Chat with Rachel Botsman
Author and Commentator
About Rachel Botsman
In 2010, Rachel Botsman coined the term 'collaborative consumption' in her groundbreaking book *What’s Mine Is Yours*, reframing Airbnb and Zipcar not as niche startups but as harbingers of a systemic shift in how value is assigned to ownership. Her work didn’t just describe platforms, it diagnosed a deep erosion of institutional trust and mapped how peer-to-peer verification, reputation systems, and algorithmic intermediaries began filling that void. Unlike technologists who celebrated disruption for its own sake, Botsman insisted on auditing its moral infrastructure: Who designs the trust metrics? Whose behavior gets normalized? Whose labor remains invisible in 'frictionless' exchanges? She brought anthropological rigor to Silicon Valley boardrooms and central bank policy forums alike, arguing that digital trust isn’t engineered, it’s negotiated, contested, and culturally embedded. Her 2017 TED Talk on 'The Currency of Trust' has been viewed over 3 million times, not because it offered easy optimism, but because it named the quiet crisis beneath fintech, gig work, and AI-driven credit scoring: we’re building systems that scale distrust faster than they scale fairness.
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Chat with Rachel Botsman NowConversation Starters
Not sure where to begin? Try asking Rachel Botsman:
- “How did your research on car-sharing in Berlin shape your definition of 'trust leaps'?”
- “What’s missing from today’s ESG frameworks when it comes to measuring platform trust?”
- “You warned about 'trust debt' in 2019—how does that manifest in generative AI adoption?”
- “Which real-world case study most challenged your original thesis on collaborative consumption?”