Bookworm: Who Can You Trust?

Trust and tech expert Rachel Botsman explores how trust is built, managed, lost and repaired in our digital age.

What’s this book about?

We’re at the tipping point of one of the biggest social transformations in human history. We’re moving from an era when we were inclined to trust big institutions, such as governments, banks and the media, towards a future where we’d rather place our confidence in total strangers, bots and digital currencies. But why?

In Who Can You Trust? Rachel Botsman – a renowned expert in the field of trust and tech, who writes regularly for Wired, the New York Times, The Guardian and Harvard Business Review, explores how trust is built, managed, lost and repaired in our digital age. And she raises some pertinent questions about what’s coming next for humanity in this vital but overlooked area.

What’s really changed and why does it matter?

‘Disruptive’ technologies and online companies such as Uber and Airbnb have changed how we live. But few of us stop to think about the implications their services are having on the way trust functions in our society.

What was once a very top-down relationship between big institutions and citizens now plays out across a horizontal sharing economy, between networked peers and through new technologies such as blockchain – a system Botsman describes as “distributed trust”.

Ratings systems are central to this evolution. When we are being rated by our peers, we know that betraying someone’s trust for short-term gain will show up in our ‘reputation trail’ and thus have negative long-term consequences. This makes us more trustworthy and, in turn, it allows us to put our trust in strangers – even with vitally important tasks such as babysitting.

But, if we’re getting rid of the bathwater, shouldn’t we at least consider the fate of the baby?

So, what are the upsides of ‘distributed trust’?

Just as paper money revolutionised trade, our new-found ability to trust strangers gives us access to more goods and experiences than ever before. We can even ride in their cars and stay in their houses!

The biggest example of this expanding market comes in the form of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba – a platform that connects buyers and sellers in a virtual marketplace trading everything from auto-rickshaw parts to Zen gardens.

Alibaba’s success has, to a degree, been determined by how well it adapted its business model to address the trust deficit that existed between sellers and buyers in the Chinese market. By holding transactions in escrow accounts until the buyer confirms receipt, Alibaba achieved something that globally dominant Amazon failed to do – trust. And the rest is billion-dollar-generating history.

But are there any downsides?

 Botsman cites the example of China’s 'social credit system' – a national 'trustworthiness' rating system for citizens. This has now been widely deployed, with the proposed aim of making it easier for people to make fully informed business decisions, that is a high social credit score would indicate that a party can be trusted in a business context.

As the system is still in a state of evolution, it’s impossible to say exactly what the negative consequences might be. However, they might include travel bans, reduced employment prospects,  and ‘naming and shaming’ for low scorers. And scores may be reduced by seemingly trivial acts such as smoking in a non-smoking zone or cheating on online video games. And all this creates an immense pressure to conform in order to maintain a high score.

What lessons can I take from this?

 We can’t turn back the clock.

Along with bringing more opportunities, new technologies and the internet have made life more transparent. This may place our own actions under greater scrutiny, but it also makes it harder for institutions to hide the greed and malpractice that once went on behind closed doors – and easier for organisations such as Wikileaks to expose them to public view.

Given all we’ve seen so far – from the Panama Papers to Partygate – our scepticism about the integrity of the rich and the powerful is arguably well founded. So maybe the people rated highly by our peers are indeed a safer and more trustworthy bet.

What am I most likely to say after reading this book?  

“What do the ratings look like?”

What am I least likely to say after reading this book?

“Nothing has changed – it’s all fake news.”