Trust Needs a Major Innovation

An article on 404 Media had me thinking about the state of trust in society today. The article describes software landlords are using the U.S. that forces prospective tenants to offer login credentials (or pass through a login) into business systems so that tenant’s pay can be verified. While the article is all outrage and describes that laws may be broken, it fails to mention why this push for trust and base truth of information continues.

More acutely, this effects the rental community because of risk vs. reward. So many are trying to gain access to an increasingly short list of rental properties and trying to gain an edge. When forging documents is trivial and success means gaining the full wight of the legal system’s protections if you get possession of the property - this activity inches closer to pervasive.

So we have this big collision about to take place between the ever-increasing need for trusted information (potentially so obtrusive that it breaks laws) as housing providers protect themselves and the willingness of so many fudge information as it becomes all-digital and easily modified.

This is playing out on the wider stage of what many call the “post truth” era. People split into polarized groups that fight non-stop over information none of them can reasonably trust or verify. But they all say it with such confidence that trust starts to look like a measure of how good the messenger’s performance was.

I had thought that blockchain tools and something like non-fungible tokens might evolve into a wider open trust mechanism but that didn’t happen. For governments who try to intervene in the wider trust model (think digital IDs, for example), they will face a great deal of resistance. It is perhaps true that people don’t trust their governments as much as they once did (if they ever did).

In the long-ago past, I imagine trust in institutions like media was implicit because people didn’t know any different. People were watching Walter Cronkite concerned with how John F. Kennedy was doing, not whether Cronkite was a shill for the left-wing. Much like a time when one could pay for groceries with a handwritten cheque, so few people imagined passing bad cheques. Well, until they did imagine it.

We have moved as a society into a place that requires true, open and reliable digital trust systems. These have to be built from the ground up to be unimpeachable (that may be impossible), and to create an environment where we don’t know any different but to trust the truth of the information it provides.

I know our tech institutions will solve this problem, but unfortunately it needs to be done now.