>Trust is hard to build, and our government is increasingly looking towards control and surveillance to ensure safety instead. Stores are moving certain items u

>Trust is hard to build, and our government is increasingly looking towards control and surveillance to ensure safety instead. Stores are moving certain items up to the register, because thieve simply walk out with entire boxes of Nutella or instant coffee. I'm reminded of "The Evolution of Trust" [0], a fun and interesting online simulation of agent-based cooperation with iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas. Of course no society is perfectly uniformly cooperate/cooperate, but some have an equilibrium that is more in that direction than others. It's a property that can be eroded by the exploitation of group norms you describe, and the system has to adapt by assuming more malice on the part of others. I wonder if anyone has written deeply on the trend toward externalizing and formalizing implicit/informal trust structures. Of course it's not a new thing (think of Renaissance-era credit systems that were arising that allowed for wide-ranging merchant trade in the absence of face-to-face individual trust), but the rise of the police state, cryptocurrencies, and even the new Amazon Go stores that outsource anti-theft trust to computer vision all seem to be an increasing trend toward assuming that informal trust is impossible in our new environment and that alternate formal systems are necessary. [0] http://ncase.me/trust/ http://ncase.me/trust/