Team Human: Recalibrating For Trust

Consider a text message in which you are deciding where to meet for dinner with a friend. As you go back and forth in that stream of abbreviated communication, you suggest, “Let’s eat Italian,” to which your friend responds “Fine.” The one-word text sends you into a state of alarm. Did they mean “fine” as in “great,” or “fine” as in “Fine, you win, we can eat where you’d like”? Somewhere in this chain of communication, trust has been lost.

Featured on Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast today are William Softky and Criscilia Benford, a husband and wife team who are looking deep into the biophysical and mathematical underpinnings of establishing trust in communications. They’ve just published a paper titled “Sensory Metrics of Neuromechanical Trust” in the journal, Neural Computation. In this conversation, Softky and Benford join Rushkoff to dive deep into experiences of digital disorientation and screen addiction. What’s really going on in our brains as we consume more and more digital stimuli? Have our nervous systems been recalibrated by these flattened, two-dimensional interactions?

Opening today’s show, Rushkoff looks at the recent Mayweather vs. McGregor boxing match. Did this spectacle represent a surrogate Trump vs. Obama battle? And while that fight is over, the victor declared, what does it mean when governance itself becomes a prolonged spectacle?

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