Future of Trust

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

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.

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.

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.

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,