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Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart
If you can't trust those in charge, who can you trust? From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. But this isn't the age of distrust -- far from it. In this revolutionary book, world-renowned trust expert Rachel Botsman reveals that we are at the tipping point of one of the biggest social transformations in human history -- with fundamental consequences for everyone. A new world order is we might have lost faith in institutions and leaders, but millions of people rent their homes to total strangers, exchange digital currencies, or find themselves trusting a bot. This is the age of "distributed trust," a paradigm shift driven by innovative technologies that are rewriting the rules of an all-too-human relationship. If we are to benefit from this radical shift, we must understand the mechanics of how trust is built, managed, lost, and repaired in the digital age. In the first book to explain this new world, Botsman provides a detailed map of this uncharted landscape -- and explores what's next for humanity.
299 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 14, 2017
About the author
Rachel Botsman
8 books219 followersRachel is the co-author of the upcoming book What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (Harper Business, October 2010). She consults, writes, and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through current and emerging technologies, and on how it will transform business, consumerism, and the way we live.
Rachel has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia. She graduated with a BFA (Honors) from the University of Oxford and undertook her postgraduate studies at Harvard University. She has consulted with leaders at the highest levels on the intersection between brand, innovation, and sustainability, both as an independent adviser and with top-tier agencies including Prophet Brand Strategy and What If Innovation. Rachel has also worked as a teaching assistant at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and acted as an editorial advisor on the book Creativity Inc.: Building an Inventive Organization, (Harvard Business School Press, 2003.) Her articles have appeared in a range of publications including Business Week, Brandchannel, Business21, and Worldchanging.
To build her experience in the public and political sectors, Rachel joined The William J. Clinton Foundation as a director. During her time at the Foundation she worked with celebrities, CEOs, government, media figures, and NGO leaders spearheading high-profile public-private partnerships including The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Nickelodeon, Rachael Ray, and the National Basketball Association. She was instrumental in building The Alliance for a Healthier Generation — a joint venture with the American Heart Association — into a multi-million dollar national program that mobilized broad-based support efforts to help combat childhood obesity.
Rachel has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia. She graduated with a BFA (Honors) from the University of Oxford and undertook her postgraduate studies at Harvard University. She has consulted with leaders at the highest levels on the intersection between brand, innovation, and sustainability, both as an independent adviser and with top-tier agencies including Prophet Brand Strategy and What If Innovation. Rachel has also worked as a teaching assistant at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and acted as an editorial advisor on the book Creativity Inc.: Building an Inventive Organization, (Harvard Business School Press, 2003.) Her articles have appeared in a range of publications including Business Week, Brandchannel, Business21, and Worldchanging.
To build her experience in the public and political sectors, Rachel joined The William J. Clinton Foundation as a director. During her time at the Foundation she worked with celebrities, CEOs, government, media figures, and NGO leaders spearheading high-profile public-private partnerships including The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Nickelodeon, Rachael Ray, and the National Basketball Association. She was instrumental in building The Alliance for a Healthier Generation — a joint venture with the American Heart Association — into a multi-million dollar national program that mobilized broad-based support efforts to help combat childhood obesity.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 89 reviews
November 12, 2020
I just started a business, and I thought the first and the most important thing that I must build is TRUST.
Trust comes first, so I started my journey with a book about trust.
Who can I trust and how can I build trust are two different questions, and you can't find an answer in the book for both of them, but instead it will help you understand what trust is. What is a trust leap, what is reputation, how trust is evolving from local and institutional to distributed, are we ready for the trust shift, who is trustworthy, how to become a trusted influencer and many more questions are answered in detailed explanations.
Trust comes first, so I started my journey with a book about trust.
Who can I trust and how can I build trust are two different questions, and you can't find an answer in the book for both of them, but instead it will help you understand what trust is. What is a trust leap, what is reputation, how trust is evolving from local and institutional to distributed, are we ready for the trust shift, who is trustworthy, how to become a trusted influencer and many more questions are answered in detailed explanations.
January 1, 2018
This is an interesting look at trust as a major shaper of human behavior, particularly in consumption habits, and how it has changed with the advent of apps like Uber and Airbnb. As societal trust in institutions like government and the press falls, there seem to be a variety of commercial entities that have managed to gain mass market trust, from getting into a stranger's car when they are our ride-sharing driver to purchasing illegal drugs online with cryptocurrency to staying in a stranger's apartment via Airbnb. Botsman explores a variety of business examples and academic studies on the subject of trust in a conversational tone that could easily be understood by the most technologically uninitiated person. While previous reviewers are correct that many of the cases she cites are available elsewhere, they are nicely aggregated and incorporated into the narrative here with minimal unnecessary jargon. If you follow tech news, many of these examples will be all too familiar, but reading about them presented through the lens of trust is thought-provoking. Some concepts, such as her surprise that high degrees of trust exist in drug-peddling darknet markets, would likely be more relatable to an older generation of readers than mine.
However, I would have appreciated a conclusion that pushed a bit more into an analysis of the large amounts of trust we now place in algorithms and tech companies. Botsman's statements that trust is a human concept ultimately and that we need to pay more attention to the reasons we place our trust in specific companies or services as technology shifts are no doubt true, but I wanted to come away with her insights into what that level of trust validation would mean, and I didn't find it.
I also thought it would have been interesting to take a more extensive look at dating apps, especially those that claim to depend upon "social proof" of some kind (The League, Coffee Meets Bagel) or algorithms (OKCupid). Botsman touches on online dating, but it is unique from other examples in that relationships should, at least in theory, be less commodifiable than an Uber ride or an Airbnb night. Peeple was provided as an example of an app that did not allow opt-outs, but I thought that this was a weak example given the outrage that the very premise of this app created, the watering-down that had to be done before it was released, and the fact that it still does not appear to have found a substantial user base. Lulu, an app that allowed women to give uncensored reviews of men that they could not originally opt out of, might have been another example of an app with a larger userbase that similarly commodified people into five-star ratings, but bizarrely found a mostly college-aged user base.
Ultimately, I think the degree to which you find the book revelatory will depend upon the amount you're already familiar with many of the concepts Botsman is discussing in the book. If you're new to most of the content, you may find it completely mind-blowing. I learned some new stories that I had not previously read about in detail, and enjoyed her strong writing, but expected something more revelatory than I encountered.
However, I would have appreciated a conclusion that pushed a bit more into an analysis of the large amounts of trust we now place in algorithms and tech companies. Botsman's statements that trust is a human concept ultimately and that we need to pay more attention to the reasons we place our trust in specific companies or services as technology shifts are no doubt true, but I wanted to come away with her insights into what that level of trust validation would mean, and I didn't find it.
I also thought it would have been interesting to take a more extensive look at dating apps, especially those that claim to depend upon "social proof" of some kind (The League, Coffee Meets Bagel) or algorithms (OKCupid). Botsman touches on online dating, but it is unique from other examples in that relationships should, at least in theory, be less commodifiable than an Uber ride or an Airbnb night. Peeple was provided as an example of an app that did not allow opt-outs, but I thought that this was a weak example given the outrage that the very premise of this app created, the watering-down that had to be done before it was released, and the fact that it still does not appear to have found a substantial user base. Lulu, an app that allowed women to give uncensored reviews of men that they could not originally opt out of, might have been another example of an app with a larger userbase that similarly commodified people into five-star ratings, but bizarrely found a mostly college-aged user base.
Ultimately, I think the degree to which you find the book revelatory will depend upon the amount you're already familiar with many of the concepts Botsman is discussing in the book. If you're new to most of the content, you may find it completely mind-blowing. I learned some new stories that I had not previously read about in detail, and enjoyed her strong writing, but expected something more revelatory than I encountered.
