Opinion | The Next Decade Will Be Just as Bad - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ter-decade-trump-theranos.html
2010 decade lying cheating trust cooperation history politics crisis culture
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We will remember the 2010s as a grifter’s paradise. These were the years when our collective sense of objective reality totally fell apart and when politics, business, technology, culture and even ordinary life fell fully under the sway of a new breed of swindler, huckster, influencer, troll and hacker.
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this was the big lesson of the 2010s: Almost nothing is as it seems. Doubt everything. Trust no one.
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Getting through modern life seems to require adopting a corrosive view of society that makes a hash of our fundamental ideas about the value of cooperation and trust among our fellow humans
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rather than the establishment foiling Trump, his slippery style and overwhelming blizzard of lies would so fully alter political and media culture that by the end of the decade, members of the G.O.P. would be embracing and echoing his conspiracy theories as a way to forestall his removal from office.
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The grift wasn’t limited to politics. The tech industry welcomed hucksters with open arms. Look at WeWork, Uber and Theranos — once high-flying start-ups that promised to change the world in big ways and small, each unmasked for peddling false prospects, unreal tech or hiding systemic corruption and abuse
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Facebook and other social media services were not just a haven of state-sponsored disinformation; with dodgy, easily gamed stats, social media increasingly came to provide a false view of the world.
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Why are we being overrun by scams? Society’s signals for judging reputation and trustworthiness haven’t caught up with the changing tech.
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Our information system has slipped its moorings, and as a result, lying and scheming and fraud has simply become too effective a life strategy. As I argued in March, when the celebrity college admissions scandal broke, we’re seeing the “uberization” of corruption — bending the rules is becoming routine and pervasive, a push-button cheat code for modern life.