二 失去信仰

在公共机构信任的毁灭性危机背后——以及我们为什么现在更有可能“打电话给朋友”

Chances are you have never heard of an American woman called Jean Heller. She was a young reporter just a couple of years out of graduate school when she uncovered a dark secret the United States government had been hiding for more than four decades.

It was this. Between the years of 1932 and 1972, 600 African Americans living in Tuskegee, one of the poorest counties in rural Alabama and with the highest syphilis rates in the nation at the time, had been used as human guinea pigs by the United States Public Health Service. It was one of the most unethical medical research experiments the country had ever seen and would become known–rather blandly, in light of what it represented–as the ‘Tuskegee Study’.

In the experiments, the county’s black farmers, many illiterate, were subjected to painful spinal taps, daily blood draws and, when they eventually died, autopsies. The men were offered free hot lunches, transportation to and from hospitals, free medicine and free burial services as incentives to enter the study programme.1 The farmers were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Of the 600, 399 of them were syphilitic, while 201 did not have the disease but were used as controls. Doctors merely informed all participants they were being treated for ‘bad blood’.2 These trusting men, disadvantaged and easily manipulated, became pawns in what James H. Jones, author of Bad Blood, identified as ‘the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history’.3

Shockingly, the farmers were left to suffer the ghastly ravages of syphilis, which can include blindness, deafness, dementia, heart disease, paralysis and eventually death. And not knowing they had the disease, the men unwittingly passed it on to their wives and children. ‘The Tuskegee Study began ten years before penicillin was found to be a cure for syphilis and fifteen years before the drug became widely available,’ wrote Heller in her story published on 26 July 1972, in the New York Times. ‘Yet, even after penicillin became common, and while its use probably could have helped or saved a number of the experiment subjects, the drug was denied to them.’4

Why? Because the very purpose of the study was not to cure the participants of syphilis. The goal was to observe the long-term effects of the disease and to determine through autopsies if untreated syphilis affected black bodies the same way it affected white ones. ‘As I see it,’ one of the doctors explained, ‘we have no further interest in these patients until they die.’5

Heller’s story became front-page news and generated widespread public outrage. Members of the US Congress reacted with shock, denying they had known what was going on. The egregious research was stopped immediately, but the fact that it had continued over four decades was the result of a lot of people turning a blind eye for a very long time.

Responding to the outcry, congressional investigations led to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections, to monitor ethical standards. Federal laws were also created, requiring Institutional Review Boards to oversee clinical research and ensure adequate protection of all study participants.

Twenty years later, the government, right from the top, was still apologizing for the ‘moral and ethical nightmare’ of Tuskegee. ‘It was a time when our nation failed to live up to its ideals, when our nation broke the trust with our people that is the very foundation of our democracy,’ President Bill Clinton said in a press conference in 1997, standing alongside eight elderly survivors of the study. ‘To our African-American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist. That can never be allowed to happen again… An apology is the first step, and we take it with a commitment to rebuild that broken trust.’6

This shameful chapter in medical research history shook the foundations of trust between Americans, especially black patients, and the medical system for a long time afterwards. It’s only recently, however, that anybody has tried to quantify the scale of the trust fallout.

African-American men today have the worst health outcomes of all major racial, ethnic and demographic groups in the United States. The life expectancy of black men at age forty-five is three years less than for their white counterparts.7 It is caused by multiple factors, including disparities in income, diet and healthcare access. But could the differences also be linked to the general African-American distrust of healthcare providers that grew out of the Tuskegee Study? And if so, to what degree?

These are questions that intrigued two researchers, Marcella Alsan at the Stanford Medical School and Marianne Wanamaker, an economist at the University of Tennessee. After crunching data from various national population and health surveys, in 2016 the pair confirmed what other researchers had hypothesized: that high levels of mistrust existed among African-American men decades after the Tuskegee Study was exposed.8 The difference was that Alsan and Wanamaker put a precise number on its life and death effect.

When someone doesn’t trust their doctor, typically they stop going for check-ups or for care when they need it. The researchers deduced that, as a general principle, this has led to a decrease in life expectancy of 1.4 years among black men over forty-five.9 Perhaps the most remarkable finding, however, was that more than a third of the life-expectancy gap–between older black men and their white equivalents–could be attributed to fallout from the disclosure of the Tuskegee experiment. It’s a staggering revelation: life expectancy has dropped for millions of men who didn’t live in Alabama and had nothing to do with the Tuskegee Study because of broken trust–or to put it another way, compounding mistrust.

Dr Joseph Ravenell gave a wonderful TED talk in 2016 on this very problem that continues today. He pointed to the fact that high blood pressure is one of the leading causes of death among African males over fifty, a medical problem that could be prevented with timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment. So why is it so deadly for black men? ‘Because too often high blood pressure is either untreated or under-treated in black men, in part because of our lower engagement with the primary healthcare system,’ says Ravenell. ‘Some of our earliest research on black men’s health revealed that for many, the doctor’s office is associated with fear, mistrust, disrespect and unnecessary unpleasantness.’10 So people skip going to the doctor, especially if they feel fine. Indeed, Ravenell has found in his research that many black men trust their barbers far more than they trust their doctors.

