ContrariLand

My company had Gillian Tett as a guest speaker. She had a nice casual style, walking onto the stage one hand with a Starbucks and the other holding an Oprah for President t-shirt she found at the airport. In reviewing my notes, a couple of her moments stood out.

Her mnemonic for navigating the world today is FUCU, representating the following:

1 Fragmentation. The breakdown of institutions and other “verticals” that have kept societies tied together. More fracturization and tribalization.

2 Unmoored. As institutions have broken down, there are fewer “stories” that bind society. In that world, what do people truly believe?

3 Customization. Her analogy was that her daughter would never buy an “album” today and instead would but the 10 tracks that she wanted.

4 Uncertainty. All of this combines to form a an uncertainty that seems to hover over much.

Her second key point was around the idea of trust in the world today. She contrasts “Vertical Trusts” – which is trust in large organizations such as churches, schools, experts and the government, as well as “Horizontal Trust”, which is trust in direct neighbors and those in tight circle. She argues that both of these have been decreasing.

In their place is an increase in “distributed trust”. This represents trust in people who are total strangers in the traditional conception, but who have some shared values or ideas. The idea of riding in a strangers’ car would have been ridiculous to me a decade ago. Last weekend I rented my vacation house out to two days to a random stranger only familiar to me through his profile picture and his AirBnb rating (which was non-existent!).

Why is this? Why do we trust strangers with a rating more than we trust institutions, experts and neighbors?