Them and who has even written and implement chill book about this world that we live in. And even written and worldntial book about the that we live in. If i am not mistaken, even worked for one of the first ethan worked for one of the first. Com enterprises. Ofis also a Founding MemberGlobal Voices online, a popular Nonprofit Network of bloggers, citizens, and journalists. In 2007, he joined the inaugural wikipedias eyes reboard. Added to the list of stop global bloggers. It is my pleasure to present ethan zuckerman. Please join me in welcoming ethan to rice. [applause] mr. Zuckerman thank you so much. It is wonderful to be here in this beautiful state on this gorgeous campus. Want to tell you about where i from and how that informs some of the work that i am doing at the moment. I teach at the m. I. T. Media lab which is one of the stranger academic institutions in the world. Behind the media you have to be future on inventing the and you have to be studying something that no one else is studying. My colleague at the top of the screen used to be one of the top rock climbers in the world and ended up losing both of his legs below the knee in a climbing accident and went on to become an amazing researcher in biomechanical limbs. Terry oxman is as designer mary future and you have to be studying something that no one else is studying. My colleague at the top of the screen used to be one of the os and surfaces that look like cells or organisms. Pretty is not nearly as but in some ways it is more global and colorful. I study civic media. Im interested in the idea that by making media, we can make change in the world. The work i have done for the last dozen years is with a group called Global Voices which looks for people in developing nations who are writing about their country in a way that the rest of the worldbut in some ways ite global and colorful. I study civic media. Tends not to know about. There are pakistanis talking about their countries, not in terms of islamic fundamentalism but in terms of science and technology. And people talking about west africa in terms of the economic opportunity. Because of the work that i do, i get to meet with people in a amazing and different places. This is a photo from september of last year. Ghana. N accra, i was hanging out with a bunch nf canadian ghanaia bloggers. I wanted to meet the guy in the red hat. I had in reading him because he and comedian, an essayist, one of the most successful political organizers in ghana. He had organized an upandcoming social movement. Impoverished for about 40 years and has recently turned things around. It is now a middle income country. A lovely place to go and visit. A lot of people working in high tech and management which is to say there are a lot of people who have cars, air conditioners, and televisions. This is not a nation of stereo typical huts. It really stinks when they do not have electric power which is happening a lot because the nation has become very wealthy and also because of Climate Change. They get most of their electricity from hydro water. Very low because the rain cycle has changed. This leads to on off. The power goes off and on all of the time and it is driving people nuts. People are getting together and driving to protest, they are lanternsp kerosene because this is what they need low because the rain cycle has changed. This leadsto use to read wet anu all at their tshirts, they off on must stop. He is organizing marches with 500010,000 people. They are marching into the center of town to say to the government, look, you need to get your act together. We cannot live without electric power. I am watching this. I am really interested in this. And like the good social scientist that i am, i say hey, what is the best way to politically organize here. When you are organizing things and getting people into the streets, are you doing this through facebook or twitter . Says i ame and not political. What . 5000ave just organized people to march through the center of the capital city to protest electricity and you are going to tell me that you are not political. In many countries where i work, when you say youre not political, what it means is that you do not want to end up in prison. But that is not ghana. It is an open society. According to reporters without borders, they have a more free and open press than we do here in the United States. The reason he wanted to tell me that he was not political was he did not want everyone else in the room to think that he was an idiot. And that is what is happening in politics in ghana right now. People who are strongly affiliated with the Major Political parties, are being seen by the Younger Generation as wasting their time. Guy in his late 20s, he literally will not allow himself to be photographed near someone who is strongly associated with one of these Political Parties for fear that he will lose his credibility, and someone will think that he represents one of these parties, and that also someone will think that he is someone involved in organized politics. Which is seen in ghana as being such a dirty game and so far removed from what is actually happening on the ground like the electricity shortage, that he simply does not want to be associated with it. I came back and i was thinking about this. I hear this all over the world. I go to india and i talked to him and he corruption activists who are trying to track people taking bribes on mind and they say they are not taking bribes online and they say they are not political. I go to russia. Not political there either. I come back to the United States , and you start hearing some of the same stuff to the extent that these two gentlemen have anything in common, one of the things that senator sanders and mr. Have in common is that they are both very much attached to the idea that they are removed from politics. That they are somehow separate from the into the tuition of politics as we know it. It is a little harder for bernie to make this