It doesn’t matter that regulations and ethical standards have since been put in place; the echoes of Tuskegee still linger and affect some people’s decisions.11 The findings also tell a bigger story: they show how one trust-busting incident can create a generational scar against an institution or system that takes decades to heal. And sometimes the damage is too deep to repair.

It would be comforting to think that trust-shattering incidents like the Tuskegee Study were all in the past, the lessons learned and acted upon. The truth is that institutional trust is in greater jeopardy now than ever before. For a stunning illustration of why ordinary citizens feel more betrayed than ever by elites and those in power, and why those elites themselves are heading into a twilight zone, we need only look to the Panama Papers.

It began with a message–anonymous, of course. ‘HELLO. This is John Doe. Interested in data?’ The recipient was Bastian Obermayer, a thirty-eight-year-old investigative reporter for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. It was sometime late in 2014 when the mysterious message appeared on the reporter’s laptop. Obermayer was sitting in his flat in a quiet neighbourhood in Munich at the time. ‘We’re very interested,’ he quickly typed back.

The source replied in encrypted chat that he or she was going to leak a mountain of highly confidential data, ‘more than you have ever seen’. The source made it clear upfront that he didn’t want money, only justice. ‘I can’t explain my rationale without making my identity clear… but I want to make these crimes public,’ Doe replied.

Over the course of 2015, more than 11.5 million of the documents that became known as the Panama Papers were transferred. They represented forty years’ worth of digitized records ripped from the servers of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The amount of data was staggering; we’re talking 2.6 terabytes, and it included 4.8 million emails, 2.1 million PDFs, 3 million database files, 1 million images, as well as other confidential contracts, letters, bank records and property titles.12 The documents would turn out to be the greatest single data drop in journalistic history, 2,000 times larger than the 2010 Cablegate coup, when WikiLeaks released more than 250,000 classified diplomatic cables that had been sent to the United States from 270 consulates and embassies around the world. These cables contained allegations of corruption and revealed numerous unguarded comments such as US embassy staff referring to Vladimir Putin as an ‘alpha-dog’, Hamid Karzai as being ‘driven by paranoia’ and a comparison of the then Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Adolf Hitler.

The Panama Papers revealed that between 1977 and 2015, the firm Mossack Fonseca had created more than 200,000 offshore shell companies in tax havens around the world, for world leaders and their families including President Putin and Kojo Annan, son of the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, celebrities such as footballer Lionel Messi, and many other important global elites. But beyond the revelations it laid bare, the leak itself represents a remarkable trust story.

Imagine you have been handed an immense cache of secret documents. What would you do?

Journalists have, by nature, an obsession with scoops, with being first. But after working non-stop for more than two months, Obermayer realized he was in way over his head with the small team at his German newspaper. The volume of data was daunting. He needed help, lots of it. So he took the unusual step of sharing the files with hundreds of other journalists from around the world.

Obermayer first reached out to Gerard Ryle, someone he deeply respected and had worked with before on the Luxembourg and HSBC leaks. Ryle is the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a non-profit based in Washington, DC. It was set up in 1997 to create a network of journalists around the world to expose global scandals. It was, for example, the ICIJ who first revealed the war contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan that were unfairly awarded to companies that had donated large sums to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush.

Ryle is an Irish-born reporter. He is a calm and softly spoken man. He is the kind of person you can imagine not talking much at a dinner party but saying the one thing everyone remembers. A veteran newshound, he is the embodiment of an investigative journalist, ready to shake every tree and go down every burrow to find the truth, to make sure he gets a story right. He became Director of the ICIJ in 2011.

In June 2015, Ryle and Obermayer organized a secret meeting on the thirteenth floor of the National Press Club in Washington. Staff from rival news outlets like the Guardian, BBC, SonntagsZeitung and Le Monde gathered around a long conference table.13 During the meeting, the journalists decided the project needed a code name. Prometheus was agreed upon, after the Titan from Greek mythology who stole the secret of fire from the gods. Before they could get access to the documents, the journalists had to sign a basic non-disclosure agreement. It required them to operate under only two rules. First, to share everything they found, and second, to publish on the same day, at the same time, and Ryle had the power to set the publication date.

All the leaked documents were stored in a searchable database program named Blacklight. If you wanted information on a specific name, for instance ‘Ian Cameron’, the database would run a search and in a matter of minutes produce a CSV file with all the matching documents. Some of the clients, however, were harder to identify–Mossack Fonseca addressed some of the more secretive ones by code names like Winnie the Pooh or Harry Potter.

