Binary Thinking & The Future of Trust on the Internet
People are basically complicated. Not good. Not bad. Complicated.
In The Starfish And The Spider, authors Ori Brafman & Rod Beckstrom discuss online trust in the context of Paypal & Ebay.
Ebay, since its inception, has been predicated on the belief that people are basically good & should be trusted. If you give them a chance to behave well, for the most part they tend to. You’ve probably encouraged this line of thinking before if you’ve heard a coworker say, “assume positive intent.”
Such an assumption would be laughable at a place like Paypal, where they are constantly exposed to the many different ways in which people try to abuse trust online. If you asked a Paypal employee, they’d be more likely to tell you that people are basically con-artists & trust needs to have strict limits.
Disagreements about human nature have popped up throughout history. The Bible for example espouses that people are born bad & tend to stay that way. Judaism & Islam disagree about Original Sin, and argue instead that we are born more or less good but become bad over time.
By some accounts, maybe we were too trusting with the internet. Selfish actors have abused positive intent at the highest level. Disinformation & weaponized propaganda are threats to democratic elections…
