Open Questions

The deepest open question about the trust layer concerns the relationship between trust and power. In every social system in which trust is a significant resource, the distribution of trust is correlated with prior distributions of power. People who have access to well-established networks, prestigious institutional affiliations, and documented histories of consequential participation will generate trust signals more easily than people who lack those advantages, not necessarily because they are more trustworthy, but because their trustworthiness has been more legibly documented in forms that the trust layer can recognize. A trust layer that reproduces existing power distributions under the label of merit is not a constitutional innovation. It is an existing hierarchy with a new verification mechanism. How the trust layer is designed to resist this reproduction, while still performing the function of distinguishing genuine trustworthiness from its simulation, is a question for which the intellectual traditions engaged in this chapter do not provide a fully satisfying answer. Bias audits, alternative evidence, appeal, and an equal standing that does not depend on any attestation are the minimum the design owes.