Francis Fukuyama on how the web bred global distrust in institutions
Francis Fukuyama considered nine explanations for the global wave of populism and concluded “it’s the internet, stupid”. He asserts we are in an “existential struggle for liberal democracy”:
Broadly speaking, the internet removed intermediaries, traditional media, publishers, TV and radio networks, newspapers, magazines, and other channels by which people received information in earlier periods. Back in the 1990s, when the internet was first privatized, this was celebrated: anybody could become their own publisher, and say whatever they wanted online. And that is just what they did, as all the filters that previously existed to control the quality of information disappeared. This both precipitated and was an effect of the broad loss of trust in all sorts of institutions that occurred in this period.
Moving online created a parallel universe that bore some relationship to the physically experienced world, but in other cases could exist completely orthogonally to it. While previously “truth” was imperfectly certified by institutions like scientific journals, traditional media with standards of journalist accountability, courts and legal discovery, educational institutions and research organizations, the standard for truth began to gravitate instead to the number of likes and shares a particular post got. The large tech platforms pursuing their own commercial self-interest created an ecosystem that rewarded sensationalism and disruptive content, and their recommendation algorithms, again acting in the interest of profit-maximization, guided people to sources that never would have been taken seriously in earlier times. Moreover, the speed with which memes and low-quality content could travel increased dramatically, as well as the reach of any particular piece of information. Previously, a major newspaper or magazine could reach perhaps a million readers, usually in a single geographic area; today, an individual influencer can reach hundreds of millions of followers without regard to geography.
In other words, we are not at the end of history.