 Everybody thank you for coming out. I'm going to start this talk with three apologies Apology number one is the standard one for this slot. I am between you and drinks My job is to give you something to argue about over drinks You can argue with me. You can argue with each other But I understand my role in all of this and I promise I need to drink as much as you do Apology number two I am an American and I'm about to give a horrifically American-centric talk and normally I am I am too good a guest to do this But the trick is I want to talk about stuff that I'm actually just starting to work on and I haven't had time to sort of go through And be polite and come up with all the UK examples for it Nor do I actually know of the theory that I want to put forward actually works for the UK So I am completely acknowledging that I'm going to be the American bastard who sort of gives you The view from my country not the global view and hope that by apologizing for it ahead of time That somehow makes it better. I'm not sure that it does But I'm gonna say it in the hopes that it does and then the third thing is an apology specifically to Rebecca Which is this has absolutely nothing to do with the description within the program Because I don't think I gave her a description and she sort of trusted that I would talk about what I normally talk About but this talk is actually all about mistrust and not just mistrust in me Which is a very very good idea but institutional mistrust This is a graph that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about lately This is a graph from Pew Research And it's a synthesis of a number of studies in the US Looking at people who say that they have some or a lot of faith in government And you'll notice that this graph is a very distinctive pattern to it in the late 1950s when we were having our post-war boom and inventing rock and roll and life was good in suburbia We had very very high trust in government in the US We impeached the president you'll note that that tends to erode your trust a little bit That's a Nixon over there, but things just keep getting worse Other than an ill-advised war which has a nice way of bumping up trust in government We have been on the steady decline And so we have gone from a strong majority of people trusting in government to a very very low level At this point in time and what's interesting is that it's not? Just government if you ask us who we mistrust more than anything else in the US who will tell you Congress They're probably the least trusted entity we can deal with except possibly talk show hosts But if you look sort of across the board the US has had for falling trust in almost every form of institution Over that period from about 1958 to the present what's really interesting to me sort of shocking is that the only? Institutions that are rising in trust in the United States are the police and the military And this scares me quite a bit because that actually reminds me a little bit of Egypt Where you suddenly end up with a system where people are basically saying we don't trust any of these institutions Except for the guys with guns. I'm sure they have our best interests I've been trying to figure out whether this Globalizes at all and the research on this is is complicated. It's tricky. Ailman does this survey every year They've been doing the trust barometer since 2007, but they're a global PR firm And they're mostly trying to figure out whether you trust big brands I do like it in the sense that they think that the UK is even less trusting than the US and they do think We're on a general trust decline Probably the more realistic work on this is the World Values Survey and the World Values Survey breaks out in sort of an interesting way Germany Northern Europe Scandinavia Increasing trust and treats in trust in government Over the period of the last 25 years or so most of the rest of the OECD Most of the developing world lower interest in governments of other institutions So I'm in no way trying to make the case that everybody is growing as trustful But I am trying to make the case that mistrust is a big and real problem that we should be thinking about And there's a lot of possible reasons for this mistrust. I mean me personally I favor an explanation that blames Reagan and Thatcher I think having a nice long run of people telling you that government can do nothing and then trying to demonstrate that Government can do nothing goes a long way towards eroding trust I think more access to media has a lot to do with erosion of trust This is really where Moises Naim goes on this Naim basically says look we've had these revolutions Access to information Mobility much greater opportunity for most people much broader life choice And it makes it possible to basically look around the world and say I could live a very different way Things could be very very different for me that has a way He thinks of eroding the power of very large institutions even cross-chef Fun guy Bulgarian Probably the least trusting people in the world goes even further and says look we we can Demonstrate that you would be extremely Ily advised to have trust in government because the government actually has much much less power Then we do over much larger structural forces particularly market forces It's a wonderful little book even basically says look all you people in Europe marching in the streets Give it up forget about it. You're asking for the end of austerity your governments can't end austerity The the market is going to beat you up so badly who should you march against you can't you'd be marching against an abstract force There's absolutely no hope go away And and so let me just say I actually sit on a board of directors with with both these guys and I gotta tell you It's a real barrel of laps Look at this, you know civilization is falling apart so I I Am interested in trust as a way of explaining a lot of what we talked about is sort of a crisis in This is very much sort of in vogue in the u.s. So talking about this idea that civics is falling apart Very low public participation Often pulled out through things like voter turnout and you can either look at this and say shame on us We're doing a terrible job of being citizens or you can look at mistrust and essentially say Why would I really mobilize to vote for membership in an institution that has a 9% approval rating? Do I really care