结论

‘It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.’center>

Joseph Stiglitz1

On 28 February 2016, in a small cinema in Pan Paper Village in Kenya, more than 400 locals had gathered to watch an English football match. The game was between two of the greatest rivals in the Premier League: Manchester United and Arsenal. The cinema belonged to Eric, an entrepreneur who also owns a printing business, small kiosk and a photo studio. He is a local success story.2

The Kenyan crowd, sitting in a darkened room with the game projected against a wall, cheered as the players walked out to start the match. Man U started out strong with Arsenal struggling to get anything going. Then the screen went blank. The crowd let out a groan. ‘Get the game back on!’, ‘Boo, what’s happening?’, ‘We’re missing the match!’, the paying customers hollered at Eric.

The cable company had disconnected the service because Eric’s bill had not been paid on time. Feeling frazzled, with hundreds of eyes trained on him to fix the problem, and fast, he reached for his phone. He opened an app called Tala, a company that makes loans to people without a traditional credit history in emerging markets including Kenya, the Philippines and Tanzania. Luckily, he recently reached gold status for repaying four loans on time and his credit had been increased to 5,000 Kenyan shillings (KES), the equivalent of around £40. It’s a decent amount of money when you consider that a small 0.33-litre bottle of Coke costs around 50 KES.

With a few taps and swipes on his phone, Eric took out his Tala credit line and immediately paid his cable fees. Within minutes, the match was back on the big screen. The crowd cheered; the score was still 0–0. Each customer paid Eric around 15 KES, so he made 6,000 shillings in takings. After everyone had left, he paid back his Tala loan and kept the profits.

Eric is one of more than 300,000 people Tala has issued loans to in Kenya since the company was founded in 2011. Loans range from $10 to $100, with terms of three to four weeks. The interest rates range from 11 to 15 per cent, considerably better than those of the loan sharks who charge a crippling 300 per cent and more. The repayment rate is 90 per cent. Tala’s customers are part of the one-third of the world’s population that is ‘unbanked’. Across the globe, there are 2.5 billion people who have no traditional credit score and are therefore not eligible to receive loans to fund new businesses, buy a home and generally improve their lives. ‘For a traditional bank, [the lack of a credit score] means there is no real data to answer the question: “What’s my basis for investing in this person?”,’ says Shivani Siroya, the thirty-four-year-old founder and CEO of Tala.

Siroya was first raised in Udaipur, India. Her mother, by all accounts, was a renegade. She went to medical school and was the first female doctor, a gynaecologist, in her community. She ran medical camps in rural areas, training women how to deliver babies more safely. Her relationship with her patients was always selfless. ‘We would say to her, “Mom, you work so hard and your patients never pay you,”’ Siroya tells me.3 ‘But money wasn’t the thing that kept her going. For her, being a doctor is not a transactional relationship. She truly wants to help.’

The family eventually ended up moving to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, and her mother continued her good work there, often allowing poor patients to pay when they could or not at all. ‘She gave them credit because she trusted them,’ Siroya says.4

On the phone from Santa Monica, California, where she now lives, Siroya sounds so calm and tranquil she might have just finished a yoga class. She gives the impression of being, like her mother, full of life and goodness. It’s odd to imagine her working in the cut-throat culture of mergers and acquisitions at Citigroup, which is where she began her career as a banking analyst before going on to become an equity researcher at UBS. Siroya loved the data but something didn’t sit right with her. ‘I didn’t want to be analysing companies selling diet drugs; I wanted to work with companies doing something with impact.’5 She heard about social enterprise guru Muhammad Yunus who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for pioneering the concepts of microfinance and microcredit. Shortly after, she quit her job and joined the United Nations Population Fund.

At the UN, she ended up working with thousands of microbusiness owners, such as locals running food stalls and small kiosks across Africa and India. Over the course of two and a half years, she interviewed more than 2,500 people, going door to door and learning the detail of their lives. ‘These micro-entrepreneurs were working so hard to grow their businesses and to help create jobs, yet they felt really stuck. They were getting access to really informal micro-loans, often from loan sharks, but they couldn’t get access to any kind of real capital in the form of a business loan,’ Siroya says. ‘When I looked at the other side, I found that traditional banks felt these individuals, operating in an economy where cash is prevalent, were too risky. I saw a gap in the market.’ She realized the problem came down to identity. How could she build financial identities for people who didn’t otherwise have any?

