The #encryptionist movement has a blind spot. Not because encryption itself is bad – it isn’t. Encryption is a tool to protect dissidents, journalists, communities under threat, and everyday privacy. In the small picture, strong encryption is often necessary.
But in the bigger picture, something more subtle is happening. Strands of crypto and decentralisation culture promote the idea of removing trust – replacing social relationships with mathematical guarantees, “trustless systems,” and automated consensus. And this is where the problem begins. Because human societies are not built on the absence of trust, they are built on trust itself.
Trust is not a bug in human systems, it is the foundation of cooperation, empathy, and shared reality. When we frame progress as eliminating trust rather than cultivating it, we weaken the social fabric that allows communities to exist. Trust is social infrastructure.
Research consistently shows that societies with higher social trust have lower corruption, crime, stronger institutions and healthier civic participation. Trust grows through openness, shared norms, and collective accountability – not through technical enforcement.
Encryption can support trust by protecting vulnerable communication. But “trustlessness” as an ideology, as often unintentionally erodes by framing humans as inherently untrustworthy, replacing social accountability with technical rules and encouraging isolation rather than relationship-building.
The paradox of crypto culture is that the rise of crypto and “trustless systems” is itself a symptom of declining institutional trust. People turn to mathematical systems because they no longer trust governments, media, or social institutions, it’s a feedback loop, thus is understandable. But if the common sense solution becomes removing trust from social systems altogether, we are accelerating the fragmentation we are trying to escape. You cannot build healthy societies purely through cryptography.
It’s worth thinking about – Open vs closed – Historically, most meaningful social change has emerged from open processes with shared debate building public knowledge commons to feed into collective organising. Many #encryptionists don’t realise they may be contributing to this dynamic, because their motivation often comes from good places: protecting freedom, resisting surveillance and empowering individuals.
The challenge is not to reject encryption, but to ask a deeper question. Are we building systems that strengthen human trust, or replace it? Are we designing for cooperation, or just adversarial verification? Are we reinforcing shared humanity, or modelling a world where nobody trusts anyone?
So yes, please have a conversation with an #encryptionist today, not to argue, but to explore whether our tools are helping rebuild trust, or unintentionally dissolving it. Because the goal isn’t a “trustless” world. The goal is a world where trust can flourish again.
OMN #openweb #4opens
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