Ten - Conclusion: False Trade-Offs

Summary

Throughout this book, I have discussed the role of trust in technology discourses as part of a process of quantification, extraction and legitimization that entrenches existing inequalities and injustices. I have shown how this process, which I have called trustification, consolidates power in the hands of those designing and deploying technologies on populations around the world. Embedded within these narratives is a computational logic that emphasizes the reduction of people and of social problems into something that is countable and can appear solvable. It is through this framing that technological solutionism, and the application of generic solutions across contexts, seeks discursive legitimacy. In the absence of trust, technology discourses measure proxies for trust in order to extract from populations the legitimacy that trust can provide.

Trusting technology is virtually impossible. When we cannot tell who or what it is we are trusting amid sprawling sociotechnical assemblages, trustworthiness becomes replaced by what levels of trust can be measured. In the absence of both specific trust and the possibility of trust, we are expected to act as if we trust anyway. The discourses of technology development and deployment serve to enact what I have called trustification. This is the construction of situations in which populations are forced to perform the conditions of trust when trust itself does not or cannot exist.

Discourses are important in mediating power relations of technologies. As Simone Natale writes, ‘technologies function not only at a material and technical level but also through the narrative they generate or into which they are forced’ (2021: 55). We must pay close attention to the stories constructed around technologies, how they are constructed, and how those stories emerge from historical narratives such as colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and others. Throughout this book I have emphasized the performative nature of technologies and their discourses, the way that telling stories constitutes those material and social conditions differently for different populations.

Trustification fuses this discursive process with quantification. We can describe it as a conflating of narrative logics and computational logics. By measuring trust, and by speaking those measurements, trustification constitutes the conditions of trust regardless of whether trustworthiness or trusting relations actually exist. In doing so, it also creates the expectations of trust and the expectation of legitimacy generated by populations performatively acting as if they trust.