Who Can You Trust
Giselle Minoli made the point at #googleplus about only being able to trust what we make ourselves: I have to disagree entirely.
But she does get at an absolutely central point, and a concept I've been drilling into for a couple of years. Gideon Rosenblatt inspired a key insight as well.
Society is founded on trust. And how societies function is based on the level of trust within the society. There are high-trust, and low-trust societies, and this is a large area of study I've only just begun to scrape at (drop the terms into Google Scholar or Microsoft's academic database for starters).
We can trust in the institutions which found themselves on trust itself. That is, those which are accountable, open, transparent, commit to what it is that they will do. They may fail, but if they fail, they're open about that as well.
(Google are ... somewhat ... adhering to that last, though I wouldn't say they're doing a great job of this.)
Start-ups' Flipside
Some time back on Hacker News discussing whatever, I replied to a comment saying "Oh, I could start up a project to do that" concerning some need with the observation that it wasn't the starting up that was hard, but the not-shutting-down part.
Silicon Valley, synecdoche for the information media technology industry as whole, is a start-up culture, but that goes hand-in-hand with being a shut-down culture. The sector takes risks, seeks extreme financial rewards, dubs them after fantastical creatures that don't exist, unicorns, and, if a venture is even only modestly rather than outrageously successful, kills the concept without blinking. Even if there are hundreds of thousands, or hundreds of millions of people affected.
Governments are institutions which are criticised for their inefficiencies, but a side-effect of that is a strong resistence to shutting down.
(Sometimes too strong, but then, all features can be useful or harmful, swords cut two ways, etc., etc.)
And governments aren't the only ends to these means. Social organisations, educational institutions, cities, and nations -- as cultural constructs of common language, religion, beliefs, traditions, rituals, etc. -- are extremely durable. Not indestructable, but far more resilient than most commercial institutions.
(I don't have explanations of why this is yet, though I'm thinking of a few possibilities. One that stands out is an ability to survive in a very-low-activity state for a long time -- call it a hibernation, pupal, or spore state if you will.)
What commercial structures provide is an immense capacity to capture capital flows and formation (debt, equity), attention (via the very information media technologies that Silicon Valley develops), political power, social, cultural, and propaganda influence, and the like. But the brightest stars burn out the fastest, and the trajectory of many tech firms is high but brief. AT&T, IBM, Apple, Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft are among the oldest alive today. All are monopolies. (Something that goes very closely in hand with networks, physical, or logical.) All have reputations for playing rough, largely because there's very little other than aggression which creates a defensible space.
There are many things I've built myself which no longer work, or which I cannot maintain, or keep up-to-date with current needs. Rugged individualism is another trope, and in fact, the term itself is political -- Herbert Hoover used it in a speech in February of 1928, and its modern use is established from there (check that yourself on Google's Ngram viewer). So, no, we do need to work together, but we need to do so in ways that are trust-generative in and of themselves.
Information Technology is a Trust Killer
One of my strongest insights -- the one Gideon prompted me to -- was that advances in information technologies themselves tend to reduce overall social trust, and trust-building institutions. I'm not completely convinced this is correct, but it smells right to me.
In a pre-technological world, you could not communicate rapidly in rich detail beyond what you could immediately see or hear. You might be able to light a signal fire, visible for miles, to send a few bits. Or you could dispatch a messenger with a memorised or small written message, capable of covering 20 miles, possibly 250 miles on horseback, per day. Distant traval was impossible for months of the year -- November to May meant no seafaring due to storms and short days, in the Northern Hemisphere.
Every major preindustrial empire had an associated religion. The forms varied tremendously, but each had at its core a set of trust-generating precepts, behaviours that must be or could not be followed. Without the ability to check in on agents or counterparties at distant locations, you had to be able to rely on predictable behaviour. "A man's word is his bond." The concepts of name, that is, identity, and reputation, were virtually synonymous.
Deception occurred, certainly. History and mythology are full of it. But it's highly noted. Dante reserves his deepest pits of hell not for the transactors of violence, but for the betrayers of trust. This mattered to society tremendously.
Writing, printing, telegraphy, telephony, photography, cinema, radio, television, interactive communications systems, databases, the Internet, mobile connectivity -- all increased the capacity to see approaching real-time, or receive detailed representations of, conditions at a distance. You no longer relied on belief, testimony, and trust but on evidence.
(With profound implications for such trivial things as science and empiricism.)
A common observation of monitoring systems -- employee computer desktops, children's cellphones, professional review systems, etc. -- is that they break down trust. That's why you don't sneak a peak at your childrens' diaries or journals without a very good reason. (Generally: trust has already been broken.)
(This isn't an argument to stupidly deny evidence, but the line is a delicate one.)
We Need Trust-Generating Social Systems
Religion played this role before, I don't know that it can now, though I suspect something of roughly similar shape may be required. Note that the ancient empirical religions were not similarly structured; rather, they varied tremendously. Some were multitheistic, some pantheistic, some animist, some monothestic. Some had no gods, but were founded on meditation and practice. Some on ancestor worship. Some on rituals and sacrifice. And no, I'm not a Religions major, and my very casual familiarity with the field can certainly be corrected and strengthened.
There are also clear exceptions to the general rules. The Mongol Empire was largely tolerant of multiple religions, so far as I'm aware, and there were others as well, though I believe each did have a central faith of some form.
I don't have good answers yet, though I'm finding the questions interesting. I recommend others consider these issues.
Adapted from a G+ comment.