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Data. Together. Let's read about it

Trust (May 12)

🎬 Recorded Call

Intro

New technologies attempt to free us from (data) monopolized spaces, but does cryptographic trust truly map onto or enable better human-to-human (or human-to-company or human-to-technology) trust?

Readings

Themes

  • Human and Cryptographic
  • Misuse / co-option, leveraging of the term trust
  • Why are the dominant metaphors for trust in tech financial?

Notes

  • Human and Cryptographic
  • Misuse / co-option, leveraging of the term trust
  • EDGI history: lack of trust in the state
    • recent context with protest: who do we trust; police? no; barricades controlling access to TAZ that has been set up in Seattle
    • e.g., John Brown Gun Club against Proud Boys
    • A building of community trust in moment
    • Not "trust" in decentralization in a concept... not sustainable, still a need for something?
      • Still wanting to use twitter
    • dc: follow up: "not a consensus of trust"
  • Tech mixed up with trust relationships?
    • dc: trustless tech, silicon valley deals with this too: any social reputation system mediates that
  • Social perspective on trust:
    • based on vulnerability
    • tech-based trust: based on invulnerability... based on feeling comfortable that nothing is gonna happen
      • ... conceptualizing it as trust the opposite of what it actually is
    • Ke: building tech relationships within EDGI... the way was through: reliability... showing up for each other on a weekly basis;
    • M: feedback loop of trust (and mistrust)... in interpersonal situations. A process but in terms of "tech" trust: it's a first-principles /structure over process
    • B5: "real relationship of trsut starts with no protocol, evolves over time."
      • lead with vuln, move forward
      • in protocol perspective: reign in, define
      • following defunding, a committment to work on a new thing as a way forward. An interesting display of trust? Framing of decentralization falls apart here
      • different trust convo: not trusting police
    • DC: there are people trying to bring dweb (blockchain) tech to this moment, srsly! PURE IDEOLOGY
    • DC: protocol as model: what about ways that they can be used to create space for trust and relationship building and maintenence... indigineous STS labs and the way those do so and grow
    • K: truth-default theory; following protocol as being actual good will
  • DC: move into cryptographic trust, cryptocurrencies
  • M: connect to last week and monopolies. Intersection of health data with blockchain
    • if you abuse trust & fail to activate the negative feedback, there is limited possibility to rescind trust
  • B5: notion of being de-anonymized in any PII. Implication of anonymity on platforms.
    • Blockchain is a technology – you can move things off
    • Z-cash: anonymization optimized in this space
    • Intersects "do I trust the tech" and "what types of trust does the tech enable"
    • If you can have a fully anon blockchain, can you prevent contract tracing NSA problem. Collection of individually owned things
    • Libra paper speaks to antithesis – unclear why there is a blockchain
  • DC: Brunton quotes (paraphrased af, obvi)

Bitcoin is an incremental tech so the actual tech advance small, but implication connects to larger history of digital cash schemes

The coin in bitcoin. Bitcoin as an electronic coin is chain of signatures. No existence outside of the chain of verification.

Deliberate inefficiency as replacement for trusted third party. Trust in scarcity rather than in people

  • B5: contextualization of this tech. Came out of libertarian groups. Contrast w trust web article in techcrunch.

    • "smart contract" invokes notion of law
    • beauty of BC as a project is its scope. Digital scarcity is applied to a ledger

  • DC: even in intro to bc paper, intent was nothing less than replacement of entire financial system

    • Set of different underlying technological assumptions

  • B5: Cryptographic definition of trust is this concept that economics can save us. If we can wrest away control of money, we can move forward and design better futures

  • KB: corruptive influence of using tangibles to sub for intangibles "value" "trust"

  • DC: people conflating affordances of these technologies. Bail block fund uses distributed computing to raise bail for people

  • Via M: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bail-bloc-founder-says-how-monero-mining-can-help-ice-detainees

  • DC: Also Black Socialists of America app "Dual App"

    • a reworking of underpinnings of these technologies?

  • Kelsey: RE: bailgiving money to the state

  • Kevin: enforced system of markets, use money because we have to

    • blockchain models of reform not enough, not accounting for like what would happen to gift economies

  • b5: barter conomies, independence and freedom

  • k: trust requires choice

  • b5: co-option of language... "Trust"

  • ke: circular trades and reowkring barter

  • Abolition https://theappeal.org/justice-in-america-episode-20-mariame-kaba-and-prison-abolition/

  • M: User control of rings of trust. Technical enablement of actual in-person trust

Discussion

DAWN: We're midway through the 2020 season of the Data Together reading group. The topic this week was trust, both cryptographic and human. I didn't realize that piece until I read it again today, that we had that subtitle to it. Brendan and I will be facilitating. I thought we could start off with a go around about what people thought. We had a bunch of readings, but they're quite brief. So I thought we might just start with general impressions around the topic, and then try and move through the core ones and see where people are at. Does anyone want to go first about what came up for them when they were reading this stuff.

KELSEY: I don't have a whole lot to say, but my immediate impression was that that Doteveryone piece talking about how people work with technology and whether it's accessible and whether they feel like they have power over it—I want to read that whole paper, that was really, really cool. It really brought home a lot of the concepts that we talked about in the Monopolies reading; there was a quote in there that was along the lines of, well, it doesn't really matter if I understand the issue, my option is to turn it on or off.

KEVIN: I didn't get much chance to read. I skimmed everything. I realized I really wanted to read the Brunton one, because it's like story bait. And it's the longest one, so I didn't get to get through it. I guess I'm more interested in the human aspect of trust than the cryptographic part, generally. I didn't see that much yet in the readings.

BRENDAN: I'll chime in I guess it's because I can maybe do some connecting work there. Some of the initial basis for this talk came out of the relationship between cryptographic trust and human trust. Specifically, one of the things we were trying to get at was a little bit of the co-opting of the phrase "trust", or the repurposing of the phrase "trust", as it relates to... and looking at it through both sides of the mirror, or however many sides of the prism, choose your object. But I think the thing that for me really jumped out was that, Kelsey I was really with you on the Doteveryone. From one side you're seeing this population that just feels completely beholden to the whims of a technology, and a degraded faith and a sense of lack of control being expressed in a number of places. And then at the other side, you also have the TechCrunch article talking about how, Oh, yes, we're going to rebuild the trust web. And they're describing something that is at the same time more complicated, and less and less about trusting, in the human sense. I think that was what was exciting about Doteveryone in juxtaposition to the cryptographic concept of trust.

