The Technologies of Trust
How We Cooperate at Scale
I’ve been writing about Trust recently. I started with the topic of money, which I contend is widely misunderstood (or more generally, hasn’t been sufficiently reflected upon). I also talked about loans and companies.
The common thread of trust here makes me want to talk about another concept, that while fairly pervasive, has escaped labelling and deep discussion. I’m choosing to describe this concept as the “Technologies of Trust,” a set of formal, abstract systems that provide the foundation for large-scale cooperation. This bucks some commonplace uses of “technology” but is true to the defined term, and creates a space for something that has no such space today.
The term "technology" is often associated with the physical sciences, but a broader definition is "the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes." This is a useful lens. Just as categorizing physical tools under "technology" gives us a shared language to discuss them, we need similar categories for our abstract tools. We can think of a hierarchy of dependencies. Physical technologies allow us to manipulate the world, and organizational technologies allow us to coordinate groups to apply those physical tools. But for organizations to function at a large scale, beyond the limits of personal relationships, a separate category is needed: the technologies of trust. These are primarily applications of economic and social science, creating the formal frameworks that make broad, impersonal collaboration possible.
What are these technologies of trust? The list is long, but some of the most fundamental examples include:
Money: The primary form of depersonalized trust. It is a purely abstract system whose power comes from our collective confidence that it can be exchanged for goods and services in the future, allowing transactions between strangers who have no personal reason to trust each other.
Loans: An instrument built on personal trust. Unlike money, a loan requires a direct assessment of a borrower's reliability, including their intent and capability to repay. This personal nature limits its scale compared to a depersonalized system.
Contracts & Law: Formal agreements and rules that create predictable, enforceable expectations between parties.
Corporations: Legal structures that enable groups of people to act as a single entity, limiting individual liability and enabling large-scale investment and enterprise.
Finance: A complex system that bridges personal and depersonalized trust. Through banking, for example, personal trust (a loan agreement with an individual) is converted into depersonalized trust (newly created bank deposits that function as money in the broader economy). It uses tools like interest and collateral to bolster personal trust where it might be weak.
Professional & Academic Standards: Credentials, licenses, and peer review that create a baseline of trust in specialized knowledge and skills.
Government: The overarching set of institutions that create, administer, and enforce the laws of a society, providing a framework of stability.
Bureaucracy: The operational systems of rules, procedures, and hierarchies used to manage large organizations—public or private—in a consistent and predictable manner.
Digital Trust Systems: Modern extensions of these frameworks, including blockchains, digital identity systems, and encryption, which allow trust to be distributed without central intermediaries. These highlight both the promise and peril of new, untested technologies of trust.
Formal vs. Informal Trust
A common thread among these examples is that they are formal systems. Unlike the informal, intuitive trust we place in friends and family, these technologies are designed to be evaluated through reason. They create a framework of predictability that allows us to engage in complex collaborations with people we have never met. A formal system, however, is only as strong as the informal trust that individuals place in it. When confidence in these institutions erodes, so does their ability to facilitate cooperation.
Contemporary life shows how fragile this balance can be. For example, social media both erodes and reinforces institutional trust: on the one hand, disinformation campaigns weaken confidence in governments or media; on the other, platforms also serve as vehicles for new forms of verification and accountability.
Understanding these technologies is not merely an academic exercise; it is essential for a functioning society. When individuals lack a basic understanding of these systems, they are less likely to trust them, leading to reduced participation and a loss of potential collaboration. This can lead to unproductive modes of reasoning and the embrace of radical ideologies that fail to appreciate the delicate balance required.
Another aspect to consider is how these technologies complement and balance against each other. This balance is one reason it’s useful to think of them as a group, as many flawed ideologies can be described as a failure to balance amongst these techniques.
When Trust Systems Are Rejected
Some ideologies are defined by their skepticism of certain technologies of trust. While this is sometimes expressed in stark, theoretical terms, the reality has usually been more nuanced.
