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- Herausgeber: Melville House UK
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: The FUTURES Series
- Sprache: Englisch
A revealing exploration into how trust defines our lives, how it can be won and lost, and what its future might look like, in this fascinating addition to Melville House UK's new FUTURES series. In a society battered by economic, political, cultural and ecological collapse, where do we place our trust, now that it is more vital than ever for our survival? How has that trust – in our laws, our media, our governments – been lost, and how can it be won back? Examining the police, the rule of law, artificial intelligence, the 21st century city and social media, Ros Taylor imagines what life might be like in years to come if trust continues to erode. Have conspiracy theories permanently damaged our society? Will technological advances, which require more and more of our human selves, ultimately be rejected by future generations? And in a world fast approaching irreversible levels of ecological damage, how can we trust the custodians of these institutions to do the right thing – even as humanity faces catastrophe?
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Contents
Foreword
Love, if you believe the stories, is the supreme force that makes life bearable. ‘We must love one another or die,’ wrote W. H. Auden as the Second World War began. When the bombs start falling, humans naturally turn to the most fundamental and powerful of emotions. But it is not love that lets people save money in a bank. It is not love that means a police officer can carry a Taser or a gun. It is not love that allows them to stay calm as anaesthesia flows into a vein; it is trust.
I began to think properly about trust when I was involved in a project at the London School of Economics called Truth, Trust and Technology, which looked at the crisis in public information. It was two decades after I had started work at something called the New Media Lab, which was charged with giving The Guardian newspaper an online presence. We were regarded with some mistrust by many of the newspaper journalists, who thought we were not proper reporters, and feared that the paper would sell fewer copies as people read it online. They were right. Yet slowly, inevitably and sometimes painfully, The Guardian became, first and foremost, a website. It was an early lesson in how new technology can create wholly new relationships, even as it transforms institutions and habits that were thought to be untouchable.
Newspapers are traditionally scrappy, cynical places. The Guardian felt it was different. For many years it has been rated as the most trustworthy newspaper in Britain.1 I knew not everyone liked it – to its detractors, the paper gave off an air of intolerably self-righteous smugness – but I was proud to work there. It feels good to be trusted. Yet there is no escaping it: my profession is distrusted by nearly half the population and, frankly, I understand why.2 Good journalists are driven by a desire to uncover the truth about society. But many fall prey to the pitfalls of journalism: the fact that your proprietor is usually more interested in viewing figures, clicks or sales than investigative reporting; the knowledge of what they do and don’t want to hear, and the need to tailor your work accordingly; and the difficulty of getting at a version of the truth on deadline and to the satisfaction of your viewers, readers or listeners.
Asked if they want journalists to tell the truth, people will say they do. But what they often prefer to turn to is the version of the truth that best reflects their instincts and preferences. This is as true of readers as it is of media proprietors, and can be just as serious a problem on the left as it is on the right. Trust, then, is not always a matter of trusting someone to tell you the truth. Sometimes it is simply about delivering on a promise to make sense of the world – to deliver what feel like fundamental truths, untrammelled by the demands of accuracy. The satirist Stephen Colbert dubbed it truthiness.3 How else would it be possible for Donald Trump to launch an app called Truth Social? (This is one of the reasons why the question ‘Do you trust X?’, which pollsters ask with increasing frequency, tells us only a partial story about trust. I trust X to do this but not that; I trust her to console me, but not necessarily to tell me the whole truth; I understand his motives, and that’s enough for me. I quote plenty of these stats about trust in this book because they reveal shifts in public opinion that tell us something about the direction of society, but at their heart they try to quantify a sense of the intangible. I’m sorry to say this, but don’t always take them on trust.)
More hearteningly, trust can also be a powerful force for good in politics and journalism. It gives a reporter or leader the authority to deliver news that an audience doesn’t want to hear. It creates the right conditions for empathy – the glue that holds societies together, especially unequal ones, where lived experiences are so different.
This ability to inspire personal loyalty is the most sought-after quality in politics. One of the most powerful things one person can say to another is simply: I trust you. Yet very often we need to delegate that judgment to someone, or something, that’s better able to make it. Sometimes that’s a government. Increasingly, it’s a tech company. In Britain, the NHS is a symbol of the trust we place in medicine and in the ability of the state to look after us. But in the past decade we have experienced a series of crises that have shaken people’s faith in the ability of governments to make the right decisions quickly and fairly. Now we face probably the biggest crisis of all – the climate emergency – which will test their legitimacy even further.
