The Frameworks of Trust and Trustlessness Around Algorithmic Control Technologies: A Lost Sense of Community download
Abstract
Certain techno-political infrastructures, e.g. blockchains, aim to replace our existing social and institutional modes of producing trust as a social resource. Can they successfully do that, without the reliance on the very same institutions, which could safeguard and guarantee their trustworthiness in the first place? By now we have more than a decade of experience trying to build autonomous, code-driven, private ordering infrastructures, designed to complement, disrupt, or replace both private and public institutions. The revolution of these ‘trustless’ digital technologies is yet to happen, raising concerns about their promises to address the existing trust challenges of centralized institutions, their capacity to eliminate the societal reliance on trust, and the potential consequences thereof. Therefore, in this chapter, we pose the following questions: How does trustlessness through the elimination of more-or-less trusted middlemen impact our values and our sense of belonging? How does the decision to end trust maintenance through trustless technologies impact the cultivation of a sense of community within a society? This chapter addresses these questions by critically reviewing the claims surrounding the trustlessness
of automated, code-as-law-based governance systems in the field of digital identity management—an area that continues to command the attention of various organizations and institutions.
algoritmen, trust