Podcast: Designing Open Democracy: "Trust, a concept analysis" (After: Fake News Trivia) (2019-12-11 Wednesday)

Hi All Members of Designing Open Democracy,

Before the year ends, this is a gathering about how the year in democracy has ended, as well as to discuss what the future may hold for democracies around the world. Our guest Alexar Pendashteh (then director of Open Source Industries Australia) presents his analysis on the nature of trust and how society conceptualises and acts upon it, joined by Andrew Kay (of the Angry Aussie YouTube channel), cooperative expert Antony McMullen from the audience, and host Brian Khuu.

The summary and analysis below were drafted by Claude Code from the episode's automated transcript, to bring this older post up to the standard of the newer ones. The original event announcement, podcast player, full timestamp index, and a raw transcript excerpt are preserved in the collapsible section at the foot of the post. Quotes are reconstructed from an auto-generated transcript — verify against the recording before citing.

This was the first episode of the DOD podcast — an unusually wide-ranging conversation that starts from "what is trust?" and ends up explaining why democracy-reform groups keep failing to cooperate with each other.

Trust as the thing the next layer is built on

Alexar Pendashteh, a technologist, frames trust through emergence: physics gives rise to chemistry, chemistry to biology, biology to psychology, and individuals to society. At each layer, when the lower one is "in harmony," something new becomes possible above it. His interest is in what humans could collectively achieve that we currently can't — and his claim is that trust is the substrate that lets the next layer emerge.

His working definition is precise and worth keeping: trust is the perception of another person's perception. It's therefore bidirectional and self-reinforcing — the more I believe you'll back me, and believe that you believe I'll back you, the stronger the bond becomes. He links this to an engineering idea: resonance. Waves in sync amplify into a tide.

Why trust gives way to rules

Where does trust come from? From the human capacity for language and shared abstract concepts, which let us form alliances and act as one entity — and, crucially, "protect the tribe rather than ourselves." That cooperative capacity is what made us the dominant species.

But it doesn't scale indefinitely. Andrew Kay introduces Dunbar's number (~150) — the ceiling on stable one-to-one social relationships. Beyond it, direct trust has to be substituted by rules, evidence, and abstractions:

"Bigger tribe, more rules. The bigger it gets, the more rules you get."

This is the hinge of the whole conversation: as groups grow past the point where everyone knows everyone, the trust that held them together gets replaced by machinery — law, contracts, hierarchy — and that machinery has its own failure modes.

The workplace runs on the absence of trust

Alexar applies this to organisations, via Noam Chomsky's description of corporations as "dictatorship bubbles." What coordinates a hundred people in a company, he argues, is not trust but law — and the standard employment structure is quietly designed around an assumption of distrust: that workers resent work and will shirk given the chance, so every process exists to extract enough output before they "run away." That design, he argues, actively undermines the collective intelligence it could otherwise tap — which is why small high-trust startup teams routinely outperform managed ones.

Cooperatives: matching ownership to democracy

Cooperative expert Antony McMullen (also featured in the Beyond CSR episode) joins from the audience to make the link explicit. There's a spectrum: broad-based employee share ownership at one end, worker cooperatives at the other. His key point is that democracy and ownership have to move together — formal democratic say without an ownership stake (or vice versa) creates tension, because external shareholders' only interest is return on investment. A co-op flips it: those who work in the business own it, decide together, and share rewards equitably. The defining rule is one member, one vote (no member may hold more than 20% of share capital) — and the hard problem is attracting external investment without letting investors capture decision-making. This is economic democracy: democracy extended into the structure of ownership, not just governance.

Tribalism, and tribal epistemology

The conversation's sharpest concept is the double-edge of tribalism. The same trait that produces loyalty and the capacity to act as a group also produces its pathology: tribal epistemology — when the tribal bond starts rejecting shared standards for establishing truth, because pursuing objective truth could weaken the tribe. As identity anchors like tradition and religion fade, the participants argue, people reach for cruder substitutes (left/right labels) to signal who can be trusted — and those labels then become tribes whose cohesion can override evidence.

The punchline: why democracy reformers can't unite

The most DOD-relevant moment is Alexar's framing of a problem the group lives with directly. Democracy-reform groups — he names Secure Vote, Horizon State, NewVote, Flux, MiVote, newDemocracy, and DOD itself — are collectively a small, principled minority. Logically they should unite behind one banner to push the boulder together. Instead they fall into internal argument, because there's no single word everyone can identify with strongly enough, and nobody wants to compromise their particular approach. Meanwhile, less-principled groups do make those compromises, unite under one label, and gain power.

"How can we — without needing to identify as one thing, even though there are different approaches — find one thing that brings all of us together, and act as one entity and still be effective, without compromising any of your values? To me, that's the huge challenge." — Alexar Pendashteh

His proposed method is characteristically systems-minded: understand philosophically how a concept like trust comes to be and what influences it, and you can find the leverage points to engineer (or set up the conditions for) a solution — the way understanding electromagnetism led to Wi-Fi.

Money, Bitcoin, and trust relegated to mathematics

The final third traces trust through money: gold- and silver-backed notes ("I trust you'll defend my claim to gold") → fiat currency ("trust the government") → hyperinflation (Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe) when that trust collapses. Then Bitcoin, which the group reads as a philosophical experiment: trust relegated from a human institution to mathematics, producing a "trustless" system where consensus needs no central authority. Alexar's observation is the keeper — blockchain shifted IT's focus from what we do with information to who does what with information, i.e. from data to governance and verifiable claims. He dates it as the moment technologists and social reformers found common ground.

Andrew Kay supplies the cautionary coda — "trust, but verify" — and names internet-based voting as "the worst thing I can think of," a theme that recurs across DOD's end-to-end verifiable voting discussions.

