Sharing Trust: Tasteful Designs of Social Systems

Sharing Trust: Tasteful Designs of Social Systems   Cameron  Tonkinwise     Monday,  December  5,  2011   Sharing Economies appear to be trending. And as with any phenomenon that is going to have a significant impact on the future, these economies have multiple manifestations with family resemblances. Websites like shareable.net, meshing.it and collaborativeconsumption.com, and their associated publications, are cataloguing an increasing number of sharing service systems, sometimes digital and/or larger-scale and/or for-profit, sometimes off-line and/or smaller-scale and non-monetary. Common features of these sharing systems appear to be: • Decoupling use and ownership Modernization, in capitalist countries, throughout the 20th Century aimed to increase the autonomy of individuals, or at least more nuclear family households, through provisioning systems based on ownership. Governments created financial systems and land-use regimes that encouraged home buying, and business innovation focused on producing cheap household goods to fill those houses. By the close of the 20th Century, patriarchal families could enjoy autonomous suburban existences via all the stuff they owned, apart from having to earn the wages to pay for all that over-packaged, forever- needing-replacement stuff. Sharing Economies respond to the unsustainability of this situation by enabling the use of stuff that people do not own. These could be digital files or tools or cars or building spaces or productive land; and they could be owned by a neighbor, or by a company; or a community could jointly own them, or they could be an unowned commons. Whatever the system, the resource, now subject to ‘usership’ rather than exclusive ownership, can be utilized with greater productivity, minimizing the amount of stuff sitting idle in suburban houses, waiting for their owners to find the time to express their autonomy by using this or that thing. • Re-embedding exchange in social relations As Karl Polanyi famously argued (The Great Transformation, 1944), capitalism allowed people to free themselves from traditional, smaller communities, but at the price of the security that those convention-dominated societies afforded. Resourcing yourself in larger, urban contexts permitted more diverse ways of living, but it involved the greater risks associated with cooperating with people you did not know before and might never see again. Business, based on the exchange of money backed by government-enforced contract law, developed as the primary way in which people in cosmopolitan urban settings could minimize the risks of provisioning themselves without pre-existing social relations (see Cook, Hardin & Levi Cooperation without Trust, 2007). Despite current attempts by businesses to foster social relations with their customers – through brand  affects, or social media, or service designed frontline employees – it remains the essence of business that a customer’s relation to a business can begin and end with the paying of money for goods that are then privately owned. Sharing Economies by contrast restore sociality to goods distribution. Many instances of sharing economies are platforms for peer-to-peer product or facility sharing. People are connecting, often negotiating, and even meeting, with each other in order to access goods. Even the business-to-consumer systems – to the extent that they are making ‘functional sales,’ selling the use or results of a product to a customer rather than the thing itself – are primarily service industries, where customers must interact with employees beyond one-off retail experiences. In a way that appears to reverse Polanyi’s historical theory, sharing economies evidence people freeing themselves of the burden of owning so many things by re-socializing their everyday economies. They are adopting systems that revalue social experiences, either as what is being explicitly sought (using sharing of resources as ways of meeting people for instance), or as costs to transactions that are now tolerated (sometimes because it allows access to cheaper or more customized goods). Sharing economies can therefore be defined as social relations that allow for usership without ownership. As is apparent to anyone you ever ask about whether they would participate in sharing economies, the crux is trust. To explain in more detail, it is important to recognize that within the broad church of what is being called, for strategic purposes, ‘the sharing economy’ there are some crucial differences: • Rival Goods Goods are often individually owned because it is only practicable for one person to use them at time. These kinds of rival goods stand in contrast to, on the one hand, mostly intangible goods, like digital files, which can be used by multiple people simultaneously without any degradation to the quality of any of those individuals’ use (in actuality, copies are being used); and, on the other hand, mostly larger scale goods that can, like rooms and cars (if they are going in the right direction), and sometimes must, like a multi-person rowing shell or an airplane (the latter for economic reasons), be used by several people at the same time. Yochai Benkler has done some lovely work characterizing the gerundive, ‘shareable’ (see his “‘Sharing Nicely’: On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production,” http://www.benkler.org/SharingNicely.html). Rival goods are more shareable if they are lumpy (i.e., have excessive capacity – like the spare processing power of a computer, or the unused hours a drill spends in a garage), mid-grained (i.e., the product is evenly distributed across society, not something that everyone has and so unnecessary to share, nor something so large or expensive as to be sparsely spread across society), crisp (i.e., the excess capacity can be redistributed across society in discrete packages without large transaction costs), and renewable (i.e., after each rival use, the good is quickly ready for another use, rather than needing extensive re-set-up).  