Working collaboratively, local journalists–from Iceland to Nigeria to Russia–could piece stories together in ways that would have been almost impossible to do from a newsroom in one country. ‘While one journalist is looking at Indian data, it might lead them to Brazil, or France, and then suddenly you’ve got this trust-building exercise where the Indian journalist shares information with the French journalist,’ explains Ryle.14

A critical member of the ICIJ leadership team was thirty-three-year-old Spanish-born Mar Cabra who heads data and research. Her colleagues describe her as a ‘data genius’. Mar distinctly remembers the day a colleague discovered Messi among the client list. ‘A message appeared in the virtual newsroom saying, “Oh my god, I found the football player Lionel Messi!” The other journalists were like, “Oh my god, Messi.”’ Once one person had found Messi in the documents, everybody had found Messi.

After nine months of painstakingly combing through tens of thousands of documents, the journalists were exhausted and stressed, and champing at the bit. Many times, Ryle had to calm jittery journalists whose natural instinct was to start reporting on the injustices they had discovered. ‘It took a lot to keep everyone holding the line,’ he says. The journalists were spread out across time zones, working in different languages and based in countries with different social and political environments. Ryle was not technically their boss and he couldn’t force them to do anything they didn’t want to do. At the end of the day, everyone was legally free to report as they saw fit. Yet, remarkably, the story remained a secret for nearly a year.

Ryle knows a thing or two about what makes journalists tick. ‘A journalist’s biggest weakness, whether they like it or not, is their ego. But on this project, we had an awful lot of selflessness going on,’ he says. ‘I tried to give them a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves.’ The prospect of a bigger and better story if they all worked together was used as a carrot, but Ryle knew he also needed a stick. ‘I made it clear that if they broke the trust once, the ICIJ will never work with them again.’

Ten minutes before the agreed embargo was due to expire, an unexpected message appeared on Twitter: ‘Biggest leak in the history of data journalism just went live, and it’s about corruption.’ It was tweeted by Edward Snowden. Juliette Garside was sitting in the offices of the Guardian with her bosses and the rest of the Panama Papers team when it came. ‘We had our fingers hovering over the button to go live with our story but we were respectfully waiting for the exact embargoed time,’ she says. ‘Then the Snowden tweet appeared and all hell broke loose. Everyone in the room was shouting “Go, go, go!”’

On Sunday, 3 April 2016, at 8 p.m. German time, dozens of news organizations around the world started publishing front-cover stories about the Panama Papers. Just hours after publication, thousands of people took to the streets of the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik to express their outrage and to call for their prime minister to quit. The papers revealed that Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson had a secret offshore tax account called Wintris Inc., in the British Virgin Islands, that he used to hold investments with his wealthy wife. He reportedly avoided more than 500 million Icelandic krona (approximately $4 million) in taxes on the wealth. To make matters worse, he had set up the account in 2007, while Iceland was on the brink of a financial meltdown. Gunnlaugsson resigned shortly after the leak.15

Bastian Obermayer, the whistle-blower’s original contact, was one of the first to discover the links to Vladimir Putin in the files. He repeatedly came across the name Sergei Roldugin, a Russian concert cellist. It turned out that the cellist had been a friend of Putin since they were teenagers and was godfather to the president’s daughter, Mariya. It was reported that Roldugin owned a Moscow bank called Bank Rossiya that had allegedly handled billions of dollars in transactions with offshore companies.

In all, 29 of the billionaires featured in Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s 500 richest people, 12 serving or former world leaders and 140 politicians were named in the Panama Papers. The documents implicated the king of Saudi Arabia; Ian Cameron, the late father of former UK prime minister David Cameron; six members of the House of Lords; Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister; Ayad Allawi, former vice president of Iraq; and Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine.

In itself, the appearance of a name in the files was no proof of wrongdoing; there are plenty of legitimate reasons to hold money in offshore companies and trusts. A foreigner, for example, buying a vacation home, may set up a local shell company to purchase the property. Indeed, Mossack Fonseca vigorously denied having broken any laws, as did many of its clients. Even so, the avalanche of information provided damning examples of how the rich and powerful can exploit offshore tax regimes and strip countries of tax revenues that most believe they deserve to pay.

The public outrage was loud and vehement. Here were the rich finding ways to grow even richer by avoiding taxes the average person must pay. Here were leaders essentially salting away money for which tax should morally be payable for the benefit of the very countries they were governing.

Was this all we could expect from those at the top level of society, those who are meant to serve the public good?

The feeling of disillusionment that followed the leak wasn’t just about money; it was about fairness and equality. Why did the wealthy, powerful and elite get to play by different rules? The revelations left the social contract in tatters: it destroyed the tacit understanding that we all work hard, pay our taxes and are ‘in this together’.

In revealing to the average person what went on behind the scenes, the Panama Papers confirmed one of the key reasons why institutional trust is eroding at an alarming rate; many people feel let down and left behind, watching in dismay as the elites and authorities in charge seem to thrive and act unethically, at the very least. To borrow the title of a book by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate economist, trust is facing a Great Divide.16

Institutions, as the eighteenth-century Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico observed, are essentially social structures made up of a history of practices, values and laws that are accepted and used by many people.17 We often think of institutions as something physical–grand university buildings, ancient stone churches, the Houses of Parliament–but they can also be an idea, constraint or a social norm. Marriage, for example, is an institution. So is the family unit or the British monarchy. Religion, property rights or other legal constitutions are institutions. ‘The simple point is that institutions are to humans what hives are to bees. They are structures within which we organize ourselves as groups,’ writes the historian Niall Ferguson in The Great Degeneration. ‘You know when you are inside one, just as a bee knows when it is in the hive. Institutions have boundaries, often walls.’18 In other words, concrete or conceptual, they are valued building blocks of rule and repetition on which societies are built. They shape our behaviour and how we interact with each other.

