Welcome to the “Trust Economy” era! Technology, which gives us nightmares about the protection of our personal data, i.e. our data security, and which we complain about polarizing, actually created something amazing on the one hand.

It allowed us to rent a car from strangers over the internet, to stay in the house of someone we don’t know, to buy clothes for our child from another mother whose name we don’t know, to entrust our lives to an Uber driver whose name we don’t know how he drives, to entrust the logo of our company to the creativity of a designer thousands of kilometers away. As technologies that enable sharing what you own with someone else for a short time are developed and used, social paradigms also began to change.

With the interaction that occurred between people who are thousands of kilometers apart in the world, something groundbreaking happened: A new sense of community was formed, and more collaboration based on information and need was started.

This allowed people from afar to get to know each other with a positive and curious perspective that goes beyond political boundaries, cultural differences, and social status, and to get ideas from each other. Away from physical and social limitations and prejudices; new ideas began to sprout from individual collaborations and exchanges made on a need basis, and unbiased interaction increased. It turned out that all that was needed to reach this utopia that everyone dreamed of in theory was a neutral mechanism – digital applications – that would eliminate physical, cultural and social judgments.

While we were expecting technology applications for sharing purposes that provide trust and zero physical prejudices to create a “sharing economy”, they created the “Trust Economy”. In an environment where we can reach many people who buy and sell the same house, car, face cleanser, game console, pet food with a single touch, what matters now is not how that seller looks, what he wears, which country he is from, but whether he is “reliable” or not.

“Reliability” proved to be the most important factor determining how much money you will earn. When buying something, we look at whether the yellow stars next to the name of the seller whose real name we don’t even know are yellow instead of the “Likes” under his posts. Trust began to destroy the trap of manipulating appearance and advertising with sight. As the US Dollar’s currency symbol is $, while the credibility, reality and value of the “Like – Like” icon, which is the currency symbol of advertising, decreased; The currency symbol of trust “Star- “Star” rose. The value of sellers and service providers, individuals and companies began to be measured by stars next to their names, i.e., trust, and this continues to provide them with increasing economic returns. Trust has become the most valuable currency of the new world and its value will continue to rise.

That’s exactly why if you’re not making an effort to build and strengthen trust I wouldn’t recommend you look forward to the future with confidence because it seems like the future will leave behind what it doesn’t trust.