[GamChix] Fwd: FW: [Internet Policy] The Internet Has Altered the Meaning of “Truth” and “Trust”

[esther king]

 https://futurism.com/who-can-you-trust/
The Internet Has Altered the Meaning of “Truth” and “Trust”

As children, we were always told to avoid strangers. Yet today we’re
comfortable getting into their cars via Uber or Lyft, or staying in their
homes with Airbnb. As our enthusiasm in trusting one another has risen,
it’s declined when it comes to institutions, from banks
<http://news.gallup.com/poll/192719/americans-confidence-banks-languishing-below.aspx>
 to media outlets
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-30/facebook-stumbles-with-early-effort-to-stamp-out-fake-news>
 to governments
<http://www.people-press.org/2017/05/03/public-trust-in-government-1958-2017/>.
Why is this happening, and what does it have to do with the omnipresence of
technology?

This is the subject of a new book called *Who Can You Trust? How Technology
Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart
<https://www.amazon.com/Who-Can-You-Trust-Technology/dp/1541773675>*,
published on November 14 by PublicAffairs. Its author, Rachel Botsman, is a
visiting professor at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, and
one of the world’s foremost experts on trust. She recently chatted with
Futurism about what she learned about trust, why this shift is different
than others in the past, and how we avoid a dystopian future.

*This interview has been slightly edited for clarity and brevity.*

*Futurism*: Where did the inspiration for this book come from? You open
with the 2008 financial crisis, but I got the sense that this was just the
tip of the iceberg in terms of people mistrusting institutions.

*Rachel Botsman*: In 2009, I published my first book, *What’s Mine is
Yours,* about the sharing economy. The piece that always fascinated me was
how technology could enable trust between total strangers over the internet
to make ideas that should be risky, such as sharing your home or a ride,
mainstream. And so I immersed myself in understanding how trust in the
digital age really works. Through that research, I discovered that my
interest was much broader — I wanted to understand how we place our faith
in things, what influences where we place our faith, and what happens when
our confidence is undermined in systems such as the financial system or
political system. So I started to wonder whether the current crisis of
trust in institutions and the rise of technology facilitating trust between
strangers were connected in some way.

That led to what I think is the central idea of this book: that trust is
shifting from institutions to individuals. I felt that this was a timely
and important book to write because we’re already seeing the profound
consequences of this trust shift, from the influence on the presidential
election to Brexit to algorithms and bots.

*F*: Is trust being lost or is it simply shifting?

*RB*: I don’t like this narrative that trust is in crisis. In fact, it’s
dangerous because it only serves to amplify the cycle of distrust. Trust is
like energy — it doesn’t get destroyed, it changes form. You need trust in
society for people to collaborate, to transact – to even leave the house. A
society cannot survive, and it definitely cannot thrive without trust. For
a long time in history, trust has flowed upwards towards the CEOs, towards
experts, academics, economists, and regulators. Now that’s being inverted —
trust is now flowing sideways, between individuals, ‘friends,’ peers and
strangers. There’s plenty of trust out there, it’s just flowing to
different people and places.

It’s also false to say we need more trust. Of course, we can have too much
trust in the wrong people, in the wrong things. We can give our trust away
too easily.

Trust is like energy — it doesn’t get destroyed, it changes form.

*F:* Institutions are, of course, made up of people, which makes it kind of
funny that we’re less willing to trust those institutions. Where does that
break down?

*RB:* I think it’s an issue of scale, a feeling that organizations and
institutions beyond a certain scale lose their human-ness. It’s also a
problem when the people inside the organization feel like they’re serving
the system instead of the people. A huge trust problem takes hold when the
system becomes so large that there’s no way the intentions of the
organization, no matter how good their employees or their culture, are
aligned with their users or customers. You see that in the banking industry
— even if a particular bank is compliant and has a good culture and smart
employees, it’s really hard for consumers to look at that bank when they
come out with humongous profits and say, ‘Oh I trust your intentions are
aligned with mine.’