For me, what really jumped out is, if you read the Bitcoin white paper, just that first paragraph, it sort of talks about how, oh, we're gonna solve the trust problem. But it's a fairly narrow definition, right? The double spending problem is really what they're talking about. And the double spending problem is just being able to prove that a single dollar was only spent once, or once at a time. And that quickly spirals into a lexicon that co-opts or leverages the phrase "trust". I really wanted to talk about that today. I wanted to see what others think about the way that the word "trust" is used and reused, and what it means to different people in this space. There's more more questions and observations, but that's where my head's at.

DAWN: Yeah. I'll build on that, and then maybe that'll help us go into a direction for discussion. I echo, Brendan, those things you brought up, and what everyone else has mentioned as being on my mind, and also when we were thinking about selecting this. I think the other thing that we were trying to complement, and I think it'd be fun to talk about even if folks didn't get to read it, is a little bit of that history that came out of Finn Brunton's book Digital Cash, about some of the things that were going on to help redefine "trust" as it got redefined in this cryptographic way, and then taken up by these decentralistas. And I think that other piece of Libra, which maybe makes sense to bring up at the end, was trying to think about this role of gatekeepers, who those trusted parties are. It's skewed pretty financial-heavy in terms of, there's the Bitcoin white paper. Libra association is also in this very financialized technology. Take the social web, here comes to trust web, even though it's broadly trying to be about something else, really falls into talking about trust in a very specific technology way. And it's very informed by cryptocurrency. But then we wanted to open that up a little bit and do that comparison work, or think about the ways that that term is being leveraged in those contexts. And that's why we chose that Doteveryone summary, because I think it does a nice like, hey, what are people currently thinking about their relationship to technology? And then it was helpful to take a spend a bit of time looking at that Wikipedia article and being like, Oh, right, what are all of the different contexts that trust is used in and a lot of them are not about financial transactions. So why is this such a dominant source to mind for inspiration when we talk about technology? There is a very specific lineage there.

KELSEY: It's impossible to not remember in this moment that EDGI got into the decentralized web because of a lack of trust in the state. I'm reading these articles while at a protest over facing off against militarized police. The one barricade the police have erected is between them and the peaceful protesters, and meanwhile, like two days ago, someone drove from the street into the crowd. Every other protest I've ever been at, there's been a barricade erected by the police to protect protesters from traffic. There's no trust here.

Yesterday, a big event in the Seattle protest is that the police actually left the faceoff. And so, we took the precinct, they'd boarded it up, but the street that had been blocked for over a week was now available. And it's really this interesting space where everyone's talking about, well, who do we trust? The police are obviously not allowed in this space. There are still barricades up controlling access. There's no one leader here. The barricades are controlled by different people who are just showing up, honestly, it could be anyone. The John Brown Gun Club, which is a far left second amendment group, has shown up to do security against threats of Proud Boys. That's been a rumor around for days. And everything inside the zone is—it feels very Burning Man, to be honest. There's just incredible amounts of free stuff and people walking by several times an hour offering you food and earplugs and hand sanitizer and stuff. And so there's this really strong outpouring of community trust in this moment, especially over trust of state, trust of sanctioned authority. But there's not there's not a real strong trust in decentralization as a concept. And it's really hard to believe that we've reached some kind of sustainable state. So there is still need for something, and it feels like we want tech to be the answer, in general space, not here specifically, that lets us have both.

DAWN: Can I ask you to say a little more about this one last part? I think you gave us a lot to connect back to the readings. But this idea of, there's not trust in decentralization as a concept—what do you mean? Do you mean people are using the term decentralization to think about that space? I've seen people on Twitter referring to it as CHAZ, as an Autonomous Zone, as very much drawing on, a set of anarchist literature and organizing tactics, but I'm very much at a distance.

KELSEY: Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And it's crazy, because even when you're standing there, you're still getting most of your information from the Twitter hashtag—which is part of the issue. But there are other people present who absolutely do trust these anarchy principles. That's definitely a thing that's happening. But broadly as a society, and even as a group of protesters, there is not a consensus of trust.

DAWN: Maybe we can unpack this a little more before we go into the Brunton reading and the Satoshi Nakamoto first Bitcoin paper—I think this comes up so much in all of our previous reading groups, the wanting to use the tech, or what that needs to look like. Maybe we could talk more about how we've experienced people wanting to rely on tech for trust or what forms those currently look like. I would say that the way that certain decentralized protocols want to replace trust or be "trustless" is only one thread in that. I think even in Silicon Valley, there's a new mode, we want to use new forms of technical mediation to replace or augment how you think about a relationship you have with a trusted party. Any reputation system that anyone decides to implement where you vote on people is an example. But maybe we could talk a little bit about how tech is being mixed up with trust relationships, first. That might help us set the stage.

MASH: I think, in terms of the social perspective on trust, it's based on vulnerability, and based on whether you feel comfortable being vulnerable with somebody, whereas technological or tech-based trust isn't actually based on vulnerability. It's based on invulnerability. So you're not actually trusting, it's more that you feel comfortable that nothing's actually going to happen, just because of the way that the technology is structured. In terms of the experience, it's very different. Obviously trust plays a role, but I think conceptualizing it as trust is the opposite of what it actually is.

KEVIN: Yeah, I agree with that. I got through the Doteveryone paper and was thinking about how I built trusting relationships with people with EDGI. It was mediated through Slack and Zoom, through technological processes. For me, I felt like the way that I built trust with folks here was just through reliability, people showing up for each other on a weekly basis. We were always showing up for each other, and we depended on each other. And I don't see how any form of technology creates that reliability.

