The previous post focused on how modern life feels hostile to individuals, because people by and large don't have many people who they can rely on, and who are on their side. This is a continuation to this, focusing here more on the general idea of social trust, and how the technological system keeps eroding it.
A large divide between how people view the world is those who think that trust is largely a technical problem, something we can solve through institutions and technologies, either through credentials, the law, a review system, governments, or perhaps technologies such as encryption, blockchains (which people don't talk much about anymore), and those who think that trust is foundational to society, it is not something that can be bypassed by anything other than people living together and getting direct evidence from their life about who is and isn't trustworthy.
Unsurprisingly, I fall in the latter camp, as all techno-pessimists and anti-civilization people do, the view that technology only accentuates social division and abuse, in a myriad of ways:
At the end of the day, trust is built from living with one another, and nothing can bypass that. Credentials attempt to do so through having standardized processes of verification, but in practice that only guarantees a minimum (often times abysmally low) floor for someone's competence, but this says nothing about their actual skills, and much less about their character, who they are as a conscious (or unconscious) person.
In general, we need the unity of a shared context to live and make appropriate decisions together. But the technological system is geared towards scale and not harmony, which is why it needs institutions that can mediate between people, through credentials as mentioned, or through track records (criminal, academic, professional), or the law system. Such a focus on scale necessarily reduces the complexity (and ineffability) of real social interactions down to predictable and measurable behaviors, which is why you could never know how loving or courageous someone is based on their resume, but you can know how long they studied in a certain school, the grades they got, how much money they made (hypothetically), and so on.
All of this is most obvious in areas where conscious qualities are at the core of what we seek in one another, which is why dating apps kill the soul of people looking for love, because someone's character cannot be reduced down to a mere list of bullet points, and why a real community could never be built in the same way that companies recruit people, because the former requires active participants, whereas the latter can operate with merely obedient people who are okay at the narrow tasks that they need to do.
Our system operates through formal specification, defining literal things that a person needs to do and then gets rewarded for doing, and through constraints, the lines that they cannot cross lest they get punished. But neither of those things necessarily lead to virtue, in fact more often than not, they lead to people abusing the reward system on one hand, trying to optimize for the literal thing which is being incentivized while getting away with the least amount of work, something which is obvious with school tests, or to people who respect the word of the law but not its spirit, a game that wealthy people are intimately familiar with.
The consequence of this is that a world mediated by such literal processes for its social cohesion, rather than the unity of the context that makes us live with one another in small groups, essentially rewards anti-virtues: maximally effective at meeting the formal demands, but utterly empty of any real virtue. This is why Goodhart's Law shows up again and again in any system that human beings design. From a basis that fundamentally lacks any social cohesion, a sense shared by most people that the collective is inherently valuable and something they want to contribute to, people will always find loopholes to get ahead, or at least do the bare minimum while remaining unpunished.
Another way to see all of this is that the glue for social interactions is and can only be social trust, because the mind and the systems it builds are janky. We can see this in how literal language is quite a fragile process and requires us to have some amount of shared context and good faith in one another to be effective at all. If we took everything that someone said and put it under maximum scrutiny, with the intent to only see the incoherences and flaws, then we would find that we could always find such faults even in the ideas of the greats. Conversely, if we made the effort to have a charitable interpretation of what anyone said, we would find that the vast majority of people hold ideas which make some sense given the contexts they've experienced and the ideas they have been exposed to.
This isn't to promote some type of hyper-relativism when it comes to the different worldviews around us, but simply to make the point that communication is ultimately a human exchange, and that without some amount of good faith in one another, language becomes utterly useless. Likewise with our systems, but we can't as easily translate this insight about trust in this larger domain, because we live in the system in a fashion which is unlike the language that we use.
What we see in our atomized times, and the utterly fractured landscape of political discourse, is that ideas by themselves, no matter how good they are, cannot create a harmonious world. This is because even the best ideas are only apt in certain situations, but never in all of them. This is why every political belief can be critiqued if examined for long enough, because there will always be an important set of contexts where its rigid ideas cannot respond effectively.
But what happens is that our technologically-driven (and ego-driven) system doubles down on the same of ideologies because of its demands for growth. As a result, the lack of trust that regular people have in those above them is never addressed, and keeps getting worse and worse as their suggested solutions keep failing to deliver.
It might not seem like we live in a low trust society in the West, because relatively speaking things are still doing okay, even if the internet has heavily fragmented social and political cohesion, and that mass migration has made this even worse for regular people, those who cannot afford to live in wealthy areas that gatekeep migrants. But I don't think it will take much, a few shocks to the global supply chains and some local turmoil I would estimate, for the downwards spiral of societal collapse to kick into motion and become undeniable.
But then again, as our inevitable decline continues, people will always find a target to blame so as to relieve their frustration, because they cannot bear to look at the fact that the entire project of civilization was doomed from the start. Which is why it might be the case that people will remain in denial until the very end, and that the game of scapegoating will turn to violence under the conditions of a low trust society.
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Trust Technosystem Jankiness Atomization Collapse
2026-04-03