Truth, Trust, Identity
Three things are converging into a single meta-problem: humanity is losing shared grip on "what's real," "who to trust," and "who is who" at exactly the moment our tools can manufacture infinite, convincing alternatives.
"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination" — John Lennon
This stops being poetic and starts describing our information substrate.
The Chain
GAMES → shape BELIEFS (perception of truth)
↓
TRUTH → enables TRUST (basis for agreement)
↓
TRUST → enables CONSENSUS (shared reality)
↓
CONSENSUS → shapes IDENTITY (who we are together)
↓
IDENTITY → produces CULTURE (how we coordinate)
Each link depends on the one before. Break any link, coordination fails.
Why This Is The Meta-Problem
Truth, trust, and identity are preconditions for solving any other collective problem—governance, climate, finance, AI alignment. When they fail:
| Failure | Result |
|---|---|
| No shared truth | Can't agree on what the problem is |
| No trust | Can't coordinate on solutions |
| No identity verification | Can't know who's in the conversation |
The core risk is epistemic: groups inhabit incompatible realities, identity signals become spoofable, no referee has enough legitimacy to adjudicate. Force or tribal loyalty becomes the default tie-breaker.
The ABCD Stack Response
New forms of epistemic infrastructure must be built: protocols, institutions, and tools that prove origin, context, and incentives behind information streams.
| Layer | What It Provides | Addresses |
|---|---|---|
| AI | Pattern recognition at scale | Detection of synthetic content |
| Blockchain | Immutable provenance | Verifiable origin, audit trail |
| Crypto | Aligned incentives | Skin in the game for truth-tellers |
| DePIN | Ground truth from physical world | Data that can't be hallucinated |
This isn't just technology—it's the infrastructure for restoring workable levels of truth, trust, and identity in a world where reality is cheap to fake.
The 2027 Urgency
There's a window—roughly 2 years—before AI + data production enters a self-reinforcing loop. Position now, while we can still steer.
The critical path runs through:
- AI reasoning capability — solved
- Agent autonomy — emerging
- Real-world data capture — fragmented ← bottleneck
- Data → AI pipeline speed — slow ← bottleneck
- Incentive alignment — weak
- Regulatory clarity — absent
The bottleneck is infrastructure (DePIN, data provenance), not AI capability.
The Northstar
"Not the biggest player. The most trusted."
When synthetic content is infinite, trust becomes the scarce resource. Those who build trust infrastructure own the future.
Connected Pages
The chain runs through these pages:
- Games: Where beliefs form
- Truth: The epistemic foundation
- Consensus: How agreement emerges
- Identity: Proving who speaks
- Trust: What consensus builds
- Culture: What trust produces at scale
- AI Problems: The urgency framing
- Problems Index: The metacrisis context