MASH: Yeah, I think the way that I conceptualize trust from a social perspective or interpersonal perspective is a feedback loop. If you give a little bit of vulnerability to someone, then they will return that and then gradually more trust is built. Then there's also a negative feedback loop, too, where if you let somebody know that you mistrust them, then they will be more guarded around you and they'll mistrust you. So over time, there will be more and more mistrust. So it's a process. But in terms of technological trust, it's a first principles sort of approach where it's not about the process; it's about the the rules or the structure.

BRENDAN: I love, Mash, that you honed in the vulnerability characteristic. The thing that I think highlights that is the way that a relationship, a real relation of trust, starts with no protocol and evolves over time, right? You're referring to this cycle of like, Okay, I'm going to lead with with a little bit of vulnerability in an effort to move things forward. But from the protocol design perspective, or from cryptocurrency, you have a much more constrained definition of trust, that has to arrest every possible interaction that could happen and codify it, and we use the phrase trustlessness. And it's been this assuming bad actors sort of methodology.

I, like Kelsey, have been spending a lot of time thinking about the police, and particularly following very closely Minnesota's defunding promise. This stepping forward, which is a very human capacity, to say, look, we don't understand what we're going to do, but we know that this isn't working. And we've at least had some public commitment on behalf of politicians to work on a new thing right now, a way forward. It's such an interesting display of trust. I think that one could very much argue that the phrasing that we use for decentralization really starts to fall apart here, where there has been a transition of power, by virtue of protests that have managed to start to achieve the outcomes that they desire. But if we were to call that decentralization, that sounds like shoehorning things in a way that doesn't feel right. And so I think there's an interesting way in which, to me, a lot of what's been happening in the Black Lives Matter movement and in the protests that we're seeing across the world right now, just don't in any way graph on to this into this sort of crypto-digital currency—it's amazing how stale some of these particles feel in the current context. All of this fundamentally is about a lack of trust in the police, right? This is a trust conversation. It's just not the one that we picked the readings for, in some ways, and in other ways, it really is. I just want to highlight the limit of the framing here and how much the current events has really blown that open.

DAWN: I think we've had success in previous readings trying to bring up pretty disparate things. I remember we were talking about the relationship to the state and the civic, and we had that No One is Illegal reading, and I think that has always been really helpful to open up things. In this case, we have a much tighter set of readings that are about a very narrow technological take on trust but that yeah, I think current events and witnessing state violence, police brutality, the the murder of George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet and her death here in Toronto, it's showing the paucity of some of this to explain what I would say is more at stake in most people's relationship to tech.

But I do want to say that I don't know if you've noticed, but there are absolutely some Bitcoin people on Twitter who have tried to make a case for cryptographic protocols in this moment, I'm not even joking. I wish I was joking. They are wild ride Twitter thread reads. You're like, I don't even know where you're going with this. They involve, like, hand-drawn charts, they're about the financial system, and then at the end, they're like, oh, and this is why it will solve police brutality. And you're like, what? This is ideology. This is pure ideology at this point. You can't even drop your your thing for a moment and actually engage, separate from that with what's going on? Sorry, I saw a couple of those yesterday, and I'm still thinking about them.

Okay, so that is an aside, I actually thought something that you said, and that builds on what Mash just said, would be the thread that would be more meaningful to carry forward was this idea of first principle structure over process. Brendan, you said this idea of a real relationship of trust starts with no protocol and evolves over time. I think both of what you said opens up some really interesting possibilities. And this is not to agree or disagree, it's just to offer more to that conversation. I absolutely think there's something about how stuff evolves, or the process side, is very underconsidered in how a design gets specced out or implemented. The format of a white paper is this, like, Oh, I made an argument that will hold up over time, as the final instantiation of this thing, this proof of concept, that maybe has an intellectual lineage that sets itself up to be bad like that. But actually, I think that protocol in different contexts, say in indigenous communities, in the way that some labs that are indigenous STS labs have drawn on protocol, I think allows for an evolution, or allows for a structure that builds trust. So I feel like there maybe are models to think about what a scaffold is that provides that space that you can build relationships in. That's different than this weird, rigid, Oh, we made a protocol that's not flexible and didn't consider a full range of things, and now everyone has to operate in the narrow confines.

KELSEY: Yeah, I really appreciate Mash when she brought in. There were a bunch of frameworks, and I'm spinning them all around in my head. This may not come out super coherent. I especially really like the truth default theory concept, where we're saying that people by default think that other people are telling the truth. And I feel like there is a really interesting place where the protocol aspects plug in. Mash, you talked about positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops for trust. But I think there's got to be nuances in there that are that are kind of the problem. Not to pick it out or anything, but specifically you called out vulnerability, and I think that's really accurate. But I think that we often take following a protocol as a proxy for being of actual good will.

And then we have this problem of a classic abusive relationship of any kind, whether it's state with people or person with person, is where that negative cycle doesn't kick in. You keep trusting them even though they betray your trust. That's kind of a failure of our trust mechanisms. And then there's this part where protocol comes in, and I've been formulating phraseologies that I haven't thought all the way out, of, what if protocols are guidelines for how you can how you can earn trust in a specific community? Because it absolutely is part of what goes on in terms of, if you dress a certain way, if you know how to act at a certain kind of dinner, the community that cares about how you act at that certain kind of dinner can use that as a proxy for you being of the community trustable by the community. But then when you have different protocols, this is this is pure conflation here, but you know, if you have UDP try to talk to HTTP, you're just not going to have a success at all. There's nothing there.

DAWN: I think there's something interesting though about that site of protocol and the way that word is used in different areas. Again, this idea is a narrow technical sense, how it's used. I think maybe in particular, around a current wave of decentralized projects is very different than even that broader history of protocols in computing and digital communications, to be honest, because most of them are old, and grow in weird and over time in the history of how they get defined and redefined is quite interesting and intense. not totally my area. I made a BGP joke not very well, but we know some people who are really into BGP, who are Data Together friends. Um, I wonder actually, if maybe this does help us segue a little bit into talking about that cryptographic trust, and maybe that we can rely on Brunton, but we don't have to exclusively think about that. He just provides a couple of anecdotes and moments from this early history of when it was getting developed that are helpful to understand some of the intellectual underpinnings or what was motivating those folks, which I think definitely inflect how those concepts get used, in the technologies that go with them.

