The Alternatives to Sorting Out Trust All Suck
Avoiding the hard problem.
Trust is so central to humanity that I'm surprised it doesn't figure more prominently in recent visions of where we're headed. I haven't found a rigorous, exhaustive (MECE) framework that encompasses all the futures we might face, but the futures on offer today do seem bleak. For example:
New Optimists tell us to worry less: Things are better! While I agree that mortality rates, poverty and other statistics have improved, this brand of optimism seems to ignore the dysfunctional dynamics that characterize our very fluxy moment. I can't help but believe that the default path we're on takes us into autocratic surveillance societies, with new intelligences emerging that will be motivated by consumerism instead of social good, plus a high likelihood of self-inflicted, traumatic climate disruptions, all while trust continues to crumble. I'd be willing to cool my jets if I didn't think our momentum was taking us over a cliff.
Tech Utopians are also optimists: Tech will fix it! Look at the cool things in the Fourth Industrial Revolution! Everybody gets a superpower! Alas, I fear tech has helped bring about many of the problems I'm talking about here, and the people guiding tech have usually pursued efficiency, scale and profit — even when it means hacking our easily addicted brains — over building a convivial world. Generative AI absolutely has the potential to help us design a better world, but only if we solve for the many trust issues it kicks up. (Explore the time-honored tradition of tech-utopian visions here. Some have been quite accurate.)
Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) lies out at the edge of tech-utopian visions: AI and robotics will not only put us out of work, they will also deliver all our needs and wants, so we can kick back in our Barcaloungers and enjoy life. Pretty unrealistic, right?
In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg gave us his vision of living in the Metaverse, which he believed in strongly enough to rename Facebook to Meta and waste invest many billions. It's worth noting here that Zuckerberg is the unelected, unsupervised sovereign of a virtual "nation" larger than the populations of India and China combined (3.9 billion monthly average users of Meta's services, vs roughly 2.9 billion). Where he steers his ships affects a substantial fraction of the humans on the planet.
Unfortunately, Zuckerberg's vision would have looked familiar to anyone tooling around in Second Life in 2003, and likely less social or novel than that pioneering service. Worse, though, is the idea that we'll love donning immersive goggles for our social interactions and dressing our avatars with what the next virtual person is wearing, when it's our in-person presence that helps us connect. We're very astute readers of expression, gaze, skin tone and body language for good reasons.
The "trustless" crypto vision seems alarmingly naïve: We're going to redesign today's institutions by bidding up smart-contract initiatives anonymously, using crypto tokens, and that's going to add up to a desirable, well-oiled society? Do you trust how "facts" were added to the shared ledger? Do you trust that nobody's violating the principles that make blockchains work? And don't you actually want to know and meet the people who share your community?
Finally, the broligarchs who say "we have to get off this rock!" seem oblivious that trust is essential to becoming a multiplanetary species. Without trust, you don't want to be on the first thousand cramped rockets full of settlers. It's not a great sign that most of the broligarchs are busy protecting themselves, as they break trust every day.
Besides, there's plenty to do here to heal our lovely planet.
Notably missing from my view of public discourse are other, more interesting voices' visions, such as those from ecofeminism, indigenous ways of knowing, Commoning, and the many communities trying hard to fix the world's problems. They don't seem to get the attention that the ones I've cited get, yet they should be influencing our conversations about the future we design together.
Which are your favorites? Which have I missed? Where are you on the hopeful-to-hopeless spectrum?
#visionsofthefuture #trust #designfromtrust
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.