It is therefore important to differentiate sharing economies of rival, that is, usually tangible goods, from the sharing of information or digital files or capacity. The former have particular trust issues, especially in relation to what Benkler calls crispness and renewability; that is, ensuring that goods are available for use by various users without excessive transaction costs. • Alternatives of or to Capitalism One might wonder why sharing economies are trending at the moment. It is important to remember that sharing is of course old rather than new, though David Graeber is now famous for arguing it is a myth that, anthropologically, societies evolve from sharing through bartering to monetized exchange (see: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/david-graeber-on-the-invention-of-money- %E2%80%93-notes-on-sex-adventure-monomaniacal-sociopathy-and-the-true-function- of-economics.html). Less archaically, some of the United States’ greatest capitalists, such as King C Gillette, promoted sharing economies, in the form of socialized and so industrialized domestic production – centralized meal production, laundering and childcare in serviced apartment buildings – as the model for high density urbanization at the end of the 19th Century (see Dolores Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution, 1982). This points to the fact that every business involves the shared use of resources: the capitalist can only make money from owning the means of production by getting workers to use it in coordinated ways. Services like coffee shops or transport depend upon customers using things in scheduled ways that they do not own. Most of the cases that are cited as part of the sharing economy trend at the moment are new for-profit business models. These innovations in ‘collaborative consumption’ tend to use digital services to make access to goods owned by others more efficient. The resulting value proposition generates revenue for the owner of the under-utilized resource by connecting them to a market looking for cheaper shared goods. However, the Global Financial Crisis and especially the recent Occupy movement have highlighted the demand for non-corporate and even non-capitalist forms of provisioning. Many cases of the sharing economy are therefore better characterized as part of the growing Solidarity Economy, a collection of mutualist and cooperative institutions and barter and gift processes promoted by the World Social Forum. There is an overlap here with attempts to create more sustainable societies and the associated postmaterialist values of cultural creatives. A system of sharing that is for-profit is clearly ontologically different from one that aims to be a source of political resistance to capitalism. This will be most apparent in the trust mechanisms involved in those distinct systems. So, what kinds of systems of trust are at work in these emerging sharing economies, these increasingly significant ways in which people are negotiating the use of rival goods they do not own? Trust is essentially paradoxical. To trust is to have confidence that someone will do something. But trust is only at stake in situations in which there remains a risk. To have complete trust is no longer to be in a situation of trusting. On the other hand, trust is of course never just a gamble. It a reasonable if not fully reasoned assessment of multiple facets of a situation, even if it manifests as a feeling. Academic discourse differentiates generalized trust from specific instances of trusting. The former is an aggregated sense of the propensity of someone to enter situations that require trust; to be trusting, and in turn trustworthy. It is commonly appreciated that those who are more open to trusting others tend to be themselves dependable when entrusted with a task. Being prepared to trust others tends to be a self-fulfilling statistical prophecy; offering to trust others provides opportunity for confirming experiences of people being in generally worthy of trusting; whereas being distrustful means avoiding situations in which people might prove to be more trustworthy than expected. So sociologists attempt to discern whether people are in a collective mood to trust, either each other, or the institutions that provide the conditions for or substitutes to people trusting each other. It could be that current sharing economies evidence a return to people being more trusting, contrary to the culture of individuation and even fear that has characterized the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st. Nevertheless, there is some skepticism about the value of generalized trust research by those who think that more significant are ways of negotiating particular instances of trusting. In these situations, it becomes clear that trust is more than some affective evaluation of personality. Trust involves determining whether A will do M in conditions X, Y and Z (this is a paraphrase