Jerry Michalski: "I've always felt like the lonely champion for humans in the tech world."

Jerry Michlaski is not your typical tech consultant; he's a true visionary who has spent a lifetime unraveling the complexities of trust and collaboration in a rapidly changing world. Born in San Diego but with a life story that spans continents and generations, Jerry's unique upbringing laid the foundation for his extraordinary life arc.

With a father who worked as a Civil Engineer across South America, and his mother's family's escape from Germany to Bolivia in 1939, Jerry's path was altered significantly by influential mentors like Russell Ackoff, whom he studied under at Wharton, and other serendipitous connections that reshaped his understanding of how things work. He soon embarked on a mission to help organizations grasp the essence of trust and become genuinely trustworthy by delving into the nuances of language, processes, and intentions.

A pattern finder, lateral thinker, connector, and facilitator, with a true passion for public speaking, perhaps one of Jerry’s most remarkable projects is the creation of the world's largest published Brain, a digital repository of interconnected thoughts that provides insights into the intricate relationships between technology, society, and business.

Jerry's three decades of exploration have led him to a groundbreaking thesis: we've lost trust in human beings over the centuries, leading to the creation of systems and institutions that assume everyone is a “bad actor.” He believes we are now in the midst of a transformation into a Relationship Economy, where trust, interdependence, and meaning are being re-discovered through movements such as open-source software, pattern languages, the sharing economy, microfinance, unschooling, traffic calming, and workplace democracy.

Jerry's career journey began as a technology analyst, initially at New Science Associates, where he created innovative research services. He later served as the Managing Editor of Esther Dyson's tech newsletter, Release 1.0, where he was at the forefront of shaping the tech industry during the dawn of the Internet era.

Since 1998, Jerry has been an independent advisor, working with a diverse range of organizations, from IBM and the Wharton School to Blogger (now part of Google) and eGroups (now YahooGroups). He's been a notable figure in the media and has built a reputation as a thought leader in public speaking.

In 2010, Jerry founded REX, the Relationship Economy eXpedition, based on his discomfort with the term ‘consumer.’ This platform brings together individuals from various sectors to explore the deep-seated issues surrounding trust in the modern world.

Jerry’s work isn't just a profession; it's a relentless pursuit of understanding trust, fostering collaboration, and envisioning a world where relationships, authenticity, and trust are at the core of our interactions. Jerry's mission resonates with a world that is yearning for a genuine reconnection with the principles that underlie our shared humanity.

This week, in conversation with Machinelab…

Jerry, trust is a central theme in your work. How does trust function in institutions like education, elections, and corporate workplaces, and what are the implications of understanding trust in these contexts?

So my thesis is that somehow, somewhere between 300 and 3,000 years ago, we lost trust in human beings. We decided that there are too many bad actors out there and that most people are bad actors. So we designed systems and institutions assuming just about everybody is a bad actor. So in education, elections, and the workplace, we do a whole bunch of different things.

In education, we have a compulsory education system where we separate children into one year tranches. Really, one of the best ways to learn something is from somebody who's a couple of steps ahead of you. And one of the best ways to lock in knowledge is to teach somebody who's a couple of steps behind you. But the sixth graders don't want anything to do with the fifth graders. And we're automatically creating scarcity in a school system where there's actually abundance everywhere. So for me, a lot of the things that are broken in each of our institutions have to do with a loss of trust in people.

In the corporate workplace for example, we have Ricardo Semmler who inherited the company, Semco, from his father (who was a very type A personality). It was a normal corporation. And then Semmler, who had wanted to be a rock band musician or a surfer his whole life, suddenly said, no, we're going to change this company. And he created what now we're thinking of as workplace democracy by trusting his employees. There's a whole series of stories. He's written a couple of books about it too. He's a great example of ways of actually helping change corporate workplaces into high-trust environments instead of low-trust, which is what we've got today.

That’s interesting. What do you think we’ve forgotten about trust over the years and what has pushed us away from both creating authenticity within that reflects in our external worlds? Help me understand this...

That is a complicated question. The problem is that we used to be highly interdependent. We stayed alive by depending on each other. One of the rifts I have is that poverty is a new term in the Western world [introduced around 1650]. Because before 1650, the whole village might have gone under because there was a famine or there were huns on the hills that could kill or enslave us. But the idea that one household will be poorer than the others and will go under because they don't have work, they don't have a job, is just unknown. That's not a thing we know.

Unemployment is a new term - developed around 1750 - as the Industrial Revolution really caught on, which then displaced a whole lot of ways that we used to stay alive before and replaces them with work, everything with a price, and the requirement to have money to buy those things. A whole world that we don't question right now. So that's one set of things that shifted around trust.

