Mistrust: Why Losing Faith In Institutions Provides The Tools To Transform Them Ethan Zuckerman. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021. 275pp. $26.95 (hardcover)

Abstract

An old Jacobin quote, variously attributed to Robespierre or Saint-Just, claims that ‘la méfiance est au sentiment intime de la liberté ce que la jalousie est à l’amour’: this same appraisal of the decisive political importance of mistrust – if not the bellicose affect underlying it – drives the interesting new book by Ethan Zuckerman. The author’s career is a good example of an interdisciplinary trajectory between academia, digital activism, and startup culture. Before his current position at the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Zuckerman was for many years associated with two key institutions in the ‘Cambridge School’ of US internet-and-society scholarship: the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, and the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab (which he left in protest over the Media Lab director’s financial entanglements with Jeffrey Epstein). He has also, through projects such as Global Voices and Geekcorps, been involved in nonprofit work in international development and media pluralism. As for digital innovation, while at tripod.com at the turn of the 21st century he is widely credited with the invention of the pop-up ad. Mistrust begins with the contention that an inflection point has been reached in ordinary citizens’ perception of the trustworthiness of institutions, public and private. Zuckerman perceives the global nature of the crisis, but both the diagnosis and the therapy in the book refer mainly to the American case. This overwhelming systemic mistrust imperils the stability of current political arrangements, leading to a new cleavage, between those the author terms insurrectionists and traditional institutionalists. Such a cleavage is orthogonal to the customary Right–Left one, but it does not cover the entire polity: both insurrectionists and institutionalists share a proactive approach to political life, hence both seek to dispel the feeling of powerlessness and disengagement mistrust engenders. Thus, the book overall can be seen to chart the range of contributions that more or less institution-friendly modes of activism can offer in the fight against political apathy. Structurally, the first three chapters of the volume are devoted to a description of the phenomenon of contemporary mistrust, its causes, and consequences. The remaining six chapters explore different political strategies to counter mistrust and ‘fix’ institutions. Zuckerman remains somewhat agnostic as to the root cause of mistrust: sudden crises, race animosities, neoliberal assaults on government bureaucracy, growing wealth inequality, diffuse political awareness in the broader population are all mentioned as possibilities, but none is singled out as decisive, and ultimately the mere fact of institutional underperformance, as suggested by Pippa Norris, can prove sufficient (2001). Rather more interesting is the discussion of consequences, most notably with regard to the subversion of the value of transparency, which