Trust in institutions bobs and dips with scandals, recessions, wars and changes in government. In the past, it was much easier to hide wrongdoings, such as Tuskegee, for years, even decades. Now, in a digital age, shoddy institutions and the leaders and elites at their helm are much more likely to be exposed and lose our trust quickly, sometimes for good. A deep loss of faith in banks, governments, the media, the church or other elite institutions is not a new phenomenon. Go back to any other civilized age and you’ll find examples, such as the Crédit Mobilier Scandal of 1872 where a sham company was used as a front to bribe US congressmen and to funnel money to its construction projects. The scandal became a symbol of post-Civil War corruption. And then, a couple of years later, there was the Whisky Ring, exposed in 1875, involving hundreds of politicians, distillers and distributors who conspired to avoid payment of taxes by reporting lower alcohol sales. Unprecedented, however, is the extent and rate of the breakdown of trust we are now witnessing between citizens and institutions, between the everyman and the elites. Alarmingly, survey after survey of public sentiment across countries and age groups tells a similar, woeful tale.

In the 1970s, post-Watergate and the Vietnam War, when trust in government and the armed forces had slumped, Gallup began asking Americans how much confidence they had in their major institutions, such as banks, media, public schools, organized religion and Congress. Approximately seven in ten Americans believed they could trust key institutions to do the right thing most of the time.19

Over forty years on, the same Gallup survey continues. In 2016, it revealed that the confidence in fourteen institutions averaged at only 32 per cent. Confidence has fallen to historic lows across every single major institution, bar two–small business and the military.20 When the survey first started, 75 per cent of Americans said they had ‘a great deal or a fair amount of’ trust and confidence in the federal government in Washington in handling international problems, and 70 per cent had confidence in the government for handling domestic problems. Those figures are now at 49 per cent and 44 respectively.21 For Congress, the numbers are even worse, plummeting from 42 per cent in 1973 to 9 per cent now.22 Even the Supreme Court, once a bastion of trust in society, has suffered a major decline–from 45 per cent in 1973 to 36 per cent today.23 But it’s not only governmental organizations where trust has eroded. Public faith has also taken a hit when it comes to banks (60 to 27 per cent);24 big business (26 to 18 per cent);25 the church (65 to 41 per cent);26 and newspapers (39 to 20 per cent).27

In terms of age groups, millennials are the most doubting. According to a 2015 survey conducted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics, 86 per cent of them distrust financial institutions. Three in four millennials ‘sometimes or never’ trust the federal government to do the right thing and a staggering 88 per cent ‘sometimes or never’ trust the media.28

The plunge isn’t limited to the United States. The story is similar across Western Europe and Britain. Respected pollsters Ipsos MORI have tracked people’s trust in twenty-four different occupations in the United Kingdom, from politicians to hairdressers, for more than thirty years. Nurses come out on top as the most trusted, with a stellar rating of 93 per cent. But in this kind of survey, the category to watch is the one with the sharpest decline. It shows how easily once mighty institutions can crash and burn. According to Ipsos, the big loser this time round was the clergy. When the Ipsos poll started in 1983, 85 per cent of the people trusted the clergy to tell the truth. It was the most trusted profession. By January 2016, the clergy had fallen 18 percentage points to come in as only the eighth most-trusted profession overall.29 Consider this: the average Briton now trusts the random stranger they meet on the bus or in a supermarket to tell the truth more than they trust a member of the clergy on the other side of a confessional.

So why is trust in so many elite institutions collapsing at the same time? There are three key, somewhat overlapping, reasons: inequality of accountability (certain people are being punished for wrongdoing while others get a leave pass); twilight of elites and authority (the digital age is flattening hierarchies and eroding faith in experts and the rich and powerful); and segregated echo chambers (living in our cultural ghettoes and being deaf to other voices).

For institutions to retain credibility and our confidence, there must be penalties–loss of power or position, fines–when they break the rules or the rules become meaningless. Take something clear-cut like traffic regulations. In Britain, the legal convention is to drive on the left. If over the course of, say, a week, we saw hundreds of cars veering down the wrong side of the road without any consequences, the power of the traffic rule would quickly dissolve. Similarly, rogues within institutions must be seen to pay or be punished. When they get off scot-free, our faith in the institution is shaken. And in recent years, we’ve seen many leaders get off scot-free. Consider banks. How did the crash of 2008–the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression–result in the jailing of only a single investment banker and minimal reform of Wall Street? What did that do to our trust?

