Is Big Tech letting you eat cake? 

Every good salesman knows the big secret ingredient for a loyal customer base: Trust. It’s the lifeblood of every brand, every business and every institution that has had long-lasting social impact. 

Our society’s symbols and rituals of trust perpetuate themselves in our everyday interactions, either evident in the dollar bill’s “In God we Trust”, or subtly stated in one’s habits such as choosing to shake hands with someone in this post-pandemic world. 

Trust is implied in our daily choices, from the car we prefer to drive, to the brand of water we drink, to the doctors we choose to visit. It is an understated core element of the sustainability of an economy, as well as it’s stakeholders’. 

Trusting is a primal instinctual survival function - both animals and humans are hardwired to discern where risk or survival lies - learned from centuries of mechanically and subconsciously discerning what is trustworthy, 24/7. 

 A good salesman knows that in order to “seal the deal”, trust is the primary customer need they must speak to. A good advertiser knows that too, as well as how to repeatedly create this perception of safety on a mass scale.

But what we’ve all heard before is that not all that glitters is gold.

High tech products have been the object of case studies for the industry’s rapid ability to respond to customers’ burning pains, perhaps ones their customers themselves weren’t aware they had, along with the resources to create perceived need or the ability to mitigate brand concerns. 

In such commercial prowess there’s a constant endeavour to influence behaviour, relying on the virtually infinite human demand for the feeling of safety and need for connection with a like-minded community, backed by relentless brand storytelling coupled with an unprecedented ability to biohack perception.

But what happens when a once loyal customer base realises the king walks naked? What happens when public interest is no longer the key metric of choice? What happens to the salesman when the castles he sells are revealed to be made of sand?

The laws of biology can perhaps be hacked but the psychologist Abraham Maslow told us about our “unhackable” innermost needs. 

For demand to exist, it’s not about how high tech the supply is. Firstly it must meet the essential needs of it’s human users for physical integrity, safety & security, positive social engagement and self-actualisation, strictly in this exact hierarchical order. 

The few exceptions to Abraham Maslow’s consumer behaviour theory, when demand exceeds supply, are those of products that greatly but temporarily enhance the perception of integrity, safety, interaction and self-actualisation, while delivering disastrous consequences in the long run. 

An example of such exception is drug use: to override our hard wired instinct for health and survival is precisely the drug’s role, so it catalyses the remodelling of a subject’s bioneurology in order to create a lasting altered state with a new perception.  

Whether this is achieved with a certain calculated risk is widely regulated in the pharmaceutical industry, but history tells us poorly regulated techniques for bypassing our nature constantly surge, which often yield disastrous results to the most vulnerable first and foremost. 

Many great writers have theorised about the ecological impact of a possible technocracy, as C.S. Lewis writes in his book

Abolition of Man

: “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as it’s instrument”. 

As “Zero Trust” Models evolve from a key framework towards a cybersecurity benchmark, our nature attests again to Abraham Maslow’s consumer behaviour theory to justify the unforgiving Law of Supply and Demand: when trust leaves the chat, your customers leave the chat.