Mistrust: A Conversation on Harnessing Technology for the Public Good

With Ethan Zuckerman, author of the new book Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them, and Nicholas Carr, author of the newly reissued The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains

Tuesday, February 9th at 7pm via Zoom
Free & open to all; RSVPs required
Co-sponsored by 1Berkshire and the Berkshire Innovation Center

The rise of mistrust is provoking a crisis for representative democracy—solutions lie in the endless creativity of social movements.

Join us online February 9th for an interactive live discussion with Ethan Zuckerman, founder of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Nicholas Carr, author, blogger and former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. Together they will discuss the core ideas in Zuckerman’s newest book, Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them.

Zuckerman, who directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT from 2011-2020 has long been considered one of the leading thinkers at the intersection of technology, politics and society. In his new book, Mistrust, Zuckerman moves beyond the anger and mistrust of institutions to a set of levers – laws, markets, codes and norms – that provide tools for citizens to promote positive change in the world.

Nicholas Carr, author of five groundbreaking books that deeply question how technology is changing our brains and reshaping our social fabric, will join Zuckerman to discuss the major propositions presented in Mistrust.

Ethan Zuckerman has a long history of creating platforms and organizations that use technology to raise new voices. Zuckerman’s Media Cloud platform enabled scholars at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center to analyze and critique the mainline coverage of the 2016 election. Global Voices, which he co-founded with Rebecca MacKinnon in 2005, promotes free speech online across the globe. In 1999, after living in Ghana as a Fulbright scholar, Zuckerman co-founded Geekcorps, a tech Peace Corps, to assist in the transfer of technology and business skills to entrepreneurs in the developing world.