all that much if I think that this institution is not particularly powerful and not particularly? Effective and so a lot of what I've been sort of thinking about these days is Can we take other forms of some activity seriously? Because when you look and you essentially say youth are disaffected they don't want to be involved with civics It's clearly missing the point of many many young people who are involved in volunteering Who are involved on a local level who are involved in protest movements what you're really seeing? I think is people essentially saying look I am so mistrustful of these institutions that you want me to participate in that I'm simply not going to do that But if you can give me another way to participate that feels meaningful where I feel like I could actually be effective I'm absolutely willing to step up and sort of make the change So this is the somewhat crazy case I want to try to make to you and skeptical in a child is here to help me with this I want to try to make the case that mistrust is an amazing and almost infinitely Renewable civic asset that if we can simply look at mistrust as not this barrier We have to overcome but actually look at mistrust is this incredibly powerful force that if we can figure out how to harness Actually becomes a really interesting path towards civic change We have the possibility of seeing the extent to which there really is civic revitalization taking place and Which you could build a very very different vision of civics So this is the crazy proposition that I want you to run with me on and by the end of this We can have a drink and you can tell me that I'm completely full of it or or that you've come around So here's my case If mistrust is a massive force that is sort of changing people's political opinion If it's not just this generation, but is intergenerational if it's affecting not just trust in government But trust in a large range of institutions There's sort of three possible Responses at least three possible responses that we might want to consider One is that we might want to look at the ways that people work within existing systems and say How can I be most effective given that I would trust these institutions very much? I knew PowerPoint was going to screw up my slides here is how power for a student This is supposed to be a very pretty equation. It is a rewrite of an equation from 1958 by Anthony Downs on the calculus of voting and the idea behind this is Downs is trying to figure out Why would anyone ever bother to vote and he says well? It's perfectly rational because economists are perfectly rational you look you see What's the probability that my vote is going to make a change? You look at the size of the benefit that that change would have for you And then you essentially say is that worth the cost that it's going to take me to vote? And you do that and it doesn't make any sense at all You do that you basically say it is so rare that my vote in an election is actually going to swing the election That no one votes for that reason We must be voting for some other reason and so a bunch of theorists including overshoot come in 1968 and they add this D to the equation they basically say no no no It's not just the probability of benefit It's the probability of benefit plus this notion of civic duty If we just take seriously this notion that we all have a duty to civic participation That helps us explain why people participate in systems even if their vote is not going to be the decisive vote And so I feel Watson strong very very smart woman over at Google trying to figure out how to make civics better Comes back and says great. I'm going to think of civics in this way as long as The probability of having a benefit Plus this sense of duty for civic protection. I have is Greater than the cost it takes me to take a civic act I will take that act and some cool ideas fall out of this If you want to get people more involved with civics, there's three things you can do You can make civics less costly. You can try to make it easier for people to participate You can try to find a way to make people feel like they're going to be Efficacious within the system. We're actually going to have the benefit that we're looking for or we can basically say look I don't know if you have a benefit, but you're going to feel really good about this It's your duty to participate in the system And when I look around at the work that people are doing in the field a lot of it plays with these three different axes a Lot of terrific work out there is being done around this concept of trying to figure out how you lower the cost of action now I am speaking in giant theoretician generalities here Everybody who sees themselves on the slide Please don't get upset that you're being put solely into one box, but Catherine like the reason I'm talking about this right You know one of the things that Code for America does very very well is thinks about this question of how government make services more efficient How they're doing better? Responsiveness how to make it significantly easier for someone to have a positive interaction with government I view that as a lower cost theory Okay, the work that you're doing over at Google very much around this question of can Google make it easier For you to go and vote for you to participate in the election very clearly sort of a lower cost Strategy so I think a lot of these are simply looking at this and saying can we take this system make it more efficient That's a good way forward There's lots of people fully around on the duty set of this is where we get truly America centric lots and lots of duty Strategies basically say can we reinforce almost these sort of ritualized behaviors? Can I show off that I voted or can I get people so passionate about their local community? Their interest group that in one fashion or another this is driving us to civic participation because of loyalty to that group in one fashion So here's the problem with these two if we don't trust the institutions in the first place Lowering the cost of interacting with them may not actually be all that helpful If we're essentially saying I don't believe this institution is particularly helpful I don't believe that it has legitimacy. I don't believe that it's particularly effective Lowering that cost of participation is not necessarily going to be the key thing that gets us up at home We