Over the past couple of decades, the banking industry has had its skirts lifted to reveal some very grubby underwear. From Enron to Arthur Andersen, Freddie Mac to Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers to Bear Stearns, AIG to Northern Rock, Nick Leeson to Bernie Madoff, the BHS pension funds fiasco to the Libor scandal, the list goes on, and it has taken a hard toll on trust. Perhaps the biggest blow, though, has come from the fact that only a handful of CEOs, the ‘captains of finance’ who played a role in creating the financial crisis, faced any form of punishment. The few who lost their jobs, most notably Ken Lewis of Bank of America and Dick Fuld, the former CEO of fallen Lehman Brothers, walked out the door with multimillion-dollar golden parachutes. The message is clear: if you are rich and powerful, you can break the rules, as long as it makes a lot of money. It’s an acute case of moral hazard; when things went belly up, the bankers didn’t face any real consequences.

Some bankers, such as Madoff and Leeson, proved inherently untrustworthy. But for the most part, banks are not filled with bad people; it’s more a case that people working in banks are operating in a toxic culture with a perverse incentive structure that permits–and even breeds–unethical behaviour and misaligned interests. They acknowledge as much themselves.

Labaton Sucharow, a respected law firm based in the United States, conducted an independent survey to find out how financial insiders view other professionals within their industry. More than half of respondents believed that their competitors engaged in illegal or unethical behaviour. Nearly a quarter admitted they would engage in insider trading if they could get away with it and just under a third believed that financial services professionals might need to engage in illegal or unethical behaviour to be successful.30 ‘The succession of scandals means it is simply untenable now to argue that the problem is one of a few bad apples,’ admits Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England. ‘The issue is with the barrels in which they are stored.’31

Rising star Andy Haldane, a Yorkshireman, is currently chief economist at the Bank of England, working alongside Carney. He has become a key figure in the debate on financial regulation calling for ‘reformation’. Indeed, in 2014, TIME named Haldane as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World for being ‘the central banker not afraid to be blunt’.32 ‘The significance of these findings is not the precise percentages, as striking as these are,’ says Haldane in response to the Labaton findings. ‘More fundamentally, it is because of what they reveal about finance’s perception of itself, the mirror it holds to the social identity of finance… It is the sociology and psychology of banking and bankers that needs to change, as much as their finances.’ The problem is, can you regulate culture?

Faith in the financial institution will not be restored unless the behaviour of banking changes and we see more in the way of serious punishment or penalties for those in the rotten barrel. The systemic breakdown of trust in financial institutions comes down to this application of different rules for different folks. ‘Along with the other rising inequalities we’ve become so familiar with–in income, in wealth, in access to politicians–we confront now a fundamental inequality of accountability,’ writes American political commentator and author Christopher Hayes in his fascinating book Twilight of the Elites. ‘We cannot have a just society that applies the principles of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful.’33

When it was revealed in 2015 that over 11 million Volkswagen vehicles were knowingly programmed with software, so-called ‘defeat devices’, which can dupe government emissions tests, CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned. His pay-out post ‘dieselgate’ was a staggering 15.9 million euro.34 Likewise, no individuals or institutions have taken a serious hit following the 2016 Sir John Chilcot inquiry, which found that intelligence about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) had been misrepresented in order to justify the invasion of Iraq following the attacks on the World Trade Center. I distinctly remember, in 2003, watching the news as the ‘war on terror’ began, bombs lighting up the Baghdad skyline. More than a decade of military interventions followed, unleashing astronomical human destruction and massive financial costs. When the long-awaited Chilcot findings, a 2.6 million-word report, were published in June 2016, the verdict was unequivocal: the legal basis to invade Iraq was ‘far from satisfactory’. The report confirmed that the ‘intelligence’ about Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMDs was ‘flawed’ and exaggerated.35 The British prime minister’s justifications may have destroyed the trust of the British voters but no politicians from the time, including Tony Blair and President Bush, were held truly accountable. It hasn’t helped that both those leaders have been defiantly unapologetic.

As professors Alsan and Wanamaker proved with the Tuskegee Study, specific events can trigger rampant mistrust of entire systems. If politicians can take us into war under false pretences, we start to wonder how we can trust the wider process of decision-making in government. If Chuck Blazer, the ex-member of FIFA’s advisory committee, accepted bribes, corruption must be pervasive in other sporting organizations. If we can’t trust the behaviour of bankers, the financial system must be broken. If we can’t trust journalists to report accurately on the financial crisis, the Iraq War or the presidential race, the press must be failing us as a credible source of facts. If we can’t trust the Catholic clergy to report abuse, perhaps it means the leaders of the church are only loyal to the institution, not the people they are meant to serve.

It’s as if the safety net we once relied on–our trust in the wider society and its sterling institutions–has been ripped away and we’re in a spiralling trust freefall. It’s not only that corrupt individuals are getting away with bad deeds; as the Panama Papers showed, the moral compass at the top of society is also spinning wildly.

It is easy to see why ‘loss of trust’ in established institutions has become both a mantra and a real crisis of our times. The problem is further amplified by the fact that many of us are trapped in echo chambers of information shared by ‘like-minded’ people, where we hear this message over and over.