December 1, 2017
It’s basically a collection of other people’s research studies, startups, books, movies, articles, concepts, terms, and quotes. (The bulk of one chapter was actually spent retelling the plot of an episode of Black Mirror) There are also a *lot* of references to professors and directors at brand name universities or consultancies. (Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, Bain, McKinsey... you’ll hear from people at these places every few pages) Anything interesting was already written before and can be found online in someone else’s blog or book or article, and you probably already know most of the examples anyway. The rest was made up of personal anecdotes involving affluent/privileged experiences with a new app or tech service. It has nothing new to say and no new insights to consider. One thing I liked was the author’s definition of trust—that was original—but you’re given it before the first chapter even begins. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
December 19, 2017
Rachel took us on a rolling coaster from Bitcoin to drug distribution on Darknet, from China social credit to bots and robots, all to clarify the bold claim that we no longer put our trust on local or institutions, but we are moving to the 3rd phase of trust: Distributed trust - a change that can make the world-as-we-know-it on fire. A truly thought provoking book. However, the broad cover of many topics means that only the surface is scratched, and I would definitely wanna learn more about those topic.
January 19, 2018
Listened as an audiobook.
Narration was excellent. The book content is very good, but didn’t really offer me anything new. But then I have followed Rachel for some time on Twitter and read her previous book. It’s interesting and in my opinion the 2 chapters on BlockChain are the highlight of the book.
Narration was excellent. The book content is very good, but didn’t really offer me anything new. But then I have followed Rachel for some time on Twitter and read her previous book. It’s interesting and in my opinion the 2 chapters on BlockChain are the highlight of the book.
February 12, 2018
I first encountered Botsman when I read What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption and really enjoyed her insight. Plus, given that I work in an industry (public libraries) where collaborative consumption and sharing is baked into our DNA, Botsman's work held particular professional interest for me.
In "Who Can you Trust?" Botsman expands on her previous work by diving into the mechanisms that drive human trust. As a species we've gone from individual trust (we knew the reputation of all the people in our immediate tribe/village) to institutional trust (governments, authoritative bodies such as the church, the press, higher education, business, etc.) to the place that we find ourselves today where trust is distributed again amongst individuals but those contacts may be spread around the globe. As we see institutional trust fall apart (see also: election of Donald Trump), distributed trust is on the rise. But it's a messy game.
In China, starting in 2020, it will be mandatory for all Chinese citizens and businesses to have a publicly known, state-issued Social Credit System score. The theory is that a standard, uniform score of trustworthiness will reduce the friction of market-based transaction. That's the tentative upside. The glaring downside is that a person's trustworthiness score will be used in any number of ways that are Orwellian to the nth. Want to send your kids to a particular school? What's your SCS score? Want to get a visa? What's your SCS score? Want to get a rental car? What's your SCS score? And so on. And keep in mind that this is the state keeping the tally. Hard to be a dissident in such a scenario.
Botsman is excited about blockchain technology being the savior of trustworthiness and while she makes some good arguments, I don't feel like I'm familiar enough with the technology to even comment at this point. With one exception: technology always seems to be trickle-down. The poor and disenfranchised will, if history is any guide, be the last to benefit and be the first to be taken advantage of.
In "Who Can you Trust?" Botsman expands on her previous work by diving into the mechanisms that drive human trust. As a species we've gone from individual trust (we knew the reputation of all the people in our immediate tribe/village) to institutional trust (governments, authoritative bodies such as the church, the press, higher education, business, etc.) to the place that we find ourselves today where trust is distributed again amongst individuals but those contacts may be spread around the globe. As we see institutional trust fall apart (see also: election of Donald Trump), distributed trust is on the rise. But it's a messy game.
In China, starting in 2020, it will be mandatory for all Chinese citizens and businesses to have a publicly known, state-issued Social Credit System score. The theory is that a standard, uniform score of trustworthiness will reduce the friction of market-based transaction. That's the tentative upside. The glaring downside is that a person's trustworthiness score will be used in any number of ways that are Orwellian to the nth. Want to send your kids to a particular school? What's your SCS score? Want to get a visa? What's your SCS score? Want to get a rental car? What's your SCS score? And so on. And keep in mind that this is the state keeping the tally. Hard to be a dissident in such a scenario.
Botsman is excited about blockchain technology being the savior of trustworthiness and while she makes some good arguments, I don't feel like I'm familiar enough with the technology to even comment at this point. With one exception: technology always seems to be trickle-down. The poor and disenfranchised will, if history is any guide, be the last to benefit and be the first to be taken advantage of.
March 6, 2018
Review + personal highlights
Review
Botsman gives a detailed description of the shift of trust: from local to institutional to distributed trust. She gives clear examples of how technology can attribute in the process of determining someone's, or something's, trustworthiness.
Personal highlights
• Financial crisis was not the first and last, but it was a big nail in the coffin of institutional trust. Same for panama papers, Volkswagen scandal, tesco's horsemeat, etc.. p. 3
• Brexit = a symptom of trust shift: from the monolithic to the individualized. But it isn't the age of distrust, it's just a shift. p. 5-6
• Third biggest trust revolution in the history of humankind. From local to institutional to distributed. Other forms willl still persist, just a new dominant form. p. 7
• The explosive growth of the sharing economy is a textbook example of distributed trust at play. It's also why we are feverishly scoring and rating everything. p. 8
• Trust enables us to feel confident enough to take risks and to open ourselves up to being vunerable. p. 16
• Personaized trust: in a person. Generalized trust: trust we attach to an identifiable but anonymous group or thing p. 18
• Definition: Trust is a confident relationship with the unkown. p. 20
• Alibaba, Alipay, TrustPass: examples of how trust was key in the rise of online payments and alibaba. p. 22-23
• Trust leaps are important: they exapnd what is possible, what we can invent and who can be an inventor. Trust leaps extend the reach of our collaboration and creations, opening up new horizons of opportunity. p. 30
• Tuskegee experiment: doctors did terrible experiments on black people to learn about syphilis. This caused a distrust of black people in doctors, making them reluctant to go to the doctor and actually decreasing their life-expectancy of 5 months. p. 33
• Sy trust in so many elite intitutions collapses at the same time: 1) inequality of accountability (certain people are being punished for wrongdoing while others get a leave pass) 2) twilight of elites and authority (the digital age is flattening hierarchies and eroding faith in experts an dthe rich and powerful), 3) segregated echo chambers (living in our cultural ghettoes and being deaf to toher voices). p. 42
• Climbing the trust stack: first you have to trust the idea, then the platform, then the individual. p. 60
• The California Roll principle / Law of Familiarity: In the late '60ties people didn't liked sushi: too strange. Rolling sushi inside out + adding cucumber and familiair ingredients helped. Trust flows easilier if it is something familiar. p. 62
• The What's in it for me principle. The WIIFM factor. p. 68
• Trust influencers, p. 76
• When I get in a car with a stranger, is it the driver I am trusting? Have I placed some faith in Uber, the company, its team? Am I trusting the Uber brand? Perhaps I have cconfidence in the platform itsellf, the app, payments, rating system and its mysterious pricing algorithm? Some of the answers lie in the history of trust between people, companies and brands. p. 88
• With the dawn of social media in the twenty-first centruy, everything canged. Marketers were hit with a seisic shif tin the way trust worked with consumers. It became much harder for brands to exaggerate or make false claims, no matter how flashy their ads. p. 91
• Trust hierarchy of needs, from low to high: identity, security, safety, compatitbility, belonging. p. 93
• Trust is not the same as trustworthiness. Encouring generalized trust simply for the sake of creating a more 'trusting society' is not only meaningless, it's dangerous. For on ething, people are already inclined to want to trust blindly, particularly when greed enters the picturue. We have to look at trustworthiness. p. 112
• Trust signals: status, authority (white lab coat), endorsements of third parties. They change in the age of distributed trust to reviews and ratings for instance p. 115
• UrbanSitter: booking.com for babysitters: the most influential social connection was not the parents rating the sitters, but between the sitters: parents wanted to book the friends of the sitter they really liked. Trust lies within the group with the expertise (the sitters) rather than the group with a similar need (the parents). p. 121
• Trustwortiness is more important (more objective) than trust. Trustworthiness = Is this person competent? Reliable? Honest? p. 123
• Black online market as an example of distributed trust: Turns out, drug dealers care about their online brand and reputation and customer satisfaction as much as Airbnb hosts or ebay sellers. A typical vendor's page will be littered with information, including: how many tansactions they have completed; when the vendor registered; when the vendor last logged in; and their allimportant pseudonym. etc. Vendors put in real effort to demonstrate their trustworthiness. Tehy will even offer free samples p. 140
• Some vendors, eager to build brand, label their drugs as 'fair trade' or 'organic' to appeal to 'ethical' interests. Even 'conflict-free' drugs as brand. p. 141
• 'The real secret of Silk Road is great customer service.'p. 141
