“Infrastructure” is the talk of the town in Washington, DC as cracked bridges, melting cables, and maxed out electric grids make news every week.
But it is not just the roads and wires that carry our goods and information that are in need of an update. The signs of a broader decay in our public information ecosystem are everywhere: disappearing local news coverage, a lack of trust in our elections and political processes, lackluster government service delivery as illustrated with chaotic vaccine signup systems, rampant scams that make it difficult for the average American to tell legitimate government communications from phishing attacks. Our “civic infrastructure” is depleted, underfunded, and inadequate for a 21st-century democracy.
Read more at Next City.