Crisis of Trust

Last week, for my tenth entry, I spoke of how brand loyalty made Apple as influential as it is today. Apple showed that it's not being the best or the cheapest that sells products. It's being the most trustworthy, and people are willing to pay huge premiums for trust.

The inescapable truth is: trust sells technology. The biggest hindrance to the acceptance of technology is still trust. How else did it take us an eternity to finally automate our national elections? I remember senators worried that the systems might be "hacked," which was insane as indeed one would have to be an absurdly talented hacker to hack a computer not connected to any network. And the problem's just getting worse. The biggest blow by far was the ZTE broadband scandal, which to me was infinitely annoying since I was a big fan of the DepEd's plan to computerize classrooms using the broadband network.

But more inescapable here is that in the Philippines, this "technophobia" is born not from a fear of technology per se. If so, then we would not be the most cell-phone addicted country in the region. No, we aren't afraid of technology--we're afraid of the government that seeks to use said technology. We don't distrust computers, we distrust what the politicians might do with them.

And for that crisis of trust, not even the best technologies can conjure a solution.

Miguel Tensuan, Entry 11