Lisa Gansky is an entrepreneur whose vision led her to pioneer e-commerce in 1993 as the co-founder and CEO of Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial website, which was acquired by America Online (AOL) in 1995. She also authored several books, among which The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing, published in 2010, is still considered the cornerstone of the sharing economy. Her work on trust has been central to rethinking the business models of the digital era.
In a moment of growing mistrust in all traditional institutions, from Governments to business, religious or educational institutions, the American internet pioneer, entrepreneur and thinker Lisa Gansky shared with us her definition of trust: “Trust is a social contract, a kind of agreement or a set of expectations that we have with each other“. According to her, technology doesn’t have all the answers and solutions to address this global crisis of trust, but it can be part of the solution: “Technology isn’t going to save us, we have to come together, but technology can help us create trust in a way that is more what we need according to how we live and work today than the old institutions from the 20th century”.
Interviewed in the third episode of the ReImagine TALKS podcast series, the author of ‘Radical Trust: How blockchain liberates the Next Economy’ expresses her conviction that “the world is changing faster than we can learn”. “The idea of using technology to engage more people and scale good ideas is fantastic. The issue is that society has moved quicker than the governing organizations”. “In the case of trust,” she adds, “we are in the early days, but I’m optimistic that blockchain can be very helpful for that, because it’s actually designed to scale local in a way. It’s a decentralized technology platform that is very tofu, in the sense that it can take on the flavor of whatever is around it. So, it can be good for many different applications and locations”.
Gansky believes that “we are in this inflexion point between no more”, because the world is no longer like it used to be “and not yet”, as it is not yet what it will be in the near future; “which for me is exciting but makes a lot of people nervous”. The world is changing so fast that we really don’t know what will happen next, and in this situation “we have two choices: we could be afraid or curious”. The Internet pioneer challenges us to be curious rather than fearful and expresses a hopeful conviction: “The hotter the water becomes, the more likely we are to develop courage”.
ReImagine Trust is the third chapter of the ReImagine TALKS, a series of video podcasts launched by the think tank Re-Imagine Europa together with leading media partners and featuring some of the most innovative, influential, and original thinkers of our time, challenging conventional thinking and reimagining the concept with an unexpected and contemporary lens. The series is hosted by Erika Stäel von Holstein and Luca de Biase; RIE’s Chief Executive and Research Director, respectively. After the first two episodes, Reimagine Capitalism with Harvard Business School’s Professor Rebecca Henderson and Reimagine Power with University of Southern California’s Professor and former Spanish Minister Professor Manuel Castells, it will present a conversation about how to Reimagine Ethics with the expert on Ethics and Technology Professor Jeroen van der Hoven.
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