"It is no longer feasible to fully comprehend the inner workings of the innumerable devices that we depend on; rather, we are forced to trust that the institutions that deliver these devices to us have designed, tested, and maintained the devices properly."

I'd say the above could be replaced with:

"It was never feasible to fully comprehend the inner workings even of the simplest devices that we depend on, including our own bodies; rather, we are forced to trust causes on the basis of their predictable effects and proceed accordingly."

That is, I don't think the 'trust' you describe or the lack of full comprehension are particular to a technologically advanced age. People did not understand water wheels, longbows, stirrups, keels, oars or other objects any more than they now understand circuits, disc taps, rubber etc.

I wonder if this radical trust is justified on the grounds that these expert systems are always trying to make a sale. In other words, since they have a very tangible monetary investment at stake, are they worth trusting? Does their investment decrease the amount of potential hesitancy toward them.

Thanks for this thoughtful essay, PJ. A couple of (long-winded) points in response:

I totally agree that trust in technologies, their makers and their users is a fundamental commitment we make in a technological society, but the plethora of evidence that our trust has been misplaced accounts, I think, for the fact that we live in a time of widespread existential anxiety. Many of the people I encounter simply don't seem very comfortable in the technological world we've created -- with their surroundings, with one another, or with themselves. That helps explain, I think, why people today seem so angry so much of the time, and the general lack of civility that's been widely discussed and decried.

One reason for this lack of trust is, as an earlier poster noted, that we realize that most of the technology available to us today is available because someone wants to make money from it. Profit, not safety or overall social benefit, is the goal. We're also uneasy because we daily witness the effects of technological power used irresponsibly,as when the car in front of us swerves from side to side while its driver texts her girlfriend.

Another major reason for our lack of trust is the insoluble problem of unexpected consequences: those who produce a given technology seldom consider its potential effects in relation to the diverse circumstances in which it will be used, and wouldn't be able to foresee those myriad effects even if they did try to consider them. We're vulnerable to technological mistakes, and on some level we know it.

The growing complexity of technological systems that you cite also helps explain the widespread existential anxiety I referred to above. The combination of dependence and helplessness is not one that promotes security, or a sense of self possession. Talking to an automobile mechanic or a computer geek makes us feel inadequate -- we've lost trust in ourselves. This helplessness is promoted by manufacturers who realize most consumers today don't *want* to be bothered with repairing the technologies they use.

Contrary to what the earlier poster said, there was a time not so long ago when people knew how to fix a lot of the stuff in their lives, and there was a sense of rootedness that came from that ability. See the recent book "Shopcraft as Soul Craft" for a lovely meditation on that theme.

Trust in many respects is a function of engagement, if not intimacy, and here, too, technology can work in the opposite direction. Despite the sorts of surface interactions that are the currency of social media, many of our technologies actively promote disengagement and isolation. Communicating through technologies increases our connectivity in some ways but undermines it in others.

Georg Simmel (and Georg is the correct spelling, btw) had already recognized this tendency at the onset of the twentieth century, when he wrote, in "The Metropolis and Modern Life" (1903),

"Every dynamic extension becomes a preparation not for a similar extension but rather for a larger one,and from every thread which is spun out of it there continue, growing as out of themselves, an endless number of others…. At this point the quantitative aspects of life are transformed qualitatively. The sphere of life of the small town is, in the main, enclosed within itself. For the metropolis it is decisive that its inner life is extended in a wave-like motion over a broader national or international arena."

While it's true that familiarity can breed contempt (as many people are reminded as they spend Thanksgiving Day with their families), and while it's also true that many people can't wait to escape the claustrophobia of small-town life, it's also true that misunderstandings can easily arise when technology enables anonymous interactions over distance. Who hasn't had the experience of having an off-hand remark made in an email misinterpreted by its recipient because the tone didn't come across as it was intended? And who can trust the companies that make many of our most common technologies and techniques when you can't get a real person who works for them on the phone?

