Bruce Schneier on The Internet, Scale and Trust

From Andrew Keen … Keen On… Bruce Schneier: How The Internet Allows Us To Scale Trust:

Trust me on this one. There are few people who have given trust and reputation more thought than security expert Bruce Schneier. His latest book, Liars And Outliers, asks the question of how society functions when we can’t trust each other. And Schneier has spent a lifetime thinking through the relationship between trust and reputation in our new information economy.

The Internet both changes everything and nothing about trust, Schneier explained to me when he came into our San Francisco studio. On the one hand, the security guru told me, it allows us to scale trust; but, on the other, he went on, digital technology allows those who abuse trust to do more damage. The Internet is also doing a bad job replicating society, he asserted. with contemporary social networks like Facebook and Twitter being worse environments for building trust between people than 90′s style chat rooms and email.