Mistrust Issues: How Technology Discourses Quantify, Extract and Legitimize Inequalities

We are often expected to trust technologies, and how they are used, even if we have good reason not to. There is no room to mistrust.

Exploring relations between trust and mistrust in the context of data, AI and technology at large, this book defines a process of ‘trustification’ used by governments, corporations, researchers and the media to legitimize exploitation and increase inequalities.

Aimed at social scientists, computer scientists and public policy, the book aptly reveals how trust is operationalized and converted into a metric in order to extract legitimacy from populations and support the furthering of technology to manage society.

Garfield Benjamin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Solent University, Southampton.