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.

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

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,

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.