The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

There is a vast history behind the trustworthiness of a tube of toothpaste, a long path of building trust inch by inch. Once that path is trodden, though, trust can be borrowed for new products and new media with surprising ease. The remarkable thing about the early days of the internet was not how hard it proved to enable people to trust each other in the anonymous reaches of the ether, but how easy. All it took was for eBay to solicit feedback from customers after each transaction and post the comments of buyers about the sellers. Suddenly every deal lay under the shadow of the future; suddenly, every eBay user felt the hot breath of reputation on his neck as surely as a Stone Age reindeer hide salesman returning to a trading place after selling a rotten hide the year before. When Pierre Omidyar founded eBay, few believed as he did that trust between anonymous strangers would prove easy to create in the new medium. But by 2001, fewer than 0.01 per cent of all transactions on the site were fraud attempts. John Clippinger draws an optimistic conclusion: ‘The success of trust-based peer organizations such as eBay, Wikipedia, and the open-source movement, indicates that trust is a highly expandable network property.’ Perhaps the internet has returned us to a world a bit like the Stone Age in which there is no place for a fraudster to hide. That response would be naïve. There is plenty of innovative and destructive cyber-crime to come. None the less, the internet is a place w...