Communism: In theory, many communist traditions reject markets, corporations, and money itself, relying instead on centralized planning and bureaucracy. In practice, however, even communist regimes such as the USSR or China never fully abolished money or markets—both sanctioned and unsanctioned markets continued to exist. This shows how difficult it is to eliminate these technologies of trust completely. What communism demonstrates most clearly is an overemphasis on government and bureaucracy at the expense of other balancing systems.
Libertarianism: Many libertarian strands distrust government and bureaucracy, instead placing heavy faith in contracts, markets, and voluntary associations. But this perspective often underplays the fact that governments do far more than simply “enforce contracts.” They create the very conditions under which markets exist—defining property rights, establishing money, and ensuring stability. Beyond that, governments must intervene to correct for failures (like pollution or monopolies) and to unwind outdated rules that distort rather than enable economic life. Libertarian experiments such as charter cities or cryptocurrency-based communities illustrate both the appeal of market-centric trust and the difficulties of maintaining order, fairness, and adaptability without strong public institutions.
Anarchism: Anarchist thought often rejects nearly all formal trust systems, seeking instead to build cooperation through informal trust, mutual aid, and federated local assemblies. Examples like the Rojava region of Syria show attempts to create alternative, decentralized institutions. These systems reveal both the strengths of informal trust in tight-knit groups and the difficulty of scaling them to larger societies.
Recent populist movements also show how selective rejection of trust systems—such as undermining courts, electoral processes, or expert institutions—can destabilize societies. Even when not fully ideological, these attacks erode confidence in the shared frameworks that make cooperation possible.
The lesson across these cases is not that certain ideologies are simply wrong, but that any attempt to radically unbalance the ecosystem of trust technologies—by over-relying on one and dismissing others—creates fragility. Durable societies require a balance among these different tools of trust.
The Price of Complexity
The challenge is finding the right balance. While trust expands our potential for good, it is not without risk. On one level, trust can be exploited, if we are not vigilant enough. On another level, systems dependent on trust can be forced to shrink when trust is lost. As a combination, our capability for successful vigilance puts a limit on the amount of trust that both logical and intuitive systems support.
Technologies like finance enable a level of prosperity analogous to building an economic skyscraper, reaching heights unimaginable from the ground. A financial crisis, in this view, is a catastrophic failure, but it is a failure that could only happen from such a height. The alternative is not a skyscraper that cannot collapse, but a simple hut with a much lower ceiling for growth.
In this metaphor, regulation serves as the skyscraper’s safety systems: fire codes, structural reinforcements, and emergency exits. They cannot eliminate risk altogether, but they can reduce the likelihood of collapse and increase resilience when shocks occur.
This is why, even after a major crisis, trust is rarely abandoned entirely. It is damaged, but it proves resilient. The response is not to tear down the system, but to repair and renegotiate trust through new regulations and reforms. The alternative—a complete return to simpler, less powerful systems—is often unthinkable, demonstrating our fundamental dependence on these complex technologies, for all their flaws.
Educating for Trust
Ultimately, the technologies of trust are not merely abstract systems; they are the essential tools we have engineered to overcome the natural limits of personal relationships, enabling the vast collaborations that define our world. Small-scale, personal trust is innate, a concept that barely needs to be taught, as it is coded into our function from evolving in small communities. Understanding the abstract technologies that allow for this large-scale cooperation, however, does not come so naturally.
This is why, just as we teach our children about the physical world, we must also educate ourselves and future generations about these abstract systems. Schools, universities, and public institutions should include civic education on money, law, and emerging trust systems. The goal is to build critical literacy so citizens can weigh their potential and their risks. Policymakers can help by ensuring transparency, accountability, and accessible regulation. And as individuals, we can cultivate trust by participating in institutions thoughtfully and critically, rather than retreating into cynicism or ideological views.
Understanding the value in each system helps reinforce the need for balance. At its simplest, this is immunization to ideology.
Balance itself is a bit harder to obtain, as it's not enough to understand one's own position, or even those close to us. Balance requires listening to others as a first step. But in large communities we need to trust others who aggregate views distant from us, either physically or along other dimensions.
Understanding in this context also allows acknowledging flaws, and working to improve implementation. Putting this all together, we can foster a more collaborative and prosperous society for all.