position then donald. He has been an unusual figure as the one socialist. Donald trump probably actually has a legitimate claim to being an outsider is leased from institutional politics. Institutional politics, institutions more generally are what i think we are moving away from and moving to a culture of sharp and extreme mistrust for. One is simple example. Thinkooking at how we about politicians in the United States. This is a survey that comes from gala. It asked people if you expect people in these professions to behave honestly and ethically. You can see that nurses do very well. Police officers, a little less so. Areas on theower way down. The only people who come out lower at 7 are lobbyists. Once you start getting into money and politics, we start getting to the point where we do not expect much from people going into these businesses. This has been happening for a long time. This is a very long, slow change in how American Society is structured. This is a compilation to him by the Pew Research Center asking americans to question do you trust the government in washington to do the right thing most or all of the time . Number peaks in 19 64 at 77 . This number now runs between 12 19 routinely. It has been a long gradual slide. It had a real comeback around the year 2000. I was born in 1973. The only time this question has been in positive territory, in my 43 your lifetime that 50 of americans have said that they trust the government to do the right thing, was just before we invaded iraq. For the most part, what we have seen is a shift away from assuming that our government is going to be acting in our interest to a moment where we simply do not expect that to happen. If this was just about government, it would be disturbing that it is more disturbing than that. Americans and ask about trust in large institutions of all source, level ofrts, that trust is falling sharply over time. The two institutions that come up that most people say they trust all or most of the time are the military and Small Business. This is strange. , theyou think about egypt ended up with the military after throwing out the under the other institutions. The military and Small Business are the only institutions where we have increased interest. We trust the military more now than we did in the non. Everyone else has fallen quite far. We might understand the church religionrganized falling but we have seen the medical system fall sharply in trust. We have seen banks. Public schools. Organized labor. Newspapers and the press. The criminal justice system. All the way through. We trust these institutions less and less. The simple rule of thumb is that if we cannot see an individual common human being, if we see a structure or an entity rather than a person, for the most part as americans we are shifting to the point where we do not trust it anymore. It is not just us. The Global Pr Company has been running a similar survey around the world. They are finding that these levels of Institutional Trust are dropping gear on year. The places where they are not dropping are concerning places like china, singapore, the united arab emirates. Best not falling in the governed, open societies. Scandinavia. And it is falling in the most economically successfully closed societies. Well forworking really you, open society and democracy, you probably have a decent Institutional Trust. If you are in a closed system, you probably have high Institutional Trust. If you are anywhere in the middle, it is falling apart. It is worth asking why is this . What happened . I have some guesses. It is possible that having the impeachment of the sitting president had a lot to do with this. I think it also had a lot to do with a systemic attack both in the u. S. And the u. K. On the idea that government could do good. We had a real shift in the 1980s, a lot of people refer to it as neoliberalism, generally speaking government are going to be significantly less effective than the private sector. When you have government officials standing up and tell you that the government can do no good and you should not fund it, you end up at a place where the government can do no good. It is a selffulfilling prophecy. We have government officials who have embarrassed themselves, who have damaged the dignity of the office. I am doing my best to be a partisan here. To bee bipartisan bipartisan here. For a lot of the people that i know, watching the u. S. Government, this incredibly wealthy and powerful nation, failed to take care of our own during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was a moment of realization that the system was not working. The safety notes safety net that we thought we could trust are not once we can trust anymore. The 20072008 banking crisis was another moment that shook people to the core. A realization that the systems we thought were too big to fail, which we thought had safeguards counteract negative effects, were in fact surprisingly fragile and needed a lot of help to recover from systemic fraud and abuse. I am a media scholar. By and up thinking that the press has a lot to do with it and that ending up with an unshackled press in the era of at thete looks to be start of the shift. It starts in the 1970s. And the shift on taking a close look at the Nixon Administration has something to do with it. Figures like Edward Snowden are capable of putting incredible revelations into the press and having widespread effect. That also has a way of undermining the opacity of the power of institutions. . Hat does this mean fors a real uphill battle people who are strongly associated with existing institutions and government. Watch all ofg to in thed representatives no to support marco rubio to effect. If you accept my theory that we are at an antiinstitutionalist moment where people are incredibly suspicious of any existing institution, there is really nothing worse than having mitt romney show up and say what you should do now is work for marco rubio. This probably