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Trust underpins civilisation. It expands the scope and complexity of the pursuits within our collective reach by allowing us to act as a group, to align, and even to coordinate over large temporal and geographic distances. Unfortunately, the more adept we are at leveraging it, the more expensive it is to establish and maintain: as people’s social contexts expand and turn over evermore rapidly, the foundations on which trust is built get eroded. So we (gradually and iteratively) found ways to decrease our dependence on it. We did what we could to replace trust with formalised, rigid bureaucracies and “blind” processes, which we tasked with the risk assessments and rule-policing we no longer had the capacity to take on ourselves. The internet made things worse. Its digital nature shrank the surface area for trust-building while further expanding our social context, and—for reasons inherent to both its design and its ideological foundations—it eroded the legitimacy of the imperfect trust-

On Trust Infrastructure Trust underpins civilisation. It expands the scope and complexity of the pursuits within our collective reach by allowing us to act as a group, to align, and even to coordinate over large temporal and geographic distances. Unfortunately, the more adept we are at leveraging it, the more expensive it is to establish and maintain: as people’s social contexts expand and turn over evermore rapidly, the foundations on which trust is built get eroded . So we (gradually and iteratively) found ways to decrease our dependence on it. We did what we could to replace trust with form

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