• Reputation is trust's closest sibling; the overall opinion of what people think of you. p. 144
• 'Padding feedback'= purchsing your own products on different account and give yourself positive reviews. p. 146
• Social credit score in China: we wil see the birth of reputation black markets selling ways to boost trustworthiness. p .156
• There's a compelling psychological reason people are willing to sign up to systems like this. Seame Credit has tapped into a fundamental aspect of what makes us human: the desire to push oursevles to be better. p. 157
• What will it do to our authenticity when we are tempted 24/7 to act nice to score? Distributed trust could also become networked shame, or turn life in one endless popularity contest. p. 164
• Mark Meadows, founder of Botanic.io: 'all bots should be required to ahve an authenticated identity so we can trust them. Bots need reputation. p. 189
• We are just beginning to udnerstand how anthropomorphism influences trust. It turns out that an autnomous car with a name and voice is perceived as more trustworthy more. p. 193
• Who is to be held responsible for autonomous machines? p. 202
• Blockchain: transfer of assets, supply chain certification, smart contracts. p. 226
• With Blockchain you have to trust the idea of the blockchain and the system. And given that most people lack the technical know-how to understand how the system really works, you have to trust the programmers, miners, entrepeneurs and experts who establish and maintain the cryptographic protocols. p. 230
• More than forty banks have a stake in a consortium called R3CEV to come up with shared standards for blockchains. p. 243
• A challenge: setting up trust systems that can adapt nd keep pace with an unprecendented rate of change. p. 253
• For the moment, at least, we remain in a mindset that wants a benevolent leader, an ultimate decision-maker to take charge and fix the problem. The positive is that all these processes are far more transparent than ever before, as well as under mass observation and open to comment from everyone with at stake in them. p. 254
• Challenge of distributed trust is that many new technologies, from bots to blockchains, either anonymize people or attempt to remove entirely the need to trust another human. Yet it's humans, with all our wonderful kinks and mutations, who make trust possible p. 255
• There is no simple answer to the question 'Who can you trust?' but we do know that ultimately it coes down to a human decidsion. Technology can help us make better and different choices, but in the end it's we who have to decide where to place our trust and who deserves it. p. 256
Review
Botsman gives a detailed description of the shift of trust: from local to institutional to distributed trust. She gives clear examples of how technology can attribute in the process of determining someone's, or something's, trustworthiness.
Personal highlights
• Financial crisis was not the first and last, but it was a big nail in the coffin of institutional trust. Same for panama papers, Volkswagen scandal, tesco's horsemeat, etc.. p. 3
• Brexit = a symptom of trust shift: from the monolithic to the individualized. But it isn't the age of distrust, it's just a shift. p. 5-6
• Third biggest trust revolution in the history of humankind. From local to institutional to distributed. Other forms willl still persist, just a new dominant form. p. 7
• The explosive growth of the sharing economy is a textbook example of distributed trust at play. It's also why we are feverishly scoring and rating everything. p. 8
• Trust enables us to feel confident enough to take risks and to open ourselves up to being vunerable. p. 16
• Personaized trust: in a person. Generalized trust: trust we attach to an identifiable but anonymous group or thing p. 18
• Definition: Trust is a confident relationship with the unkown. p. 20
• Alibaba, Alipay, TrustPass: examples of how trust was key in the rise of online payments and alibaba. p. 22-23
• Trust leaps are important: they exapnd what is possible, what we can invent and who can be an inventor. Trust leaps extend the reach of our collaboration and creations, opening up new horizons of opportunity. p. 30
• Tuskegee experiment: doctors did terrible experiments on black people to learn about syphilis. This caused a distrust of black people in doctors, making them reluctant to go to the doctor and actually decreasing their life-expectancy of 5 months. p. 33
• Sy trust in so many elite intitutions collapses at the same time: 1) inequality of accountability (certain people are being punished for wrongdoing while others get a leave pass) 2) twilight of elites and authority (the digital age is flattening hierarchies and eroding faith in experts an dthe rich and powerful), 3) segregated echo chambers (living in our cultural ghettoes and being deaf to toher voices). p. 42
• Climbing the trust stack: first you have to trust the idea, then the platform, then the individual. p. 60
• The California Roll principle / Law of Familiarity: In the late '60ties people didn't liked sushi: too strange. Rolling sushi inside out + adding cucumber and familiair ingredients helped. Trust flows easilier if it is something familiar. p. 62
• The What's in it for me principle. The WIIFM factor. p. 68
• Trust influencers, p. 76
• When I get in a car with a stranger, is it the driver I am trusting? Have I placed some faith in Uber, the company, its team? Am I trusting the Uber brand? Perhaps I have cconfidence in the platform itsellf, the app, payments, rating system and its mysterious pricing algorithm? Some of the answers lie in the history of trust between people, companies and brands. p. 88
• With the dawn of social media in the twenty-first centruy, everything canged. Marketers were hit with a seisic shif tin the way trust worked with consumers. It became much harder for brands to exaggerate or make false claims, no matter how flashy their ads. p. 91
• Trust hierarchy of needs, from low to high: identity, security, safety, compatitbility, belonging. p. 93
• Trust is not the same as trustworthiness. Encouring generalized trust simply for the sake of creating a more 'trusting society' is not only meaningless, it's dangerous. For on ething, people are already inclined to want to trust blindly, particularly when greed enters the picturue. We have to look at trustworthiness. p. 112
• Trust signals: status, authority (white lab coat), endorsements of third parties. They change in the age of distributed trust to reviews and ratings for instance p. 115
• UrbanSitter: booking.com for babysitters: the most influential social connection was not the parents rating the sitters, but between the sitters: parents wanted to book the friends of the sitter they really liked. Trust lies within the group with the expertise (the sitters) rather than the group with a similar need (the parents). p. 121
• Trustwortiness is more important (more objective) than trust. Trustworthiness = Is this person competent? Reliable? Honest? p. 123
• Black online market as an example of distributed trust: Turns out, drug dealers care about their online brand and reputation and customer satisfaction as much as Airbnb hosts or ebay sellers. A typical vendor's page will be littered with information, including: how many tansactions they have completed; when the vendor registered; when the vendor last logged in; and their allimportant pseudonym. etc. Vendors put in real effort to demonstrate their trustworthiness. Tehy will even offer free samples p. 140
• Some vendors, eager to build brand, label their drugs as 'fair trade' or 'organic' to appeal to 'ethical' interests. Even 'conflict-free' drugs as brand. p. 141
• 'The real secret of Silk Road is great customer service.'p. 141
• Reputation is trust's closest sibling; the overall opinion of what people think of you. p. 144
• 'Padding feedback'= purchsing your own products on different account and give yourself positive reviews. p. 146
• Social credit score in China: we wil see the birth of reputation black markets selling ways to boost trustworthiness. p .156
• There's a compelling psychological reason people are willing to sign up to systems like this. Seame Credit has tapped into a fundamental aspect of what makes us human: the desire to push oursevles to be better. p. 157
• What will it do to our authenticity when we are tempted 24/7 to act nice to score? Distributed trust could also become networked shame, or turn life in one endless popularity contest. p. 164
• Mark Meadows, founder of Botanic.io: 'all bots should be required to ahve an authenticated identity so we can trust them. Bots need reputation. p. 189
• We are just beginning to udnerstand how anthropomorphism influences trust. It turns out that an autnomous car with a name and voice is perceived as more trustworthy more. p. 193
• Who is to be held responsible for autonomous machines? p. 202
• Blockchain: transfer of assets, supply chain certification, smart contracts. p. 226
• With Blockchain you have to trust the idea of the blockchain and the system. And given that most people lack the technical know-how to understand how the system really works, you have to trust the programmers, miners, entrepeneurs and experts who establish and maintain the cryptographic protocols. p. 230
• More than forty banks have a stake in a consortium called R3CEV to come up with shared standards for blockchains. p. 243
• A challenge: setting up trust systems that can adapt nd keep pace with an unprecendented rate of change. p. 253
• For the moment, at least, we remain in a mindset that wants a benevolent leader, an ultimate decision-maker to take charge and fix the problem. The positive is that all these processes are far more transparent than ever before, as well as under mass observation and open to comment from everyone with at stake in them. p. 254
• Challenge of distributed trust is that many new technologies, from bots to blockchains, either anonymize people or attempt to remove entirely the need to trust another human. Yet it's humans, with all our wonderful kinks and mutations, who make trust possible p. 255
• There is no simple answer to the question 'Who can you trust?' but we do know that ultimately it coes down to a human decidsion. Technology can help us make better and different choices, but in the end it's we who have to decide where to place our trust and who deserves it. p. 256
February 28, 2018
Knyga prasidėjo visai neblogai – apie tai, kuo mes šiais laikais pasitikime ir kodėl tai svarbu. Tradicinis pasitikėjimas hierarchinėmis institucijomis stipriai mažėja, mes vis labiau tikime minios reitingavimu nei autoritetais: Uberio vairuotojų reitingai tapo svarbesni nei Vilniaus savivaldybės išduodamos taksi vairuotojų licencijos, kurios lyg ir turėtų suteikti tam tikrą kokybės garantiją. Dažniausiai viskas su šia tendencija gerai, jeigu tikime, jog minia yra protinga ir priima vidutiniškai gerus sprendimus. Gal ir maisto kokybės inspekcijos nebereikės, jeigu visi restoranai bus nuolat klientų reitinguojami.