of Russell Hardin’s formula in, for example, Trust, 2006). Importantly, this is not just a measure of whether A has the necessary intention to do M, but whether A has the capacity, that is, the requisite skills to do M irrespective of their intention. This is one of the ways in which generalized trust is inadequate to situations of sharing tangible, rival goods: I generally trust my friends, but lots of my friends do not have the skills to handle some of the things I own and value yet might be prepared to share. What is at issue in sharing economies is trust between people who are not friends. Not only are they not friends, but if the sharing system is digitally facilitated, they may not meet face-to-face, and/or their sharing might be one-off. These are all conditions that in fact appear to promote trust according to the famous experimental research of Robert Axelrod (The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984) in relation to Prisoners’ Dilemma games, and the equally famous research of Elinor Ostrom in relation to the sustainable management of commons (see for instance, “Coping with the Tragedies of the Commons,” Annual Review of Political Science, 1999): namely, that a person will be more likely to share if -­‐ they know the other person beforehand (and so can predict their intentions) -­‐ they know that they will see the person afterwards (and so will have to face opprobrium personally) -­‐ they know that they will be sharing with that person repeatedly (and so can develop conventions based on being nice, punishing betrayals, but then quickly forgiving)  -­‐ they are interested in doing well out of the sharing, but not the best (and so can avoid rivalry) I will come back below to how sharing systems create versions of Axelrod and Ostrom’s heuristics for successful sharing in the absence of rich, personal relations, but for now it is enough to recognize that evaluations of trustworthiness between strangers will almost always have to be case-by-case assessments; in which case the primary question for promoters and developers of sharing economies is: how to enable people to get to know each other, quickly, and in the right ways. Two points though: • Weak Ties As noted, sharing economies seem to be proliferating as a result of new kinds of sociality made possible by social software. What is new is the productive strength of communities connected primarily by information and communication technology, rather than geography or ethnicity. Without having met, and without having any interest in each other beyond the specifics of what brought them together, people in these groups nevertheless engage in trusting collective actions. To this extent, trust, with its connotations of whole-person assessment drawing on multiple facets of someone over time, seems to be the wrong word for the confidence in each other that underlies many digital communities. Just as the word ‘friend,’ now a verb, does not really correlate with what the word means in a flesh-based world, so the word trust appears to be stretched thin when digitized. Cooperation in digital domains, such as collaborative software design, seems to succeed because actions, being immaterial, are partitioned (each participant is only working on this or that component; the sharing is of the ‘sheared’ type, like when a cake is shared by being cut up) and correctable. Also, the thinness of what holds the communities together mean that these tend to be expert communities, which provide on the one hand, barriers to entry, allowing only those who understand the value of the work being done to participate, and on the other hand, incentivize only valuable contributions as participants look for esteem from other participants. • Instantly Aggregated Anonymity Communication technologies are a sometimes-confusing blend of the instantaneity of oral communication with the ambiguity of written communication. They are also highly personalized, with one-to-one directness, whilst also allowing anonymity or pseudonymity. After more than 2 decades, social norms for digital media, such netiquette, are still not adequate, with extensive flame wars and trolling. However, these same mechanisms also allow internet communities that otherwise comprise strangers with only thin connections to self-regulate collaborative relations. Comment systems and transaction ratings, because they can be done more or less instantly and anonymously (without risk of retribution), afford communities social norm mechanisms, in other words, ways of sanctioning free-loaders or system abusers. These systems can themselves be hacked, but scale can correct these aberrations,  aggregating a large number of responses quickly, as well as more conventional case-by- case moderation. There are then at least 5 distinct approaches to fostering the kind of trusting sociality at work in emerging sharing economies. 