The New Science of Trust |
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According to this week’s FT, even carbon trusts aren’t trustworthy. People are buying carbon credits that turn out to be meaningless and fraudulent. The bankruptcy of trust is truly pandemic. Alex says that folks have habituated, that we aren’t hurting enough to constitute new markets of trust. But these nascent markets are already ubiquitously exploited. Companies tout their trustworthiness in ads and marketing that anyone with a brain cell knows is fraudulent. Life in the straight commercial world is a perpetual cycle of longing, seduction, and abandonment. Last week, preparing for a European trip, I decided to see if my Platinum Amex was worth the annual fee. I needed two of the benefits they market–travelers cheques and a car rental.
arly on, I realized that none of it was going to work. I decided to follow it through, in a kind of hypnosis, now fascinated with finding out just how outrageous the experience could become. Altogether, I spent about four hours on the phone, and got nothing. They wouldn’t sell me cheques and charge them to my card. The platinum agents kept telling me they would, then they connected me with the “right person” who said they couldn’t. I repeated the cycle several times with the exact same result.
The European car rental was even more bizarre. I kept telling the platinum rep what I wanted to do, and they said it was no problem. Then they would connect me with an outsourced employee who consistently told me that they couldn’t help me. In one case, a man answered the phone after a pause, and I said I wanted to see if my platinum card was actually worth anything. He said, “What’s a platinum card?”. Turns out he was working for a car rental wholesaler and knew nothing about Amex, even though they had connected me to him. The whole thing was a joke and a scam. Finally, I did everything myself on the Web–another couple of hours. THe Platinum card will definitely go at the end of the year. These experiences leave us gasping for the oxygen of trust.
I see people instantly migrating to any new space where the oxygen of trust might be intact. So much of what’s got energy today–from the move to local and organic foods to the popularity of MySpace to the millions of Internet chat rooms–represents this search for people, products, and processes that are trustworthy. A vital new arena will be the “engineering of trust”. Take MySpace–people migrate there to own, control, and inhabit a new direct relationship space. What happens when you find out the person who’s page you are posting on is a fictional film character, a virtual promo for which new owners Fox collect a fee? How do you engineer trust in these fragile new environments so that the old forms of self interest and exploitation can not colonize and corrupt? The engineering of trust is a new art that will become a science–follow the trajectory of eBay and Craig’sList for a sense of the earliest steps in this progression. This new science is difficult. It involves reciprocities that 20th century business has not being willing to engage in. But the crisis of trust–We can’t live without it and it’s scarce–can mean only one thing. Trust is the luxury good of our times. Trust is the new gold. Figuring out the art and science of designing, investing in, and sustaining trust is a central challenge in the shift to a support economy.
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Yikes, nightmarish experience. Surprised you even had the nerve to call into that byzantine cyber-hell.
The trust intangible may be scarce, but it can also be abundant, and it can be infinite too. It is not scarce like natural resources, and behaves in entirely different ways. The idea is that in this epoch traditional economics of scarcity are replaced with a new logic and economics of abundance.
There’s ‘…only so much to go around…’ is the classic principle of scarcity economics. For our Internet epoch the focus on scarcity of finite tangibles is orthogonal.
For example, today there is a certain popular nonsense concerning ‘attention economics’ or ‘attention management’ (command and control) as if the attention intangible is a scarce, finite resource that needs to be control and optimized like an ore mine. To see this how utterly ridiculous this is, all one needs to do is visit eBay’s headquarters reception in SJ. There you will see displays of thousands of Pez dispensers. The collection was made possible by eBay and was among the reason the company was founded – to fundamentally release enormous, unlimited amounts of digital attention. It’s abundant, non-scarce – believe it, like trust and other intangibles, there is far more than enough attention ‘…to go around…’
Heidi and Alvin Toffler are advancing the notion of a focus on non-scarce intangibles doubling national GDP in a generation (~25-years). Many, like me, agree strongly. It’s what makes value networks, value networks analysis and its absolute focus on abundant co-creation of value and intangibles so essential, so critical to individuals, business, organizations, civil societies, the environment and the future.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity
-j
I love the concept “the engineering of trust.”
It does take time and energy to make people with whom you have a relationship feel trust. At basis, you need to give them enough information so that they can decide for themselves that trust is warranted.
It follows that provisions of the U.S. Constitution that allow the legislature to learn about (literally “oversee”) the acts of the executive, actually engender trust. It’s a shame that the current Administration views this powerful tool for making a cohesive society with such disdain. But then, fostering a cohesive society is not their aim.