MASH: I want to connect what Kelsey said with I watched the video of your last month's talk. And somebody brought up the idea of the blockchain intersecting with medical data. Kelsey brought up this idea of the switch into the negative feedback loop or the distrust cycle. It kind of conflicts with the ledger aspect of blockchain. If somebody abuses the trust in that type of system, if information is supposed to be private, and it becomes public as a result of an abuse of trust, then there's limited recourse in terms of what you can do to—well, I mean, you can't undo it, but then also, how would a negative feedback loop work in that kind of context is what I'm asking.

BRENDAN: I think it's interesting, it's not this is another misappropriation of a phrase, but the notion of being outed, when you're using a permanent append-only log is—by "outed", I don't mean that in the closet sense. I mean, in the de-anonymization sense. When we sort of start intermingling, I really think you can abstract past medical data and really any kind of personal identifiable information right, even your transaction history itself forms a sort of unique behavioral pattern. Bitcoin has struggled with this for a long time. It's never claimed to be anonymous, but it's sort of implied it. I don't think that that means that a blockchain is —it's a data structure, at the end of the day, and so you have mechanisms for, you can control for that, to some degree, by moving things off of the chain that don't need to be on it. And I think we see a lot of stuff like z cash, which is a really great example of trying to take anonymization to the nth degree in a blockchain and have those two ideas sit in the same space at the same time and be relatively cohesive.

I guess there's it intersects with, do I trust the technology, and then, what types of trust has the technology enabled? I think are the two questions that jumped to mind for me. And the reason I brought it up in the last call was, I think that contact tracing and blockchain-adjacent technologies have some merit; if you wave a magic wand and assume that z cash approach works, and you can have an sufficiently anonymous blockchain, does it help you create a situation where, because you don't have a central authority governing a ledger, are you able to prevent the NSA problem when it comes to managing a contact tracing framework? Because I think that when we look at our, our own health data, and I think really what it is, at the end of the day is a collection of individually owned things, is the way I sort of perceive it. Which is your own health information. Everybody has their own health record, but there's a collective interest in us being able to trust each other and and share important moments of intersection, right. The classic, you and I have been in the same space and no classic Wow, talking about things that are three months old... but you know, you and I have been in the same space and we both would like to have some sort of zero-knowledge method of exchanging that information.

I think the Libra paper speaks to the antithesis of this, where you have a blockchain for the sake of saying the word blockchain. That's part of the reason I wanted to assign some of the super dry reading for this, of the Libra thing, because I thought it was really important to look at oh, Libra Networks is a company and Libra Association... there's a Libra board that is inside of the Libra company, and they govern the network, and you're supposed to just sort of look at all this and say, Yes, we can trust this. And I think that that's this very interesting intersection there. And the reason I bring it up in answer to the question about healthcare data and blockchains is governance and protocol and process where we have this, the section on governance of a lot of these projects is really where I think we have a lot of questions of is this really centralization? Is that a lot of questions and histories for sure out there.

DAWN: I mean, if it's okay, I would actually maybe we could start. There's a couple of really succinct but opinionated takes that Finn Brunton has in the section, the last section I recommended, which might be cool to respond to, which would get us into thinking about both those three readings. If that feels Okay, if there's more, maybe Mash that you want to directly respond to in what Brendan said, I will leave it to you, but otherwise, I thought I could give us a couple quotes.

So I think we have a short section in chapter 10, which is the synthesis of Finn Brunton's argument and then that background in cryptography in chapter three. So the parts that I wanted to surface from chapter 10 are his analysis of Bitcoin, which I think is compelling in an interesting way. His argument is on page 155: Bitcoin is an incremental technology. So the actual technological advance is small, but it had a striking theoretical breakthrough. So it combined a lot of work that came out of cryptography and computation from peer to peer networking and also ways that they dealt with digital timestamps that connected it to this larger history of digital cash schemes which very much came out of a libertarian background.

And then he has, this is on page 161, from Nakamoto. The direct quote from that paper is "and Bitcoin is an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures". And then I think this is a Brunton quote, "it's a system for collective verification of ownership with no existence outside the system of verification". So it's both a technical structure and then an ownership convention is part of what Brunton wants to make very clear. And to that point that Brendan said about anonymity. So there's this notion of anonymous sort of, but it's using money that's unconditionally visible, traceable and public, always. So what anonymity means there, it's fallen down over the years in terms of how people use it or can review those public transactions. But this is where I think there's sort of two more really interesting arguments he makes. So how he sees that there is a form of trustworthiness operating in the systems that are different than trust on a third party again, so Bitcoin is really responding to a very narrow take on type of trust before that was in financial context, which is on page 68. "The process of policing transactions and preventing double spending and thereby, the perception of trustworthiness, confidence and value of currency in the eyes of its holders required turning the physics of quantum computation into a kind of friction, or brake." So a deliberate inefficiency in a system as a replacement for a trusted third party. And how that was done in Bitcoin is through hash collisions. So it's a trust in scarcity, rather than a trust in the value of a currency that would rely on others; what the system has set out to do is prove to you how difficult it is to make more of it and that it's verifiable that this amount was that amount of difficulty to make. And so I think his concluding take is that this whole apparatus, the apparency of the ledger, the verification of ownership, the proof of work process and foreknowledge, of the introduction of the remaining quantity of new money are actually designed to produce a predictable amount of scarcity that you would call verifiable, distributed and trustless. But it's actually putting this as a scarce object into a specific infrastructure. So it's the ledger of the blockchain and how it works. And it's sort of like this. I mean, one that relies on as I think folks have seen in the development of the actual technology, new types of trust, or ways to relate a set of people to each other. So it's interesting that it's a trustless system, but as a system that has a community and maybe you could not say good things about its governance, but has a governance around the underlying production of that system.

