Ryszard Kapuściński, the Polish anti-colonialist journalist and poet, wrote: “Silence is a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet.”

There’s a lesson here about technology and trust: Who gets to be part of the conversation, and who gets silenced? With the immense power of new tech concentrated in the hands of a small number of technology owners, this is not an abstract question. It will determine whether tech erodes trust or whether we can earn trust.

Transparency or Dialogue?

Tech can be used to earn trust by increasing transparency and fairness. Or it can be wielded to destroy trust, by enforcing silence. Unfortunately, I’ve seen far too much of the latter in recent weeks. The problem begins with how we talk about dialogue itself. Opening up honest dialogue is certainly a part of transparency. But that dialogue has to be honest and focussed around understanding the truth. What we’re seeing instead is a troubling shift: the prioritization of dialogue as performance over actual transparency. Transparency demands the truth of what is being shared. Dialogue, stripped to its bare mechanics, demands only words.

When the owners and builders of new technology aren’t honest about its benefits and drawbacks, that erodes trust. When those owners create spaces where only their voices are amplified and others are quieted, that erodes trust further. When people witness technology being deployed to benefit a privileged few at the cost of the many, when they watch as tech is weaponized to silence inconvenient voices—that isn’t just unfair. It’s dangerous. And it threatens both technology and society.

For the past year, and especially at January’s World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland we’ve watched tech CEOs and billionaires celebrate their rising influence, increasingly finding themselves in positions of political power and favor. Their confidence is palpable. Their platforms are vast. And their willingness to use those platforms selectively by amplifying some voices while marginalizing others has become impossible to ignore. The difference between private celebration and public suppression couldn’t be more stark. It couldn’t highlight the fundamental unfairness embedded in our current tech infrastructure more sharply.

Control and Silence

Kapuściński again: “Silence has its laws and its demands. Silence demands that concentration camps be built in uninhabited areas. Silence demands an enormous police apparatus with an army of informers.” Looking around, an Minneapolis and elsewhere in the US, I have to ask, what does it mean when the technology we develop becomes part of that silencing apparatus?

The difference between the “dialogue” on the promenade of Davos and the repression on the streets of Minneapolis couldn’t be more stark. It couldn’t highlight the unfairness of tech (and society) any more sharply. On the largest scale, social media, increasingly powered by AI, is shattering what’s left of our global digital commons. In the warring narratives of Minneapolis, the US federal government used whatever technical savvy at its disposal to elevate grudges and lies over truth and responsibility. As if seeking to embody this trend, TikTok, under new, ostensibly American and certainly less competent ownership, turned its addictive algorithm sharply to the right. On an individual level, the surveillance state we’ve been warning of for over a decade now allows for personal revenge against the administration’s enemies, with facial recognition used to both take away privileges and track down new victims for ICE.

You can’t earn trust without listening to others, enforced silence breeds resentment and distrust. Using technology, especially the very tools that promised to connect us and democratize information, to create that enforced silence is a betrayal of innovation and of our best hopes for the future. Responsibility – for truth, for honesty, and for innovating for trust – can only be postponed, and people will only be silenced for so long.