Originally written before the AI era. Revised for StevePatterson.online.
I moved fully into the online world in the mid-1990s, and one of the first things I noticed was how quickly people became dependent on technology. It did not take long. The addiction showed up almost immediately. At this point, almost everyone reading this knows someone who is online whether they want to be or not. That makes it harder, and more important, to trust yourself in the digital age.
As we have moved deeper into this digital life, older words like trust, truth, and love have started carrying new meanings. Or maybe they have been used so much that they have lost some of their weight. We express love through screens. We argue about truth through platforms. We build trust with people we may never sit across from in the same room. In the process, we have stretched some very personal spaces into public and semi-public forms.
Who do we love? Who do we tell the truth to? Who, if anyone, do we really trust?
There are more places to apply those words than ever before. There are also fewer reasons, or at least fewer obvious incentives, to cultivate a relationship with any one person, place, or idea. There is always something else just “over there.” Another person. Another opportunity. Another path. Another version of life that looks close enough to touch because the digital world keeps redefining what closeness means.
That “over there” keeps expanding. It pulls what we desire closer while also making it more distant. We now have day-to-day connections with people we have never met and probably never will. That has become normal. When we talk about our “so-called friends on Facebook,” what are we really saying? If those people are not real friends, then who are the real ones, especially if we rarely interact with them in any meaningful way?
The nature of relationships has changed, and the language we use to describe them has changed with it. Words get overused until they become vague. Truth itself has been shredded so badly that even people who claim to seek it often seem to be chasing something they can no longer recognize.
Does truth still exist if we refuse to acknowledge it?
Either way, trust remains one of those words that can mean almost anything depending on who is using it.
Information has become so central to our materialistic society that there is never enough of it. Even people who try to avoid the constant stream of updates cannot stay uninformed for long. The same news that makes people miserable is often the very thing they feel compelled to share, as if the misery needs company.
Don’t you feel better?
There was a time when we trusted each other more directly. Now, the number of people in our lives has often been replaced by the accumulation of things, services, subscriptions, platforms, and devices. Trust is not simply lost over time. People are lost. They drift away, get replaced, or become profile pictures we scroll past.
With money sitting at the center of so much of modern life, online financial trust became one of the first major concerns. Is this website secure? Can I trust this merchant? Can I send money through PayPal to a friend’s email address and expect it to arrive? Every “yes” creates more options. The global marketplace never closes.
Today, we often trust things more easily than we trust people. More specifically, we trust services delivered through digital containers. Can you trust this buyer? Can you trust this seller? Why should you? Most of the time, the answer is not personal. It is simply how the system has developed as we have become more distant from one another in a world where the “economy” has changed the conditions of life for almost everyone.
The days of knowing people at work well enough to remember their wedding anniversary ten years later are becoming rarer. The digital world did not create that shift by itself. It became the icing on the cake in a world already driven by mechanization, speed, and economic pressure. The emerging cyber realm just gave that distance a new home.
You do not have to watch the news to guess what is happening. There is always the main bad story, a few more waiting in the wings, and countless others that may never happen but can still keep people anxious. Floods happen. Planes crash. Political scandals unfold. Markets move. People suffer. That is life. These events happen whether we talk about them all day or not.
Even if you avoid news outlets and voting, you probably still know what is happening because you are living inside the same system as everyone else.
What else is there to know?
The point is that trust means something different now. Large online communities built around shared interests are a new form of trust. Trusting people I may never meet, but have known online for years, is not the same as the relationships people had before the digital age. But that does not mean these connections are meaningless. Some of them become important in ways that are hard to explain to people who still think real life only happens offline.
Interacting with people from different places, including people living through circumstances I would never see from my own street, has changed the way I understand the world. It has helped create the mindset of a global citizen, or maybe an Earth citizen. I get some sense of how we are doing as a species from those interactions. I trust that I have my finger on part of that pulse, and I contribute where it makes sense.
But trust in the digital age is scattered. It is not the same trust that existed in an era of high school reunions, steady jobs, benefits, and long-term workplace relationships. That older model brought its own problems, but losing it brought displacement, dissolution, and a deeper move into the energy of the virtual world.
I have been writing blog entries like this since 1996. Back then, none of this looked the way it looks now. Some of you remember that period, but not many people were doing what I was doing in the cyber world at the time. It was smaller, stranger, and less obvious. It still felt like territory being explored instead of machinery being managed.
I cannot imagine what it will look like twenty-two years from now.
To the children being born as I type this at 7:15 EST on November 23, 2019: Stand straight and look forward.
You’re welcome.
By then, trust may extend to people living in space, maybe even people born there. Who knows? Whatever happens, it will not look like today.
As trust keeps changing—how we practice it, where we place it, and who receives it—the starting point probably needs to be much simpler. Trust yourself in the digital age before you hand that authority to the crowd, the platform, the algorithm, or the random opinions of other people.
I mention “the random opinions of others” often because they are everywhere now. They can be interpreted in all kinds of ways, but in the end, that is what they are: opinions.
Trust yourself.
And maybe trust technology too, at least enough to use it as a tool. It can give us access to whatever we choose to seek. The key is remembering who is doing the choosing.