Future of Trust

Consent as infrastructure. Not buried in Terms of Service that no one reads, but built into the product itself. Opt-out by default. Clear value exchanges. The ability to leave and take your data with you. Apple did this with App Tracking Transparency when they made consent visible and revocable. Users opted out en masse because for the first time,

Reciprocal transparency. If you can see me, I should be able to see you. Not your marketing copy, but your actual ownership structure, how you make money, what you do with my data, who benefits from my participation. The asymmetry has to collapse. This is what Signal figured out early. If you’re going to ask people to trust you with their

Finite games over infinite extraction. People are exhausted by platforms that treat them as renewable resources. There’s a reason why people are willing to pay for newsletters, for Substacks and Discord communities, for anything that feels like a bounded exchange rather than an infinite scroll designed to keep them producing value. Substack

Minimize your surface area. Don’t click, don’t share data and don’t feed the algorithm. Find safer, under the radar places for genuine exchange.

When extraction becomes this pervasive, people opt out. They go dark and build walls around what matters to them.

And this is already happening. You can see it in the shift from public social media to close friends lists. In the rise of group chats, Discord servers, and paid Substacks. In people using fake names and burner accounts as default. In