It occurs to me that the controversy surrounding the trademarking of a guild name is an example of exactly the sort of permeable boundary between communitarian and authority-based enforcement that can cause trouble, that I was discussing in the posts on trust.
I’ll be on a panel at the Churchill Club on Wednesday evening. The topic is connected gaming, and the speaker list is an interesting one. It does cost money to attend, though. Full details can be found here:
In part I I gave the basic grounding for my take on the issues of trust, reputation, and policing. Now I want to dig into some of the deeper issues there.
Apologies in advance for a grim poem this week!
Outside School, Lima
I saw it on the flatbed: a horse
belly slit open, large chunks
of meat missing, hide flapping
like a flag, tail dripping off
the edge of the truck
cars jostled to follow it, every one
full of children like us, begging
their mothers, asking
for nightmares
I got none, but I have to tell
the story, or else the horse
died in vain, and the children
will have nothing to worship
no flag to follow
no rules to break and later obey
Trust is a big topic. There’s a number of definitions out there related to different domains; everything from the famous Ronald Reagan “trust, but verify” dictum applied to international arms treaties, to “trusted computing” which is not about whether something is trustworthy, but whether it behaves predictably from a software/content provider’s point of view (and not necessarily the user’s!).
In general, most people tend, of course, to assume that “trust” means what the dictionary says: someone or something on which you can depend.