In the future, we are going to delegate more of our trust to artificial intelligence. And while sometimes that may be cheap, fast and even necessary, we should think very carefully about the repercussions of those decisions. Who do we blame when things go wrong? How many of us will truly be able to understand how an AI is weighing up the data we give it? Are we using AI as an ethical cop-out for decisions we’d just rather not have to make ourselves?
We spend more and more of our time in virtual and quasi-virtual spaces, where we’re forced to establish credibility and trust quickly. In these places, the things that define us in the real world will often vanish, and we can build new, free-floating identities. And we are developing ever more sophisticated ways of deceiving each other, many of which are extremely profitable. That doesn’t only mean online fraud: we need to pay attention to the huge profits to be made in the attention economy, and how it is transforming politics as much as, say, the beauty industry.
None of this means that we’ll become less capable of trust. But the things in which we place our trust are going to change. Democracies may become less attractive than a surveillance state that feels secure. The authority of rights-based law will be challenged, because much of it was written in a pre-digital world and because we enforce it in ways that favour the better-off. The media will have to compete with algorithms that will become steadily better at interpreting the world in ways that people find compelling. The police, who have traditionally acted as a bridge between the public and the law, will be confronted with crimes they are ill-equipped to tackle and subjected to tests of integrity which many will fail.
What will this new social contract look like? In this book, I try to avoid too many dire warnings and prognostications. (At the back of my mind hovered Life of Brian’s Bloody Boring Prophets, which still cracks me up on the twentieth viewing.)*If we carry on doing this bad thing, even worse things will happen is not, when repeated often, a very compelling narrative. And I take for granted that writing about the future is bound to reveal more about the preoccupations of the present than it can reliably tell us about what’s to come. Nor, in a short book, did I have space to explore some trust-based relationships, such as those between doctors and their patient, teachers and pupils, or between colleagues like soldiers or football players – fascinating though these are. Instead, I trace how artificial intelligence and the metaverse are transforming ideas about trust, and why the way that we enforce the law and underfund the legal system has eroded people’s faith in its fairness. The COVID-19 pandemic showed how fragile societal trust can be and has lessons for the way we handle other emergencies, especially global heating. And I imagine how these upheavals will bear on the lives of a few people living between now and the 2040s.
But first we need to understand the very first thing in which people trusted – and how, as they fought less and traded more, they started to develop sophisticated ways of establishing whether they could put their confidence in each other.
Notes
1. ‘Guardian judged to be most trustworthy newspaper’ (20 January 2005), https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jan/20/theguardian. pressandpublishing; ‘The Guardian is most trusted by its readers’ (13 August 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/aug/13/the-guardian-is-most-trusted-by-its-readers-among-uk-newspapers-finds-ofcom
2. Edelman Trust Barometer 2023, https://www.edelman.com/trust/2023/trust-barometer
3. ‘Truthiness voted 2005 Word of the Year by American Dialect Society’ (6 January 2006), https://americandialect.org/Words_of_the_Year_2005.pdf
* ‘The whore of Babylon shall ride forth on a three-headed serpent, and throughout the lands, there’ll be a great rubbing of parts …’
A Brief History of Trust
People may let you down, but God never did. ‘Me have trust to God’s help,’ wrote a monk a thousand years ago, in one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded uses of the word. And again: ‘Blessed is the man, that maketh the Lord his trust.’ Islam has a word, tawakkul, which roughly means ‘perfect trust in God’. Trust was the test of faith: the willingness to believe in what could not be seen.
It is difficult, nowadays, to conjure up what it was like to live in a society where trust in God was implicit in daily life. The trust He deserved was ineffable and unquestionable. ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding,’ say the Proverbs. The Bible makes it clear that trust in God was greatly to be preferred to any trust in government. The book of Isaiah warns that trusting in Pharaoh was like leaning on a staff made of a broken reed: if you leant on it, it would splinter in your hand. ‘You can’t depend on anyone, not even a great leader,’ says a modern version of Psalm 146 baldly.4
When it first emerged, Christianity was an insurgent religion whose followers were persecuted, so it made sense to warn Christians that people in authority were not to be trusted. But soon the Church created its own leaders, whom they declared the ultimate source of authority. Frustrated by the Pope’s intransigence over his marriage, Henry VIII solved the problem to his own satisfaction by rejecting papal authority and creating a state religion, the Church of England.
