What does trust have to do with security anyway?

Balancing priorities in the cyborg age

In a series of articles about our modern Cyborg Age, I’ve argued that our traditional understanding of trust is flawed. We’ve misunderstood its role as a moral imperative, when in fact it seems only to be a rough and ready predictor of attention costs (attentiveness to reliable outcomes) and benefits for processes involving our interactions with others. Evolution has equipped us with a low cost cognitive assessment. To use it properly, we need to rethink its use in the modern world. No doubt, some will prefer to hold on to the moral view of trust and disagree, but then one remains stuck with the usual dilemmas. There are solid reasons for wanting to understand trust better.

Trust and Security

If you work in IT or even in business, you might be forgiven for thinking that trust is the mortal enemy of security. This is simplistic and misleading. Most of us regard the old Cold War adage, “Trust, but verify…” as an ironic truism, but in fact what it really teaches us is something about the dual nature of trust. Trust has two parts: the assessment of trustworthiness and the decision to watch over and monitor our dealings with others, i.e. to manage our attention.

It requires only a small leap of the imagination to see that trust is an attention regulator, using the currency of mindspace or invested work as its currency. I believe the http://markburgess.org/trustproject.html has now…