might have more encounter with it. We might have more exposure with it Perhaps if those encounters go significantly better We're going to start winning back some of that trust But that strikes me as a very very tall hill to walk up This is not a trust equation that has changed in the last three or four years This looks to be a four-year-fifty-year change Simply reducing the cost to me seems like a very hard way to go and to meet duty Which I see a lot of my friends my dear friend Eric Lou Is all about patriotism is all about increased civic engagement and I just don't buy it I think so much of what's going on is people looking at institutions and saying they're not as effective They're not as powerful. They're not as wonderful as I want them to be I think trying to increase duty in many cases puts us in this really terrible place Where we're trying to make people feel very bad about their behavior We're essentially saying you're not a good person for being sufficiently engaged If you would only pull yourself up by your bootstraps and be a proper civic actor We'd all be much better off and I think instead we're trying to fight against a very large trend So here's where I get excited. I'm excited around this question of Can we help people figure out how to be effective within these systems? And I'm trying very very hard to follow Tom's gospel of trying to figure out how to actually Measure the efficacy of the activities that we're taking part in and the trick about all of this is trying to measure efficacy Forces you to have a theory of change You can't simply say We got 10,000 people out into the streets. Therefore, we were effective You can feel really good about getting 10,000 people under the streets But unless you have some theory on what those people in the streets are going to do and you can measure whether that actually happens You can measure whether mobilization gets you towards that. It's very very hard to figure out whether you're going in the right way So a lot of what I've been thinking about the last couple of years are what are these different? paths towards change And we know some of them very very well. We know that representative democracy Terrifically effective path towards change Except that it's one that we now seem to be mistrusting a great deal If we essentially say the way that we're going to have change is Electing a new leader electing a new parliament electing a new Congress But we don't have much faith in that institution This is a hard way to force people towards change and the other problem with this is that it's not necessarily a particularly participatory method your individual Participation doesn't necessarily feel like it moves the needle very far And it moves the needle further if you're involved with a campaign or you're leading a campaign It moves the needle a lot further if you're a candidate But for many many people this sense of how much can you personally contribute to it? fairly small and It's also become a highly professionalized field. It's a field where people go into politics. They view this as the career They view this as as where they're going So I think it's always we're seeing less enthusiasm for change through this method I Spend a lot of time in the human rights field This is a field in which our theories of change are all about how to win victories in the courts The courts are another institution in which trust is falling over time This is another place where you find yourself sort of looking at this and saying Am I really going to be able to make change by taking a case to court by litigating our way through it? While it's an incredibly powerful way to have change on a very large scale you get a court decision You have legislation that follows you have executive enforcement that follows It's again an extremely professionalized area very very hard theory of change for most people to participate Fortunately, we're at a moment where there's a whole lot of other ways to change and here I'm taking my cue from less and less it shows up in this book a long long time ago Code another loss of cyberspace and he said something really simple look We think we control society through law But the truth is we control society at least four different ways. We can make something legal or illegal We can make it easier hard to do through code and other architectures that we put out in the world We can make it cheaper expensive within markets, and we can make it socially desirable or socially undesirable And in fact when we try to control people's behaviors, we generally use all of these things at the same time They're much more powerful used to get my basic contention is that we don't spend enough time thinking about those three Leftmost right most near side lovers of change and that particularly at a point of institutional mistrust Those lovers of change start looking extremely strong Code is a really interesting lever of change when you start saying I don't trust institutions Therefore, I'm going to try to find ways to put really good encryption software out in the world So I can actually secure my communications because I don't feel I can persuade my government to stop spying on me That's a code response It takes something that's fairly hard to do right now and tries to find a way to make it significantly simpler And for people who don't have a lot of faith of working within those political institutions This may seem to be a very good way to work for change Probably only to open to a very small number of people most of us are not writing the newest incarnation of PGP But for some people looks like a very powerful method of change Markets are an incredibly popular and powerful method of change You see the whole rise of social entrepreneurship in many cases what people are trying to do is Make change by essentially saying look, I'm not going to be able to reform the laws I don't think I'm going to be able to get taxis correctly regulated So we'll just found a company will found a Uber and we'll try to force a change out there in the market in my country We can't seem to get reasonable behavior change Around auto emissions fine great test that we'll make it affordable electric automobile And once we actually get to the point where it's affordable Why a lot of people will have massive change on this and we'll use markets to go for it doesn't work Does it not? Lots of interesting questions about