The idea that a king ruled by divine right lingered. But as democracies emerged, they increasingly sought to draw a line between the church and the state, making belief a private matter and a citizen’s obligations to their government quite independent of any God they might believe in. The idea of the social contract, in which citizens obeyed the law in exchange for security, became the norm. As John Locke put it in 1689:
Political power is that power, which every man having in the state of nature, has given up into the hands of the society, and therein to the governors, whom the society hath set over itself, with this express or tacit trust, that it shall be employed for their good, and the preservation of their property.5
Institutional trust became – in theory, at least – reciprocal. It gave people the confidence to obtain the life they wanted. Interpersonal trust made us human. Institutional trust makes us citizens. To put it another way, interpersonal trust gives you the confidence to step onto the zebra crossing when a car is approaching. Institutional trust means that if the car runs you over, you know that an ambulance will take you to hospital and the driver will be punished. Only when the institutional trust is there would many of us dare to step into the path of an oncoming SUV.
Indeed, by the time Locke was writing, people had already begun to put their trust in institutions other than the Church. Banking as we now understand it had begun in the late fourteenth century with three wealthy Italian families, including the Medici. Gradually, as companies were able to borrow more and trade across borders, it became possible for a company to operate in different countries. Then banking opened up to more and more people. By 1975, even women could open a bank account in their own names in the UK. Today, some of my financial data is handled by corporations based thousands of miles away. These digitised acts of trust are now so routine that they barely touch our consciousness. Yet even a century ago, most of them would have been profoundly strange. How can you be so trusting? The answer is a shrug. Because I must; because not to do so would be to cut myself off from much of modern life.
For anyone living and working in a town or city, trust takes thousands of forms every day. Most of this trust is not based on confidence in individuals. Banks play a role in it, but not an exclusive one. It’s vested in a company, a government or an organisation, not a person, and nowadays it is overwhelmingly digital. Checks are made and permission is granted. In the morning, I board a train carrying several hundred people who have all established their right to travel by buying a ticket. No physical money changed hands when I paid my fare, but I trust that the train company – or is it another institution acting for the train company? I don’t really know, and it doesn’t seem to matter – they will shift the right digits from my account to theirs.
I buy a salad for lunch from a popular sandwich chain; I have no idea where it was grown, or who handled it; but I trust that it contains 679 calories, because one institution (the government) has made a law compelling another institution (the sandwich chain) to publish how much energy it contains. That law, in turn, recognises that restaurants are good at hiding how unhealthy their food can be, and removes the need for me to trust my own judgment about how fattening the sandwich will be. The government is offering me a cognitive shortcut, a trust-substitute, that it thinks will help me make better decisions. Sometimes I would rather it didn’t. The salad accounts for quite a lot more than the 378 calories that my watch tells me I’ve burnt moving around today, but my doctor and the authorities haven’t yet asked me to share this information, so I hope that the tech company that manufactured it won’t abuse my trust by doing so anyway.
I take a bus home and a CCTV camera films me. What happens to that footage? I trust that it will be deleted eventually and only used if a crime is reported. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. The Metropolitan Police recently began to scan people’s faces on the street and compare them to a database of wanted criminals.6 This is happening even though only 42 per cent of Londoners trust the Met, according to YouGov.7
In China, where the government has introduced facial recognition technology to monitor people’s movements more closely and reward or punish them accordingly, there is less need for the authorities to invoke the threat of crime as a justification for surveillance. In an authoritarian state, technology is introduced without consulting people, and the pandemic offered another excuse to expand it. But perhaps, with a different understanding of what the state should do, I would trust the government to use it for the benefit of society, and to knock me into line if I was undermining the collective good.
Sitting in a traffic jam, I’m listening to a podcast. Zero trust, boasts an ad for an online security service. This is initially confusing, but I eventually grasp that the message is that the company doesn’t trust anyone, so I should know that I can trust it. It’s another way that institutional trust overcomes the challenge of living in a city and negotiating thousands of online connections: there are just too many people for me to trust them all.
Institutional trust, with its checks and built-in scepticism, is very different from the intangible bundle of faith, hope and confidence that we now call interpersonal