1. Authenticated Identification Given what was just said about the value of anonymity, enabling low barrier participation in social media, it is important to note that a major drive is underway to create systems that validate, by singularizing, online identity. For sharing systems, authenticating the identity of a stranger, with whom you might share a rival good, provides two pathways to building trust. The first is that one can getter a more comprehensive picture of who someone is, or at least was, if their digital footprint can be gathered under one identity. This is related to point 3 below, and issue of taste with which I will conclude. The second is that validating who someone is renders him/her able to be pursued by legal systems outside of the internet or the sharing system: see 5 below. Trustcloud.com, a startup at angel investing and alpha testing stage in New York City, measures your participation in various social media. The idea is that the longer and wider your social media trail, the more likely it is that you are who you say are: it is quite a conspirator who can fake a years-long social media account for the purpose of stealing a shared product. However, Trustcloud will also provide ‘badges’ (overlapping with the next point) based on more qualitative analyses of your digital footprint. There is one for example for having tweeted from more than 2 continents. Because Trustcloud’s focus is on identity, this badge is given because it is unlikely that an identity fraudster broadcasts their location. However, it also becomes an indicator of a cosmopolitan disposition. Note though, that these ways of authenticating digital identities exclude late adopters of social media technology. 2. Reputation Currencies Veterans of online communities and commerce, Amazon, eBay and Couchsurfing, all use peer-to-peer ratings, quantitative and qualitative evaluations of exchanges. These systems, not least because of the positive feedback effect of their scale, are quite robust. The work on social dilemmas by Axelrod and Ostrom mentioned above indicates that the mere presence of social sanctioning possibilities – the fact that someone can see that a system enables them to be punished , especially publicly shamed, for betraying trust – tends to promote trusting collaborations. However, that same research points out that punishment is itself a kind of Commons. For the one doing the punishing, there is a cost (in time and social reputation) that is not shared by everyone else in the system who nevertheless benefit from the fact that a wrongdoer is being punished. Getting people to be the sanctioner can therefore be challenging. Some research for example indicates that Couchsurfers rarely give negative feedback, both because of concerns about reprisal ratings, but also  in awareness of the liberal values that underlie Couchsurfing in general (see Adamic et al “Rating Friends without Making Enemies,” Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2011). As a result, Couchsuring has a second layer to its currency, ‘Vouches,’ which are scarcer – only those who have been ‘vouched- for’ 3 times can then in turn ‘vouch’ for others. This indicates that peer-to-peer ratings have all the problems of quantitative assessments: Are the criteria for the evaluations clear, and observed by the evaluator? Can evaluators themselves be evaluated (e.g., Amazon: ‘Was this review helpful to you?’)? In the attempt to increase participation in the evaluation process, by making evaluations one-clicks for example, does the quality of evaluations diminish? Quite a few sharing system startups right now are based upon attempts to make reputation currency exchangeable: if I have a good eBay reputation, can that be an indicator of my trustworthiness in a local tool library. Given what was mentioned above, about the danger of notions of generalized trust, and sharing systems needing to know if A is able and willing to do some specific B, there is reason to be skeptical of reputation currencies working across different kinds of sharing platforms; though, it may prove useful for trust building as will be discussed in 5 below. 3. Supplementary Social Sharing In the mid 2000s, Swapstyle.com was developed to enable mostly late-teen females in Australia and the US who had bought one or two expensive fashion items to exchange their garments or accessories between each other without money (the following is based on research by Dianne Moy whilst completing a Masters by Research at the University of Technology, Sydney). The website included a forum designed to allow the users and developers to troubleshoot. However, the forum was quickly appropriated by the users as a place to discuss currently popular TV shows. It became apparent that this extraneous sharing of pop culture likes and dislikes was used by Swapstyle participants as a place to find out more about each other. Contrary to what was discussed above about the productivity of thin, functional relations in digital communities, many sharing systems make use of these domains in which participates can thicken their social ties by interacting with each other about matters not directly relevant to the sharing (or even, it would seem, someone’s trustworthiness). I will return to what I believe is happening here in relation to profiling below. 4. Branding Intentions If I trust you, I am making an assessment of your intentions; I believe that your intentions ‘encapsulate’ mine (to use of the terminology of Russell Hardin), that you intend to do as I intend you to. Making someone’s intentions as transparent as possible is therefore a crucial part of establishing systems of trust. Yochai Benkler draws attention to the fact that larger scale collaborations often depend on allowing people to have various intentions for undertaking the same actions. This foregrounds that sharing, for example, can be undertaken for various reasons: out of familiar, ethnic or religious obligation; to be social, whether generally building community, or to more  specifically meet new people (for learning, friends or to date); to save resources, for reasons to do with sustainability or