⚡ Building Trust in the Electric Age
About why our architectures of trust are failing and why we need better ones
👋 Hi, Ed & Chris here. In the Atlas of the Long Now, we interpret our rapidly changing world. We do this through the historic-futuristic lens of the long-term thinker and the toolbox of the speculative creator. After all, by interpreting the past, new imaginings of the future reveal themselves.
Over the past year, we have written extensively (in the Dutch version of The Atlas of the Long Now) about the major role trust plays in enabling complex modern societies, how today the digital realm undermines it, and what could be done to get trust back into our public discourse and institutions. Pakhuis de Zwijger, an independent discussion platform for social-innovation and creation in Amsterdam, noticed and invited us to join their Designing Cities for All Fellowship (DCFA) so we could explore The Architectures of Trust in a series of conversations with experts and thinkers from around the globe.
We will introduce this series on the 3rd of October with a historical interpretation of how trust has been shaped over the past thousand years, and a number of design principles and scenarios that will show how trust could be organised and secured in a possible future. More information on the rest of the program and which guests we will be welcoming will follow, but for now we can tell you that there will be a podcast, a book club and a number of events in November that can be participated in live and online. See the dates and times below:
Monday, 3 October 8pm-2pm (CET) — De DCFA launch: Introducing Edwin Gardner & Christiaan Fruneaux (The Chrononauts) and the theme, Architectures of Trust.
Monday, November 7, 8pm-2pm (CET)- Building a Public Domain: On how we arrive at a shared truth in public discourse.
Monday, November 14, 8pm-2pm (CET) - Building a Public Culture: On our digital identity, who it belongs to, and how it determines how we interpret our citizenship.
Monday, November 21, 8pm-2pm (CET) - Building a Public Governance: On how new digital infrastructure can play a role in building participatory democracy.
To introduce the series, our guests and readers into our thinking on trust, we present to you the introductory essay below. Enjoy, and let us know what you think.
Building Trust in the Electric Age
‘Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.’
—Albert Einstein
In November 17, 02021, a US court sentenced Jacob Chansely, also known as the ‘QAnon Shaman’, to 41 months in prison for his role in storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2020. Images of Chansley in the Capitol building went viral because of his ‘barbaric’ outfit. His painted face, the large spear he carried, and his horned fur hat became symbolic for the mayhem that day. Because of this, Chansely’s sentence was extra harsh. To set an example among the wild online tribes that stormed the Capitol. According to the judge who sentenced him Chansely frequently posted ‘vitriolic messages on social media, encouraging his thousands of followers to expose corrupt politicians, to ID the traitors in the government, to halt their agenda, to stop the steal, and end the deep state’ prior to his storming of the Capitol.
The story of Jacob Chansely and the events on January 6th became emblematic of a sharp deterioration of societal trust in Western societies during the last 30 years. The social media messages of Chansely are testimony of a widening and deepening social mistrust in our democratic and governmental institutions and the officials, professionals and experts that make it run. This lack of trust is, of course, deeply problematic. Especially for democratic communities. If we don’t address and fix this trust-problem, it will spell the end of our way of life.
Trust is the glue that holds societies and civilizations together. It’s the core principle on which all human relationships are build. It is consequently also the most sacred principle of effective communication. It is quite remarkable, in that light, that the societal dynamics of trust are still poorly understood. Especially when one considers it has been over thirty years since the introduction of the most omnipresent communication-platform ever conceived; the Internet. It is time that we start exploring how societal trust works, how it is produced, and how it is linked to communication technology. If we know it’s dynamics, we can perhaps design our way out of our current predicament.
There is a link between societal trust, information technology, the experience of community and the scale of human cooperation that a particular society is capable of. To understand this link, it is helpful to take a few steps back, zoom out, and look at the introduction of the printing press in the mid 1400’s and how it transformed society and made the Modern world possible.
Before the invention of the printing press the dominant information technology in Europe was the spoken word. This had obvious limitations. We had to meet each other, so we could talk to each other, so we could build trust, so we could cooperate effectively. Trust was a very personal affair. The institutions of trust where small villages, family structures, friendships, clans, and fealty. Within these institutions cooperation and division of labor could take place. Something that was quite challenging outside these circles of trust. This dependence on spoken word made large communities and economies of scale almost impossible.