So maybe that was a little heavy. I'm realizing that I always read things that are academic, so I think I sometimes say things really densely. But I thought that was such a great opinionated take on Bitcoin but I think is very interesting about like what trust was removed and then what a new form or infrastructure that it created.

BRENDAN: I think that that really is such an interesting, it's the beauty of the Bitcoin paper and the beauty of the history of this. I think that it's really interesting that this came out of libertarian groups and the bringing up of this origins of this thinking. And I think that, the contextualization is an incremental technology is quite interesting. It's often heralded as this revolutionary concept, and then at the same time, if you connect that to the Trust Web article from TechCrunch, it's like, no, no digital currencies are infrastructure, they're a thing that you can use to get to smart contracts. Which we didn't really talk about a ton, but I think are also really interesting. When you use the word smart contract it often invokes the notion of law, which is closer to sort of some of today's thinking, or today's problems. But I think that the beauty of the Bitcoin as a project is its scope. It's it's a contained thing, its definition of trust is centered around digital scarcity. And that digital scarcity is applied to creating a ledger and it's clean, it's it's straightforward. It has what it can do and what it can't do, and that's that's kind of that. My concern is that the specter that that has invoked, people showing up on Twitter saying that Bitcoin can solve problems of racial tension, somewhere in there the dish ran away with the spoon.

DAWN: I think it ran away from the beginning, to be honest. I take the point of like, in one sense it was a system that set out to do a very specific thing, like Bitcoin, but you point correctly to how quickly smart contracts developed as a way to think about ledger and blockchain technology, which is them being like, oh but if we write a contract and put it on a blockchain, it can be applied to everything, that explosion happened immediately. And also, if you look at, and it was great that you suggested this Brendan, even the intro of the Bitcoin paper, it wants nothing less than to replace the entire financial system. It was always grandiose. It was always escaping at the seams of a narrow scope. I think it poses a question. It's a set of different underlying ideological assumptions.

BRENDAN: I think you're right to point to the opening paragraph of the Bitcoin paper. I want to ask the group, I think that the cryptographic definition of trust implicitly seems to direct us to believe that economics can save us; there's some notion of using money to solve our problems. And if we can just engineer digital money, if we can wrest control of money from classic old school structures, like governments and Facebook, then we'll be able to move forward and design better futures for ourselves. That's my read of the crypto space. I don't know how well that argument holds up in the context of billions of people at home, very angry about their relationship to certain governing structures.

Does anybody want to take the bait on that?

KELSEY: I mean, I put "abolish money" in the chat. And, you know, it's not something I ardently believe. But we have talked again and again in these discussions about the corrupting power of finances that enter the system. And it's not even necessarily money itself. It's not even necessarily the power that it both is and represents. It tends to be the conflation of something intangible for something tangible, and I think that's where we get hung up with the technology as well.

BRENDAN: Totally, the notion of digital scarcity is really interesting, and how that creates the tangibility of fungibility—it's really interesting notion, right? At the same time, I think a project that would be interesting to bring up here as something of a counterpoint is the crypto Harlem project here in New York, which is focused on fenceline communities leveraging digital currencies and cryptography and techniques to both evade the surveillance state and to empower themselves to catch the next wave of economic prosperity. And so maybe this is a double edged sword. Maybe you can engage with it for your own good.

It's really hard to think about things in context of what's going on outside our windows in the streets

DAWN: I think there are these examples of people actually subverting almost the affordances of these technologies. I think he mentioned the Bail Block Fund where people use crypto miners in the browser. It was a progressive publication. They built this crypto miner that helped raise funds to pay for people's fail, if you visit their website in the browser and allow them to use it. I also mentioned the Black Socialists of America have this decentralized organizing app that's called a dual power and also builds on the concept of dual power, thinking about building alternative cooperative economies. And this idea of how you can use these technologies in ways that subvert the premise of markets and money as the site for change. I think those are all really interesting as cool examples. They're interventions in a space, but they might not rework trust. I shouldn't say that. I think maybe something like Bail Block is more than an intervention, I think some of the other ones that you mentioned, and I think the dual power app, maybe is really trying to fundamentally rework trust through how it uses those technologies. And then I'm interested in how they're seeking to accomplish it, and wondering what they're going to change to get there because it can't just be an off the shelf way of using these things.

KELSEY: The bail concept, there's so much about it. But the really hard to get around one is that you're literally giving money to the state that you don't think should be imprisoning people.

DAWN: Yeah, Who's with me next semester. Abolition.

BRENDAN: Down.

KEVIN: I just wanted to add to the money question that Brendan brought up. For me, how it ties to trust is, I feel like money is this thing that we've been taught that represents value and can be traded for resources. And it's like, no, you're born to this system that you didn't choose. So it feels like the system of coersion more than trust. We can exchange money, not because we trust each other, but because we've been forced to do so. And so, how you're saying, the systems that are just trying to not reform or revolutionize financial systems aren't enough because it doesn't take into account the things that Kelsey was mentioning, at the protests, people were giving hand sanitizer and stuff for free. There's not this monetary transaction that's happening; that's slowly building trust.

BRENDAN: Yeah, I deeply agree with you, Kevin. I think some of you have heard me on this topic. But my chief concern with the design of some of the systems that co-opt the language of trust, I think that it points back to what, Mash, you were saying. My personal definition of the word trust is something that is very open and free-form. And while I completely want to honor and respect, Dawn, the importance of protocol here, because I really think that's a massive piece, protocol not in the digital sense in the human interaction sense in the way of the way of living to the world sense. But setting that aside for a second, I think that, Kevin, you're getting at the point that I care about the most, which is that I trust, for me, comes from a system that feels like I have both agency and freedom to do whatever I want. And that, for me personally, really is one of the reasons I gravitate toward barter economies, and why I think the central principle of open source is such an important thing here, where I don't have to do anything, I don't have to exchange value by any pre-determined means. I can participate according to different skill sets, I can make contributions that are not necessarily fungible. And to me, that's a really important part of my definition of trust and part of my definition of a framework in which a genuine definition of trust can emerge. And part of the reason that I was so infuriated by that TechCrunch article that claimed that the next thing that was going to emerge was the trust web, and that it was going to be a collection of cryptocurrencies, to me that is just a total co-option of language that starts with the Bitcoin paper, paragraph one, and ends with people on Twitter claiming that money fixes everything and we should make it digital. Sorry, that's my rant.