with commercial thrift. To develop trust in the sharing of rival goods, as opposed to the kind of ‘sheared component’ collaborative actions Benkler is discussing, it is perhaps necessary to separate out the various reasons for sharing, and make systems that are dedicated to only one kind of reason. In this way, participants can be more certain about the intentions behind those they might share with. The branding of a sharing system is therefore important to the trusting it enables. The branding should frame all communications in a consistent set of values, reinforcing as much as possible the kind of intentions that are being assumed to underlie the actions the platform enables. Importantly, this would also include the role the organization that developed and operates the platform plays. Developing a sharing system to service those committed to enhancing societal sustainability might be done by a not-for-profit governmental or non-governmental agency, or by a conventionally commercial business. But being able to trust someone also means being able to trust the sources of information you are using to make that evaluation, and the system that you will use to do the trusting. So transparency about the intentions of a sharing system’s administrators must be part of their brand, irrespective of whether it is associated with the fields of sustainability or sociality, etc. This was apparent in the controversy that erupted about Couchsurfing shifting from a not-for-profit to a B-Corp. The ‘crowding out effect’ of money is important to note here. This is the idea that extrinsic motivators can displace intrinsic motivators – that offering an incentive to someone to do something they are already doing for self-motivated reasons tends to cause someone to switch to the incentives as their reason for doing something, such that when the incentive disappears, so does what they were doing. Money in particular is very infectious. For instance, if someone is using a sharing system for sustainability reasons, but engages with someone who is using the system to make money, it can be difficult for the former to persuade the latter their primary motivation is not monetary, to the extent that they will likely begin to use the system also to make money from then on. And of course, whilst money is the primary motivator our society uses to get people to collaborate (go to work for instance), it is also well known that people tend to take the money without doing the task it was tied to if it all possible: in other words, monetary incentives also incentivize cheating, exactly the opposite of sharing. So again, being direct and forceful about the values behind the design of a sharing system, especially when it is monetary, is important for trusting. 5. Progressive Risk Taking I have often referred to ‘building trust’ and this is a conventional metaphor that describes how trusting is something that is often pursued progressively, moving from situations with minimal costs should the trust be broken, to ones with more and more at stake. Trust academics somewhat extremistly, borrow the terminology of conflict resolution, especially hostage negotiation: graduated reciprocation in tension reduction (GRIT). In sharing systems, this means allowing exchanges of smaller goods for shorter periods for example. However, this is often not possible, if for reasons of the previous  point, a sharing system is limiting itself to one particular kind of good to ensure clarity of intentions. Having someone stay one night in as a new AirBnB host is obviously less of a risk than having them stay several, but having a stranger sleep in your house for even one night is still a substantial undertaking. There is however no smaller unit for AirBnB participants to GRIT through. The same goes for peer-to-peer carshare: letting a stranger drive your car for half-an-hour can be a large risk, and only very slightly less risky than letting him or her drive it for half-a-day. In these cases, where the lowest level of sharing is too large to allow for graduated trust building, systems can encourage initial participation by design clean and quick opt outs. Being able to provide backup accommodation for someone at short notice should AirBnB sharers find that they would like not to continue with the relation shortly after meeting would be an example. But these kinds of opt outs are only suitable for some kinds of rival goods. 6. Institutional Backups As indicated above, capitalism, at least in liberal democracies with secularized and so individuated cultures, depends upon legal systems that, in the absence of strong and clear social norms, can be invoked to enforce exchange obligations in worst-case situations. As was also noted above, trust can be broken despite good intentions, where the skills to use a rival good might have been over-estimated, for instance. In these more or less no-fault contexts, institutions of insurance can provide recompense. Having recourse to legal or insurance remedies is of course important for sharing trust. It is not that these backups make a sharing relation trustable, but rather, as with the previous point, encourage the building of trust by providing assurance about what will happen should the worst risk be realized. Significantly, legal and insurance systems are not structured to support sharing. Legal systems, in liberal democracies for sure, are centered around private property. Insurance follows suit, with many policies voided if people other than the owners use products