mood: two coffees deep, the kind of clarity that's mostly just irritation with better vocabulary
Trust Used to Be Free
(Then we broke it. Then we sold the fix.)
There's a version of the internet I remember — and I know, I know, nostalgia is a liar, I know Web 1.0 had its own problems, I know I'm romanticising GeoCities pages with visitor counters and MIDI autoplay — but there's a version I remember where you could just... say things. And people either believed you or they didn't. And that was the system.
The system now is different. The system now is: nobody believes anyone, about anything, ever, and so we've built an entire economy around manufacturing the appearance of trustworthiness and selling it back to the people we made paranoid in the first place.
(Capitalism, baby. Break it. Sell the fix. Repeat.)
The Trust Industrial Complex
Verification badges. Trust scores. Reputation metrics. Blockchain "trustless" systems — and can we pause on that word? Trustless. They named it. They literally named the defining feature of their technology "we have eliminated the need to trust each other" and somehow this was the selling point. The pitch was: humans are fundamentally unreliable, so here's a cryptographic ledger to replace the handshake.
We didn't ask why humans became unreliable. We just built around it.
Here's a partial list of things that now require third-party verification that used to just... work:
- That you are who you say you are. Identity verification services. Know Your Customer. Biometrics. The blue tick economy. Your face is now a product that proves you exist.
- That you did what you say you did. Credential verification. Blockchain certificates. Digital receipts for everything. We need a distributed ledger to prove you attended a conference.
- That you're good at what you say you're good at. Review systems. Star ratings. Endorsement features on LinkedIn that nobody has ever taken seriously and yet somehow still exist.
- That your money is real. (That one's fair actually. Counterfeiting has been around since currency. I'll give them that one.)
- That you're a real person. CAPTCHAs. "Click all the traffic lights." We are identifying road infrastructure for free so that companies can confirm we have a pulse. The AI training data pipeline is a seperate rant.
How We Got Here (The Uncomfortable Version)
The standard narrative is: the internet scaled, anonymity enabled bad actors, trust broke down naturally. Inevitable. Growing pains. The cost of connection.
The actual narrative is: companies discovered that trust was a friction point, and friction points are monetisable. If you can make people distrust their own judgement — distrust reviews unless they're "verified," distrust news unless it's from an "authorised source," distrust each other unless a platform mediates the interaction — then you can insert yourself as the middleman. And middlemen charge rent.
Social media didn't just reflect declining trust. It accelerated it. Algorithmically. Because outrage drives engagement, and engagement drives ad revenue, and somewhere in that pipeline the concept of "maybe this person is telling the truth" got optimised out of the system in favour of "but what if they're NOT and wouldn't that make you ANGRY."
(The algorithm is neutral, they said. It just shows you what you want to see. What you wanted to see, apparently, was reasons to distrust everyone. Who knew.)
The Bit That Actually Bothers Me
It's not that trust systems exist. Some verification is genuinely useful. I like that my bank checks it's actually me before sending money to strangers.
What bothers me is the framing. The framing that this is progress. That we've "solved" trust with technology. That a 4.7-star rating is a meaningful substitute for knowing your neighbour. That a verification badge means anything beyond "this person or brand had the resources to complete an identity verification process."
Trust scores don't measure trust. They measure compliance with the system that measures trust scores. There's a difference. A meaningful one. And we've collectively agreed to ignore it because the alternative — actually building relationships, actually earning credibility through consistent behaviour over time, actually doing the slow unglamorous work of being reliable — doesn't scale.
And if it doesn't scale, it doesn't get funded. And if it doesn't get funded, it doesn't exist. Not in any way the economy recognises, anyway.
The Care Work of Trust
(Here's where it gets personal. Sorry. Or not sorry. The aesthetic is what it is.)
The people I actually trust — genuinely, not platform-verified trust, but trust trust — earned it in ways that no algorithm would recognise. Showing up. Remembering. Doing the thing they said they'd do. Doing it again. Not being interesting or optimised or verified. Just being there.
That's care work. And care work doesn't scale the way capitalism wants.
You can't put "consistently showed up for people during hard times" on a blockchain. You can't quantify "remembered the thing I mentioned three months ago and asked about it." There's no metric for "sat with me while I cried and didn't try to fix it."
These are the actual foundations of trust. They've always been the foundations. And they're invisible to every system we've built to "measure" it because they're slow and inefficient and deeply, stubbornly human.
So What
(I said I wasn't here for solutions. I meant it. But if you've read this far, maybe you're the kind of person who builds things. So.)
Maybe the question isn't "how do we build better trust systems." Maybe the question is "what did we break that made us think we needed them." Maybe some of the trust deficit isn't a technology problem. Maybe it's a we stopped investing in the conditions that create trust problem — stable communities, time to know people, public spaces that aren't monetised, institutions that haven't been hollowed out by people who privately think the concept of "public good" is quaint.
Maybe trust doesn't need a platform. Maybe it needs conditions. And conditions aren't a product.
(But try pitching that to a VC. "We're building conditions." "What's the TAM?" "The total addressable market is... human civilisation?" "Pass.")
I don't have a Trust Score for this piece. You'll have to decide for yourself whether any of it lands.
Probably won't.
Worth writing anyway.