We've also forgotten how to trust each other and how we don't have mechanisms for bringing young people into society in a trustworthy way. We don't have a way to figure out how to trust information we see. There's all sorts of different things that are going on there.

Pine and Gilmore wrote a book titled Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want - now I'm not a fan of the book because they’re sort of promoting faux-thenticity, which is the perception of authenticity, which is not authenticity. So that kind of irritates me. So somehow coming back to ourselves and being centered and honest with each other and being vulnerable with one another, here I'll point to Brené Brown's work on vulnerability as really essential. It is a way to get back to authenticity that will connect us to each other so that we can trust one another again. And that's just one swing through the topic.

I'll just add here that advertising is the attempt to create emotions in our brains that are fake, that are not really there, but that hopefully we will append those emotions to the product or service that were being advertised, and then we'll just buy them because they're somehow better. The whole advertising world really irritates me because advertising involves several deep breaches of trust, which we have normalized. The first breach is I'm going to dumpster dive your exhaust data so that I know all about you, that you don't know that I'm actually collecting up. The second breach is: then I'm going to manipulate that data and put algorithms on it so that I can figure out what you like more than you understand what you like. And then I'm going to sort of pour that in front of you and fill your world with noise called advertising to try to get you to buy stuff that you probably don't actually need. That's like a fourth breach of trust. There are other ways to have business, and unfortunately, the ad model is the way that the internet is funded, so that's not a good thing. So all of this has really pervaded our worlds as we are.

What role do you see technology playing in enhancing trust and collaborative decision-making in the future?

I just discovered a report that I wrote for New Science Associates in 1988 titled ‘Neural Networks: Prospects for Commercial Use.’ And GPT right now is a descendant of the work that was being done on neural networks back then. So I've been watching this for a really long time. And I've always felt like a lonely champion for humans in the tech world. So many other people were like, ooh, speeds and feeds and cool, what algorithms we can use and all kinds of techy, geeky stuff that doesn't match well with how humans work and how society works! So I'm really afraid that a lot of the tech visionaries are also deep libertarians. Libertarianism has no room for commons. It doesn't understand those kinds of things, even though these people happily use open source software, which is a kind of commons. So I think that the tech world is really confused and confusing in a sense. And finding its way to enhancing trust and collaborative decision-making is going to be hard and it's going to take some work. Again, sharing what we know is hard to do right now. We are drowning in the info torrent and have no place to put what we believe in over time and grow it slowly.

Looking back at your experience working with Esther Dyson's tech newsletter Release 1.0, how has the tech industry evolved in terms of trust-related challenges and opportunities since then?

There's a bunch of interesting work on trust because there are many people, analysts and intellectuals who understand that trust is a deep and important issue. I'm not sure we've figured out how trust works or figured out useful ways of rebuilding trust. And there are unfortunately a lot of parties out in the world actively trying to undermine trust.

I will just say that the far right, the extreme right, in this country and around the world is busy trying to undermine our trust in journalism, science, elections, and one another. Because when we have no trust in those things, then we can't use fact-checking against them. And when we lose trust in a lot of things, we'll just grab whatever good ideas are floating by in the info torrent and seize it and be like; oh, okay, that makes enough sense. It kind of fits my model of the world. And I'll go with it. So I think that trust is one of the really deep, important challenges now.

I've invented a thing called design from trust, not for trust, but from trust, which means designing institutions and systems and solutions from a basis of an assumption that people have goodwill and good intentions. Not all of them, but most of them. And if we take advantage of that, you actually build completely different systems than when you start with the assumption, which I call design for mistrust, that almost everybody is not very trustworthy. So that's just scratching the surface of what I've learned since working for Esther back in the 90s.

In the current landscape of social media and yellow journalism, what are some effective strategies to build trust and maintain authenticity? 

Oh, man. Well, it would really help if the business model for social media wasn't advertising and addiction. That would be a really good start. So let's pretend that somebody figures out we're going to do something about Facebook. Facebook has more monthly average users than the populations of India and China combined. And that includes all the people, even people not old enough to be using Facebook. So Mark Zuckerberg is the dictator of a country larger than the two largest countries on the planet. And he knows more about all the individuals in his country than any of those countries or espionage units or whatever know about their own people.

It's just astonishing because we have poured our hearts and souls into Facebook. So let's pretend we decide to do something about Facebook. What's the remedy? I watched as Microsoft was found guilty of antitrust and then a lousy remedy was applied and it didn't really help. I watched as the AT&T monopoly was broken up into baby bells. That was sort of the remedy and that didn't work. We now have a duopoly in the US because we have very stupid policies. So what's the remedy for Facebook? This may sound difficult, but I would say Facebook needs to redesign everything so that it treats its members as citizens and not consumers.

