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.

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

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,