Future of Trust

My job is helping people who are building the future understand the cultural and emotional systems shaping it and right now, the problem is we are still building for an economy of participation when we're entering an economy where participation itself has become the liability.

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

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.

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,