Approximately a billion people in the emerging markets have basic smartphones. People are using them in the same way that Westerners do–to text friends, surf the net, run their daily lives and pay for everything from electricity bills to parking fees. The phones also tell a story about their owners. Tala can cull more than 10,000 data points from a phone in less than one minute to gauge a person’s ability and willingness to repay loans. ‘We look at behavioural things such as what are their current spending habits? Do they have consistency in their income? What other apps do they use?’ explains Siroya.

The size of a person’s network is a strong trust signal for potential borrowers. Turns out, if our phone calls last more than four minutes, we tend to have stronger relationships, and therefore may be more creditworthy. Similarly, people who communicate with more than fifty-eight different contacts tend to be better borrowers because they have a wider network to depend on. Even how we organize our contacts can be revealing. ‘If more than 40 per cent of the entries in a person’s contact list have both first and last names, it suggests a customer who is sixteen times more reliable than one with very few contacts listed with first and last names,’ explains Siroya. Filling in a first and a last name shows, in a small way, the care and attention we pay to something. Indeed, no single piece of information determines whether someone gets a loan–it’s the cumulative points of data that provide a clear picture of a person. ‘It’s a financial identity that looks more like a person and less like a score,’ says Siroya. ‘This is data that would not be found on a paper trail or in any formal financial record.’6 It proves that a person doesn’t need a traditional credit score to prove they are trustworthy.

Today, Tala is the fifth most used app in Kenya. Only the Bible app, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are ahead of it. ‘Customers don’t see us as a traditional banking institution which they have a transactional relationship with. They see us as a personalized financial partner,’ Siroya says. Tala illustrates how technology can help find ways round trust bottlenecks to unlock more economic activity. It demonstrates how data and algorithms can prove that there are billions of people like Eric, often overlooked and undervalued, that deserve to be trusted.

Why is Tala so successful? It sounds so simple: start with the person, not the system.

‘Free markets can succeed for all if business works with the people, not just sells to them,’ says Richard Edelman in response to the 2017 Edelman survey that revealed a ‘global implosion of trust’.7 To get out of the current trust collapse, we need radically to rethink the foundations on which our institutions are built so they are designed to work not just for people but with people. ‘We must rebuild faith in the system citizen by citizen, community by community, where common goals and fairness matter,’ writes Edelman. In other words, put people at the centre of everything you do.

The litmus test for any organization is this: would people describe it as an ‘honest, ethical and reliable friend’, someone who is there when you need them?

To give a simple example, when Tala wants to send their customers a reminder to repay their loan, they don’t constantly bombard them with notifications when those customers clearly don’t have any money in their bank. What’s the point? Instead, they send borrowers a friendly SMS reminder the minute a deposit hits their account. More than 80 per cent of people pay on their phones as soon as they get that reminder. It shows the power of technology when it contains simple ingredients of humanity such as empathy and fairness.

When I started writing this book, I thought, maybe a little naively, that most of the entrepreneurs, hackers, leaders and innovators I would meet designing ideas based on distributed trust would be like Siroya. And many are–working to reframe deeply held institutional assumptions about power, access and equality. There are figures like Gerard Ryle, head of the ICIJ team of journalists behind the Panama Papers story, who uses digital networks to get people to work together, selflessly and collaboratively. Or entrepreneurs such as Leanne Kemp, founder of Everledger, and Savi Baveja, CEO of Trooly, who want to take on such enormous industries as background checks and the diamond trade, industries with troubled legacies and where trust has been systemically broken in many places. If you add up the stories of founders such as Joe Gebbia from Airbnb, Lynn Perkins from UrbanSitter and Frédéric Mazzella from BlaBlaCar, you start to see a world where new mechanisms for enabling trust leaps can make us comfortable with people, ideas and experiences we may never have otherwise considered. Their companies might look very different from each other but what they have in common is using digital tools to build trust with strangers to connect and collaborate on an unprecedented scale.

On the other hand, there are entrepreneurs who act like ‘digital gods’, reaping the humungous benefits of platforms and algorithms with immense impact on our lives, but denying responsibility when things go wrong. In some cases, the high walls of institutions are merely being replaced by opaque, controlling algorithms and unpredictable leaders of platforms. Travis Kalanick, for example, the controversial co-founder and former CEO of Uber. Among other instances of bad behaviour, Kalanick sent emails to his PR team after the media reported a woman had been choked by a driver, instructing them to ‘make sure these writers don’t come away thinking we are responsible even when these things do go bad’.8 The company and its notorious founder don’t do themselves any favours by projecting an aggressive and flawed public image.