this markets want you to make a profit Making a profit is often at odds with making change very very hard to figure out how you're doing on those multiple But clearly a place that people end up going when they don't feel like they're being affected through the existing institutions changing norms is probably the one that that we spend the most time studying and For those who are getting the reference to bad American sitcoms That's actually not just a norm joke of norms from Cheers But it's actually one of the best studied norms change campaigns the Harvard alcohol project Decided that they wanted people to adopt the Scandinavian innovation, which was the designated driver We live in a very heavy driving society huge problems with driving well drunk and so the whole idea was how do we introduce this new norm that It's not a good idea to drink and drive that the designated driver is a big way to have it And so the Harvard alcohol project had one of the leading sitcoms which happened to be set in a bar Start introducing the notion of the designated driver and and not as a good thing actually the episode where they bring it in norm Complains terribly that he has to drink water instead of drinking beer because he is the designated driver But it turns out to be a phenomenally influential way to get people thinking about a behavior change Which is not about a legal change It was already illegal to drive while drunk But to get to a norm change of what people actually do day-to-day and a huge amount of what happens around Online activism is focused around this idea of norm change. How do we try to change people's perceptions? How do we try to change what people think is the right way to do when you look at something like the equal rights campaign? Which went out and encouraged many millions of people to change their icons on Facebook What they were really trying to do was show that there were a lot of people whose minds had changed around marriage equality So for people who are sort of going on Facebook and saying is this an issue people really care about is this an issue People are really paying attention to you were suddenly confronted by some large percentage of your friends say no Actually, I take this very seriously and I'm going to make a change about it. It's extremely lightweight. It looks very thin It's pretty easy to interpret a slack of ism But if you start asking in terms of am I changing people's norms over time? It suddenly becomes potentially compelling and sometimes norms change is what you need in the United States We're having terrible terrible problems with police violence against an African-American man This is not a law change. We don't need different laws that prevent police officers from shooting on our men What we do need is a long-term norms change around how African-American males are perceived Which is an enormous problem in my country and unfortunately I could fill many many many slides with examples of where this is coming So this takes us to this example that I wanted to show off This is a pair of images That became quite famous after Michael Brown got shot in Ferguson So we have an unarmed young man Now a very complicated story about what happened before he got shot But this was a reaction to the media portray After Michael Brown got shot Media do what media do these days they went onto his Facebook page and they looked for photos to illustrate stories And they use this photo and in this photo he shot from below He's flashing a peace sign, but many of the newspaper articles said that he was flashing a gang sign He looks you know his age is sort of ambiguous, but he definitely looks like a grown-up He doesn't necessarily look like a teenager Activists very quickly said so why did you choose that picture? Is that really the right picture for portray Michael Brown because in the same Facebook feed and around about the same time You have this photo of this sort of pudgy kid in a high school jacket Look significantly younger You had both of these but you chose the left one instead of the right one and Activists started putting up a very specific Twitter meme where they took two photos and they both came out of your photo stream and One was designed to make you look dangerous and one was designed to make you look like you see yourself And the hashtag associated with this was if they gun me down which picture would they use? Now this is a norms-based theory of change This is looking at this and essentially saying the ongoing problem in American society is how African-American males are perceived if we want to go after this change We have to go after the media We have to go after this sort of large area of exposure if we want to have this change We need to gain attention. We need to put this issue on the agenda We need to win a battle of frame We need to be able to say our interpretation of this that the media Systemically is not paying attention to our side of this that that gets traction Then we want to figure out is that changing attitudes over time which we're only going to see out of behavioral change a Lot of the work that I'm doing is trying to figure out. Can you measure this and can you quantify this? And we think the way that you can do this is by looking at campaigns like this Looking at who they're impacting in terms of reach Looking at how mainstream media ends up picking up these ideas as a way of thinking about agenda Doing words work with word frequencies and sort of counting word occurrence to look at what frames dominate within this and Then looking to surveys into actual behavioral change over time So a lot of the work that I'm doing in my lab is around this question of can we build tools? That allow you to track attention to these different campaigns Can we figure out how they're getting picked up in the media how they're getting amplified? This is looking at at two campaigns in the u.s Both around police violence and the ways in which they sort of ended up Reinforcing and not reinforcing each other black lives matter is this idea that has been coming back again and again I can't breathe which was very specifically around the chokehold death of Eric Garner had currency within that situation It hasn't gone any further than that But it's also showing us how hard it is to actually sort of move the needle When we look at black lives matter as compared to larger discussion of Ferguson. It's basically