On 29 June 2016, Facebook made an announcement about changes it was making to its personal news-feed algorithm. ‘We are updating News Feed over the coming weeks so that the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed,’ wrote Facebook’s engineering director Lars Bäckström.36 The statement sounded fairly innocuous but what it meant was significant; the feed would now promote content posted by friends over content by traditional media outlets.

Given that an estimated 41.4 per cent or more of traffic to news sites comes from Facebook, the change seems likely to bring about a critical decline in referral and reach for publishers.37 More significant, though, was the way the new Facebook algorithm represented a profound shift in the diversity of opinions and news we see, the things that challenge us or broaden our worldview.

Sociologists describe the innate tendency to associate and connect with people similar to us as homophily. These similarities might be dimensions such as ethnicity, age, gender, education, political affiliation, religion and occupation or, say, where we live. We also cluster around niche interests such as whether we like pug dogs, Thai food or playing chess. The internet amplifies homophily, sorting people into online neighbourhoods on social channels like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. It becomes much easier to find crowds of people who think, live and vote like we do online than offline.38 It creates loud and polarizing echo chambers with less space for constructive disagreement, debate or enlightenment.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans get news on social media, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. What’s more, Facebook is the number-one source of news for two in three of its users. That’s nearly half of the US population.39 The algorithm tweak means we are limiting our exposure to opposing perspectives, whether it’s on a presidential race, climate change, safety of vaccinations or ISIS. It’s hard for alternative viewpoints and contradictory information to break into someone’s echo chamber. For the most part, we see ideas and news we are likely to agree with.

If you were surprised by Trump’s presidential victory or the Brexit vote, you may well be living in what Eli Pariser, author and co-founder of Upworthy, pinpointed back in 2011 as the ‘filter bubble’ effect.40 ‘The rise of naked partisanship, increasing economy and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste–all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable,’ President Obama said in his farewell speech on the evening of 10 January 2017. ‘And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we accept only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that’s out there.’41

In the aftermath of the EU referendum, Tom Steinberg, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, provided a powerful illustration of the filter bubble epidemic. ‘I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory,’ he wrote. But to no avail. The algorithm must have assumed he wasn’t interested. ‘The filter bubble is SO strong, and extends SO far into things like Facebook’s custom search that I can’t find anyone who is happy despite the fact that over half the country is clearly jubilant today and despite the fact that I’m actively looking to hear what they are saying.’

People are more likely to describe ‘a person like me’ as the most credible source of information. A friend or, say, a Facebook friend, is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.42 ‘The mass population is relying less on newspapers and magazines and instead chooses self-affirming online communities,’ says Richard Edelman.43 The Facebook algorithm is proof of a new ‘world of self-reference’. Not only do we become victims to our own biases but it is also easier to cherry-pick stories that inflame our outrage. Distrust of institutions breeds more distrust until the fearful meme becomes contagious.

It is no coincidence that Trump pulled off a victory to become president in 2016 during a crisis of faith in traditional authorities. Here, supposedly, was a Washington ‘outsider’, who during his campaign promised to ‘drain the swamp’, clean up the political establishment. The former Apprentice host and impulsive falsehood-circulating tweeter, told voters he would ‘shake things up’ and do everything differently, from banning Muslims entering the United States to scrapping the Affordable Health Care Act (Obama Care). He promised to be the opposite of the ‘very, very stupid people’ currently leading America. During his campaign, Trump was consistent about one thing–he would ‘Make America Great Again’ (the Brexiters had a similar killer slogan: ‘Take Back Control’).

His claim to ‘tell it like it is’ represented an intoxicating form of transparency for many people. ‘Those princes who do great things,’ wrote Machiavelli, ‘have considered keeping their word of little account, and have known how to beguile men’s minds by shrewdness and cunning.’44 In other words, Trump may have lied during his campaign, but as Stephen Colbert, the American talk-show host, explained to his viewers, Trump embodies ‘truthiness’: ideas which ‘feel right’ to many people.

‘A deep recognition of the slow death of the meritocratic dream underlies the decline of trust in public institutions and the crisis of authority in which we are now mired,’ says Christopher Hayes. ‘Since people cannot bring themselves to disbelieve in the central premise of the American dream, they focus their ire and scepticism instead on the broken institutions it has formed.’45 Trump’s rise was a product of suffering.

At the 2016 Democratic Convention, President Obama observed that Hillary Clinton, a former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State, was the ‘most qualified candidate ever’ to run for the presidency. The fact that the election was even a contest came down to trust.