KEVIN: I agree with you, I just wanted to throw that in there and the idea of revolutionising barter. I've been reading about circular trades, and how that solves the problem of the need for the people exchanging to want things from each other. If you have a circular trade, it facilitates larger possibilities of trade. I'm curious about that type of stuff right now myself.

DAWN: There's a great book, it's very accessible, called Taking Back the Economy by JK Gibson Graham. It's all about actual concrete forms that are not the market as a way of thinking about economies or the free market in this narrow capitalist sense. It talks about local currencies, which are similar to building circular economies through bartering forums, it does mention gift economies, and it has a bit of a transition approach, in that it identifies concrete steps that maybe aren't totally, all the way—the ways you get there without requiring you to justify that you're going to build a new system that's coherently going to pop up and be fully formed from this to that tomorrow, which, I've been reading and listening to a lot more about abolition. Not only, but in light of everything that's happening, and now, there is a great podcast Justice in America with Mariame Kaba.

She talks about this idea of how you think about abolition, it's a process to go back to what Mash said, you ask yourself this question at each step, which is, is this meaningfully dismantling the system or working towards dismantling the system? If so, then we do it. If it's something that could make the system "more humane", and get us stuck in a way that actually perpetuates it, then we don't do it. That's how a lot of people who are abolitionists make arguments for or against certain types of reforms. Some people would maybe align with abolition, but other ones would not. That's why I think almost all people who are into abolition are against bodycams, because that's not going to do anything. It's actually putting more money for specific things. It's like no, what you should do is have police stop showing up in certain kinds of calls, disarm them, cut their budgets, because these will actually move in that direction, even if it's not like, tomorrow there are zero police.

I wonder if there's more that we want to take from any particular readings, I actually think kind of what we're continuing to return to is the paucity of the readings to explain the kinds of ways we need to think about trust right now in relation to technology. So yeah, what do we want to talk more about? Is there anything from those readings we need to say, or do we just want to scheme together for a better future with a different way we think about trust in technology.

KELSEY: I'm curious about ideas of constructive trust. We just had the abolition conversation briefly. It's a lot easier to oppose something than to build something good. And if it's not cryptographic economy, what is it?

BRENDAN:
I'm a big fan of that. And I'd like to ask the question of using not just characteristic of vulnerability, or others can put in forth other phrases, but what systems can we think of that actually allow some degree of vulnerability?

I find it very interesting, the relationship between the protesters and the mayor of Minnesota, where the recent interaction they had where it was just like, are you going to abolish the police? Yes or no. And then he was like, hesitation, and they were just like, shame, shame. It was like, Oh my god, this is Game of Thrones, while I very much agree with the end goal. And then you contrast that with the nine city council members who come forward with a much more cohesive plan and present. I think there's a degree of vulnerability there. I'd love to just pivot to talking about everything non cryptographic. Kelsey, I have no suggestion for you other than the hard work of people with concerns and people who are the subject of those concerns sitting at the same table. And I would submit that there are others far more equipped than me on the call to talk about processes that surround mediating that conversation.

KELSEY: And I do think that it's interesting to bring back into that space for a moment, because right now there's this really intense trust and really intense solidarity. And it's super multiracial and from protesters in the movement, and I've never felt anything quite like it. And the reason is, people are bodily vulnerable. And people have needed to really use that bodily vulnerability. It's not a fake thing at all. It's very real and very, very real community solidarity and very real identifying problem elements surrounding them and having them exit the crowd or helping somebody up off the ground who's been hit with a blast ball or any of this stuff, it's because of this extreme vulnerability. That's the point of nonviolent direct action: because you're extremely vulnerable, you're suddenly much more trustworthy.

MASH: Yeah, I mean, it makes me think of mutually assured destruction, where part of how deescalation happens is the possibility of harm to both sides. And then it becomes incentivized to deescalate, because of that possibility of harm. And again, that plays into the idea of equity and power. And you can't really deescalate if one side has all the power, because they don't have any vulnerability.

KELSEY: Just to build on that, they abandoned the precinct and boarded it up, and they publicly stated it was a show of trust, because they were like, they're probably just going to burn it down. And we were like, is this trust? Like, you abandoned a building? Assuming we would burn it? that doesn't feel like trust.

MASH: It's not a cryptographic system, but I kind of like the way that Facebook thinks about trust. I mean, obviously, there's many criticisms of Facebook out there, but I think the way that it conceptualizes human relationships in terms of rings of trust, because you can designate people as close friends or people who can even verify your account, but then you can also have lists of people that you trust. Personally, I shitpost on main, but but I have a list of people that really get my random memes I post. But then I also have more family friends, who I only post appropriate stuff to. The thing is, the user has control over the rings of trust, and they can move individuals between rings at their own discretion. Maybe that's a way to conceptualize trust from a technological perspective, because the technology facilitates that, as opposed to Twitter, where you're posting publicly. I think they're gradually introducing a little bit more control, but it's not to the same degree.

DAWN: I would just add to that. That is maybe an imperfect read on trust, because if it's only one sided, as how that relationship gets representedt there's something about how that gets codified in social networks which is very interesting. I've brought this up before on calls, but I'll say it again, I think the way that SSB really tries to think about interdependence, or a way of thinking about how things are related to each other in a way that's not one-sided offers something.

I think we could design much less operationalized technology. Things could be so much more speculative, is my firm belief, or experimental in these ways, but I think we're stuck in a very narrow way of developing.