invisible This has been something that's been very very popular within the social media frame It doesn't show up when we hold them up against the mainstream media frame at least in terms of absolute value What is interesting is that when we start getting into a different form of analysis We're often able to figure out how social media does in fact have an impact This is another way of looking at all the stories for two months around Ferguson So we took all the newspaper stories We could get using the media cloud tool and we started clustering them together and the way that we cluster them together is based on linguistic coincidence So if two sources are using the same words We ended putting them very very closely together and you could pivot the graph between the sources and the words So this whole area over here Looking in the green is getting convened around these words and what's very interesting here is this word militarization This is an idea that the comedian John Oliver really brings into play You actually see John shows up right next to him John Oliver gets up and does his weekly comedy show and Says look of all the things that are really crazy going on with Ferguson It's the fact that you cannot tell the US police away from the military You simply can't distinguish the two all this military equipment has gone into the police And then we can see this and watch this sort of resonate throughout the media dialogue There's a whole cluster of the media that ends up picking this up ends up sort of reinforcing this over time It's not the whole media. There's other clusters of the media that simply don't pick up this language of all They end up with a very very different frame for how to talk about the reason we think this is important The reason we think this is useful is that all of this social media based norms based change Works on this idea of saying can I give you my interpretation of this situation and can I get you talking about it? And we are starting to see ways that we might be able to track how someone introduces that language brings it in potentially so structures dialogue over time That was point one points two are way way way faster So point one was look if you don't trust these systems You're less likely to participate in them You're going to look for other ways to participate That may be through looking for change through code through markets through norms My hope is that we have some interesting ways potentially to track change through norms Here's two other ideas that come out of this if you don't trust the institutions One of the temptations is to look for a way of sort of the institutionalizing the whole space And I would argue that this is the excitement that people had about the internet as a space for social change starting in the early 1990s when you have the sort of raw Cybergutopianism of someone like John Perry Barlow this really comes from a sense of these rules Don't apply the existing institutions aren't in this space. We can start from scratch and we can move in an entirely different Direction how's that worked out for us? We've ended up with Tim Berners-Lee starting very very explicitly With a vision of a worldwide web in which everyone's a publisher Everyone has a web server. Everyone's putting up their own content We've very very quickly ended up at a point of centralization where we're all creating content But we're creating it in this very centralized and controlled fashion and what's ended up happening is that this? Potentially highly decentralized area has ended up creating its own institutions which by the way we now mistrust So we now have this space that was all supposed to be about it couldn't be centralized It couldn't be institutionalized and the crazy bit of it is even the most decentralized participatory institutions They're still institutions if you watch what Wikipedia is dealing with right now They are dealing with the fact that you essentially have to be a professional Wikipedia if you want to participate in that community at a certain level it has become its own institution with its own institutional structure Participation for the average Participant has gotten much much more difficult that centralization which has allowed it to scale Has changed the nature of what it means to participate in it And I think for many people the bloom has sort of gone off the rose as far as is this now an anti-institutional Institution maybe it is its own in fact institution So for me one of the questions that comes out of this is do any of the new things that people want to do in Decentralizing whether it's Bitcoin whether it's mesh networks whether it's even moments freedom box Do any of these have an architecture that somehow resists centralization? Because with all of these other architectures where we sort of said we don't trust the telephone company We don't trust the newspapers. We want to put this all in our hands. We want to decentralize it We all get lazy and we all get centralized again. I use Gmail. I am too lazy to run my own mail server I'm too lazy to deal with my own spam and that laziness has now put me in a situation where I'm trusting an institution Which to be perfectly frank? I do not trust But this is where we've ended up in this space. We've had this incredible hope of Decentralization that is very very quickly aligned us with these large institutions Which have unfortunately a history of letting us down and so one interesting possibility coming out of this is that if we go Into decentralization with this very conscious knowledge that as we centralize We end up building these institutions that we probably shouldn't trust We have a very interesting political motivation to go after these decentralized systems Suddenly looking at them not just because they're technically cool But looking at them as a way of saying look if we are embracing this idea that Mistrust is a social force Trying to get involved with these and trying to politically build them so that they are not Centralizing is a wise direction for us to go Promise the lower two would be significantly short Last one. This is the one that I'm really excited about right now. I Think one of the best ways to harness mistrust is to try to figure out how to make skepticism and Trying to figure out how to monitor the institutions were skeptical of the default political stance So here I lead on dr. Steve man I love the