The hard question has always been: How do you hold institutions accountable without destroying their credibility, because they need credibility to function, and them functioning tomorrow - literally tomorrow - is a matter of life and death?

As much as it's a problem for the institution so solve, as much as them losing credibility might be the just and rational outcome, neither of that really matters if we are unable to maintain a lockdown and lots of people die.

It's definitely (* hopefully) not where we were months ago, when we were barrelling towards a lockdown by the seat of our pants, and on a knife-edge from everything going to pieces. And it's definitely *not* shut up and hunker down time...

But if our motivation is "we need to hold it accountable so it does a better job", and we acknowledge the central role of trust and credibility, and that we need it tomorrow, then the central premise of adversarial accountability just doesn't work.

We can flip it around and ask what institutions can do to stop the confidence freefall when they fuck up. But I think it's important to take the outside-in frame, because if they fail, we suffer. It's as much our problem as it is theirs.