Liars and Outliers Bruce Schneier: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive

Chapter 16

Technological Advances

Scale is one of the critical concepts necessary to understand societal pressures. The increasing scale of society is what forces us to shift from trust and trustworthiness based on personal relationships to impersonal trust—predictability and compliance—in both people and systems. Increasing scale is what forces us to augment our social pressures of morals and reputation with institutional pressure and security systems. Increasing scale is what's requiring more—and more complicated—security systems, making overall societal pressures more expensive and less effective. Increasing scale makes the failures more expensive and more onerous. And it makes our whole societal pressure system less flexible and adaptable.

This is all because increasing scale affects societal pressures from a number of different directions.

• More people. Having more people in society changes the effectiveness of different reputational pressures. It also increases the number of defectors, even if the percentage remains unchanged, giving them more opportunities to organize and grow stronger. Finally, more defectors makes it more likely that the defecting behavior is perceived as normal, which can result in a Bad Apple Effect.
• Increased complexity. More people means more interactions among people: more interactions, more often, over longer distances, about more things. This both causes new societal dilemmas to arise and causes interdependencies among dilemmas. Complex systems ...