fact that Steve is the guy who more or less in events wearable computing as we know it But not only does he hate Google Glass, but he also has this wonderful way of like making it clear that he is not wearing Google Glass He is not in fact the sexy person with glass out of the background He's all about his wearable computer being very intrusive because in part He wants you to think about the fact that he has a camera on his face and then it's pointing at you because man's main philosophical contribution is this idea of surveillance and Surveillance is this idea that lots of us with cameras looking up might be able to start Counterbalancing very very powerful people with cameras looking down And it's potentially a very compelling idea and it's one that gets more and more compelling when we have more devices and better connection going forward So where this has taken me personally in my work recently is to Sao Paulo, Brazil And the reason I'm working in Sao Paulo is the alignment of these three factors Sao Paulo elected this really interesting guy mayors names Fernando Hidal. It's the former minister of education Comes in to the Sao Paulo government and says look I'm going to do something a little unusual But I'm going to publish a hundred and twenty Tangible actionable goals, and I want you to hold me to and if I don't live up to these don't reelect me That's fine. But here they are. Here's a 300 page book here are my goals The reason he does this is that this guy of the great shoe who's the founder of the World Social Forum is Whispering in his ear and basically sort of saying You got to do this. This is how we want politicians to be accountable in the future And I have this network called ready. No, so Sao Paulo network of our Sao Paulo of Thousands of community activists who want to take you up on this And so we had invited to come in and build the tech and the tech that we're building is a system called promise tracker and Promise trackers very very simple. What it basically says is pick something in your community that you care about One of the big things that we've been going out and doing with people is is play grants Do your children have a safe place to play? Let's go out map them put them on a map Let's talk about what's working there. What's broken with the infrastructure? What needs help and let's take this map and do a number of different things with it We can go to the government. We can say look you are not living up to your promises We can go to the media and essentially say look Here's what's going on with the state of playgrounds in the city We can also go to the community and try to figure out how to organize around it when we face this problem ourselves Our tool is incredibly generic. It's basically a survey builder It allows you to pick something that you want to monitor It allows you to design your own survey and then it allows you to do the geocoded geolocated survey It outputs the map it outputs the images it outputs data tables and it outputs a wing of you Building a narrative through this, but here's the logic behind this At a moment of very very high mistrust There's an enormous power associated with saying to people Your job is to try to make sure that these people live up to their promises If you don't trust the press to hold the government responsible And in fact press trust is one of the big things that's fallen down Can you with a small group of your friends? Start organizing ways to in little ways Collect data and try to hold authorities responsible And are there ways by putting out that ability to sort of build this campaign? Have other people adopted have other people download the software Can that start turning into a joint effort to try to ensure that citizens feel like They actually have some voice in trying to make sure that authorities are listening to them Authorities are living up to those promises over time It's really small efforts, but one of the big things that we're hoping out of it Is that people are going to end up feeling that by taking on this idea of monitorial citizenship They're finding out in many cases that things are actually significantly better than they thought We're finding that when people go out and do this They pick an issue where they feel like the government is horribly falling down on the job And then what they actually find by going out and monitoring it is that the problems are much more isolated much more contained Than they had initially thought they also find themselves coming up with tangible solutions that they want to try to figure out How to break into the process and what's exciting about doing this in the sub hollow context is you have a government That's actually saying look we want you we need you and we now have a direct channel To figure out how this ends up being feedback that comes back into government so look Long day. I am the guy between us and drinks. I don't know if it's really hot up here or in general But I'm swag at this point here are my big points I think mistrust is here to stay and I think if we don't think about these questions the civic participation Taking this trust seriously We're going to keep being disappointed by efforts that don't work out I think a lot of the popular approaches to changing civic engagement Don't take mistrust seriously enough and I think anything that essentially lectures us on Have a better sense of duty come on step up be a good citizen is missing a very large societal trait I think we need to look really seriously at these to me perfectly Rational ways that people are looking outside of mistrusted institutions and looking for other paths to change I think we need to recognize those activities whether they're coding whether they're starting socially responsible businesses Whether they're running a campaign to try to change the norm by using internet memes I think we have to view them as potentially legitimate and we have to evaluate them based on their actual success and failure of what they're trying to do and Finally, I think if we could start getting our heads around this idea that mistrust is this near infinitely renewable resource We can actually start thinking through strategies of citizenship like Monetorial citizenship that are actually empowered and strengthened by it So that's the case that I'm trying to make Now is a great time to argue with me. I think arguments are best with drinks in our hands