It's really pretty simple. That means immediately abandoning the advertising model because that's for consumers and going to a paid membership model. And would you pay $5 a month for Facebook? What is the ARPU of you? Can you match that in cash? They probably would have fewer users. Sorry about that Facebook, but then we will stop suing you for antitrust or whatever else! So, I think that in social media, there's a couple of things like that. I have to say I am Twitter user #509. I'm the 509th person who ever signed up for Twitter. What Elon Musk is doing with Twitter breaks my heart. And I'm quite convinced that Elon Musk is out to destroy Twitter intentionally. He has not done anything an intelligent person would have done. And I thought from building the largest automaker in the US and sending more things into space than even NASA or anybody else has done would make him pretty smart. Turns out he's an idiot or he's got pretty underhanded motives. And this is just my opinion. But we really have to worry about social media.

And then journalism has been completely captured by attention. I put some videos up after Trump won the election in 2016. They're easily findable online about Trump. It's sort of a field manual for dealing with Trump. And one of the things I say is that in one of the debates, in the middle of one of the debates, Jeff Zucker (who ran CNN News and who was complicit in Trump's rise to fame because he helped him get The Apprentice and run all of that), Jeff Zucker should have said, hey, turn the cameras on me. He should have looked into the cameras and said; my fellow Americans, we've been hacked. I don't mean that Chinese and Russian hackers have broken into our servers, which they probably have. And that's not as important as what I'm about to say. What I mean is; the person we've been showing you right now, Donald Trump, has hacked us to hurt you. And until we figure out how to stop this and change it, we're going to show you a whole lot less of him and certainly nothing of him live. That would have been maybe a game-changing moment. And it might have changed CNN's reputation.

But instead, CNN is busy becoming Fox. Fox and the far right are busy spinning us out of control. The Pulitzer Prize, ironically, was created by Joseph Pulitzer, who was one of the inventors of yellow journalism, alongside William Randolph Hearst. They did battle back in the day, brutally with each other, lying like crazy with sensationalism and all kinds of things. We are in a far worse era than that. And I think that like the Nobel Prize inventor of dynamite and the Rhodes Scholarships are imperialists. These are prizes created to whitewash difficult reputations, is what I think. I believe that the landscape we're in is really complicated and sort of overwhelmed by its capitalist impulses. And if we went a different way and had different priorities, like society and well-being, we might actually get some place. There are lots of different efforts trying to do that, trying to build that world. It's just really, really hard. And they don't have the kinds of money that the venture-funded startups have, never mind a company as well-entrenched and as profitable as Facebook.

What advice would you give to young professionals who are interested in understanding and promoting trust within their own fields of expertise?

Come help me develop a design from trust, and then go apply it in your field. I have not written a book on this. I have not created a consultancy on this as a practice for maybe two reasons. One is, 10 years ago, I would have had to do that and nothing else, and I'm too curious about everything. And then the second reason is, I can bolt design thinking onto just about any company, and it will work. It won't solve all their problems, but it will work. Design from trust, because trust involves holding a mirror up to companies and individuals and hopefully causing them to see stuff that they're not seeing yet and change.

That is a social process that requires the building of community, feedback loops, and a bunch of things that aren't as simple as training somebody up on design thinking and saying, go do your design thinking thing. So I would love to find somebody who'd want to build design from trust out into an actual practice. It's just probably not going to be me leading it at this point. But I'm happy to help anybody who wants to apply it in their fields.

Given the changing technological landscape, how can we strike a balance between leveraging technology for collaboration and ensuring it doesn't erode trust between individuals and communities?

That is a great and difficult question. One of the issues about this Open Global Mind quest that I'm on is: how do we filter what gets published? Do we let liars and other people post onto the same medium? And my answer is, unfortunately, yes. Then what you need to do somehow is manage to put marker dye on the lies and make sure that the marker dye follows the lies down the food chain as those lies get built up and spun and moved around. And I'm not exactly sure how it plays out.

But I think that denying people - who are trying to game the system and lie like crazy - room in the arena just gives them reason to say, well, see? We're being censored. There's no room in the arena. So the answer to the bad speech is more speech, not the restrictions of speech. There is a boundary between regular speech, which is protected speech, and abusive speech or criminal speech. And incitement to riot, like for an insurrection, pretty much qualifies for the second category, for example. But we really need to figure out what this balance is. But we need a place where we can talk better than we're talking today by far.

What is your one guiding principle in both life and work?

I would just say curiosity and maybe openness. And that's two principles. Sorry about that. But I am the most curious person I know, although I've met some other people who are insanely curious as well.

I kind of love life and love all the things I find. And I have a place to curate those things, which gives me another little sort of endorphin hit or oxytocin hit every time I put the little piece in the puzzle. I publish my brain openly on purpose so that maybe I'm feeding some larger common memory over time, although we haven't solved that problem.

Photos courtesy of: Jerry Michlaski

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