Who Can You Trust?

The paradox at the center of Rachel Botsman's argument is that trust in institutions and leaders has fallen while millions of people rent homes to strangers, trade digital currencies or end up trusting a bot. Botsman, an expert on trust, calls this the age of distributed trust, a shift driven by technologies that are rewriting the rules of a very human relationship. She argues that society has reached a tipping point in a major social transformation, and that benefiting from it requires knowing how trust is earned, kept, broken and restored online. The book maps this new landscape and considers what may come next for humanity.

500 Startups partner Marvin Liao included it on a list of books he was partly through, which he said reflected his eclectic interests.