In late January 2017, a protest movement with the hashtag #DeleteUber quickly gained traction over two issues, both of which involved the company’s connection to President Donald Trump. The former CEO said his participation on an advisory group within the Trump administration had created what he called a ‘perception-reality gap between who people think we are, and who we actually are’.9 But perception is everything.

When trust is lost, a company has to exhibit humility, to be unafraid to give a genuine apology and acknowledge mistakes, and to demonstrate a clear willingness to fix what is wrong. Indeed, in an age of distributed trust, it’s much harder to get away with errors and bungled responses, because there are far more people watching. Real incidents, or merely unfounded views that someone feels to be true, circulate at an unprecedented speed. A tweet about Uber’s surge pricing might appear in one person’s feed in the morning and then have flown around the world on social media by noon, leading to a full-blown protest not long after. The consequences for trust are enormous.

In 1919, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote a poem called ‘The Second Coming’ to describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.10

Almost a hundred years on, we are living in a time where perilous trust battles are raging between facts and ‘alternative facts’, falsehoods and rumours; between open platforms and gated communities; between elites or authorities and ‘the people’; between the informed, the misinformed and the credulous. It’s fair to assume that for some time to come the prevailing mood will be anti-elite and anti-authority–a feeling that our traditional systems are deeply failing us. Trust in big institutions and the established order will continue to unravel and collapse.

That reaction might be understandable but a blanket hammering of institutional trust–a wholesale rejection of the media, the courts and intelligence services, the truth-defending organizations that underpin any democracy–threatens to create chaos. We obviously need to question institutions and hold them accountable, but if we pull the rug out from under them all, what are we left with? Potentially a dangerous trust vacuum that is open to manipulation and being filled with catchy conspiracy theories, comforting biases, unfounded accusations and sleights of hand. A trust free-for-all, in other words. Think about it: when people are told they cannot trust any of the old institutions, they can end up trusting nothing, or anything. Institutions do not need to go the way of the dodo–they just have to learn to adapt to this new trust landscape if they don’t want to be left behind.

When institutional systems fail, alternatives will always rise up to take their place. Distributed trust in itself can’t knock down the rise of extremist populist movements, dangerous policies introduced by radical political leaders or a divisive resurgence of nationalism. But, driven democratically and rationally, and shaped and reshaped by people’s needs and innate preferences about how they want to do things, it can provide a path forward for businesses, governments, media and other key institutions. It gives them a means to redesign systems that put people first in ways that are more transparent, inclusive and accountable.

Significantly, this revolution is taking place in a landscape of rapidly shifting and evolving technologies, where the once unthinkable, the once impossible, can become the new normal in the blink of an eye. Humans are naturally attuned to taking trust leaps. Today, however, it feels like we are constant ‘newbies’ leaping at such an accelerated rate and in so many realms at once that it’s dizzying.11 That’s another challenge; setting up trust systems that can adapt and keep pace with an unprecedented rate of change.

I would not have written this book if I did not believe in the enormous potential of distributed trust to give people, even countries, the tools and power to leap out of low-trust situations; if I didn’t believe in its ability to help us find ways through the treacherous storm of distrust we are currently only just weathering. There is a large dose of optimism and exciting potential in the world of distributed trust, although it would be foolhardy not to acknowledge there is also a high degree of fear and uncertainty. It’s a work in progress. We’re still discovering its strengths, its virtues and its vulnerabilities.

Over the course of Who Can You Trust? we’ve looked at several stories where distributed trust always seems to lead us back to centralized power; a take-over, if you like, of those early good intentions. Take Amazon, Alibaba or Facebook. They might have begun as ways to democratize commerce or information, but they have become centralized behemoths in control of valuable and ever-more sensitive data.

What’s more, institutions meant to keep dominating powers in check–regulatory bodies and labour unions, for example–are ill-equipped to deal with a new digital era of fast-paced monopolies. One of the real challenges for distributed trust is whether it can resist, or at least weather, market forces and human greed.

