In this episode, AMT Lab contributors Lutie Rodriguez and Suraj Prasad take a deep dive into the idea of trust, the role it plays in arts and culture, and how it intersects with their research on cybersecurity and the crypto economy.
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Transcript
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Angela: Hello, AMT Lab listeners, and welcome to a special episode brought to you by the Arts Management and Technology Lab. My name is Angela Johnson, and I’m the Podcast Producer. In this episode, AMT Lab contributors Lutie Rodriguez and Suraj Prasad have a conversation about the role of trust in cultural institutions. Hope you enjoy.
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Lutie: Hello, everyone. I'm Lutie, and I've been researching cybersecurity and how that relates to arts organizations.
Suraj: Hi, everybody. I'm Suraj Prasad, and I have been reading up a lot and researching about crypto economies and trying to locate whether crypto economies could help building a future society.
Lutie: Today, we're recording a podcast for the Arts Management and Technology Lab about that research we've both been doing over the last few months, specifically, how both of those topics relate to trust. So, Suraj, I have to ask you: when was a time you lost trust in someone or something?
Suraj: To be honest with you, it sends me back in my childhood, maybe things that would seem very trivial right now. But if you were to go to a shop with a dollar bill and buy, let's say, a chocolate, and it wouldn't taste the way you wanted it because you were too young and you didn't remember the name of the chocolate that you liked, maybe, but you could just point to something. And that would often lead to a sense of confusion about whether I made a mistake or whether the other person made a mistake. And that what it would result into was that next time I would have some pocket change, I would probably go to another shop, not the first shop, because I felt like maybe that chocolate wasn't something that I liked. So I couldn't build the sense of trust going to the same shop maybe every time. But that's what I think about loss of trust at the smallest scale, perhaps.
Lutie: Yeah, it definitely affects our actions, and often for longer times than we think it should for the small instance it might have been, like going to the store to buy chocolate. I feel like my experience is kind of similar with something that happened when I was younger. And I don't even have like a fully formed memory of it, but all I remember is that I was a toddler, probably, a very small child, and I would play in my front yard. And we had this neighbor who had really big dogs, like greyhounds, I think. And instead of walking them, he would run them. He would ride his bicycle and the dogs would run following him without leashes, and they would come into our yard, also. My mom had maybe gone to the garage or something, but I was standing by myself in the front yard and they came running by and one of the dogs, like, knocked me over and caused, you know, no major damage, but all throughout my childhood, I did not like dogs. Going into people's houses, they made me nervous, even if they were small. So, strange how those small instances can affect our behavior.
Suraj: So you basically developed a trust issue with dogs.
Lutie: Yeah.
Suraj: Is that is that the term we use to identify this, that we have a trust issue with something?
Lutie: A trust issue. Yes, that's what I would say.
Suraj: Interesting.
Lutie: So, related to trust issues, in this episode Suraj and I will be talking about the large role that trust can play in the operation of cultural institutions, and specifically in the cases of contracts and cybersecurity. So, let's start today with an example of how a village in India was able to function solely on trust.
Suraj: So, we've all heard about the idea of doors and locks. Of course, we all live in homes where we have doors, and those doors have locks. And did we ever for a moment think about why do we have doors and why do we have locks on them? It's because those locks give us a sense of trust that our house and our possessions and our gifts and our clothes would be safe inside that house. If that were to be the case, it becomes peculiar to know about this village in India, which is in the state of Maharashtra in the Ahmadnagar district...
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...where nobody in their homes has a door. Forget about the lock. They just don't have a door. You can just walk right in an out of anybody's home that you want—if you want, that is. And if you want to take away something, lift something off from somebody's place, you're more than welcome to do.
