[nneonneo]

Ah, the book theft involving Caliban Book Shop. I worked in an office opposite that book shop for almost five years - walked right past that book shop every day, and had no idea they were centrally involved in moving millions of dollars of stolen books.

Sometimes, crimes really do happen right under your nose.

[EnderViaAnsible]

Stories like this remind me that trust is an indispensable aspect of civilization. Ultimately we have to trust our road workers to do good work, our bank tellers to be honest, and apparently our archivists not to steal what has been entrusted to their care.

Also, it reminds me that our justice system(s) are mostly about punishment, because we can't actually prevent crimes, just act once they are already committed.

We must trust because we cannot verify, except in Phillip K. Dick novels and Tom Cruise movies. (China's dystopian work in this area notwithstanding.)

[cerealbad]

trust has become implicit with mass surveillance. the only thing left to do is to read minds, but that's almost an afterthought for distraction and hysteria. what does it matter what you think or believe when everything you do is closely monitored and reinforced?

a reciprocal strategy develops (trust the trusted) even if you have no surveillance,technology or civilization. trust transactions begin with a certain fixed amount and then the balance shifts based around the perception of the participants.

intercepting perceptions, can circumvent trust/distrust which scales nicely if you can have sparse networks and centrally distributed information on the cheap. you can even customize interceptor information for specific networks, to create all types of down stream effects.

so how has it become implicit? well, you can use technology now to create your own trust/distrust network of information, then you can train this thing to judge new information for you, and most importantly you can expose (or hide) any biases you might have with adversarial networks. this will lead to a new type of trust, a type of meta-mathematical consensus, where machines just make trust decisions far better than humans can, and ideology starts to become replaced by dataology. data dissidents may find ways to circumvent trust networks as impostors or use cloned disposable networks, but crime and problems associated with resistance to existing orders will decline precipitously, you may be against roads but you need to use them all the same.

you may even see an emergent class of rebel/terrorist/revolutionary celebrity, since the novelty of not using a valid and accurate trust network geared towards ones preferences will be the same as not using the internet or banking systems for mass communication or commerce. parallel societies can easily exist without conflict, but the mass of humanity always moves together in the direction of simplification, and it's easier to trust machines, so far they have a much better track record than people, given their rapid adoption in almost every critical human sector. the trade off is that machines become difficult to build, repair and understand, but being a human becomes a lot easier, and one serves the other.

this may seem naive to people inside technology networks, but i expect a type of generational dependence to grow, and things that work are rather hard to obsolesce once they establish a critical mass of global adoption. people trust machines, computers, the internet, they will grow to entrust them with trust-proofs.