represents a tough uphill path for Hillary Clinton who is someone who has built her career through the institutions of the senate, the state department, working her way up to a position of incredible prominence and experience. But at a moment where we seem extremely mistrustful of the very institutions that have brought her to the fort. I am not concerned about their problems. I am concerned about our problems. Here is the problem i am concerned with. Have deep, abiding mistrust in institutions, almost everything we know how to do as civic actors does not work anymore. The main two things we know how to do in conventional civics are to elect good and wise leaders, to pass laws, to carry them out and to enforce them. Or, when we feel like those people are not listening to us, to show up, to march, to make our presence known and to demand change in one fashion or another. Here is the problem. A 9 Approval Rating in congress, when you have a branch of government that says we are not planning on doing our jobs for the next year until we have an election, when you have success of congresses congresses setting records were being the least productive, it is challenging to convince people that they can make change in the world by passing laws and having them carried out. If you do not believe that washington right now is capable of making major change in the world, it takes out this other route of protest which has been so powerful over the years. This is an image from the march on washington. The challenge is that it have got good news because there is other ways people are finding ways to do civics. I want to talk about two of them. They are the two i feel like i understand the best. We are doing a lot of interviews these are twod that i feel like i can give you a little bit of a glove. So, this guy on the screen is larry. He is probably the single least successful candidate of 2016. He briefly decided he would make a run based on Campaign Finance reform before Bernie Sanders did. Really known for is being probably the deepest theorist of the internet bed any of us have run into. He wrote books that are incredibly important. Code does is say there are multiple ways that we as a society regulate behavior. Were used to regulating behavior through law. Say you law and we cant do that anymore. Or we say, you cant do that anymore. S big observation in this book is that laws are only one of four ways we regulate society for top we also regulate through norms. None of you yet have jumped up and started arguing with me during this talk and maybe it is because im not said anything to argue with or maybe you are following a social script. The norms of behavior when someone is giving a talk at a lectern is you sent and wait and ask questions afterwards. Ands are extremely powerful constrain us from doing huge numbers of things in life because we fear social sanction. We fearfully break them, other people shun us or make fun of us. Being extremely powerful ways of effecting change over time. In fact, major societal changes are us often normative changes. Suddenly it is ok for people about that race is to be married. Suddenly it is ok for gays and lesbians to be out in public and be married to each other. We make things expensive, would make them cheap. Anyone with the misfortune of being a smoker, you notice that gets more expensive every year. That is a way of regulating behavior out of existence. Making it so expensive it is harder and harder to do. The most subtle of this is code. Codes and architectures of all sorts. These also regulate. Walked you, when you into this building you walked on tax. In those paths are designed to have you walk in a certain way and that is a form of regulation through code. There are things that are easy to do with computer and things that are hard. To ripemarkable and easy a cd and have finals. It is hard to rip a movie. It requires Custom Software and secret, dark corners of the internet. That is not enforcing law. That is an forcing code. There is code that makes that easy and code that makes that hard. What i am trying to do is understand activism by the essig. Ed lsess it is kind of like gymnastics. We know that we can make change through law. We know that when the Supreme Court decides that recognition of eight will marriage is the affectshe land, that everybody but it turns out you changingmake change my norms, markets, and codes. Of all the things in the world i am his stuff about right now, governmentread surveillance is high on my list. Run a network of 1400 journalists and translators in 120 countries. All of that communication between me and the people i work with is subject to surveillance by the nsa. Is ae have decided that price we are ok with paying in exchange for preventing and as much thought the Obama Administration might take a stand, it has not happened and there is very little hope the clinton change might. So trying to make change through law is not going to happen. The good news is there are a lot of geeks out there Running Software companies that are trying hard to make encryption standard. So when i talk to people right now, i do it through a little application on my phone call looks justd signal like an sms client. It looks just like i am sending Text Messages except they are encrypted. They are hard to intercept. I see using the tour browser, the tor browser which makes it hard to see where i am coming from. Inc. The link, friends of mine are trying to help with surveillance through code and i would argue people writing and putting that code out in the world are just as much at the best as the people with the Human Rights Campaign who are working on equal marriage. I would argue the same for elon musk who is trying to make the electric car, not a compromised vehicle but the sexiest thing that is out there on the road. And not as a way of trying to take advantage of marketing mechanisms to make social change. Something like the difficulty of passing a widespread carbon tax in the Un