink will sort it all out soon and bring in a few revolutions

charliebrownau 6y ago

Can anyone be free as long as the STATE , Police and TAXATION exist ?

api 6y ago

The decline of classical pirates is also correlated with a rise in global temperature. Arr! Mobile also arrived right around the time we really got confirmation there were no WMDs in Iraq.

gigatexal 6y ago

Imagine if China’s firewall was broken and people could see the truth and not what the CCCP wanted them to see and read.

miguelrochefort 6y ago

Governments are centralized means of coordination, which aren't necessary once we have decentralized means of coordination.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vaccinator 6y ago

Nice colors in that graph /s... all they could think about for colors is different shades of blue? Cannot think of anything more contrasted?

mariodiana 6y ago

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant"? I find it interesting that we refer to "faith" in government, as opposed to "trust." When cheaply printed books and pamphlets arrived on the seen, thanks to the printing press, we saw another kind of faith shaken. What followed, eventually, is what we call "The Enlightenment." I'm not sure the decline in government is a bad thing. Here I will disclose my political leanings. I lean very heavily libertarian. I'm something of a classical liberal, in favor of what's derided as a "night watchmen" government. I am not for getting rid of government. I just think it should do a lot less. The scope of government increases only because of the "faith" people place in it, because its track record by comparison isn't all that good.

hirundo 6y ago

> Among 102 elections in 33 European countries, incumbent parties’ vote-share fell by an average of 4.7 percentage points once 3g arrived. That's not a loss in faith in government, it's a loss in faith in the current government. A loss of faith in government would be voting for those who want a smaller government with less power, but the movements in Europe and elsewhere are hardly libertarian. Perhaps mobile internet is driving a desire for change, but for different, not less. Why would you desire that if it's government in general that you've lost faith in?

andy_ppp 6y ago

I would love for there to be an actual open source/wiki government model that we could try. I haven't done much research on what is the current state of the art thinking about this. I bet people here know loads about it - where should I start after the wikipedia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance

mam2 6y ago
even wikiepdia has a hierarchy. there's no easy way
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  But so could open source government?
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Compare the "iron law of oligarchy" (1911) mentioned in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714898

scottlocklin 6y ago

Innovation has also decreased with increased government R&D spending. Everyone knows you don't do linear regression on one point. Everyone but ... economists.

known 6y ago

https://archive.is/kPcjI https://archive.is/kPcjI

known 6y ago

Mobile internet dilutes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

srsQtho00 6y ago

It have a hard time taking this at face value. It says nothing about government as a concept and everything about “incumbent parties”. In other words, people from another generation, with ideas that don’t align with modern life aren’t trusted by the remaining population. For years, prior to mobile gadgets, one incumbent party has failed to expand its base as it dies, the other has absorbed it, while pushing away progressive voices. That has little to do with mobile internet, and the entire premise that a new technology has done what humans have been doing for generations is nonsense. Maybe the technology kicked it into overdrive but the historical record shows it’s been held to an arbitrary check based upon flimsy rhetoric, delusions of grandeur, mass indoctrination behaviors. The need for governance isn’t in question. That isn’t going anywhere. It’s the benchmark for what that governance should look like that’s being challenged.