The System Is the Problem, Not Just the Bad Actors

Most conversations about brand trust frame it as an ethics question. Are you being honest? Are you treating customers fairly? These are the right questions, but they’re not sufficient. Because the deeper problem isn’t bad intent. It’s the systems that make certain behaviours the rational choice, regardless of intent.

What markets reward

Digital and economic systems reward speed, scale, extraction and perpetual optimisation. When those are your incentives, you end up with brands pushed toward behaviours that feel manipulative even when they’re legal, conventional and category-standard.

Think about what “optimisation” typically produces: friction reduction that removes the moments where people pause and think; urgency mechanics that accelerate decisions before scrutiny can form; personalisation that uses what it knows about you to exploit rather than serve; subscription models designed to make cancellation harder than sign-up.

None of this requires a villain. It emerges from a system that punishes caution and rewards extraction.

As Cory Doctorow puts it: “Anytime you see good products produced ethically and offered at fair prices, it’s because the world from which those products emerged punishes cheating”. The corollary is equally true. When poor outcomes carry little cost, short-term optimisation becomes the rational choice.

Enshittification as cultural diagnosis

The concept of “enshittification,” meaning the slow degradation of digital products as platforms prioritise extraction over experience, reached peak search popularity in 2024 and has kept growing since. It became Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The Norwegian Consumer Council ran a satire campaign around it. It isn’t fringe commentary any more. It’s a widely shared description of lived experience. 

That matters because consumer hypervigilance isn’t a mood swing or a generational attitude. It’s a rational response to accumulated lived conditions. When people approach brands with suspicion, they’re being sensible based on what has actually happened to them.

The cognitive cost

There’s a further layer that compounds this. Coercive systems don’t just produce scammy products. They erode people’s ability to identify and avoid scams. Scarcity and cognitive overload reduce the mental bandwidth available for careful scrutiny. Stress inclines people toward worse decisions. Financial insecurity narrows focus in ways that make people simultaneously more vulnerable and more blamed for that vulnerability.

The psychology research is clear: people in stretched circumstances make more astute resource decisions than is popularly believed, but the intense cognitive load of managing scarcity leaves less capacity for the kind of slow, deliberate evaluation that separates good offers from bad ones.

So the system creates coercive conditions, and then makes it harder for people to protect themselves from those conditions. The result is hypervigilance as compensation: a kind of ambient suspicion that tries to do the work that a fair system would do automatically.

What this means for brands

The strategic shift this requires is significant. It means recognising that trust cannot be repaired through surface-level positioning or a new tone of voice. The problem lives deeper, in operational decisions, in pricing structures, in the gap between what a brand claims and what it actually does.

Operational decisions are brand decisions. The way a subscription cancellation works is brand communication. The way a pricing page is structured is brand communication. The way a customer service interaction resolves is brand communication. All of it is read through the same lens of suspicion that a phishing email would be.

The better strategic question isn’t “would we ever scam our customers?” It’s “where are we asking for trust in ways that already feel culturally contaminated?”

Brands that acknowledge structural pressures earn more credibility than those pretending neutrality. And brands that absorb short-term cost for long-term credibility, making cancellation easy, pricing transparently, resisting urgency mechanics that aren’t genuinely justified, build a kind of trustworthiness that positioning alone can never produce.