I should disclose at the outset that some time ago I worked for the Clintons at their Foundation for almost three years. I respect Senator Clinton, a lot, but she personifies a breed of authority that more and more people are no longer willing to put their faith in. Senator Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War; her handling of the Benghazi attack; a murky web of connections to the Foundation; her use of a private email server (and its mysterious destruction); and the revelation that on several occasions she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to give speeches to the same Wall Street bankers she promised to regulate–all these made her seem like a typical old-school politician and, fatally, an insider. ‘Let’s face it: our biggest problem here isn’t Trump–it’s Hillary. She is hugely unpopular–nearly 70 per cent of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest,’ wrote the documentary-maker Michael Moore in an incredibly prescient blog post predicting the win of Trump, twelve months before the election. ‘She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected.’46

The story of Brexit is a similar tale. In a heated interview with Faisal Islam of Sky News on 3 June 2016, Michael Gove, the UK’s justice secretary and leader of the campaign to leave the European Union, said, ‘I think the people in this country have had enough of experts.’47 It was a disturbing comment that really stuck in my mind. He also compared ten Nobel Prize-winning economists who signed a letter warning people about leaving the European Union to Nazi scientists loyal to Hitler who denounced physicist Albert Einstein in the 1930s.48 They were highly controversial points to make but summed up the ‘post-truth’ world, a term named as the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016. ‘Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’49 As Swiss-born British philosopher Alain de Botton tweeted on 15 November 2016, ‘New doublespeak dictionary: elite = wretched, educated = dumb, sceptical = whining, regretful = reactionary, expert = idiot.’50

‘Why did nobody notice it?’ the Queen famously asked professors and academics at the London School of Economics during a briefing in 2008 on the turmoil of the financial crisis. Almost a decade later, it’s a question being asked of experts in general, from scientists to pollsters to economists. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum, YouGov found more than half of Leave voters trusted neither academics nor economists. Two-thirds of Leave supporters–compared to just a quarter of Remainers–said it was wrong to rely too much on ‘experts’ and better to rely on the ‘ordinary people’.51 So why don’t people trust experts? We need to believe experts are honest, have integrity and the public’s best interest at heart. And sometimes we are encouraged not to trust them by vested parties because they tell ‘inconvenient truths’ about climate change, the economy or, say, tobacco.

Brexit and Trump are the first wave of acute symptoms emerging from one of the biggest trust shifts in history: trust and influence now lie more with individuals than they do with institutions.

‘Every act of creation is first an act of destruction,’ Picasso famously said. It applies to trust as much as art. As institutional trust collapses, it allows space for new systems to emerge. Technology is enabling trust across huge networks of people, organizations and intelligent machines in ways that are unbundling traditional trust hierarchies. Signs of distributed trust are appearing. Blockchain technologies, for example, which have the potential to create a digital record of history that no single person has the power to erase or change. The blockchain offers a new trust model, one where trust doesn’t need to be mediated by a centralized authority such as a government or a bank but where people who might not otherwise trust each other can agree on a single truth or a common record of events.

The rise of multi-billion-dollar companies such as Airbnb and Uber, whose success depends on trust between strangers, is a clear illustration of how trust can now travel through networks and marketplaces. Tesla may look like a smart car company but in fact distributed trust underpins the grand master plan of Elon Musk, the company founder and CEO. ‘You will be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app,’ Musk has said. This will allow owners to earn money as their self-driving car picks up passengers while they are at work, on vacation or not using it for whatever reason.

It’s still early days, but we have seen distributed trust powering the rise of crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Patreon; social media platforms; peer-to-peer lending; open-source projects such as GitHub; Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs); information-sharing hubs such as Stack Overflow and Wikipedia; citizen science projects; and many other person-to-person agreements and decentralized transactions that bypass traditional institutions and middlemen.

Its potential is massive but there’s a catch. While distributed trust may sound like a techno-libertarian dream, the flip side is that the same tools that are being used to connect strangers all over the world can also be used in deeply unsettling and nefarious ways. Consider the profound changes in the way information and knowledge reached the public, the dark side of media abundance.

From 1962 to 1981, news anchorman Walter Cronkite was a nightly presence in millions of American homes. His kind and even-keeled voice, distinctive trimmed moustache, and calm poise, rich with gravitas, inspired deep confidence with his viewers, more than twenty million a night. Fronting CBS’s Nightly News, he guided the country through a tumultuous period of tragedies–nuclear explosions, the civil rights movement, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the Vietnam War and the death of Martin Luther King. Cronkite removing his black-framed glasses and blinking back tears to break the news of the death of John F. Kennedy became one of the defining images of the day. ‘Oh boy!’ he memorably exclaimed on seeing the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969. He often embodied the emotions and thoughts of millions.

It was an era when the nightly news was a routine event day in, day out, central to many people’s lives. Cronkite, who died at the age of ninety-two, was very much an old-fashioned newsman and his appeal was simple–a huge number of Americans respected, liked and trusted him. He earned a reputation as an objective straight-shooter. If Walter said it, it must be true. In 1972, he topped the rankings of the national ‘trust index’ poll with 73 per cent, making him the most trusted public figure in the country.52

‘And that’s the way it is…’ Cronkite would say in his signature sign-off at the end of his broadcast. He would recite the line with humour, irony or sadness depending on the news of the day. It was a kind of definitive sign-off that newscasters couldn’t get away with today–and probably never will again.

