309: Trust Cannot Be Automated

Participation is Not Power

We’re now publishing our intel digest Pressure Systems frequently, connecting different news stories, and weaving unique analysis, amidst daily events. Open sourcing our sense making efforts.

Today’s issue is about Trust.

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It would appear that the Canadian federal government is going to foolishly attempt to restrict what young people can do and access online. Three reasons why this will backfire:

• Attempts to prevent kids from accessing certain digital tools make those digital tools even more attractive, addictive, and outside of parental/community control.

• Attempts to verify age online will require radically upgraded surveillance and individual vulnerability resulting in greater harm.

• Telling young people (and all users) that you do not trust who they say they are or what they will do online will further foster a culture of deep distrust and deception.

Unfortunately what may be obvious to us will remain irrelevant to those crafting and implementing these policies. Rather than fruitlessly resist, let’s pivot to where the action is.

The focus of today’s issue lies less with the policy of restriction, but more with the policy of adoption, which paradoxically the federal government is aggressively pushing. We see an opportunity in the overlap between these policies and our broader interests/concerns. Trust.

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They call it participation when the decision has already been made.

A new system arrives. A platform, a policy, a workplace tool, a service channel, a national strategy. The public is invited to learn it, use it, adapt to it, provide feedback on it, train for it, become ready for it.

This is the soft language of technological inevitability.

No one is forced, exactly. No one is excluded, exactly. Everyone is empowered to participate.

But participation is not the same as power.

Canada’s new national artificial intelligence strategy, AI for All gives itself a north star: trust. Canadians must trust AI in order to use it. They must use it in order to benefit from it. Adoption becomes the route to opportunity. Empowerment becomes the promise that makes adoption socially acceptable.

Trust is one of those words institutions reach for when authority can no longer be assumed. When expertise no longer carries the room. When the public has reasons to hesitate. When parents have reasons to worry.

Trust is not optimism. It is not a positive feeling toward innovation. It is not the warm glow of being included in a process.

Trust is the willingness to accept vulnerability.

This is the part that gets softened in public language. If there were no vulnerability, trust would not be needed.

So when a national AI strategy places trust front and centre, the real question is not whether Canadians can be persuaded to feel better about AI.

The question is what vulnerability they are being asked to accept.

A public becomes vulnerable when democratic life is conducted through synthetic media, automated persuasion, platform incentives, and information systems that are visible only at the point of impact.

This is the terrain the strategy is trying to cross.

This is where AI for All becomes interesting. Not because it is uniquely flawed. Not because Canada should have no AI strategy. Of course Canada needs a serious public approach to AI. The point is that the strategy reveals the structure of the moment: adoption has become the policy horizon, and trust is being asked to make adoption feel like empowerment.

That is a lot of work for one word.

Empowerment can mean people gaining agency over the systems that shape their lives. It can mean access, capacity, literacy, leverage, bargaining power, public control, community choice, and the right to refuse. It can mean tools that answer to people rather than people being trained to answer to tools.

But empowerment can also become the friendly name for adaptation.

Learn the system.

Use the system.

Keep up with the system.

Participate in the system.

Call the result empowerment.

This is the trap. The language of participation can make exposure look democratic. It can turn adjustment into agency. It can describe people as empowered because they have been given training for a world whose terms were set before they entered the room.

That does not make trust irrelevant. It makes trust more important.

Trust should come first. But not as a slogan, a north star, or a public confidence target attached to an adoption agenda. Trust should come first because vulnerability comes first. Before adoption, before literacy, before productivity, before opportunity, before the cheerful promise of AI for all, there has to be an honest accounting of exposure.

Who is being asked to become vulnerable?

To whom?

For what promised benefit?

With what power to refuse?

With what ability to inspect the system?

With what protection if the promise fails?

Without those questions, trust becomes a permission structure. It becomes the thing institutions ask for when what they really need is compliance with acceleration.

This is why the government strategy is useful mostly as a symptom. It gives us a public artifact in which the deeper pattern becomes visible. The strategy wants trust to unlock adoption. It wants adoption to create opportunity. It wants opportunity to become empowerment. But the missing test is whether people gain power over the systems, or merely become more capable users of systems that gain power over them.

That is the purpose of trust.metaviews.ca.

Not as a doctrine of trust. Not as a claim to have solved the problem. As a way of helping organizations cultivate trust: the point where institutions ask people to accept vulnerability in exchange for promised empowerment.

AI for All is a powerful phrase.

The danger is that “all” becomes the scale of exposure.

The possibility is that “all” becomes the measure of power.

@blakefinucanevogue said editorial and žižek said absolutely not

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