Simmel also talked a lot about the disengagement that is endemic to modern life, and that's the problem, it seems to me, with Donna Haraway's urging that we take technology in hand and make it responsive to our needs. I don't disagree, but leave us not forget that passivity is not only the result of many of our technologies but also their purpose.

Excuse me now, there's a football game on TV I want to see.

PJ, i love this piece.

to the points above that most of our complex systems are trying to sell us something: yes, increasingly. the incursion of brand and monetization into the blogosphere and its networks means that not only does digital sociality require trust in platforms and their embedded analytics, but also in the branded performances of those we interact with. but.

Haraway's cyborg recognizes itself as the product of polluted inheritances, like capitalism, and yet contains within itself the capacity to undermine what it has sprung from. when i get weary of the culture of sales that permeates social media, i take comfort in that.

P. J.,

Thought provoking post. I really appreciate the work you and Nathan are posting on these pages.

My response shares in some of the concerns articulated by Mr. Hill in his comment above. Namely, I see the elegance of your argument, but I'm not sure how well it describes the actual existential experience of modern technology. Mostly, I wonder if there is not a distinction between implicit and explicit trust when we talk about the sociability of technology use. In other words, I'm not sure if the users of complex technologies such as the iPhone or social media platforms are consciously deploying what we might meaningfully call "trust" in their use of these technologies and platforms. We could argue that their use implies a kind of de facto trust in the equipment, but does this amount to the kind of trust that operates in truly social relationships? Trusting systems and trusting persons seem to me to be two different phenomenon. And while it's possible to argue that people set up and run systems so that finally we're trusting in them, but I would suggest that the system, if it is running well, practically obscures the human element. So if we've outsourced our trust as it were to expert systems, is it still trust that we are talking about or habituated responses to (mostly) predictable systems?

Historians of technology (and Arthur C. Clarke) have pointed to an affinity between magic and technology that can be traced back to the early modern era. I would suggest that our existential experience of using an iPad, for example, more readily approximates our experience of magic than it does trust among social relations. As I write this it occurs to me that perhaps your analysis assumes the other half of the atomized (political) individual that you criticize, the rational (economic) actor whose decision making is a fully conscious, calculated affair. In other words, I suspect most people are not consciously rationalizing their use of technologies by invoking trust in the persons who stand behind the technologies, rather they use the technology as if it were a magical tool that "just worked" -- Apple products, I think, are paradigmatic here. And if the trust in persons is not explicit, can it meaningfully be called social?

One last thought. Philosopher Albert Borgmann's "device paradigm" comes to mind here. In brief, he argues that our tools are increasingly offering ease of use, effectiveness, and efficiency but at the expense of becoming increasingly opaque to the average user -- much the same dynamic that you describe. But this opacity, in his view, has the effect of alienating us from the technology, and to some degree from the experiences mediated by those technologies. In part, I suspect, this is precisely because we are made to use that which we don't even remotely understand, and this is not really trust, but a kind of gamble. Trust, in social relations, is not quite blind faith; it is risky, but not, in most cases, a gamble. Coming back to the airplane, for many people, statistics not withstanding, boarding an airplane feels like a gamble and involves very little trust at all.

To wrap up, I suppose I'm suggesting that we need to phenomenologically parse out "trust": reasoned, explicit trust; reasonable, implicit trust; unreasonable, implicit trust; unreasonable, explicit trust (blind faith); explicitly untrusting acquiescence; gambles; etc. Our use of technology relies on many of these, but not all of them amount to the kind of trust that might render us meaningfully social.

That felt like a ramble, but I hope it made some sense.

Cheers.

This is one of the most disgusting goddamn things I have ever read. Lately, I've been wondering where all the cyberpunks went. By that, I mean, all the old-school, techno-shamanic anarchist chaos vectors that guided me through my misspent youth in the early 90's. And you've given me my answer; they're all busy 'depending on the expertise of others,' and are therefore incapable of realizing that our whole fucking civilization has been stolen out from under us by the sniveling little gen-Y shits that think that this is all about generating a living wage without having to have a real job. I hope to god that they all realize how fucking useless they've become and repent before our society becomes a banal cesspool without a frontier to direct it.