The attention economy has made it easier than ever to project the least charitable view of anything you see onto a person in front of you. The most important trust relationship in people's lives is starting to become the employer and the employee, says Dr Andrew Lloyd Webber. We reach a stage where we don't care going from a world where we're both seeing the same things to not knowing whether what we're looking at is true or false fake or real - that's reality apathy.
We are in the middle of a global trust crisis. Neighbors are strangers and local news sources are becoming scarcer; institutions that used to symbolize prestige, honor and a sense of societal security are ridiculed for being antiquated and out of touch. To replace the void, we turn to sharing economy companies and social media, which come up short, or worse. Our guest on this episode, academic and business advisor Rachel Botsman, guides us through how we got here, and how to recover. Botsman is the Trust Fellow at Oxford University, and the author of two books, including “Who Can You Trust?” The intangibility of trust makes it difficult to pin down, she explains, and she speaks directly to technology leaders about fostering communities and creating products the public is willing to put faith in. “The efficiency of technology is the enemy of trust,” she says.