Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart

If you can't trust those in charge, who can you trust? From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. But this isn't the age of distrust -- far from it.

In this revolutionary book, world-renowned trust expert Rachel Botsman reveals that we are at the tipping point of one of the biggest social transformations in human history -- with fundamental consequences for everyone. A new world order is emerging: we might have lost faith in institutions and leaders, but millions of people rent their homes to total strangers, exchange digital currencies, or find themselves trusting a bot. This is the age of "distributed trust," a paradigm shift driven by innovative technologies that are rewriting the rules of an all-too-human relationship.

If we are to benefit from this radical shift, we must understand the mechanics of how trust is built, managed, lost, and repaired in the digital age. In the first book to explain this new world, Botsman provides a detailed map of this uncharted landscape -- and explores what's next for humanity.

Rachel Botsman is a world-renowned expert on an explosive new era of trust and technology and what this means for life, work and how we do business. An award-winning author, speaker and lecturer at Oxford University's SaïBusiness School. She writes and comments regularly for the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and more. She's also a contributing editor at Wired.

Her latest book, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together -- and Why It Could Drive Us Apart (UK: Penguin; USA: Public Affairs) was published in September 2017. It was named one of the best books of 2017 by Wired, book of the month by the Financial Times, a bestseller on 800 CEO Read and a finalist for The Business Book Awards 2018.

Rachel is also the co-author of What's Mine is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live (HarperCollins, 2010), which predicted the rise of platforms such as Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Uber, long before they became popular and was named one of Time's "Ten Ideas That'll Change the World" and the book was shortlisted for the 800 CEO Read Business Book of the Year in 2010.