Cronkite benefited from working in a time when people had far more trust in the media and authority. During the nineteen years he was the voice of the national news, there was, obviously, no blogging. Three broadcast networks–CBS, NBC and ABC–enjoyed a monopoly; one that has now been broken into shards by the web and fragmented by millions of news producers and sources fiercely competing for views and clicks. On Facebook, the ‘mainstream’ news now fights for a piece of our Snapchat-sized attention spans with our friends’ posts of birthday photos and pics of what they had for dinner. Cronkite earned the trust of his audiences but he also wasn’t broadcasting in a ‘post-truth’ era. People’s faith in the trustworthiness of the media has gone up in flames, a fire partly of its own making but also fanned, you could argue, by those in positions of power or influence who want to discredit a probing media. What’s more, there is little consensus on who is telling the truth. The internet has made it harder to sort fact from fiction and easier to undermine the truth.

It is estimated there are more than 3 million blog posts written in the world per day.53 One of the largest blog sites is Reddit, co-founded by Steve Huffman in 2005, when he was barely more than a teenager. Reddit is a gigantic collection of more than 853,824 message boards called ‘subreddits’, which range from the general–Sleep to Music to Politics to Food–to the niche.54 For example, ‘Weird Animals Without Necks’, where more than 30,168 neckless-animal enthusiasts post snapshots of, well, animals that appear to be neckless.55 Reddit also features some of the most misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic and hateful content on the internet, including the subreddits Pics of Dead Kids, Date Rape, Jail Bait, Beating Women, Watch Niggers Die and Fat People Hate–all of which Reddit eventually banned, but it took more than two years for that to happen.56 Reddit’s claim to fame is that it is a democratic web forum for free speech and niche beliefs; anyone can say almost anything, even if it is outrageous, toxic or false.

Huffman started Reddit with Alexis Ohanian, his college buddy from the University of Virginia. The goal was simple: to become the ‘front page of the internet’. The site is designed so that users ‘upvote’ items they think are valuable and ‘downvote’ those deemed to be unworthy, meaning the crowd curates what appears on Reddit’s front page. It’s a powerful meme engine, where stories take root and go viral. Huffman has almost reached his front-page dream–today Reddit has become the seventh most popular website in the United States, with more than a quarter of a billion unique visitors each month.57 Reddit is huge.

‘Spez’ is how Huffman, thirty-three, is known on Reddit. He has spent years as a troll on the internet and doesn’t try to hide that he can hack sites and is known for fake messaging his friends’ girlfriends. In November 2016, he used his skills and editing privileges to tamper secretly with Reddit users’ comments in the pro-Trump subreddit /r/The_Donald from ‘fuck u/spez’ (/r/The_Donald became the unofficial online home of the Trump campaign where an AMA–‘Ask Me Anything’–thread was used by Trump). Huffman redirected the abuse targeted at him to the moderators of the thread, without, he thought, leaving a trace of his tampering. But quickly realizing it was not a smart move to ‘troll the trolls’, as he put it, he fixed the comments back to their original state within the hour.

Not soon enough. The deceit, as is often the case on the internet, was rapidly discovered. It could have been viewed as simply a naive move from a young entrepreneur under pressure. Instead, the reaction was loud and intense–the meddling was regarded as akin to censorship. A couple of days after the incident, Huffman posted an apology to the community, called ‘TIFU’ (an acronym for ‘Today I Fucked Up’). ‘I am sorry: I am sorry for compromising the trust you all have in Reddit,’ he wrote. ‘I honestly thought I might find some common ground with that community [the trolls] by meeting them on their level. It did not go as planned.’58

Secretly editing another user’s threads was, by Reddit standards, a gross ethical violation of power, which eroded the trust of its vast online community. Users felt betrayed that Huffman had abused his gatekeeping privileges. Lucas Schlessinger, a user from Vancouver, wrote: ‘Terrible abuse of power. Makes me think what other comments have been edited by Reddit admins.’59 The issue was not just the act in itself but the possibilities it represented.

On Change.org thousands of users signed a digital call-to-arms, a petition calling for Huffman to resign as CEO.60 It seems, however, that Huffman, like the bankers and politicians, won’t face any real repercussions for his behaviour. He merely got a slap on the wrist, just a very public one.

Huffman’s abuse of power may have been short and contained but it represents something profound. We stand on the threshold of a chaotic and confusing period; a murky grey zone where institutional trust is being systemically undermined and distributed trust, for better or worse, is rising to take its place. As we overturn traditional institutions and old sources of authority, a new era of hyper-individual accountability has to take hold; one where we understand the factors that come into play when traditional gatekeepers, referees, experts and authorities are sidestepped, undermined or removed. It calls for a new kind of vigilance and decision-making. The sheer scale of the changed system presents immense challenges. For example, which assaults on trust do we choose to challenge and pursue? Why Huffman’s behaviour, while a million other dubious blogs and trolls pass as good coin? It’s a fallacy to believe we can take power out of individual hands. Instead, we need to think more deeply about the consequences of individual acts–and where responsibility ultimately lies.