As a young kid in San Francisco during the mid-1970s, I grew up seeing hitchhikers everywhere. Then a bunch of scary stories (and myths and hoaxes) killed off the practice and hitchhiking largely died off.
It seems to be back now and more popular than ever. Rather than being advocated by the members of the counter culture, today’s champions live in well-off communities and is now practiced with a smartphone rather than an up-right thumb.
What changed?
On one level, technology. Ubiquitous connectivity courtesy of cellular data plans, sensors that give us location-aware smartphones, and online mapping make it easy to match drivers with passengers, route them to the desired destination, and complete the transaction.
That’s only half the story. If getting into a car with a complete stranger isn’t outlandish enough, we now invite strangers into our homes, and let them take care of our kids. How is this possible?
Because of trust. Specifically, reputation systems that build trust amongst strangers.
My first experience with a reputation system was with eBay. A seller’s high feedback score allowed buyers like me to send money across the world with confidence because we knew the seller wouldn’t risk her or his hard won feedback score by ripping us off. The feedback was mutual with sellers rating buyers because eBay knew they needed to build trust on both sides of their network or else sellers wouldn’t risk sending expensive goods to complete strangers. In doing so they built a vibrant community of total strangers.
We now see this throughout the internet where we rate all sort things from restaurants and hotels to local merchants and service providers giving us confidence on all our purchases, both on and offline. It extends to movies, blog posts, and even 140 character musings so we can prioritize how we spend our time and money.
Again, this takes me back growing up in the 1970s but this time it’s the summers I spent with my grandparents at Priest Lake in rural Idaho. There, like in other all small towns everyone trusted one another because everyone knew one another and often had relationships going back generations. Reputations systems have brought this same level of trust to big urban areas where people are, by and large, anonymous. Reputation systems have disaggregated the trust that enables commerce from the need first to build relationships to enable that trust.
Everyone knows how trustworthy you are is even if no one knows who you are … and hitchhiking is safe again.