Visgi yra čia ir problemų: sumažėjęs pasitikėjimas autoritetais visuomenėje priveda ir prie kvailysčių. Jeigu labiau pasitiki aplinkui šnekančiomis bobutėmis, o ne kompetetingais mokslininkais, gali lengvai imti galvoti, jog skiepai yra skirti visuomenės kontrolei ir tik farmacijos kompanijų pelnui didinti. Toks besaikis tikėjimas minia yra aiškiausiais populizmo skatintojas: aš valdžia nepasitikiu, todėl balsuoju už Trumpą, nes jis atrodo šneka panašiai kaip (ne itin protingi) kaimynai ir lygiai taip pat nepasitiki hierarchiniais autoritetais. Tokia tendencija dar blogesnė tuo, kad pasitikėjimo nėra ir žiniasklaida, o žmonės kuo toliau tuo labiau gyvena savo socialinių tinklų burbuluose. Jei tau atrodo, jog visi aplink šneka vėjus, ir tie vėjai visai priešingi elito (mokslininkų, žurnalistų, politikų ar šiaip protingų žmonių) nuomonei, tu labiau tiki savo socialinio burbulo nuomone nei kažkokiais ekspertais.
Knygos tema yra labai įdomi, tik gaila, kad pati knyga ganėtinai paviršutinė ir be gilesnės analizės. Su kai kuriais skyriais (ypač apie blockchain) galima nesutikti, bet bent jau paliestos temos priverčia pagalvoti, jei iki tol nesi apie jas susimąstęs. Dabar norisi apie pasitikėjimo problemas paskaityti ką nors gilesnio.
Visgi yra čia ir problemų: sumažėjęs pasitikėjimas autoritetais visuomenėje priveda ir prie kvailysčių. Jeigu labiau pasitiki aplinkui šnekančiomis bobutėmis, o ne kompetetingais mokslininkais, gali lengvai imti galvoti, jog skiepai yra skirti visuomenės kontrolei ir tik farmacijos kompanijų pelnui didinti. Toks besaikis tikėjimas minia yra aiškiausiais populizmo skatintojas: aš valdžia nepasitikiu, todėl balsuoju už Trumpą, nes jis atrodo šneka panašiai kaip (ne itin protingi) kaimynai ir lygiai taip pat nepasitiki hierarchiniais autoritetais. Tokia tendencija dar blogesnė tuo, kad pasitikėjimo nėra ir žiniasklaida, o žmonės kuo toliau tuo labiau gyvena savo socialinių tinklų burbuluose. Jei tau atrodo, jog visi aplink šneka vėjus, ir tie vėjai visai priešingi elito (mokslininkų, žurnalistų, politikų ar šiaip protingų žmonių) nuomonei, tu labiau tiki savo socialinio burbulo nuomone nei kažkokiais ekspertais.
Knygos tema yra labai įdomi, tik gaila, kad pati knyga ganėtinai paviršutinė ir be gilesnės analizės. Su kai kuriais skyriais (ypač apie blockchain) galima nesutikti, bet bent jau paliestos temos priverčia pagalvoti, jei iki tol nesi apie jas susimąstęs. Dabar norisi apie pasitikėjimo problemas paskaityti ką nors gilesnio.
May 13, 2019
Este livro veio na sequência dos estudos e leituras sobre blockchain e seus impactos nos negócios e na vida do cidadão. Não conhecia a autora, Rachel Botsman, ou melhor não me lembrava do nome dela. Assisti a uma palestra dela no TED, sobre confiança (trust). Que é o ponto principal da discussão sobre uso de blockchain (considerado "the protocol of trust"). A palestra é muito interessante, recomendo que assistam, se têm interesse no assunto. No livro, a autora explora essencialmente a questão da confiança ao longo dos tempos, até chegar na sociedade em rede, o que leva também a confiança em rede, distribuida. O que é um enorme desafio, afinal como ter confiança na internet e nas redes sociais? O livro é muito bom, leitura tranquila, muitas referências e discussões complementares, muito rico. Me levou a um entendimento e posicionamento mais elevados, mais sistêmico.
==========================
This book came in the wake of studies and readings about blockchain and its impacts on business and the life of the citizen. I did not know the author, Rachel Botsman, or rather I did not remember her name. I attended a lecture of her in TED, about trust. That is the main point of the discussion about use of blockchain (considered "the protocol of trust"). The talk is very interesting, I recommend that you attend if you are interested in the subject. In the book, the author essentially explores the issue of trust over time, until reaching the networked society, which also leads to trust in network, distributed. That is a huge challenge, how to have confidence in the internet and social networks? The book is very good, easy reading, many references and further discussion, very rich. It led me to a higher, more systemic understanding and positioning.
==========================
This book came in the wake of studies and readings about blockchain and its impacts on business and the life of the citizen. I did not know the author, Rachel Botsman, or rather I did not remember her name. I attended a lecture of her in TED, about trust. That is the main point of the discussion about use of blockchain (considered "the protocol of trust"). The talk is very interesting, I recommend that you attend if you are interested in the subject. In the book, the author essentially explores the issue of trust over time, until reaching the networked society, which also leads to trust in network, distributed. That is a huge challenge, how to have confidence in the internet and social networks? The book is very good, easy reading, many references and further discussion, very rich. It led me to a higher, more systemic understanding and positioning.
November 23, 2019
Who can you Trust? is all about the importance of Trust in today’s society. How many of us have seen a Facebook ad, we have no idea who the company is, but have made a purchase? We trust that just because a company is advertising on Facebook it’s legit. After having written that, it’s a bit bizarre to think that. This summer I went to San Fransisco and stayed in a strangers house (AirBnB), we contracted strangers to come to our house and drive us around (Uber) and we made decisions based on the recommendations of strangers (TripAdvisor). Many of the systems we use today are based on this notion of trust.
Rachel also describes how technology is helping us to trust, she talks about the “dark web”, Blockchain, artificial intelligence and the Chinese use of “social credit” all of which will become mainstream in the next five years. She does this in both an informative and an easy to read style.