Graphic from Who Can You Trust? by Rachel Botsman

*F:* I was struck by your mentions of dystopian TV shows, novels, and
movies. Is there something about this moment that makes dystopia feel
particularly relevant?

*RB: *You ought to see my Netflix recommendations! We’re currently
experiencing a trust vacuum that arises when our confidence in facts and
the truth are continually called into question. A trust vacuum is created,
and that is dangerous. That vacuum is filled by people with agendas,
masterfully selling themselves as anti-establishment, and telling whatever
lie plays to the anti-elitist sensibilities currently felt by people. The
rise of the ‘anti-politician’ — from Nigel Farage to Donald Trump — is an
indicator that the biggest trust shift we’ve seen in a generation is
underway. In a vacuum, we become more susceptible and vulnerable to
conspiracy theories, to different voices that know how to speak to people’s
feelings over facts, to this new intoxicating form of transparency. Those
scratching their heads because the most qualified candidate in history lost
[an election] are overlooking a growing distrust of elites, the inversion
of influence and rising skepticism about everything — from the validity of
news to a deep suspicion of established political systems. I think people
are trying to understand the dystopia we are living through.

*F: *What makes this moment different from other moments of mistrust we’ve
had in the past?

*RB: *Of course, in the past we’ve had massive breaches of trust, such as
Watergate or the Tuskegee Study scandal. However, there are two things are
happening that make this moment unique. First of all, there’s a historic
decline in trust across all major institutions including charities and
religious organizations. It’s become systemic that people have just lost
their faith in the establishment and in the elite. And that’s become like a
virus that is spreading and being spread fast.

The second obvious point is that technology amplifies our fears, often
baselessly. Social media “weaponizes” misinformation creating digital
wildfires that spread anger and anxiety surrounding institutions. It’s also
much harder to keep misdeeds hidden or to try to cover acts up with PR
puffery. Take the Weinstein phenomenon that’s going on now — it illustrates
how fast one incident becomes a social crisis and then a movement.

*F: *Tell me a little about the Chinese social credit system. Before
reading the excerpt of that chapter
<https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion>
 of your book in *Wired UK*, I had never heard of it. What do you make of
it overall?

*RB: *The Chinese government has its social citizen scores (SCS) that are
voluntary now but will be mandatory by 2020. And then there are companies
in China such as Tencent and Alibaba that have their own scoring mechanism,
but these are different to the way we think of credit scoring. There’s an
important distinction between the government and company rating systems.

The interesting thing is observing how the government positioned the
citizen scoring — the economic rationale behind it, seeing how the reward
mechanisms were the first piece introduced, and then the penalties later
followed. For example, earlier this year more that 6 million Chinese were
banned from taking flights. Plus, the rating of Chinese citizens will be
publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine
their eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where their children can go to
school— or even just their chances of getting a date. It’s game-ified
obedience.

*F*: You made the connection to Western society, how we have versions of a
system like this though not quite so extreme. Does it seem likely to you
that this sort of thing will become more widespread to other systems and
other governments?

*RB: *Yeah, the hardest part about getting the trust scoring chapter right
is there is a tendency to view this system through a Western lens. To make
a quick judgement and conclude, ‘Well that’s never going to happen to us.
Only in China.’ But today it’s in China, tomorrow it could be in a place
near you. When you dig in and look at the level of surveillance going on in
the West, from governments to companies, and how much they know about us,
it is staggering. There are all kinds of ways we are being judged and
assessed that would make us extremely uncomfortable if we knew. Just look
at the outcry when we discovered the NSA was listening and collecting
information on regular citizens. The Chinese could make the argument that
at least their system is transparent. At least people know that they’re
being rated.

What *is* inevitable is that our identity and our behaviors will become an
asset. I guess the question is: Who will own the data? Hopefully we’ll get
to a place where it will be us as individuals so that we will be more in
control about how that data is used and sold, and that we can use it to our
benefit. As opposed to a tech company like Google, Amazon or Facebook or,
even worse, the government having that kind of control over our lives.