BRENDAN: That's a really interesting point, this emphasis on experimentation and speculation, this lack of canonical—this method of codependence, the phrase disintermediation really jumps out to me here, where Scuttlebutt is really a disintermediated platform, right? We often use the word centralization, but I think if you substitute that for disintermediation, I think some of what we're seeing here is a situation whereby we have a lot of people who are now disintermediated; we have people in the political system speaking directly to citizens. Okay, interesting example of this intermediation, but you also have the opposite of that, which is this heightened amount of contact between police and protester, which is, I don't think that there's any disintermediation happening there. But I think there's something really interesting about the capacity for failure, or tolerance for failure. And the varying expectations of tolerance for failure, that all come to the mix in a in a group setting, that is really important to highlight in these conversations, because I think when we talk about trust, one of the hardest expressions of a form of trust is like, hey, trust me, we're going to abolish the police. We're going to take a bold step forward. And really, we're going to do this knowing that we don't know the answers. We absolutely do not fully understand what's on the other side of this, but we know that we believe that what's on this side is bad. And I think that that's interesting, where SSB, on the technical side, gives us a mechanism for saying no, you don't have the complete record, there's no such thing as a complete record. The whole thing is predicated on, your network is who you see and who you are interact with, and who cares what every transaction ever is, and why are we so concerned with the digital consistency or consensus? I think that creates a much more interesting space for failure states. And I think that it's interesting that the users of SSB are so much more willing to take risks and not concerned about whether tweets are delivered inside of two milliseconds, which I think is an interesting characteristic to look at here in the group settings. It's really interesting to think about the scaling factors of this trust phrase. And I think to me that tolerance of failure is a biggie.

MASH: I don't know if disintermediation is always a good thing. In the case where there's an imbalance of power and you have interactions with somebody, then the fact that it's a direct interaction that's not mediated by anything means that the imbalance of power is presented in a pure state, whereas if you have something that's mediating that interaction, then it's a little bit more balanced. If protesters are interacting with police in the flesh, then they're very vulnerable, but they can yell at the police department on social media, and then because it's a public thing, everyone can see what they're saying. And so everyone can understand like, oh, wow, the police department just posted some bullshit, and everyone's calling out on it. So I feel like maybe sometimes it's not a bad thing to have an intermediary.

DAWN: Because I'm preparing for an AGM for a cooperative I was thinking in the other direction. The ways when, by design, you need—the principle that was in my mind is, one, no voting by proxies. One person, one vote, is baked in as this way that you help folks closer to each other, or to help with governance, where it's like, well, everyone's gonna have one vote, no one's gonna have any proxies. That kind of closeness of a close community is actually super important and baked into some of these other principles. But I take the point. I think though you're flagging an intense power asymmetry between the state and people, individuals and folks who may be non-citizens in some cases.

KEVIN: Thinking about the interaction between the protestors and the police, and how there can't be any trust there, I think one aspect of it is the anonymity. The police are covering up their badges and their names, and they're not really individuals anymore, you know, they're just this blob of force. And besides just the outright brutality, how can you know them, ever, in that context? They're not creating even an environment for trust because of that.

DAWN: Uh huh. This is something that I don't know a lot about. I wonder if other folks on this call have some of this context. I listened to one interview with someone who wrote a book about the history of policing and obviously, its connection to slavery and the slave trade, but then also its long connection to militarism and imperial actions abroad. But but there was a specific piece of that story which was the way the Blue Coat wall of silence or however people refer to it where you don't narc on other cops basically became a thing I think maybe speaks to how that is used tactically, what you pointed out, Kevin.

DAWN: But I think there's another thing though about who gets rendered visible; they get to be a uniform force or a wall. But then they have all these technologies and tools that render and individualize each person they're facing. And so people who are protesting then bear that weight of being visible.

KEVIN: So Kelsey, just put it in the chat. I agree.

KELSEY: So there's some pretty interesting crowd—they're trying to have that asymmetry, but I'm not sure to what extent they actually do, because the Twitterverse is real good at identifying license plates immediately, and found out who the shooter was the other day before the cops did, that kind of thing.

DAWN: I mean, I think that just reopens the conditions of possibility. It's beyond police realism. We don't need these systems. This doesn't have to be this way. They're spending all this money to convince us it's impossible for them to be otherwise, but it's not. You don't need that institutionalized violence.

KELSEY:
There's also something really interesting in this concept, and I don't know if this is the conversation to have this in, but there's I guess this comes from the same argument as folks who talk about nuclear power and nuclear waste and whether that could ever be safe, and there exists ambient radiation in uranium ore that you don't mine. So if you set your limit for tolerance, if you ignore that and just say you're it can only be zero and not below the ambient unmined, you create an impossible situation. That's a long way of getting to my point, which is, we the public are fallible, definitely. But our guardrail shouldn't be whether we're fallible, it should be whether we're better than the fallibility that is already inherent in the system.

MASH: I want to bring back what Kevin and also Kelsey said about anonymity and I think part of what—I don't think trust is really possible. I think there's some contexts where anonymity is very important. But I think that we can't really have trust in an anonymous situation because trust depends on continuity of relationship. I guess there are contexts where there is a one-time trust, but even in terms of social experiments about altruism and things like that, where if it's a one time interaction, you're less likely to be altruistic. But if you know that you are gonna have to collaborate with a person again and again in the future, then you're kind of necessitated to act a little bit more prosocially, in order to gain the possibility of trust later in the future. Something we talked about a little bit, maybe in the middle of the discussion was about the the monetization aspect and how it kind of facilitates a quid pro quo or tit for tat mentality. Whereas, I think trust, there's an element of ephemerality in it, and an element of eternal aspect of it because if I'm building a trusting relationship with somebody, I guess a lot of people do conceptualize it as, there has to be a balance in terms of give and take, but there's also an element of, the trust itself being valuable, and not just the individual transactions that are happening. And so I think in an anonymous context, you don't have that to facilitate it, and so again, bringing back the police thing, the anonymity has to be symmetrical in order to have trust or it has to be completely no anonymity.

KEVIN: Yeah, I agree they shouldn't be hiding themselves. And the other thing that you're saying, I don't keep a ledger of how I spend time and help my friends and stuff like that, you know, like they bought me a meal this one time, I owe them a meal another time, we don't do that. That idea of transactions and ledger does not factor into how I build relationships and trust with my family and my friends.

