The frameworks of trust and trustlessness around algorithmic control technologies. A lost sense of community

Abstract

Certain techno-political infrastructures, such as 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 worth 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 still 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. For this reason, in this chapter, we will 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 will address 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 in its implementation.

Keywords: trust, trust production, generalized trust, decentralized technologies, institutional trust, e-identity, SSI