Must admit I did feel that book was a little “intense” by enjoyed Rachel’s writing style and examples. Not many people have the family Volvo as the get away car in a bank robbery by the family nanny! No spoilers!
If you are interested in the social economics of the way society works or are in business or a business leader, this book is worth a read.
Rachel also describes how technology is helping us to trust, she talks about the “dark web”, Blockchain, artificial intelligence and the Chinese use of “social credit” all of which will become mainstream in the next five years. She does this in both an informative and an easy to read style.
Must admit I did feel that book was a little “intense” by enjoyed Rachel’s writing style and examples. Not many people have the family Volvo as the get away car in a bank robbery by the family nanny! No spoilers!
If you are interested in the social economics of the way society works or are in business or a business leader, this book is worth a read.
November 12, 2019
Jesus, santa claus, and uber are watching and judging you.
This book is definitely worth checking out. It goes into much more than just ridesharing stories gone wrong. How faith in established institutions has been undermined, what makes AirBnb possible, the pros/cons of ranking each other in ever increasing aspects of daily life, and the horrors of China's social credit score that show how dystopian it could be.
This book is definitely worth checking out. It goes into much more than just ridesharing stories gone wrong. How faith in established institutions has been undermined, what makes AirBnb possible, the pros/cons of ranking each other in ever increasing aspects of daily life, and the horrors of China's social credit score that show how dystopian it could be.
October 22, 2022
What carried me through the first quarter of the book was the hope that it would get better. What carried me through the remaining three quarters was reveling in how very bad it was, combined with my general interest in digital identity.
The book is a combination of anecdotes very loosely linked to trust online. Many of them are platitudes I've heard before, and the book didn't expand on my understanding of the situation. One example is China's social trust score, which was treated at an extremely shallow level, but is a critical concept.
There are practically no concepts, theories or models, apart from a few minimalistic and intellectually shallow ones.
Furthermore, the book is unnecessarily exhibitionist and I learn more than I wish about Rachel's drive to work and her grandmother's ring.
On the upside, it was an easy read and I didn't know a few of the anecdotes mentioned there. But besides that, I truly don't know why this book was written.
The book is a combination of anecdotes very loosely linked to trust online. Many of them are platitudes I've heard before, and the book didn't expand on my understanding of the situation. One example is China's social trust score, which was treated at an extremely shallow level, but is a critical concept.
There are practically no concepts, theories or models, apart from a few minimalistic and intellectually shallow ones.
Furthermore, the book is unnecessarily exhibitionist and I learn more than I wish about Rachel's drive to work and her grandmother's ring.
On the upside, it was an easy read and I didn't know a few of the anecdotes mentioned there. But besides that, I truly don't know why this book was written.
June 18, 2019
"It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round." - Joseph Stiglitz
February 14, 2021
Excellent read. Thought provoking!
June 20, 2019
Takes the reader from 0-60 in all matters trust—past, present and future.
Expertly researched and carefully cited—the author makes it easy to follow the breadcrumb trail.
Objective, insightful, page-turner.
10/10 – would recommend.
Expertly researched and carefully cited—the author makes it easy to follow the breadcrumb trail.
Objective, insightful, page-turner.
10/10 – would recommend.
December 7, 2019
The book is very easy to read and info is up to date. The author analyses trust in our daily life starting with uber, air bnb, Facebook and many other services and also dark internet. R. Botsman believes that trust is the most valuable thing for society, especially in the nearest future using artificial intelligence and robots, bitcoins and block chain.
December 6, 2023
Trust. Personal data misuse. Fake reviews.
Published in 2017.
“Jack Ma [Alibaba] … What he spotted early on was how technology could enable trust – make unknown sellers seem familiar to people.”
“The California [Sushi] Roll principle is based on the underlying rule of combining something new with something familiar to make it ‘strangely familiar’.”
“That’s the human tendency, to feel more strongly about a loss than a gain. The basic idea of ‘loss aversion’ is a concept first discovered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky…”
“[Uber, Tinder, etc. are] accelerated trust based on a few photos and a handful of words: shopping through a catalogue of faces. It’s trust on speed. And when we are in an accelerated mode of trust, we can be impulsive. It requires a conscious gear change to slow down and think twice about our decisions. … Efficiency can be the enemy of trust. Trust needs a bit of friction. It needs time. It requires investment and effort.” “Systems are becoming so seamless that we are not always fully conscious of the risks we are taking or the falsehoods we are sharing.”
“On UrbanSitter, when you go to book, you can see how many ‘friends’ have previously booked are in some way connected to that sitter. These connections make us feel more comfortable and confident about our decisions. They reduce the unknown. The collective wisdom of the crowd is enhanced by the wisdom of ‘friends’. It’s social proof on steroids.” “…trust really lies within the group with the expertise (the babysitters) rather than the group with a similar need (the parents).”
“It’s the same practice Amazon took a suit against in a landmark reputation case. On 16 October 2015, in Washington, DC, the company sued 1,114 individuals for selling positive five-star reviews to Amazon sellers and Kindle authors. All the defendants in the case were advertising their services on Fiverr, an online marketplace where freelancers offer to do minor tasks for a flat rate of$5. … But Amazon was smart enough to know it needed to crack down on fake reviews because they undermine the foundations of trust in online marketplaces. If reviewers and their reviews can’t be trusted, the whole system falls.”
“A team of researchers at Cornell University has developed software that can detect review spam. In a test on 800 reviews of Chicago hotels on TripAdvisor, the program was able to pick out the deceptive reviews with almost 90 per cent accuracy. In contrast, Cornell’s human subjects only managed to pick the fakes about 50 per cent of the time. … It turns out people are beautifully predictable when writing fictional reviews, using similar syntax, language, grammar, punctuation, too many long words and even similar spelling mistakes. The Cornell researchers found that deceivers user more verbs and long words than truth tellers, while the genuine reviewers used more nouns and punctuation.”
“On 14 June 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called ‘Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System’ In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair but it contained a radical idea. What if there was a national trust score that rated the kind of citizen you were?” … “For now, technically, participating in China’s Citizen Scores is voluntary. But by 2020 it will be mandatory. The behaviour of every single citizen and legal person in China (which includes every company or other entity) will be rated and ranked, whether they like it or not.”
“Under this system, something as innocuous as a person’s shopping habits become a measure of character. Alibaba admits it judges people by the types of product they buy. ‘Someone who plays video games for ten hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person’ … So the system not only investigates behaviour – it shapes it. It ‘nudges’ each of those closely monitored citizens away from purchases and behaviours the government does not like. … Sharing what Sesame Credit [owned by Alibaba] refers to as ‘positive energy’ online, nice messages about the government or how well the country’s economy is doing, will make your score go up. … And at [score of] 750, they get fast-tracked application to a coveted pan-European Schengen visa.”
“ ‘The central bank [of China] has the financial data from 800 million people, but only 320 million have a traditional credit history.’ According to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, the annual economic loss caused by the lack of credit information is more than 600 billion yuan, approximately $97 billion. … China’s lack of a national credit system is why the government is adamant that Citizen Scores are long overdue and badly needed to fix what they refer to as a trust deficit.”
“People trust a robot that is more human-like over one that is mute but significantly more efficient and reliable. ‘If you think machines are perfect and then they make a mistake, you don’t trust them again,’ says Frank Krueger, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist at George Mason University and an expert on human-to-machine trust. ‘But you may regain trust if some basic social etiquette is used and the machine simply says, “I’m sorry”.’ Such niceties are why some robots, like Bert C, are programmed to smile or frown.”
“… the launch of tools such as Facebook’s Bot Engine, a tool that makes it relatively easy for any developer to build their own customized bots. Within months of its launch in April 2016, 34,000 bots had been created.
