I worry that the crisis in confidence that is sweeping across the world's financial markets has little to do with bad mortgages and rapacious financiers.
I blame the Internet. And if I'm right, the solution to the crisis is beyond the reach of any business or government. It's going to come from a fairly radical and long-lasting shift in the very structure of society itself.
Put simple, the brand Authority has lost its luster, perhaps permanently.
We question any institution we used to trust, don't we?
- Doctors don't know anything, as any Internet search will yield more information than any one human being could distill
- As shoppers, we long ago gave up on the authority of department stores being qualified, let alone able, to measure our any need, and the cater to every one of them
- News media telling the truth? Yeah, right, considering that not only is there a news outlet online that'll match your own quirky bias or suspicions, but you, too, can produce the stuff on your blog if you want
Everything a politician says is a lie, to someone, or the rationale for the statement questionable, somewhere. The motivations of financiers, whether real or imagined, put everything they do or say say into question.
Pictures can be doctored. Videos faked. Declarations thrown out to the void, finding home or hostility almost randomly.
Information is a pliable commodity, not a premium brand. It's endless and, as such, worthless.
So there's no crisis in what we value, but rather the how we do it.
I wonder whether the days of implicitly trusting large organizations (governments, businesses, markets) are truly numbered. The medium we use to communicate no longer supports them; now that we can know everything, we end up knowing pretty much nothing. Or thinking that we don't know the whole truth. And we can't rely on them to provide the answers.
It's a shocking observation because, if I'm right, the solution is not going to come from the very entities we no longer trust. They simply don't possess the authority, nor the means by which to regain it. Instead, authority -- and the credibility, reliability, and trust that come with it -- will emerge from the bottom-up...from individuals banding together into groups, whether for shopping, investing, and even regulating their daily lives.
Think less global village, and more a million little villages in which we are members, and to which we look for filtering and affirming content. Guilds, mutual societies, clubs organized by ethnic, religious, and geographic identity. A new era wherein individuals are defined explicitly and wholly by their identities in one or more groups.
This'll make the Internet less of an open-ended network of endlessly unqualified content, and more a tool used by individuals to build little villages with it (whether online or off). Groups with barriers to entry, and responsibilities of membership, and in which we are both transparently known as well as know the other members, rules, and ways of conduct.
Think chat room with high walls. And armed guards.
Confidence will not return easily, and it might emerge in very different forms than we're used to.
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