The data Trust Atlas is collecting shows trust collapsing across all three dimensions (interpersonal, institutional, governance). Your podcast explores why traditional trust mechanisms are failing.
Here's the pattern I see underneath the failures:
Modern civilization scaled by switching from direct verification (I know you personally) to delegated verification (I trust representatives/institutions/experts). This worked reasonably well when those intermediate validators maintained connection to verifiable reality.
But we've reached a scale where:
Verification lag - Institutions validate too slowly for the pace of change
Verification capture - Validators become self-interested rather than truth-seeking
Verification opacity - Process becomes too complex for anyone to audit
The debt-based trust architecture can't handle this. It requires faith in futures that keep not materializing.
The wealth-based alternative:
Build verification into the protocol itself. Don't ask "who do you trust?" - ask "what can you verify?"
Bitcoin demonstrated this for money. Git demonstrated this for code. Nostr is attempting it for social media. The question is whether we can extend this architecture to the domains Trust Atlas is measuring:
interpersonal relationships, institutional reliability, governance quality.
Not by eliminating trust - we'll always need to coordinate beyond what we can personally verify. But by changing the verification substrate from "trust authority" to "verify directly or verify the verification process."
Well said. We should record a conversation about it.
I would love to have a conversation about it, but it's part of a much larger framework so I don't know how ready I am to actually record a conversation about it yet. Your work on the Trust Atlas is fantastic, and aligns well with the chapter I'm building for Trust, the pillar of coordination enabling collective action.
Thread collapsed
Thread collapsed
