At a point when trust feels like it’s at an all-time low, I’ve recently revisited this 2018 book written by trust expert Rachel Botsman and I’m pleased I did. This book - with the subtitle - How technology brought us together and why it could drive us apart’ is as relevant now as it was when it was written.
The author explores and explains the topic of trust and technology brilliantly, leaving an unnerving feeling that despite knowing more, you may still have only scratched the surface.
Defining trust
Early in the book, Botsman explores what trust means –it’s multi-faceted – her exploration really shows how complex it is as a concept.
She introduces the concept of the ‘trust leap’ where trust is, “the remarkable force that pulls you over that gap between certainty and uncertainty… it’s literally the bridge between the known and unknown,” which she calls the ‘trust leap’.
This leads to her definition that “trust is a confident relationship with the unknown.”
The background to trust
Botsman gives a fascinating insight to the history of trust in our global society. She explains how, before we had ‘big’ and centralised trust institutions, like banking systems and authorities, trust existed locally and at the community level – we were dealing with people we know. This local trust then gradually shifted to the institutional level.
With the advent of technology, we’ve had to make another ‘trust leap – to ‘distributed’ trust – platforms like Amazon, Airbnb and Uber. They create an opportunity for us to establish trust in something based on views from a huge pool of connections and their recommendations – good and bad, which has literally made our world smaller.
Dotted with great stories including Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba – who helped people to exchange goods and money online and make the ‘trust leap and the Maghribi traders of the 10th century who developed a trust network of traders, it’s a great foundation to understand the how and what of trust.
How our trust is challenged…
Botsman then explores how our trust has been battered over time by introducing a few examples of where we’ve lost faith – the Tuskegee scandal in the US where black Americans were deliberately and unknowingly infected; the financial crisis of 2008, weapons of mass destruction and the ‘surprise’ result of Trump’s presidential victory and the Brexit vote. This was in 2018 – we can add a host of other examples most recently where we’ve had breaches of trust from the British government, the Met police service and members of the Royal Family.
As Botsman theorises, with a loss of trust in institutions and the rise in people getting their news from social media (where our exposure to opposing perspectives is limited and we’re often operating in echo chambers) it becomes less of a surprise that that Hilary Clinton didn’t become the US President.
The Trust Stack and the strangely familiar
Botsman introduces the concept of ‘climbing the trust stack’ – a three-stage process where we have to trust an idea, then the company and then trust other people (or a machine or robot) and explains this with a couple of examples around car ride-sharing. As she explains, firstly, we have to trust the idea of ride-sharing – is it safe? Is it worth trying? Then, we next have to trust the technology platform and the company behind it. We have to go through these two stages before we use different information to decide whether the other PERSON is trustworthy.
The first time we climb this stack it’s out of our comfort zone but once we do it, we’re more likely to do it again. To make it more comfortable, organisations have been combining something new with the familiar to make things ‘strangely familiar’ and that’s what we look for.
Algorithms, psychology, ratings and bots
Botsman explores a host of different subjects – from the gaps where we get our trust in a human badly wrong (there’s a brilliant story in the book about Doris which explains this beautifully), where blame sits in a framework of distributed trust, the darknet, trust scores and how these affect our behaviour, and the ethical challenges that the rise of bots presents. She concludes the book with two chapters about blockchain and bitcoin – a timely read given the media’s current fascination with NFT (non-fungible tokens).
Facebook of course appears in here – we know that user data has been compromised, users have been part of a data experiment and are at the mercy of an algorithm that drives polarisation by promoting our friends’ views along with those of people we’ve liked, above others. Despite that, many of us still use it.
‘Who Can You Trust?’ is a fascinating insight into how and why we need to think more critically. Questioning what’s behind platforms, fake news, recommendations and things that spark an uncomfortable feeling. Botsman’s in-depth exploration of the relatively recent advent of digital technology and how it’s shifted and challenged how and who we trust is a really thought-provoking window into this increasingly important space. And it definitely leaves you with a host of ideas to think forward with.