or places. Sharing systems lobby for regulations that promote, or just prevent discrimination against, shared use. See also the work of the not-for-profit Sustainable Economies Law Center (http://www.theselc.org/) that provides advice and pro-formas for agreements between peers around sharing, and the for-profit Joint.li, that reduces the transaction costs involved in establishing joint-ownership structures and processes. Sharing systems therefore seem to be developing a range of ways to enable trusting use without ownership. And these mechanisms exist in the absence of generalized social trust, or the more face-to-face community conditions that are usually thought to allow sharing systems. I would like to conclude however, with a more worrying way in which sharing systems are developing, one where design is explicitly involved, both in terms of the systems that are enabling evaluations of trustworthiness and in terms of what is being evaluated: 7. Profiles The most obvious way in which two strangers get to know each other on the internet is via their profiles, whether these be profiles bespoke to each sharing system, or more  ubiquitous profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. The prevalence of profiles – living in the 21st Century seems to be about constant completions of these self-portraits – can blind us to what is at stake. Think of the basic components of a profile: a picture, where you are, what you do, and then some kind of personal statement – likes or dislikes, missions or beliefs, etc. We think that these are just neutral declarations of who and how we are for others to make of it whatever they like. However, it was Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction (1979 French, 1984 English), who alerted us to the fact that seemingly idiosyncratic aesthetic choices are in fact unavoidably and strictly political. What I find tasteful is never just a choice I have freely made, but contains declarations about my level of education, the cultural experience I have been able to afford, and social classes I move in. What Bourdieu, convincingly I believe, pointed out is that we negotiate everyday social life by making taste extrapolations: if that person likes that, I hypothesize that he or she would like this, given the level of education and cultural capital he or she displays by liking that. Further, I presume that if he or she likes that, then he or she is capable of doing these sorts of thing and is known by these sorts of people. It is on the basis of this kind of ‘taste regime’ and ‘social practice’ classification that I determine whether I would be comfortable interacting with that person, whether just chatting to them at a party, or engaging in some kind of sharing. In other words, it is on the basis of what can be read of someone’s tastes, that estimations of trustworthiness get made. And what is worrying is that those estimations are not objective, but merely indicate class homology. I am only likely to share with people like me. A student recently joined Taskrabbit.com, a micro-task agency, to make some supplementary income. On his profile, he used a headshot from his work as an actor – but received no task requests. He then thought he should have a full-body shot, to indicate his capacity to do physical tasks – but still received no requests. He then used a shot from the waist up – and started to receive requests. His interpretation was that a shot that showed his physique but also the ‘whites of his eyes’ was necessary. However, I suggested that it had more to do with being able to see his choice in fashion, not just in look but also in texture, the quality of his garments. This was a better indicator of his taste regime, and therefore a better indicator of his trustworthiness, at least to the people of compatible taste regimes who were early adopters of Taskrabbit. AirBnB, after a prominent case of apartment trashing by guest, introduced a range of measures to increase their trust mechanisms. In addition to insurance and better response systems, the comprehensiveness of profiles was increased, most notably with the inclusion of videos in addition to pictures. Videos provide multichannel information about someone; not just how articulate or accented they are, but also what kind of tastes inform the background of their video; their taste in wall coverings, furniture or books, if visible. Taste regimes can be mapped with much greater accuracy. Now, many sharing systems are currently populated by urban literati; people with the cultural capital to be technologically literate and cosmopolitan, if not postmaterialist, in worldview, and with the financial capital to have underutilized goods worth sharing and/or the time capital to do the social media research necessary to find shareable goods or to trust someone with use of their own goods. As a result, profiling is used perpetuate the use of sharing systems by those kinds of ‘tasteful’ people. For sharing to move into other communities, designers will need to design profiling processes in ways that allow other kinds of people to make clear their trustworthiness to other kinds of people. Point 4 above suggests that sharing systems be particular to particular kinds of people just as it they should be particular to particular kinds of goods and sharing intentions to enable trustfulness. However, designers are then merely perpetuating a class-partitioned world, not one in which different kinds of people are sharing in differential access to rival goods.