There are all kinds of ways we are being judged and assessed that would
make us extremely uncomfortable if we knew.

*F:* You mention tracking and surveillance. It’s certainly something that
came up a lot in the book, and that many of us have been thinking about.
What is the relationship between trust and surveillance?

*RB*: Well surveillance isn’t particularly good when it comes to trust.
Think of a personal relationship. If a partner is reading your messages or
tracking where you are all the time, that is a low trust relationship! I
define trust as ‘a confident relationship with the unknown.’ If you trust
surveillance, there must be faith that the tracking and data captured is
being used to your benefit. The tricky part is the black box, when you
don’t know what’s happening with your information, and you don’t trust the
system or the entity that is managing the data. That’s why we often hear
this cry ‘we need more transparency.’ But when we need things to be
transparent, we’ve given up on trust.

*F*: Where does artificial intelligence fit in this larger shift to
distributed trust?

*RB: *We’ve talked about trust shifting from institutions to individuals.
That individual might be a human, or it might be an artificially
intelligent bot. It is going to become increasingly difficult to be able to
tell if you’re interacting with a human or an algorithm. Deciding who is
trustworthy, getting the right information, and reading the right ‘trust
signals,’ is hard enough with human beings. Think of the last time you were
duped. But when we start outsourcing our trust to algorithms, how do we
trust their intentions? And when the algorithm or the bot makes a decision
on your behalf that you don’t agree with, who do you blame?

“Who Can You Trust?” by Rachel Botsman

*F:* What stands between our present day and the possibility of this
dystopian future you’ve hinted at? What could prevent this from going
totally awry?

*RB: *Tech companies will enter a new era of accountability. The idea that
the likes of Uber, Facebook, and Amazon are immune to regulation, tax, and
compliance, that they’re just these disruptive pathways that connect people
and resources, I think those days are over. There will be a sweeping wave
of regulation that looks at platforms’ responsibilities to reduce the risk
of bad things happening and also, how they respond when things go wrong.

Some institutions will use this period of change an opportunity — proving
to society that we need institutions, that they present norms and rules and
systems, and they can be trustworthy. We’re seeing this with the *New York
Times*; it has had its best year in terms of paid subscriptions. But
institutions can’t just say, ‘You should trust us.’ They have to
demonstrate that they’re trustworthy, that we can believe in their systems.

*F:* How do you think this larger shift in trust will shape us moving
forward? Shape how we spend our money and how we live our lives?

*RB: *It’s very easy to blame institutions, but we need to acknowledge that
as individuals we have a responsibility to think about where we place our
trust and with whom. Too often, we let convenience trump trust. For
instance, if we want high-quality, fact-checked journalism media, we should
pay for it and not get our news directly from Facebook. We’re all guilty of
this. I was talking to someone the other day who was saying how much he
hates Uber, how ‘It’s a devil of a company,’ I politely inquired whether
the app was on his phone, ‘Well I haven’t had a chance to delete it and
download Lyft,’ he rather defensively replied. It would take one minute [to
do that]. It’s kind of like the citizen who complains about the outcome of
an election but did not vote. So, my hope is that we use our anger
productively. We have more power than we realize in this trust shift that
feels so big and out of control.

*F: *So what’s the answer to the title of your book? Who *can* you trust?

*RB: *It’s a complicated question. It depends on the context; you can trust
people to do certain things in certain situations. I mean you can trust
Trump to tweet something ridiculous in the wee hours of the morning but not
to negotiate with North Korea. You can hopefully trust me to teach or to
write an article, but you shouldn’t get into a car with me because I’m a
terrible driver. When we talk about trust, we really need to talk about
context. I hope that, after reading my book, people are better equipped to
take a ‘trust pause,’ to ask: Is this person, product, company, or piece of
information worthy of my trust?

-- 
Christian de Larrinaga
cdel at firsthand.net
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