The future of trust is distributed
Are we — are you — too trusting?
This may seem an odd question at a time when trust is so visibly disintegrating all around us. According to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in business, government, NGOs and the media is in freefall across the globe. The average level of trust in these four institutions — across the 28 countries Edelman surveys — has declined from 50% to 47% just since last year. It’s a pretty blunt number to stick on a highly complex phenomenon, but it tells a story — and the story rings true.
But, as British philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill points out, such numbers tell an incomplete story:
‘Frankly, I think rebuilding trust is a stupid aim. I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy. In fact, I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy.’
In the absence of good data on trustworthiness, it’s impossible to say whether we trust these institutions too much or too little. In the context of everything from LIBOR fixing to phone hacking, MPs’ expenses to the Panama Papers, perhaps our faith in institutions should be disappearing even faster than it is.
And scandals like these aren’t exactly a new phenomenon, so what’s different today? American political commentator Christopher Hayes, in his book Twilight of the Elites, offers an interesting perspective:
‘Along with the other rising inequalities we’ve become so familiar with — in income, in wealth, in access to politicians — we confront now a fundamental inequality of accountability. We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful.’
In other words, it’s not powerful people behaving badly that erodes trust in institutions so much as powerful people behaving badly and getting away with it.
Undoubtedly, we should push for greater accountability across the board — to drive up both trust and trustworthiness. But we should also recognise the limitations of institutional trust as an operating system for today’s global society.
As Rachel Botsman writes in her new book, Who Can You Trust?, ‘institutional faith, kept in the hands of a few and operating behind closed doors, wasn’t designed for the digital age.’ Instead, she sees a new paradigm emerging: distributed trust.
We have already seen the power of distributed trust at work in the meteoric rise of companies like Airbnb and BlaBlaCar. By implementing peer review systems, these platforms have convinced millions to take once unthinkable ‘trust leaps’: allowing a stranger into your home; getting into a stranger’s car. Trust, Botsman argues, is the currency of the sharing economy.
These examples are the thin end of the wedge. As technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain gather momentum, we’re going to see the locus of trust shift dramatically: from elites to “people like me”; from centralised institutional systems to distributed technological systems.
Botsman’s book is not as optimistic about this paradigm shift as you might expect. Much of her commentary is about the potential pitfalls of the dawning age of distributed trust. ‘The real risk,’ she warns, ‘is over-trusting.’
Consider the strange case of the Uber driver in Kalamazoo, Michigan, who, one Saturday evening in February 2016, committed a spate of random murders, whilst continuing to pick people up through the Uber app.
‘Some passengers had heard there was a mass murderer called [Jason] Dalton, an Uber driver, on the loose in Kalamazoo, yet they continued to use the app to get to where they wanted to go. A passenger named Dunton even asked Dalton, “You’re not that guy going around killing people, are you?”’
Remarkably, none of these passengers was murdered, but why on earth did they get into Dalton’s car when they had seen the news that there was an Uber driver called Jason on a murderous rampage in their town?
Answer: they were too trusting. They assumed “the system” would protect them. A mass murderer couldn’t possibly still be picking up rides through the Uber app, right? The technology, or the company, or the peer-review system would surely have blocked him already.
Another example. In June 2014, the Chinese Government announced its plan to implement a ‘Social Credit System’, whereby the online behaviour of every single citizen is tracked and rated in order to produce a publicly available score that tells you how trustworthy that person is. A low score could make it harder to get a mortgage, a job — even a date.
The bizarre thing is that various prototypes of this Orwellian scheme already exist — run by private companies — and people are willingly signing up. One of the most popular is called Sesame Credit, run by an affiliate company of the e-commerce giant Alibaba. People sign up in the hope of attaining the rewards and ‘special privileges’ that come with a high score, seemingly oblivious to the totalitarian implications.
And lest you’re feeling smug reading this, just think about how much personal information you’ve willingly handed over to companies like Facebook and Google without any real guarantees about what they will and won’t do with that data.
In short, when it comes to technology, a little less trust might be a good thing.
The trouble, as Botsman observes at the end of her book, is that ‘distributed trust always seems to lead us back to centralized power; a take-over, if you like, of those early good intentions. Take Amazon, Alibaba or Facebook. They might have begun as ways to democratize commerce or information, but they have become centralized behemoths in control of valuable and ever-more sensitive data.’
So, in the end, the new trust paradigm faces the same challenge as the old one. Technology will always be fallible (yes, even blockchain). Some humans — and companies — will always seek to exploit others.
Without robust and democratic accountability mechanisms fit for a world where our online and offline lives increasingly merge into one, we risk surrendering our privacy and security to individuals, corporations and artificial intelligences that may not be quite as trustworthy as we think.
