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

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Without trust in the decision-maker, trust in the process breaks down, and the only important question becomes, “Who decides?”

What can we trust? Why is the 'information ecology' so damaged, and what would it take to make it healthy? This is a fundamental question, because without good sensemaking, we cannot even begin to act in the world. It is also a central concern in what many are calling the "meaning crisis", because what is meaningful is connected to what is real.

With a few exceptions, by far the most important component of successful speech communities is that its moderators have faces . A core feature of bulletin boards, comment threads on blogs, and publications is that the boundaries of acceptable speech are enforced not by tech executives, the farcical Facebook Supreme Court,[xii] or distant buildings... See more

Reciprocal transparency. If you can see me, I should be able to see you. Not your marketing copy, but your actual ownership structure, how you make money, what you do with my data, who benefits from my participation. The asymmetry has to collapse. This is what Signal figured out early. If you’re going to ask people to trust you with their

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