The thought had occurred to me about seven years ago that improvements in communications technologies ultimately undermine trust. I'd posted to my (now reddits

The thought had occurred to me about seven years ago that improvements in communications technologies ultimately undermine trust. I'd posted to my (now redditstrike'd, due to repeated trust violations by Reddit's leadership, irony noted) subreddit at the time. Archived copy: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230603101919/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communications_advances_undermine_trust/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230603101919/https://old.reddi...> It turns out that the inconvenience and costs of face-to-face and even physical written communications are both their bad and good characteristics. Yes, you incur costs, yes, they're inconvenient, but you can far more readily verify that someone is who they say they are, and increase any possible attackers' costs phenomenally. The thought occurs that very limited communications / interactions channels may be an increasingly valuable trust feature in future, though the current pitfall of such approaches is that you're very often interacting with someone who's using the same (or very similar) insecure systems as you'd be using yourself directly. The other possibility is that new protocols and institutions will emerge to help deal with the problem. One interpretation of the Axial Age[1] is that the emergence of writing and sprawling empires co-evolved social-alignment mechanisms, a combination of moral philosophy and religion, which enabled at least four cultures to deal with the emerging complexities and trust challenges, in persia, India, China, the Greco-Roman world, and the Levant. The religious and philosophical institutions which emerged emphasized trust, obedience, loyalty, and respect, and probably had much to do with the success of those societies. Keep in mind that the level of reliability needn't match what we generally expect today in high-trust cultures, only that there be a relative advantage to the contemporary immediate neighbours those empires engaged with. It's also true that comms can interact positively to trust, or at least to validation and enforcement, though audits, registers, double-entry bookkeeping, monitoring, and surveillance. Though to my mind those replace social trust values with technological trust mechanisms. Which somewhat underlines my initial point. _______________________ Notes: 1. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age>