KELSEY: David Graeber is so good on this. If you haven't read Debt the First 1000 Years by David Graeber, I super recommend it. He talks a lot about the origins of money as, what's important is not the money but actually the debt and the importance of, you build a community by not ever canceling the debt. If you always owe each other something, you know that the relationship must continue. So there exist cultures even now, where if you fully pay off a debt, that's a huge insult, because it means that you may now part ways forever.

MASH: Sort of like how your credit score goes down if you pay off a loan.

DAWN: Actually, this where I found really helpful the Wikipedia take on different domains that use trust. It spoke about how in most social contexts, trust is more used like a heuristic. It's a type of process that allows for a quick register of how you act in a situation, but it's not codified so granularly, as you all mentioned, down to the transaction level. I think there's something to that I wanted to reflect on more. But also when you were talking about anonymity and trust, I was thinking about the alternative, which is not anonymity but secret and how that relates to trust as being very valuable. So say, thinking about putting mechanisms like open balloting is one. But in many cases, you always also have provisions for when you do secret ballots. And that is a part of a way that you maintain committee cohesion and trust. And if you think about democratic participation, that's actually a way to build trust in the democratic process in a larger scale, is if people know that they can express their opinions without looking over their shoulders as they do it.

I don't know exactly how to unpack secret, but I think there's something really cool there and how that relates to building trust, but that that is quite distinct from anonymity.

It made me think of, if you're buying federal bonds, treasury bonds or whatever, it's commonly accepted that they will eventually be paid off no matter what. It's the most secure bond or whatever. And I think part of that echoes that idea of, a future expectation that's always in the future, which creates trust, because it forms a sort of economic backbone.

Chat log

  • 00:11:24 Kelsey Breseman: I read that book on audiobook a while ago, would recommend! Can dip in and out and there’s always something interesting being discussed
  • 00:12:10 Dawn, dc (she/her): Pad for notes: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw#
  • 00:13:28 Kelsey Breseman: esp compared w the illustration on that same techcrunch article
  • 00:13:33 Kelsey Breseman: v misleading conflation
  • 00:20:43 Kelsey Breseman: “what we want tech to be or enable re trust"
  • 00:21:59 Kelsey Breseman: & there is really strong call for trust & accountability on the hashtag– somebody says X and people reply confirmations or ask for confirmations
  • 00:23:04 Kelsey Breseman: trust is earned
  • 00:25:03 Kelsey Breseman: role of protocol is an interesting q
  • 00:25:16 Kelsey Breseman: protocol as guiderails for how to earn trust in a specific community?
  • 00:26:06 Kelsey Breseman: ^ more abusable than no-protocol?
  • 00:27:00 mash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth-default_theory
  • 00:30:08 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): deeeeep agree
  • 00:33:43 Dawn, dc (she/her): WHAT ABOUT BGP!!!!!!
  • 00:40:30 Kelsey Breseman: thanks for that Novi article, really helped
  • 00:45:08 Kelsey Breseman: how apocalyptic is that, to choose to trust scarcity rather than the reliability of people
  • 00:47:23 Kelsey Breseman: super deontological
  • 00:49:29 Kelsey Breseman: ugh my audio is messing up
  • 00:50:19 Dawn, dc (she/her): The audio is on my end -- gonna see what I can do on my end
  • 00:50:45 Kelsey Breseman: abolish money
  • 00:51:29 Dawn, dc (she/her): #defundthepolice #exitcapitalism
  • 00:52:43 Dawn, dc (she/her): Was also gonna say: the Black Socialist of America Dual Power app
  • 00:54:01 mash: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bail-bloc-founder-says-how-monero-mining-can-help-ice-detainees
  • 00:56:47 Kelsey Breseman: lots of money = proxy for lots of trust, goes with “are they poor because they’re ___”
  • 00:57:50 Kevin @lightandluck: +1
  • 00:57:55 Kelsey Breseman: trust impossible if you have no choice
  • 00:58:06 mash: +1
  • 00:59:39 mash: gift economy?
  • 01:00:16 mash: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt32bcgj ?
  • 01:02:35 Dawn, dc (she/her): Also happy to share a pdf of it
  • 01:03:08 mash: https://theappeal.org/justice-in-america-episode-20-mariame-kaba-and-prison-abolition/ ?
  • 01:04:57 Dawn, dc (she/her): http://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/ I think has a comparison of abolition and non-abolition techniques
  • 01:05:22 Kelsey Breseman: also straight-up love that in fact its GoT because everybody watched that so they can replicate
  • 01:08:21 Kelsey Breseman: Google+! ahahaha
  • 01:09:30 mash: LOL
  • 01:09:48 Kelsey Breseman: useful bc it doesn’t try to “create” trust, just lets you more accurately map the existing trust relationships you build
  • 01:10:10 Kelsey Breseman: also why blocking someone on Fb, even now when nobody loves Fb, is still like a top-level insult
  • 01:15:55 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): so sorry folks, gotta jet (kid needs a bath)
  • 01:16:03 Kelsey Breseman: bye brendan!
  • 01:16:06 Kevin @lightandluck: take care Brendan!
  • 01:16:07 mash: byebye!
  • 01:16:15 b5 | Brendan O'Brien (he/him): stay safe all, and thanks for the great talk
  • 01:16:32 Dawn, dc (she/her): bye!
  • 01:17:45 Kelsey Breseman: whole other can of worms, but they also use our individuality. Cops on roof were shining flashlights down and pointing at individuals.
  • 01:18:01 Kelsey Breseman: unclear why, but I know they have a partnership w Amazon’s facial recog
  • 01:22:09 Kelsey Breseman: David Graeber/Debt is sooo good on that stuff
  • 01:22:29 Dawn, dc (she/her): thanks for catching my mic! My mouse died and is charging :((
  • 01:24:14 Kevin @lightandluck: credit
  • 01:24:58 mash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
  • 01:25:09 Kelsey Breseman: oh right 5000 heh
  • 01:25:25 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 that "heuristic" part stood out to me too
  • 01:26:36 Kevin @lightandluck: +1 agree, having privacy/secret is important too
  • 01:27:03 Kelsey Breseman: Privacy is our next topic!
  • 01:27:11 Kelsey Breseman: #76