The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

I think the article's approach of referencing historic stragies from government and social infrastructure is a bit useless in this context because how much the problem changes when scarce information becomes abundant light-speed communication. I understand that they are trying to make the point that corporate overlords are bad, but maybe it would serve the purposes of the article better to just focus on the variables that matter, now that there's new capacities for transparency and accountability metrics based on some combination of historic behavior, web of trust node size, and other situational variables based on the medium -- like users that spend a lot of money, or consistently downvote known bad actors. Forcing users to have skin in the game with strict enforcement of transgressions is of course a reasonably effective, if coercive, strategy as well, and you can take the edge off this authoritarian approach if you pair it with some variant of restorative justice.

My approach is perhaps not rigorously useful, but for my personal conceptions of trust in a world of bad actors, I like looking at strategies from Axelrod's iterated prisoner's dilemma[1]. Tit for Tat is famously a good strategy, and there's also a good strategy where you forgive on multiple cooperations but gradually increase the punishment of defectors to n times for their nth defection [2]. Though I should mention that tribalist collusion with other bad actors is unfortunately a very viable approach as well.

[0]: https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/

[1]: https://axelrod.readthedocs.io

[2]: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html

And that's probably rooted in people being fundamentally devalued and taken advantage of.

We are seeing worse income inequality than in The Gilded Age and people act like it's a natural and unavoidable side effect of the existence of tech, the internet, whatever. That's BS. People created these things. If these things exploit people, it's because people designed them to exploit people.

If people want people to be treated better, then people need to stop blaming machines for our social values. Tech merely magnifies those values. It doesn't cause them to exist.

Bill Gates said that automating an efficient system amplifies the efficiency and automating an inefficient system amplifies the inefficiency. I propose that you can similarly amplify whatever underlying social values you have, whether that's something good -- pro education! -- or something bad -- racism and misogyny!

And classism. We are using technology to amplify extractive economic practices, then blaming the robots as if Judgement Day had already arrived and Skynet is now in charge of our lives. (A la the Terminator movies.)

If anything the internet nowadays is a more regulated, safer place than it used to be. The "wild west" internet of old now only endures in certain corners. It's no longer synonymous with the thing itself.

Posting with your full name instead of anonymously or pseudonymously is now the norm for many people. This changed how people interact online, but it also changed their expectations.

A full name however doesn't make a person or their opinions any more real than a pseudonym will. People will lie to you with a fake name just as shamelessly as they would hiding behind a pseudonym.

https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the-us...

https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/files/2014/...

First, the internet has opened up, and its prominent platforms (which were always predominantly american-culture oriented) are now global and thus reflect low trust cultures as well. Second, Goodhart's law, the internet metrics exist mainly to be gamed, thats why they should change. Reviews worked for a while, when the internet had a very different audience , they no longer work, that's normal wear and tear. Third, it's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like product reviews. Crowdsourcing no longer works. (Which explains why wikipedia should maintain a very conservatiove editing policy from now on)