Ideas such as China’s Social Credit System show how distributed networks of trust could become national networks of shame and interference, controlled by governments. And what has happened to those early utopian bitcoin miners? Mining power has ended up dangerously concentrated in China, at odds with the globalized ideals underlying bitcoin. The mass exchange of diverse ideas and the decentralization of information that we first envisioned the World Wide Web would bring us have happened, but so has a new kind of homophily and centralization–hyperlinks and hierarchies managing what we see and read–inside a handful of social networks.12 It’s as if the small local cafes where we talked and disagreed with strangers have been replaced by a chain of McCafes where we are given algorithmically determined food, regardless of what we might actually want. The consequence is that we have become vulnerable to digital concentrations of power. We want power handed back to the people, but what if it’s handed to the wrong people? Or only some of the people? Or, worse still, only a few of the wrong people?

It would be easy to suggest that platforms should be owned and governed by their users but there is the issue of accountability. Even ideas, such as the DAO fund and bitcoin, that seek to challenge bureaucratic systems and powerful gatekeepers, seem to need top-down decision-makers at times. When the DAO fund went belly up, what were many people calling for? An individual: Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Yes, he had to get a majority consensus from the user network to implement the hard fork solution; but it seems we still want to be able to throw up our hands and say ‘It was his idea’, or ask ‘Who’s in charge here?’ For the moment, at least, we remain in a mindset that wants a benevolent leader, an ultimate decision-maker to take charge and fix the problem. The positive is that all these processes are far more transparent than ever before, as well as under mass observation and open to comment from everyone with a stake in them.

In truth, the creators and leaders of ideas built on distributed trust are not like traditional captains of the ship issuing orders in command-and-control model and manner. But as stuff happens–whether it’s a mis-channelling of funds or an unpredictable mass murder associated with their platform–they are realizing they need to know about and take increased responsibility for everything and anything that could sink the ship. The unforeseen storms could be legal challenges, data breaches, safety questions, unethical behaviour, discrimination or even competitors. When the water starts rushing in, leaders have to act quickly and transparently to plug the holes, and this can’t always involve consensus building, although sometimes it can and should. Once the holes are plugged, they need to figure out how to fix the problem in the long-term in a ‘We will do…’ approach, engaging the wider community.

The third challenge of distributed trust is that many new technologies, from bots to blockchains, either anonymize people or attempt to remove entirely the need to trust another human. Yet it’s humans, with all our wonderful kinks and mutations, who make trust possible. It’s not technology or mathematics. When we trust an automated search engine over a human editor or when avatars or programmed algorithms serve as our managers, trust runs the risk of becoming static. What happens to human let-downs and surprises? These are how we learn to trust, and not trust. How else do we practise the skills of earning and rebuilding trust? Sometimes repairing trust requires a slow cure rate and the personal touch. It would be a shame to find ourselves in a world so automated that we depend solely on machines and algorithms to make decisions about whom to trust. That’s a world apparently devoid of uncertainty, devoid of the colour and movement born of human imperfection, and, if we take our hands off the wheel too much, possibly even dangerous. As astronaut Dave Bowman famously found out when HAL 9000 went rogue in Kubrick’s cult 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of our key challenges is deciding where and when it is appropriate to make trust a matter of computer code.

When we look back in history, we can see that trust falls into distinct chapters. The first was local. The second was institutional. And the third, still very much in its infancy, is distributed. Like most inventions in their early stages, distributed trust will be messy, unpredictable and at times even dangerous. Researching and writing about the theory has sometimes felt remarkably similar to watching my two young children bounding around the house, pushing boundaries, constantly negotiating, feeling misunderstood, trying to figure out the rules they have to abide by and the ones they can ignore.

There is no simple answer to the question ‘Who Can You Trust?’ but we do know that ultimately it comes down to a human decision. Technology can help us make better and different choices, but in the end it’s we who have to decide where to place our trust and who deserves it. It will require some care. Distributed trust needs us to allow space for a trust pause, an interval in which to stop and think before we automatically click, swipe, share and accept. To ask the right questions and to seek the right information that helps us to decide: is this person, information or thing worthy of my trust? What is it I’m trusting them to do or deliver? Each time we engage in that process, we are in our own small way taking responsibility for the kind of world we want to live in. We are exercising the power available to us all now at the press of a key. We are helping to preserve society’s most precious and fragile asset, trust.