“… an app called Tala, a company that makes loans to people without a traditional credit history in emerging markets including Kenya, the Philippines and Tanzania. … Approximately a billion people in the emerging markets have basic smartphones. … Tala can cull more than 10,000 data points from a phone in less than one minute to gauge a person’s ability and willingness to repay loans. ‘We look at behavioural things such as what are their current spending habits? Do they have consistency in their income? What other apps do they use?’ explains Siroya. … The size of a person’s network is a strong trust signal for potential borrowers. Turns out, if our phone calls last more than four minutes, we tend to have stronger relationships, and therefore may be more creditworthy. Similarly, people who communicate with more than fifty-eight different contacts tend to be better borrowers because they have a wider network to depend on. … Today, Tala is the fifth most used app in Kenya.”
Published in 2017.
“Jack Ma [Alibaba] … What he spotted early on was how technology could enable trust – make unknown sellers seem familiar to people.”
“The California [Sushi] Roll principle is based on the underlying rule of combining something new with something familiar to make it ‘strangely familiar’.”
“That’s the human tendency, to feel more strongly about a loss than a gain. The basic idea of ‘loss aversion’ is a concept first discovered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky…”
“[Uber, Tinder, etc. are] accelerated trust based on a few photos and a handful of words: shopping through a catalogue of faces. It’s trust on speed. And when we are in an accelerated mode of trust, we can be impulsive. It requires a conscious gear change to slow down and think twice about our decisions. … Efficiency can be the enemy of trust. Trust needs a bit of friction. It needs time. It requires investment and effort.” “Systems are becoming so seamless that we are not always fully conscious of the risks we are taking or the falsehoods we are sharing.”
“On UrbanSitter, when you go to book, you can see how many ‘friends’ have previously booked are in some way connected to that sitter. These connections make us feel more comfortable and confident about our decisions. They reduce the unknown. The collective wisdom of the crowd is enhanced by the wisdom of ‘friends’. It’s social proof on steroids.” “…trust really lies within the group with the expertise (the babysitters) rather than the group with a similar need (the parents).”
“It’s the same practice Amazon took a suit against in a landmark reputation case. On 16 October 2015, in Washington, DC, the company sued 1,114 individuals for selling positive five-star reviews to Amazon sellers and Kindle authors. All the defendants in the case were advertising their services on Fiverr, an online marketplace where freelancers offer to do minor tasks for a flat rate of$5. … But Amazon was smart enough to know it needed to crack down on fake reviews because they undermine the foundations of trust in online marketplaces. If reviewers and their reviews can’t be trusted, the whole system falls.”
“A team of researchers at Cornell University has developed software that can detect review spam. In a test on 800 reviews of Chicago hotels on TripAdvisor, the program was able to pick out the deceptive reviews with almost 90 per cent accuracy. In contrast, Cornell’s human subjects only managed to pick the fakes about 50 per cent of the time. … It turns out people are beautifully predictable when writing fictional reviews, using similar syntax, language, grammar, punctuation, too many long words and even similar spelling mistakes. The Cornell researchers found that deceivers user more verbs and long words than truth tellers, while the genuine reviewers used more nouns and punctuation.”
“On 14 June 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called ‘Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System’ In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair but it contained a radical idea. What if there was a national trust score that rated the kind of citizen you were?” … “For now, technically, participating in China’s Citizen Scores is voluntary. But by 2020 it will be mandatory. The behaviour of every single citizen and legal person in China (which includes every company or other entity) will be rated and ranked, whether they like it or not.”
“Under this system, something as innocuous as a person’s shopping habits become a measure of character. Alibaba admits it judges people by the types of product they buy. ‘Someone who plays video games for ten hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person’ … So the system not only investigates behaviour – it shapes it. It ‘nudges’ each of those closely monitored citizens away from purchases and behaviours the government does not like. … Sharing what Sesame Credit [owned by Alibaba] refers to as ‘positive energy’ online, nice messages about the government or how well the country’s economy is doing, will make your score go up. … And at [score of] 750, they get fast-tracked application to a coveted pan-European Schengen visa.”
“ ‘The central bank [of China] has the financial data from 800 million people, but only 320 million have a traditional credit history.’ According to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, the annual economic loss caused by the lack of credit information is more than 600 billion yuan, approximately $97 billion. … China’s lack of a national credit system is why the government is adamant that Citizen Scores are long overdue and badly needed to fix what they refer to as a trust deficit.”
“People trust a robot that is more human-like over one that is mute but significantly more efficient and reliable. ‘If you think machines are perfect and then they make a mistake, you don’t trust them again,’ says Frank Krueger, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist at George Mason University and an expert on human-to-machine trust. ‘But you may regain trust if some basic social etiquette is used and the machine simply says, “I’m sorry”.’ Such niceties are why some robots, like Bert C, are programmed to smile or frown.”
“… the launch of tools such as Facebook’s Bot Engine, a tool that makes it relatively easy for any developer to build their own customized bots. Within months of its launch in April 2016, 34,000 bots had been created.
“… an app called Tala, a company that makes loans to people without a traditional credit history in emerging markets including Kenya, the Philippines and Tanzania. … Approximately a billion people in the emerging markets have basic smartphones. … Tala can cull more than 10,000 data points from a phone in less than one minute to gauge a person’s ability and willingness to repay loans. ‘We look at behavioural things such as what are their current spending habits? Do they have consistency in their income? What other apps do they use?’ explains Siroya. … The size of a person’s network is a strong trust signal for potential borrowers. Turns out, if our phone calls last more than four minutes, we tend to have stronger relationships, and therefore may be more creditworthy. Similarly, people who communicate with more than fifty-eight different contacts tend to be better borrowers because they have a wider network to depend on. … Today, Tala is the fifth most used app in Kenya.”
April 15, 2021
Who Can You Trust? was an interesting look into social psychology and issues of social trust.
Author Rachel Botsman is a trust expert, author and lecturer at Oxford University. Her website notes that "she is passionate about teaching people how to think differently and challenge ideas around trust, humility and integrity."
Rachel Botsman:
Who Can You Trust? Covers a wide range of trust-related topics. Just some of what is covered here by Botsman include:
* Jack Ma; Alibaba
* Wikileaks
* 2003 invasion of Iraq
* 2008 financial crisis
* Sushi; the California roll
* Air BnB
* Self-driving cars
* 2016 mass shooting by an Uber driver
* The Silk Road
* China's Social credit system
* Blockchain technology: Cryptocurrencies; Bitcoin
The topic of social trust as it relates to society is an incredibly interesting one. And although I did enjoy this book, I found the writing here a tad on the dry side. This could be a subjective thing; as I'm fairly picky about how readable and engaging a book is. This one just didn't resonate with me as much as some other books I've read on this topic.
So while Who Can You Trust? was not terrible, it was not spectaculor, either. It was a fairly middle-of-the-road book that I'll rate as such.
3 stars.
Author Rachel Botsman is a trust expert, author and lecturer at Oxford University. Her website notes that "she is passionate about teaching people how to think differently and challenge ideas around trust, humility and integrity."
Rachel Botsman:
Who Can You Trust? Covers a wide range of trust-related topics. Just some of what is covered here by Botsman include:
* Jack Ma; Alibaba
* Wikileaks
* 2003 invasion of Iraq
* 2008 financial crisis
* Sushi; the California roll
* Air BnB
* Self-driving cars
* 2016 mass shooting by an Uber driver
* The Silk Road
* China's Social credit system
* Blockchain technology: Cryptocurrencies; Bitcoin
The topic of social trust as it relates to society is an incredibly interesting one. And although I did enjoy this book, I found the writing here a tad on the dry side. This could be a subjective thing; as I'm fairly picky about how readable and engaging a book is. This one just didn't resonate with me as much as some other books I've read on this topic.
So while Who Can You Trust? was not terrible, it was not spectaculor, either. It was a fairly middle-of-the-road book that I'll rate as such.
3 stars.
March 31, 2020
This book is without a doubt my favourite book in the series of books I read for SymSys Directed Readings in Social Informatics. It provides a fascinating and thought-provoking take on an element of human trust, a critical component of our society that is seldom explicitly recognized and often overlooked -- legal frameworks, as well as social, political and economic institutions seem to steal most of the limelight.