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And it's peculiar, because the thing that people in this village have trust on is not a lock, but it's a god. It's like a deity in the Hindu religion, in the Hindu mythology. So people believe that if somebody does steal somebody's property or walk into somebody's house when they're not at home, they will actually be persecuted by this god: the deity of Shani. And some of the punishments are rather harsh, so I would say that prevents people from going in, from basically going and doing anything in the village. And, second is that it cuts out the cost for locks, the cost for doors. It just cuts out all that infrastructure that's needed for ensuring a sense of safety in community. You don't need guards. You don't need people who would watch on something. You don't need to lock doors. You don't…you basically don't need those things to give you a sense of safety and trust, which is incredible, if you think about it.
Lutie: Yeah, that's interesting to me because, when I heard the premise about this story, I assumed it was maybe a close-knit community that trusted each other so much that they wouldn't need to secure up their belongings. But, it's a trust in something bigger.
Suraj: Bigger, yeah.
Lutie: A common trust and something bigger that makes those security measures unnecessary.
Suraj: Unnecessary, yeah. Yeah, I completely concur with that. However, I would bring to your attention that this village has now got a bank, and this happened in 2011. That's fresh news. The bank has a door, and it's controlled by an electromagnetic lock. Even though the lock is not visible, and, basically, that upholds the traditional belief that you don't need locks and doors. But the bank has a lock and a door. What it indicates to me is that the bank may have a trust issue being in this village that is all about trust.
Lutie: Quite a paradox, right?
Suraj: Yeah.
Lutie: But, I think arts organizations can definitely learn from thinking about how important trust is for operations, especially those arts organizations that are working under the nonprofit model, because a large part of the revenue that sustains them is through donations and people who are donating their money aren't expecting explicitly anything in return. Now, they're expecting and trusting that the arts organization is going to use their funds to benefit society or to fulfill the organization's mission. Which, I couldn't help but see some parallels with the deities for the Indian village, that they're trusting in this larger mission: what the arts organization is trying to do, in that they're trusting that their money is going to make an impact when they do donate it.
Suraj: Interesting. I also think that trust is central to not just arts, but the entire culture industry, if you know what I mean. And I'll probably try and elaborate a little bit on it. So, this is completely something that sprang at me while I was in my research. I did not go into reading about blockchains and crypto economies thinking that this is what it would reveal to me, but, here we are. And what I realized is that culture is something that allows for us to have opportunities to prove our own sort of vulnerabilities. It exposes us to our own deities and demons, in a way. And while we're doing that, it sort of lays the ground for trust as a social construct. What this basically means is that once we are in that vulnerable state, once we have sort of exposed ourselves to each other through this medium of art, relationships can then germinate fruitfully, which would otherwise take a long time.
So, just to give you an example, I, for example, may know of somebody who's a photographer or a filmmaker from a completely different part of the world with completely different cultural context. But, I find that I can be friends with this person. I can meet with this person. I can go and have a meal with this person. Even though I barely spent any time with this person. I have just seen a product of their effort, and that helps build trust with this individual. Similarly, for arts organizations, if I see their work, if I see that they've really worked hard in putting together a nice exhibition and stuff, I build a sense of trust with this organization that they are curating wonderfully to give me an experience that would be unparalleled, in a way.
So, it all boils down to the idea that culture, sort of, essentially is about creating those tools, which can help us make an ally from an adversary. By the term adversary, I don't mean the term enemy, because that has its own political connotations. An adversary is somebody who may just not have the similar kinds of ideas about life as I have. So, if I do something that's artistic, maybe there is an adversary, and that one piece of work might help me build a sense of trust with this person, and vice versa. So I think trust is really essential to not just societies and art, but our entire cultural, sort of, fabric, in a way.
Lutie: I definitely agree. I hadn't thought about the kind of empathy part in there too where going to an arts institution, having these arts institutions, helps to build that trust between other people in the community, not just between the people in the community and the institution. So, since trust does play such a key role in upholding both organizations and the cultural framework of society as a whole, there's a lot to lose if someone were to lose trust in an organization. And that's, I guess, I would say maybe the darker side of my research with cybersecurity: that it can cause so much harm.