The feedback-loop insight

The episode closes on gig-economy platforms (Uber, Airbnb, a Facebook cryptocurrency), and lands on a principle that recurs throughout the DOD landscape:

"Who is influenced is not who is influencing it... if someone's influencing something, they also need to be influenced to the same degree. In engineering that's called a feedback loop. Without it, the system destabilises — and cooperatives are a vehicle to close that loop."

The disconnect between the people who decide how a platform works and the people who bear the consequences is, the group argues, the root of the harm — and the same broken-feedback pattern DOD elsewhere calls an accountability sink. Worker or community ownership (a cooperative, or managing a resource as a commons) closes the loop.

Original event announcement, podcast player, full timestamp index, and raw transcript excerpt

# Designing Open Democracy: "Trust, a concept analysis" (Later: Fake vs Real News trivia) * Gate Open: 5:30pm * Date: 11th of December 2019 * Location: Melbourne Business Centre, Level 9, 440 Collins St · Melbourne # Reach Out Effort: Political Parties that have responded to our invitation: * Flux Party (Ben Ballingall) * MiVote * Science Party (Victorian Coordinator, Luke James) --------- RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/DesigningOpenDemocracy/events/266631081/ ----- **Designing Open Democracy Podcast Is Available In All Major Podcast App or Apple Podcast** Recording complete! A new podcast channel is now up https://player.whooshkaa.com/episode?id=538152 Let us know what you think about this episode so we can improve it next time! Timestamp: * 1s : Introduction * 265s : Define trust, Why exist? Where is trust from? What causes trust? What influence trust. * 146s : Why do we care about this topic? * 179s : In each field in science, bigger concepts is formed by previous fields. * 218s : So could the same be for trust? Are we missing out? * 265s : Start to talk about trust. We can approach it in different ways. * 290s : Personal trust is not transferable between people * 334s : Trust is a perception game * 362s : Humans have the ability to form alliance * 383s : Role of language in creating complex trust * 468s : resonance analogy * 524s : Dunbar's Number * 647s : Noam Chomsky's Dictatorship Bubble * 833s : Prisoner's Dilemma * 938s : Work agreement in companies * 1008s : Current social assumption about work * 1170s : Anthony Mc Mullen's explanation of co-ops * 1271s : Democratic Governance vs Democratic Ownership * 1550s : American Southern Strategy * 1771s : How labor issues was not always a left wing issue * 1861s : cognitive dissonance * 2223s : Conservative/Rightwing are more united * 2329s : Penny Wong * 2549s : Tribal Epistemology * 2710s : Fake Facebook Pages For Extreme Right/Left * 2780s : Allowing for compromise * 2850s : Democracy Groups Are Stuck With Infighting * 3035s : Why many co-ops fails (Divide&Conquer) * 3262s : Prisoner's Dilemma * 3533s : Using technology to increase trust in orgs * 3706s : Money * 3843s : Unintended consequences of rules/algos * 4016s : Money used to be just physical coins/notes * 4138s : Satoshi Nakamoto * 4233s : Hard to trust eVoting * 4369s : Trust but verify * 4403s : Science has base assumptions * 4458s : Bitcoin base assumptions is maths * 4622s : Crypto Ledger * 4725s : Facebook Crypto Currency * 4814s : Gig Economy * 4940s : Exploiting Network Effect * 4961s : Who is influenced is not who is influencing it ---- # Interesting transcription bit about gig economy I think it is a lot of resistance against it. , but definitely there are companies they just go out and buy a company they'll act illegally then the laws is changed. Look at Uber. Yeah look at taxies, they were running for a while... then in the end the government were not popualar with consumers . And so the government goes . These guys are being operated illegally. that uber ? Yeah Uber. Well , you know what it is is it's changed that so for me I think it's important these drivers themselves are owning the platform , not some external partners extracting values, then I am kind of okay with it, and I actually think the drivers will be better off . Whereas Problem of we got is that over time , a system like uber eats like now all the small businesses off restaurants . I think it's something like 30% that loses. systems put in place of dubious legality now that the government could be being getting donations and corruption . But there's also this popular opinion . If enough people reckon happy with with uber driver , a regular taxi then government will change the law because it be too unpopular for them , to take them , unless they make a case like in london that this is worse for the consumers , and then we might even think about the driver if you cannot suggest here is an error in your logic here a your because you said something about systems with system . Here is not just cars and drivers and passengers . Its roadways . Yeah . So people people a what ? Wass unlicensed taxi and to drive a flea car was a very serious offences. And what's something like doing tio people arguing that there's been so many people that are making money ? It's really driven housing crisis . It's had some impact on level homelessness . So you can go , I think , one of the broader implications of these technologies . It's difficult for governments because these technologies are also popular with people can . I just meant your conversation . I think the augment what you're looking for it's like the network effect , like how it is enough people in Facebook . It's very hard to not use Facebook because you're just essentially shut out from a big part of society . The trouble is with control and influence like who is influenced is not who is influencing it. So in terms of Uber , network allows for that . Of course , the current system is very inefficient , right , and then you leverage the technology people are happy , but at one point because the person team behind Uber and Facebook and any other platform is different from those who are influencing the platform by decisions they make . But an entire different group of people are influenced by that platform which our people on the ground ' the homelessness issue and Facebook all sort of host of all sort of issues . And this disconnect is the root cause of issues which something like cooperatives would solve . A concept of commons managing public resource as comments would also solve that when you close this loop , if if someone's influencing something , they also need to be influenced the same degree . But there has to be a connection in engineering . That's called feedback loop in the lack of a feedback loop the systems goes destablised, Yes destablised it does . And that's what we see here is the feedback loop is not cooperative . Camp is a vehicle to kind of close that loop . Yeah