Amidst the glut of books on digital technology and their impact on societies, this book takes a novel approach. While most books expound in-depth on one singular or a narrow set of technologies or phenomena, such as Artificial Intelligence, or investigates the impacts of a single social media platform, this book starts from the perspective of trust, something exceedingly and exclusively human. It investigates how trust plays a key role in many aspects of society, not just interpersonal but crucially also in our social, economic and political systems, and how the shifting of trust exposes key dynamics and trends in our societies.
It also provides a historic view, as the author traces the evolution of trust in our societies from ancient civilizations to modern times, documents their impacts and social uses, and projects into the future. She frames the evolution of trust in a few stages -- beginning with localized trust within small intimate communities built on interpersonal relationships, to institutionalized trust across systems, to the future form of distributed trust, most prominently represented by blockchain technology, on the verge of revolutionizing our world.
A trend that is particularly profound is the decentralization of trust -- the shift of the trust away from established institutions, towards distributed and localized trust among interpersonal networks. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer in 2016, it is said that "a friend, or even a Facebook friend, is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader" (13). It seems the increase in trust in our personal contacts and network is matched by the general decline in trust in establishments, such as governments, judicial courts, public health entities, and large companies. It is interesting to ponder the reasons behind the divergence, and to investigate to what extent it is facilitated by the rise of platforms. While the platforms enjoy relative effectiveness in facilitating trust between strangers -- to the extent of sharing something as intimate as your homes and bedrooms -- something virtually unthinkable a few years before the rise of the sharing economy, they are also instrumental in acting as a key check and balance against establishments.
Platforms themselves facilitate trust between strangers due to their abilities to encourage trustworthy behaviour. For example, the trust that is "represented in quantitative metrics, such as reviews and ratings" (88) by service providers (eg. Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts) provide an incentive for them to ensure the quality of their service to whichever customer they are serving at any one time. On the other hand, institutional trust is on the decline because problematic institutions and their leaders at their helm and their wrongdoings are more likely to be exposed and made public quickly (34), as cases like the exposé of the infamous scandals of Panama Papers and Cambridge Analytica have proven. As opposed to the highly networked society now, in the past, it was "much easier to hide wrongdoings, such as Tuskegee, for years, even decades", maintaining the veneer of reputation for institutions, allowing them to garner public trust.
The topic of trust is also becoming increasingly relevant in the current pandemic situation across the world. Amidst the extraordinary upheaval of the social, economic and political systems, and while we are grappling with the absurdities of a 'new normal', it would be interesting to see how trust among groups would be affected. For example, does the public now have increased levels of trust towards establishments and institutions, due to the fact that they inevitably are subjected to greater reliance towards governments' action and provision in crisis time, as well as greater awareness and dependence on the public health systems? Do they experience lower levels of interpersonal trust due to the fear of strangers as virus carriers and the risk of virus contagion? Or are there higher levels of interpersonal trust due to the great levels of community self-help and mutual aid networks going on in these challenging times? What is the effect of the steep decline in physical connections and diminishing of in-person gatherings, and the amplification of our online selves and ballooning influence of online platforms?
Amidst the glut of books on digital technology and their impact on societies, this book takes a novel approach. While most books expound in-depth on one singular or a narrow set of technologies or phenomena, such as Artificial Intelligence, or investigates the impacts of a single social media platform, this book starts from the perspective of trust, something exceedingly and exclusively human. It investigates how trust plays a key role in many aspects of society, not just interpersonal but crucially also in our social, economic and political systems, and how the shifting of trust exposes key dynamics and trends in our societies.
It also provides a historic view, as the author traces the evolution of trust in our societies from ancient civilizations to modern times, documents their impacts and social uses, and projects into the future. She frames the evolution of trust in a few stages -- beginning with localized trust within small intimate communities built on interpersonal relationships, to institutionalized trust across systems, to the future form of distributed trust, most prominently represented by blockchain technology, on the verge of revolutionizing our world.
A trend that is particularly profound is the decentralization of trust -- the shift of the trust away from established institutions, towards distributed and localized trust among interpersonal networks. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer in 2016, it is said that "a friend, or even a Facebook friend, is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader" (13). It seems the increase in trust in our personal contacts and network is matched by the general decline in trust in establishments, such as governments, judicial courts, public health entities, and large companies. It is interesting to ponder the reasons behind the divergence, and to investigate to what extent it is facilitated by the rise of platforms. While the platforms enjoy relative effectiveness in facilitating trust between strangers -- to the extent of sharing something as intimate as your homes and bedrooms -- something virtually unthinkable a few years before the rise of the sharing economy, they are also instrumental in acting as a key check and balance against establishments.
Platforms themselves facilitate trust between strangers due to their abilities to encourage trustworthy behaviour. For example, the trust that is "represented in quantitative metrics, such as reviews and ratings" (88) by service providers (eg. Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts) provide an incentive for them to ensure the quality of their service to whichever customer they are serving at any one time. On the other hand, institutional trust is on the decline because problematic institutions and their leaders at their helm and their wrongdoings are more likely to be exposed and made public quickly (34), as cases like the exposé of the infamous scandals of Panama Papers and Cambridge Analytica have proven. As opposed to the highly networked society now, in the past, it was "much easier to hide wrongdoings, such as Tuskegee, for years, even decades", maintaining the veneer of reputation for institutions, allowing them to garner public trust.
The topic of trust is also becoming increasingly relevant in the current pandemic situation across the world. Amidst the extraordinary upheaval of the social, economic and political systems, and while we are grappling with the absurdities of a 'new normal', it would be interesting to see how trust among groups would be affected. For example, does the public now have increased levels of trust towards establishments and institutions, due to the fact that they inevitably are subjected to greater reliance towards governments' action and provision in crisis time, as well as greater awareness and dependence on the public health systems? Do they experience lower levels of interpersonal trust due to the fear of strangers as virus carriers and the risk of virus contagion? Or are there higher levels of interpersonal trust due to the great levels of community self-help and mutual aid networks going on in these challenging times? What is the effect of the steep decline in physical connections and diminishing of in-person gatherings, and the amplification of our online selves and ballooning influence of online platforms?
June 1, 2018
If China adopts the national rating credit system for each individual, it is going to become a totalitarian state — with no freedom to express their views or forced to be responsible for views of their comrades. This is like Orwell’s 1984.
Trusting companies like Uber and Airbnb based on rating system is a fair point but it still does not explain the trust (or lack thereof) in material posted on other social media websites. Most of the time it reflects the subjective mood or views of an individual. Yes, being proactive is an idea but can be effective only if you have the knowledge on how to verify information. Should the websites take responsibility for fake news getting viral or false advertisements?
The book failed to address properly why technology is driving us apart. From kids playing together in playgrounds in the 90s to kids busy with their mini screens these days, technology has resulted in lack of social interactions in all spheres of life. I was expecting some more scientific analysis about that.
And finally, yes, blockchain technology is promising but how would it affect our right to privacy in future?
Overall, good points but a little more analysis and personal opinions of the author would have made it better.
Trusting companies like Uber and Airbnb based on rating system is a fair point but it still does not explain the trust (or lack thereof) in material posted on other social media websites. Most of the time it reflects the subjective mood or views of an individual. Yes, being proactive is an idea but can be effective only if you have the knowledge on how to verify information. Should the websites take responsibility for fake news getting viral or false advertisements?
The book failed to address properly why technology is driving us apart. From kids playing together in playgrounds in the 90s to kids busy with their mini screens these days, technology has resulted in lack of social interactions in all spheres of life. I was expecting some more scientific analysis about that.
And finally, yes, blockchain technology is promising but how would it affect our right to privacy in future?
Overall, good points but a little more analysis and personal opinions of the author would have made it better.
