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Comment by nonrandomstring

2 years ago

Trust is a valuable and precarious thing, It's hard and slow to build but easy to destroy. It's our greatest advantage against authoritarian regimes, and that's why destroying trust is a long term strategy of non-linear warfare against our culture.

Like fossil fuels that take millions of years to form, but can be burned in half a century, trust is burned (enshitification) as cheap accumulated social capital by those without higher loyalty. This for me is why financialisation sucks the life out of nations and why greedy and selfish big-tech companies are some of the most treacherous of all entities.

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nonrandomstring

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graemep  2 years ago

Fiancialisation and short term incentives are part of the problem, but not all of it.

In tech (and increasingly elsewhere) businesses have realised there are other ways to keep repeat customers without needing customer trust: lock-in, buying out competitors, network effects, being the best for long enough to obliterate competition (at least in customer's minds), branding tied to identity etc. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google etc. have very little to gain from trust or products that are better for consumers as people will use their products regardless.

  • ghaff  2 years ago

    Of course businesses require some level of trust. If Amazon simply took your money half the time and didn't ship your order, they would have problems. Of course, we can debate the degree to which they should be selective about and have more controls over third-party shippers, etc. But tradeoffs (and there are almost always tradeoffs) are different from saying that trust doesn't play a role at all.