Future of Trust

Trust collapses at scale, but it doesn’t get rebuilt at scale. It comes back in small circles and places where the asymmetry can’t take hold. The ambient extraction economy doesn’t need to take over the world for this to matter, it just needs to drive enough people into withdrawal that your old playbooks stop working.

Ambient extraction is different. It’s a level of vulnerability and theft that registers more emotionally and psychically than it does economically, and that will tip the scales of culture and business.

And if you don’t feel it yet, you may be on the benefitting side of the asymmetry.

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,

If you’re building anything that requires trust, participation, or voluntary engagement from real people, you need to decide if you’re extracting or building entry.