With the invention of the printing press, and the subsequent proliferation of publishing houses, Europe was introduced to a powerful new information technology – the printed word. The mass production of information that became possible allowed communities of trust to grow beyond the circle of personal acquaintance. Trust became a more abstract experience. People started to rely on the printed word – on schoolbooks, banknotes, newspapers, lawbooks, land maps and nautical charts. The new architecture of trust was built on the objectivity of experts, professionals and their bureaucracies that were associated with the production of this more abstract level of trust. The printing press thus made information scalable, which made trust scalable, which made the sense of community scalable, which made cooperation scalable
In the nineteenth and twentieth century we were introduced to another information technology; electronics. Which subsequently led to new methods of communication – telegraph, radio, telephone, television, and the omnipresent personal computer of today. Especially after the introduction of the World Wide Web and other Internet applications the dominant medium of trust shifted again. Although the spoken word and the printed word are still around, and have their place in society, the dominant information technology became the activated word. (We call it ‘the activated word’ because computer code does not need humans to get work done; think robotics and machine learning.) But, while the dominant medium shifted from the printing press towards the new electronic realm there are, as of yet, no new architectures of trust in place to imbue its users with an even more abstract level of trust – an absence that undermines our sense of community and, if we don’t fix it soon, our ability to cooperate.
If we want to learn anything from this very brief history of trust, we need some sort of formula (or taxonomy, or definition) that establishes the social mechanics of trust. Because only if we know its mechanics, we can draw up design principles for producing trust in the electronic age.
So, to move forward, we think that we can safely define the social space where the linking of societal trust, information technology, sense of community and the scale of human cooperation happens as a public sphere. And to put it all into a single definition:
A public sphere produces public trust by imbuing information technology with a measure of objectivity – a notion of truth that is independent from human subjectivity. This measure of objectivity is called the architecture of trust. It enables the alignment of individual norms, identities, and interests into a sense of common ownership which provides the safety needed for people to cooperate.
Looking back with this formula in mind it makes sense that in the age of the spoken word people tried, by getting to know each other, to establish some measure of objectivity. By knowing each other’s subjectivities, one could, with some human insight, perhaps deduce some objective truth. That this is difficult speaks from the fact that these people lived in a very subjective universe. Their world view was very magical. Their world was mysteriously animated or otherwise divinely inspired
When the printed word entered the scene people slowly started to trust law books, banknotes, land maps, sea charts because they trusted the craftsmanship of the people (and their institutions) that produced these printed artifacts. From this trusted craftsmanship slowly there emerged the notion of professionalism. Professionalism is a work ethic that encourages workers to leave their subjectivity at home and become an objective ‘cog in the machine’. We trust our doctors, lawyers, bookkeepers, politicians, mapmakers, teachers because we trust their objectivity. Professionalism was the architecture of trust in the age of the printed word, and bureaucracies were its scaled-up institutions.
Jacob Chansely’s ranting about corrupt politicians and the deep state make much more sense now. Professionalism was the architecture of trust that worked in the printed age. With the advent of a new information technology, the activated word, our faith in human professionalism is waning. Our (subjective) faith in the objectivity of experts and professionals does not cut it anymore. We need something stronger, something more objective. We need an architecture of trust that can withstand the massive challenges of the activated word.
We live in a transitional moment. We are still governed by the institutions that emerged in the age of the printed word, but most of our information and communication takes place in the realm of the activated word. This is a fraught situation because the dynamics of the printed age are different than those of the electronic age.
Here are a couple of those differences:
The electronic realm processes much, much, and much more information than the printed realm.
In contrast to the printed realm, the electronic realm does not only distribute information but also produces it.
Because it is activated the electronic realm can control the robotic workings of critical infrastructure.
In the electronic realm everybody is a producer of information, which is different from the printed realm that was controlled by an elite cadre of professionals.
The electronic realm makes society much more transparent because everybody can disclose information in it. There is no ballotage of professional editors, curators, and publishers.
Compared with the printed realm the electronic realm is a ridiculously complex and abstract place. It is built and governed in the language of higher mathematics, which makes its inner workings inaccessible to most.
We thus need to design a new architecture of trust that fortifies a much higher level of objectivity within the activated word, so that it can produce public trust, on which new (more democratic) communities and new (more democratic) ways of human cooperation can be established
This is not something that must be done overnight. Because the stakes are high. Like professionalism became the foundation for our current representative democracy—where a buffer of professional politicians had our backs—and the many professional bureaucracies (corporate, governmental, or otherwise) that ensure accountability and durability, this new architecture of trust will become the foundation for our future society. Thinking about the future of trust is key to the establishment of an inclusive and sustainable way of life.
Thanks for reading, let us know what you think.
Love, Ed & Chris