So, when people either attend an arts events—go to a museum or go to a performance—or choose to donate their money, they're both supplying their data, when they're buying a ticket or signing up for a newsletter, and some of their financial information, if they're making a donation or paying for a ticket online. And they trust that information is going to be safe when they do that with this organization. But without strong cybersecurity, that could not be the case in some instances, and that can really harm arts organizations, both practically and then their reputation, which is hard to get back. It's hard to build back that trust.
There was a recent example with the cloud storage company Blackbaud. In May of 2020, some months ago, hackers gained access to donors’ information from several hundred cultural institutions through a ransomware attack. A ransomware attack is where either the hacker bars an institution's access to their files, takes control of it, and then demands a ransom for that organization or company to be able to get those files back so that that actor does not share that information with the public or destroy it. So this happened with this cloud storage software company that's widely used by cultural institutions. And luckily, they did act swiftly with paying the ransom to get the files back and protect them from being released to the public. But, this went into the news, and people who donate to those affected institutions see that they were affected by this and may not feel as secure when making donations or providing their information when attending the museum. And additionally, in an article by ArtNet, a cybersecurity expert named Tyler Cohen Wood pointed out that Blackbaud actually just took the word of the hackers that their copy of the organizations’ files have had been destroyed and not released. And she said that isn't necessarily enough to make sure that your files are safe, just to trust the hackers at their word when they had, in fact, gained access to your system.
Suraj: Could you talk about the cost of this? What is at loss here, in this case?
Lutie: I think the biggest loss is trust, just because, in this instance, nothing was technically damaged: nothing physical, no files were damaged or lost or harmed by being released to the public. But, people now have the knowledge that their information is maybe not as safe as they thought it was.
Suraj: So this is a loss of trust, not just for the people involved, but people in general who come to know about this case: this understanding that their information is not as safe as they thought it would be.
Lutie: I think so.
Suraj: Okay. Okay.
Lutie: In my research, I've been looking into ways that arts organizations can improve their cybersecurity to give them more peace of mind and also to avoid situations like with the Blackbaud case. And there are three main small steps that I found that can help arts organizations with this. First is just knowing what kinds of sensitive data you have stored—what you're collecting and how you're storing it—I think, is the first step because you need to know what you have to know how you have to protect it. And the second would be knowing what security measures both the organization and any third party software that they have in place are using, because in the case of Blackbaud, the affected cultural institutions could have had as strong of cybersecurity structures as they wanted, but they were still partially relying on a third-party institution. So, reading up on those features when you're employing an outside software is important. And the third is also communicating with employees about what safety measures are in place and what role they play because a lot of breaches to security just happen by some sort of human error. It's not always the technology at fault. Suraj, do you have any other solutions for arts organizations looking to increase their public trust?
Suraj: I do, and I think we're also missing something that is essential to not just art or arts organization, I would say, to any relationship, and that is a form of contract that we enter into when you build any relationship. Sometimes these contracts are written down word for word, and they can be legally enforced. Whereas, most of the times, we enter so many contracts, which can't be legally enforced. And sometimes these contracts are purely verbal contracts given in good faith. And it's interesting to know that, in countries and nations or in ecosystems where these contracts are upheld again and again by different people, the general idea of trust in a society gets uplifted, but in nations and economies and cultures where these contracts are not maintained, where these contracts are not enforced or there is no repercussion for not holding the other side of the contract or the bargain, it results into a lack of trust. And we have seen examples of this happening in the last…just about two years. We don't need to go back in history that much.
So, if we try to understand what a contract is and then we try to bring it down to the applicability in our industries, I think the idea of smart contracts is really something that we can look at and that first it involves the idea of transparency, where once it has been written in once parties have agreed to it, the terms/conditions cannot be revised, cannot be changed. And then it also reduces the idea of latency, where if a contract has been fulfilled by one party, you know, when one party upholds their bargain, the contract assumedly has reached that maturity. So there is automation involved into it and there is the possibility of cutting out latency from these transactions, these relationships that can be built using smart contracts. Although this is still an evolving field, I suppose that, given the transparency that nonprofits are generally supposed to show or reflect to the people, smart contracts could actually be something that comes in handy to not just the donors or the funders of the organization, but also the public in general, who kind of support the organization by ideologically supporting the vision and mission of the organization too.