June 25, 2019
A great read. One of my favorite quotes from the book is "Reputation will be the currency that says you can trust me" Rachel Botsman gives some great advice on how trust has and is changing. She does a good job of explaining why Uber and Airbnb have become synonymous with trust leaps which is a confident relationship with the unknown and the way trust functions in our society. Both millennials and their parents will enjoy this book. We all have ideas about trust and I appreciate how she tackles them and lets the reader use his or her own judgment. She includes so many funny stories about things that are familiar to us like Facebook and Netflix, but she also introduces us to new concepts such as BlaBla Car where you can choose to ride with a stranger, but it based on how much they will talk during the long ride. Very enjoyable book I recommend it.
July 26, 2019
3.5 stars = this was an enjoyable read
A pop-science book that discusses how trust in the digital era has changed and presents varied examples of such how trust can be established and actually work. It does not, however, answer the question it poses: Who can you trust? I expected the author to address and answer to the overall feeling of distrust and disillusionment among many of us with regards to politics, climate change and inequality, yet this topic of distrust towards the rich and the politicians and countries as a whole, albeit present in the blurb, is not addressed. Again, the book basically presents varied examples that deal with the topic of consumer trust, and it is an enjoyable, easy pop-science read. I'd expect more depth, but it was rather cohesive and interesting as food for thought.
A pop-science book that discusses how trust in the digital era has changed and presents varied examples of such how trust can be established and actually work. It does not, however, answer the question it poses: Who can you trust? I expected the author to address and answer to the overall feeling of distrust and disillusionment among many of us with regards to politics, climate change and inequality, yet this topic of distrust towards the rich and the politicians and countries as a whole, albeit present in the blurb, is not addressed. Again, the book basically presents varied examples that deal with the topic of consumer trust, and it is an enjoyable, easy pop-science read. I'd expect more depth, but it was rather cohesive and interesting as food for thought.
October 27, 2018
A must read on the Trust landscape - blockchain, cryptocurrency and past sins
This book is tremendously valuable in simply the indexing of Botsman’s sources. Wow! Add to that a well-told story of the nature of trust and how it has changed as society and its technologies have changed and you have this thought leading, and thought provoking masterwork. While very well researched it is not an “academic” piece but a moving read, full of excellent examples told as stories that is well suited to both experts and the curious. It will be on the Required Reading List for my business unit, and I’ll highly recommend it outside of my circle, particularly when people ask me, “So what exactly is it you do for a living?”
This book is tremendously valuable in simply the indexing of Botsman’s sources. Wow! Add to that a well-told story of the nature of trust and how it has changed as society and its technologies have changed and you have this thought leading, and thought provoking masterwork. While very well researched it is not an “academic” piece but a moving read, full of excellent examples told as stories that is well suited to both experts and the curious. It will be on the Required Reading List for my business unit, and I’ll highly recommend it outside of my circle, particularly when people ask me, “So what exactly is it you do for a living?”
October 11, 2020
Saggio di divulgazione molto godibile e nello stesso tempo approfondito sul tema dell'incidenza nelle nostre vite (e nei nostri comportamenti personali e sociali) della tecnologia: social network, servizi della sharing economy, blockchain.
Il tema centrale, come suggerisce il titolo, è quello della fiducia che l'autrice sostiene oggi essere 'distribuita' tra le persone anche sconosciute che si connettono attraverso la tecnologia.
Botsman ci invita a riflettere sui vantaggi dell'avere fiducia nei sistemi tecnologici e nel contempo sulla necessità di riflettere un momento in più prima di dare fiducia ad un nuovo servizio on line, per valutare i rischi per la nostra riservatezza e i nostri diritti fondamentali (anche di non discriminazione).
Il tema centrale, come suggerisce il titolo, è quello della fiducia che l'autrice sostiene oggi essere 'distribuita' tra le persone anche sconosciute che si connettono attraverso la tecnologia.
Botsman ci invita a riflettere sui vantaggi dell'avere fiducia nei sistemi tecnologici e nel contempo sulla necessità di riflettere un momento in più prima di dare fiducia ad un nuovo servizio on line, per valutare i rischi per la nostra riservatezza e i nostri diritti fondamentali (anche di non discriminazione).
February 23, 2018
This book reads in the same fast pace of the kind of disruptive industries it chronicles. The author leaves very few stones unturned examining the dynamic evolution of trust-something we passively think about all the time but rarely actively reflect on it as our digital lives continue to grow and grow, sometimes at the risk of trusting too much, as Rachel points out. For those who research these industries for a living there might not be any “Aha!” moments but there enough stories and quips from people doing cool things to keep you glued. There is definitely a US/Western European centric book but still balanced by some reporting from Asia and Africa.
November 15, 2018
This book shares a wide range of fascinating arenas in modern life where trust is critical and is being radically reformed. Remember when it was a truism not to get in a car with strangers? Uber changes who we trust. Remember when we trusted banks with our money above all else? The meltdown of 2007-2008 and blockchain are changing that. From dating to investing, the world runs on trust and is radically changing.
But best of all, this book doesn't just outline all the ways that our trust mechanisms are changing. This book offers insights into the big ideas behind them and even has some thoughtful predictions and recommendations.
But best of all, this book doesn't just outline all the ways that our trust mechanisms are changing. This book offers insights into the big ideas behind them and even has some thoughtful predictions and recommendations.
September 22, 2019
Tämä kirja pitäisi olla jokasen sellaisen luettavana, joka tekee töitä ihmisten parissa. Eli käytännössä aivan jokaisen. Kirja kuvaa loistavalla tavalla ja hyvin yksityiskohtaisesti, miten luottamus ihmisten kesken rakentuu ja miten se on kehittynyt tähän päivään saakka. Tämän jälkeen kirja keskittyy hajautetun luottamuksen teemaan ja luottamuksen rakentumiseen niin ajassamme kuin tulevaisuudessakin. Kirja antaa loistavia esimerkkejä siitä, miksi hajautetun luottamuksen yritykset Uber, AirBnB ym. menestyvät ja miten herkkä luottamus on menettää jopa näissä, vaikka itse yritys ei suoraan voisi vaikuttaa. Kirja on helppolukuinen teos ja siksi myös helppo suositella.
March 2, 2018
An easy read. A good introduction to the concept. Adds nothing to the debate that is new though.
Crucially it lacks both a reliable argument (says distributed trust is the future jet fails to reconcile the problem she herself acknowledges that distributed trust breaks down when things go wrong) and much to say that is new. A lot of the trust models are old and while linguists may say that trust and trustworthiness are different recent research would seem to indicate that people are unable to answer how when asked.
Crucially it lacks both a reliable argument (says distributed trust is the future jet fails to reconcile the problem she herself acknowledges that distributed trust breaks down when things go wrong) and much to say that is new. A lot of the trust models are old and while linguists may say that trust and trustworthiness are different recent research would seem to indicate that people are unable to answer how when asked.
May 4, 2018
Rachel Botsman did a great work analysing the current distributed networks and which challenges we face and will be soon facing in our society. This book opened my knowledge to an aspect in technology which I hadn't thought about before. The socialisation and trust necessary to make the leap in order to accept a new service is so inherent that we don't actually think about it much.
I highly recommend this book for its fascinating content, conscientious analysis and friendly way that Rachel addresses her readers. On my top 30 for sure!
I highly recommend this book for its fascinating content, conscientious analysis and friendly way that Rachel addresses her readers. On my top 30 for sure!
October 12, 2018
I didn't really get excited about the introduction of this book. Maybe the topic is just not for me, or more exactly, it's not my priority right now.
I may take the time to get into it later on.
I'm trying to guess where it's going. Something like:
Trust is the pillar of evolution, without trust, we wouldn't have evolved, with adopting new technologies as they emerged.
With new technologies, and the latest blockchain revolution, a new chapter of trust is opening, that will radically change and transform our society.
I may take the time to get into it later on.
I'm trying to guess where it's going. Something like:
Trust is the pillar of evolution, without trust, we wouldn't have evolved, with adopting new technologies as they emerged.
With new technologies, and the latest blockchain revolution, a new chapter of trust is opening, that will radically change and transform our society.
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