Trust, Courage, and Integrity

There’s no way around these, and systems structured to mitigate the impact of their absence will have their limits.

Photo by Harry Grout on Unsplash

Unlike most people, I don’t have a problem with advertisements on platforms. Sellers need to tell people about their products, consumers can benefit from this information, and platforms need to make money.

Still, I understand why people are against ads, and why they praise a platform like Substack for not allowing them. Ads distort incentives. With time, creators end up publishing what will go viral. They make money, but user experience generally declines. Everyone makes money, but those on platforms and apps end up with the worst experience and what is incentivized is not what they want.

The solution? Just ban ads.

But the truth is that we are not against ads per se. Rather, we cannot trust media platforms not to be corrupted by them. They have shown that they cannot regulate their places well. With time, only extreme content will be rewarded. So, to guard against this eventuality, we just go where there are no ads.

The problem is thus one of leadership.

We have simply become people who cannot be trusted to do the right thing. We aren’t courageous anymore. None can be trusted, and none is incorruptible. So we have settled for the second-best thing: systems that minimize unethical behavior.

There’s a problem, however: trust is essential. Your doctor knows more about medicine, and your lawyer about the law. When it comes to medicine and law, respectively, you need to be able to trust them.

There are guardrails, but we need to be able to trust that policymakers will put people first.

The energy and resources you spend worrying whether your spouse is cheating on you can be invested in creating a relationship worth being in in the first place.

The general decline in trust will continue to prove costly. Everyone doubts before believing; every statement needs investigation, every deed will have its underlying incentives scrutinized.