Are we in a crisis of trust? Trust in institutions—governments, medicine, media—has been declining for decades, and a lack of trust in public health programs has fueled COVID-related deaths. It seems like every day we see news stories about deceitful executives or evasive government officials, giving us new reasons to distrust corporations and the institutions we have always relied upon.
Can we, then, find hope in the form of technologies that allow us to trust each other in new ways, through new institutions?
Twitter recently added a feature that lets users identify themselves with an NFT picture, distinguished by a new hexagonal border, rather than just a regular profile photo. An NFT (short for non-fungible token) is a digital commodity, typically an image, whose ownership is recorded on a ledger stored on a blockchain. This definition is probably meaningless to the average…
