The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You

Personally, what I feel is that the lower trust becomes, the more people cling to reputation signals.

I once had to make a transaction on the dark web, and that market has extremely little trust. Because of that, people there obsess over reputation signals: what someone is known for, what history they have, who has dealt with them before, and whether their name carries any weight.

As trust markets collapse, people increasingly prefer those who already have established reputations.

This article is basically arguing that capitalism destroys trust. I agree with part of that, but I do not think the problem is capitalism itself as much as institutions and structures that force short-term rewards. Those structures consume trust as a public good.

You can see this in TikTok. Why do antisocial challenges become popular there? Because people can gain attention in the short term, and that short-term attention becomes a kind of reputation signal. The incentive structure itself rewards the behavior.

The problem is that as social trust continues to deteriorate, it becomes harder and harder for new entrants to enter a market.

I have not used Upwork enough recently to judge it well, but in Korean freelance platforms, entry used to be relatively easier. However, as vibe coding became popular and trust deteriorated, clients started demanding far more references and proof of prior work.

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1. The late stage of capitalism must have started back in Roman times, caveat emptor.

2. Most societies are low trust societies, with certain exceptions usually based on draconian law enforcement.

I don't trust a lot of thought was put into this article