Lutie: I think that's a great point.
Suraj: I just feel like I, I don't know why nobody's writing about it.
Lutie: Maybe to better explain our point of why contracts are so important and why trust is also a key part of making those contracts, we could try to make one ourselves—talk about what the process is like, as an example.
Suraj: Okay. So, when we started talking about this podcast, we both entered a contract where we were both going to uphold our ends of the bargain: do our own research, and bring in material that's fresh and exciting and insightful to our listeners. We also entered into many of the unsaid contracts. I would assume, primarily one of those things could be that neither of us would overpower the other in a conversation. And that's a very important and unsaid contract, and if there is no way to enforce that contract, then I think this would be the last time we would ever do a podcast episode. And you can correct me if I'm wrong.
Lutie: I think that is the case, if you were to majorly break an unsaid contract that we had to not overpower part of the conversation, we would never do a podcast again. And I think another way that could have unfolded is if you really did not fulfill one of those unsaid contracts, whatever it may be, I could have just started not upholding my side of those contracts. So, let's say you started trying to overtake our conversation while we were either in the research stage or in the recording stage, I might just stop doing my work.
Suraj: You might just..you might just stop right now, and I might, too. And I think if this podcast makes it to the final stages and does get published and people do listen to it, it would signify that both of us upheld our end of the contract. With the said and the unsaid terms, perhaps.
Lutie: I think the fact that it is unsaid, and there are a lot of "contracts" that we make in our lives, or even that institutions make with their customers by providing, you know, a safe environment to view art, or…some of these contracts are also written when it comes to data privacy. But, when you subscribe to an email newsletter, for example, that they're going to protect your information as far as your email and name goes. That plays a big role. So I think our organizations should be actively looking for ways that they can improve both the way they make contracts, like what you were saying with the smart contracts and just general cybersecurity. And, Suraj, I know a lot of research to this point and your future research has to do with cryptocurrency and blockchain, so do you see any future with that within the arts and culture sector?
Suraj: I would say that there is tremendous possibility of crypto economies playing the role in the next shape that our democracies and societies take, at the core. And, like, we have seen that arts and culture have always been at the cutting edge of innovation in society, trying to give us the new experience, the unheard story, the most exciting experience that we've ever had. I would assume that the arts and culture sector would actually jump at cryptocurrency, understanding the potential it has for creating the equitable and accessible and the transparent sort of relationships that arts organizations or nonprofit institutions in general have been advocating for. It would also be easy for a lot of nonprofit organizations, especially in the arts sector, to find ways where they can elevate their value, elevate they're sort of equity, if they decide to engage with cryptocurrency in a positive way. Although I would say that there is definitely a big, massive gap when it comes to accessibility of this sort of technology, and being able to use it to not just their own advantage. Like, a lot of arts institutions can do it in isolation and then they can, you know, diversify their own portfolios. But, it will not work, it will not really come into play, unless each one of us on this planet is a part of this revolution of this ecosystem. And I don't know how long it takes, but I have a strong feeling that this is what the future holds.
Lutie: Right. That widespread implementation is definitely necessary before it can become a standard.
Suraj: Yes, yes, I agree with that. And considering what we have in the world right now, where the population that has access to crypto economy, to any kind of cryptological tools or inventions, is a very small percentage of our population right now. And, therefore, what we have seen so far is basically a glimpse of what may come.
Lutie: That's great to hear about. Great to look forward to in the future. Thank you, Suraj, for spending some of your time recording this podcast with me about how trust intersects with our research, and keep an eye out on the AMT Lab website for posts on these topics and more.
Angela: Thanks for listening to the AMT Lab podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and to leave a comment. If you would like to learn more, go to amt-lab.org. That is A-M-T dash L-A-B .org. Or you can email us at amtlabcmu@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at Tech in the Arts, or on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn at Arts management and Technology Lab. You can find the resources that we reference today in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
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