Trust, Celebrity and the Future of Big Social

Back in 2018 when Christine Lagarde was the head of the International Monetary Fund, she published an Op-ed in the Guardian in which she wrote “The best tonic for depleted trust is heightened transparency. The best way to fight corruption is to put in place robust, accountable, and transparent institutions.”

I know what you’re thinking. Who the hell still uses the word tonic? That’s like half a step up from potion. How old is Christine Lagarde anyway? Is she a vampire born in the late 1850s?

[Just checked. She was born in 1956. But to be fair, anyone can update Wikipedia. Even vampires.]

[Sorry. Where were we?]

Lagarde was obviously talking about how to reverse the loss of trust in the governing institutions of today… which– to be brutally honest– I’m not sure can or should survive the laws of institutional entropy.

[Note: I fall back on physics terms to sound smart. Right now, I’m fighting the urge to compare trust with matter. “Trust is not created or destroyed so much as slowly and perpetually in motion… bla bla blah… violating either the first or second law of thermodynamics.”]

[Here’s how I’d say it without pretension.]

Trust– as I understand it– never just poofs into or out of existence.

Poof! Trust!

Poof! Loss of trust.

The same amount of trust exists in the social ether before and after every macro- or micro-affirmation and violation, as institutions rise and fall, and as the tone and civility of public discourse waxes and wanes.

Well-meaning authors keep lamenting the decline of trust in institutions but that lost trust is landing somewhere. When the government loses our trust– or the courts or mass media or the church or higher ed– we’re not less trusting people. We’re just redirecting it.

And whether the leaders of established institutions like it or not, more and more, our only alternatives for that redirection are individuals on social media– beautifully imperfect– seemingly trustworthy personal brands that align with our aspirational values.

That dynamic is playing out far beyond the divisive politics of left and right. It’s infused in our worship of successful entrepreneurship– i.e., Bezos, Musk, Gates, Altman. It’s evidenced in retail commerce– particularly with the younger set— as they spend more and more on celebrity-branded products like Rihanna’s makeup or Kim’s underwear (her Skims line, not her actual underwear, pervert); or in products like George Clooney’s tequila or Ryan Reynolds’ gin.

That’s not just old-fashioned celebrity worship. That’s an active shift of trust away from larger corporate brands like Coty, Spanx, Patrón, and Seagrams. Not particularly troubling but worth calling out.

Playing with Hope

Look, there are two pieces of good news with regard to trust and social media.

The first is that in addition to celebrities and billionaires, regular people– without freakishly exceptional genes or massive intergenerational wealth– are increasingly becoming the arbiters of taste and meaning. That’s TikTok’s only charm. And it’s a nice tiny step toward Lagarde’s idea of “robust, accountable, and transparent.”

Why? Because on some level, individuals always were the puppeteers. They– the super rich and their kids, the trust fund crowd– just had the decency (and the good commercial sense) to do it from the shadows.

In that way, Big Social– even with all its contrived transparency– is the start of Justice Brandeis’ notion of sunlight: it can (potentially) disinfect. But right this second, that’s mostly misdirection– not unlike the US political process– because the spotlight gets cast and recast on the performer, not the owner of the stage, and definitely not the extramoral, commerce-driven process that operates the spotlight.

The second piece of good news is that platforms/stages (as in… the thing you physically stand on to get attention– the place where the spotlight shines)– at least the virtual ones– will be really, really cheap soon. And I mean without Big Social’s not-so-hidden cost of “being the product.”

Given the promise of AI, it’s just a matter of time before mass media’s influence is completely upended by affordable hyper-narrowcasting via distributed media platforms– leaving the earth with an infinite list of tiny little cults of personality.

Note 1: I’d reference Web 3.0 here but that brand is too inextricably tied to all things blockchain (yay!) and Bitcoin (yech! – the closest thing our generation has to tulips).

Note 2: I don’t mean Big Social is going down. Just as I’d never suggest that TV as a medium is going to shutter. But… their cultural and commercial relevance will be more noise than signal sooner than expected. And both will eventually be something only Grandpa cares about.

Hell, that’s already happening with Facebook without the shadow of AI.

Faith in Cheaper Stages

Once you scratch past Big Media’s self-serving narrative that Big Social’s platforms are the real power, you can begin to frame today’s actual disruptors as the everyday people who inspire trust in their audiences– the average Joes and Janes driving the attention bus, and making it (at a meta-level) clear to everyone in society that power is exactly that accessible.

That insight opens the door to next-level tech disruption. Because the next problem to solve is that creators are– commercially– inextricably tied to Big Social.

So– if I had to guess– the next generation of software (i.e., whatever comes after Medium and Substack) will facilitate society’s transfer from Big to small— from dependent to independent creatorship— from monolithic, elite-owned social media to federated, influencer-owned platforms. And it’ll catalyze a more fragmented but also more democratized transformation of the media landscape.

The other reason why this is inevitable? Because no one– and especially no one with thousands of followers– wants to keep living in their Mom’s basement. Especially if they’re talented or stubbornly ambitious or god forbid, both.

Because sooner or later, they’ll tire of getting paid in attention.

Conclusion: Faith in Safer Stages

Long before the migration off Big Social begins, it’s up to the next generation of tech visionaries to operationalize Lagarde’s tonic– with all its robustness, accountability, and transparency. They need to think deeply about the security fabric of their decentralized platforms– to start with foundational safeguards that protect us all against distributed demagoguery.

Big words aside…

Followers should have the right to follow anyone they want.

Leaders however should be held to the highest standards… by their own tech platforms.

That last bit is critical because distributed tech will inevitably replace journalism’s role in holding authority figures accountable.

[Yes, my least popular opinion is that journalism’s days are numbered… even for the clever outlets that have switched to a subscriber model like the NYT and WSJ… because as power decentralizes, centralized systems can’t cost-effectively scale to challenge it.]

[My one exception: NPR– because it's not too proud to beg.]

The point here is that the future value of tomorrow’s social platforms won’t be the free stage.

Their value will be determined by how thoughtfully they hold billions of influencers accountable to objective truth when each of those people is standing in one of a billion, self-powered spotlights.

And THAT– Madame Vampire– is the best tonic for depleted trust: not just retrofitting older institutions so they stop leaking our trust but investing in the platforms that will inevitably land our trust as we grow out of yesterday’s outdated forms of trust.

[drops mic]

[picks it back up]

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