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Trust becomes infrastructure when the work of navigating uncertainty is distributed across three distinct forms of reliance without allowing one to impersonate another.

Key Takeaway

Trust as Infrastructure rests on three societal capacities: reliable systems, legitimate institutions and consequential personal relationships.

They are not stages, levels in a hierarchy or three ingredients that must appear in every interaction. Each makes a different form of dependence governable, and none can perform the function of another.

Each also carries a different remainder of uncertainty: whether a system will perform and reveal failure; whether authority is legitimate and correctable; and what future conduct particular people have earned confidence in.

• Infrastructure Trust provides grounds for relying on the systems through which information and action travel.
• Governance Trust provides a legitimate and contestable floor for action among people who may never know one another.
• Interpersonal Trust is the relationship through which particular people allow something they value to depend on one another’s freedom, expecting their vulnerability to be taken into account.

The architecture is therefore deliberately asymmetrical.

Infrastructure and Governance must allow a person to exercise a right, receive a service or contest a decision without first possessing the right relationships. Interpersonal Trust can support forms of cooperation that institutions cannot compel, but it must never become a prerequisite for institutional access.

A trustworthy society depends upon all three layers. Not every interaction should.

At a Glance