I've been thinking a lot about trust recently, and about how we as people experience trust and how we represent trust digitally are radically different.

Digital trust tends to be binary or scalar out of necessity: you either have access or you don't. Sometimes you get gradients, where we grant elevated permissions to certain individuals. Roles are easy to assign, but need to be reviewed and more often than not end up as static badges.

Trust in real life works differently. There are people I'd trust with a personal secret that I wouldn't take financial advice from. I might let you work on my car but wouldn't let you babysit. I know I can count on you to come through in a pinch, but you'll never get anywhere on time.

Trust, in short, is messy.

So that gets me thinking: what are the minimum aspects of trust we would need to have a faithful digital representation of how trust actually works relationally? We're not talking from the traditional security standpoint here (e.g. cryptography), just looking at the social aspect.^[1]

To start us off, if you can't see someone you can't even know that there's someone to trust. If you can't see their actions, you can't meaningfully evaluate those actions. So this gives us our first aspect: visibility.

So what happens once someone becomes visible to us? We get an immediate sense of their posture, their action-in-motion, we can make inferences about the current state of the environment and what forces are in play. Importantly, all of these forces are immediately accessible to our internal state because each of them contribute to our next aspect: strain.^[2]

Once we have an idea of the forces that are at work in a situation, we then can see how someone reacts to the presence of strain: do they choose to take on that strain? Do they pass off the strain to someone else? How do they do that? All of the application questions play into the third aspect: cost. Who is actually bearing the cost of the strain in play? Who is visibly expending effort, emotional labor, or cognitive load?

Now all of this gives us the snapshot of trust-in-the-moment without depending on claiming to know the internal state of a person. For a robust treatment of trust we must limit ourselves to only what we can observe, otherwise we devolve into making judgments based on inferred mental state which is notoriously prone to projection and bias.

But just having the...

ConformalInfinity

ConformalInfinity