Why institutional trust has vanished and distributed trust is soaring

I love a good TED talk. Every now and then, one resonates so well with me that I feel compelled to post it here to share it with other.

Rachel Botsman’s recent talk was one such talk. She discussed how trust has moved through three distinct phases in history: local trust, where our trust was knowing those in the village, institutional trust, where we relied upon banks, companies and governments to determine who and what could be trusted to the recently emerging distributed trust, where our behaviour, repumtation and globally accepted practices and technologies dictate what we can trust today.

For example, you may have stayed at an AirBnB, taken an Uber, or you may own Bitcoin, all examples of how we don’t need to know the person involved, nor does a central institution need to tell us what can be trusted. Peers can trust one another because of the tools at our disposal now.