The tapestry of trust
A dust-up with a close friend, an argument over trivialities brought a dormant tension to life. This tension eventually sparked this idea that every interaction we partake in, every relationship we nurture, represents a thread. All these threads, microscopic and almost invisible in their singularity, bind together to form a complex tapestry that is the social fabric of our society. The threads it’s made of are social contracts. They are the norms, values, and expectations that guide our behavior. And our trust in the contracts serves to weaves these threads into the intricate patterns of our shared social reality.
Picture an ordinary day, you rise next to your partner, expecting that the secrets whispered in hushed voices will remain behind that shared veil. You brave the morning rush to get to work, relying on the silent agreement that your colleagues will pull their weight, and your employer will treat you fairly. In the virtual world, you log onto Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, placing trust in these platforms to guard your personal information against the dark recesses of the digital world. As nebulous and vague as these expectations are, they become real when reality cuts into them.
These threads, the social contracts underpin every sphere of our lives. They can take explicit forms like an employment or rental or service agreement or implicit ones like the tacit understanding among drivers to obey traffic signals or strangers on the street to follow social rules. But we find ourselves in the midst of an interesting evolution: a gradual but persistent shift towards making these contracts explicit.
From the first-ever known (24th Century BC) code of Urukagina that freed the inhabitants of Lagash (modern-day Iraq) from usury, burdensome controls, hunger, theft, murder, and seizure of property, to modern-day privacy laws that help to ensure that individuals have more control over their personal data and privacy. It marks the human quest for clarity and resilience in the structures we create and interact with.
It's an evolution that dances between the lines of the obvious and the unspoken. The present state of our society brings this delicate ballet under a harsh spotlight. Trust, the bedrock of our societal interactions, is being tested and pushed to its limits on numerous fronts. TikTok, celebrated as the most enthralling social media, is being scrutinized for its ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Reddit, once an open digital commons where ideas were freely exchanged, is closing off its APIs. Google and Bing, the two major gateways to the world’s knowledge, are seemingly on a race to maximize their profits from user data and advertisement.
Nevertheless the vision of a societal tapestry that’s flexible, and adapting to context of the present and to individual needs, evolving with the times still persists. Imagine a world where your identity, your sense of personhood, your relationships, and your professional interactions are all guided by a melange of implicit, explicit and customizable codes. A world that values more transparent and verifiable individual agency.
To web3 as naive as it seems today, is like a sapling pushing through a crack in the concrete. It brings with it the potential for such a future. It could make many of the social contracts in our digital lives explicit, promoting transparency, accountability, and individual control over the outcomes we desire. While its digital in its form, it extends beyond our digital lives, influencing the social structures of our physical world.
It’s important to keep one foot grounded in the present as we step into the future. In the face of overwhelming complexity and a ceaseless march towards explicitness, it’s important not forget the charm of the inexplicit and all illusive unknown-unknowns, the nuanced, the unspoken. As we navigate this uncharted future, it's trust that will guide you and me, the weavers of this tapestry.