The Economics of Deception

I've been thinking a lot about identity, trust, and verifiability lately.

And then I read The Atlantic’s writeup on Santos .

While I share the author's concern about the collapse of local press, the reality is this:

Our current era of frictionless communication means just about anyone can amplify lies much faster than journalists, experts, and other manual "checks and balances" can parse and refute them. And this imbalance between fast far-reaching communication and slow manual confirmation is only going to grow.

To address this at scale, publicly verifiable claims need a serious UX upgrade. Paper records, closed databases, and cumbersome bureaucracy must give way to open, trustless systems that make it easy to verifiably ASSERT and CONFIRM a straightforward, objective claim (like whether or not I've ever attended a certain college, or worked for a given company). It must become just as easy to verify the truth as it is to tweet the falsehood.

A number of tools are emerging to address this need. My old college is starting to experiment with blockchain-based credentials. BrightID , Gitcoin (with Passport) and others are developing simple, verifiable ways to connect real people to specific communities and activities.

It is still early days, but this work is vitally important - because until it is simpler to refute bald-faced fabrications than to craft them, we should expect to see more of this kind of blatant deception.