A great cartoon from Gaping Void. But the text that inspired it is even better:
Trust used to be something that bound small groups together. Over time we tried to scale trust. It didn’t scale. And what happened instead was Big Everything. In an Assembly-Line meets Broadcast world.
Big Everything broke trust. Big Media lied. Big Content Producer reduced our choices. Big Pipe and Big Device reduced it further. Big Firm wrongsized away. And Big Government did what it liked.
I urge you to run, not walk, and read this excellent post from JP Rangaswami immediately. Link
“Big Everything” is right. We’re just supposed to blindly trust Google that they’ll be neutral in search results, to blindly trust Norton Spyware checkers that they can’t be bought off, to blindly trust that book’s 3.42 stars average from all Amazon users, to blindly trust all other delicious users to tell me what is interesting. We can do better. We can scale trust. We can find middle ground between individual trust (e.g. blog subscriptions) and whole-world/Big trust (e.g. amazon ratings, digg, delicious-popular, Norton, PageRank).