Victoria Lemieux on Searching for Trust

Wednesday, March 24, 2021
11am ET, via Zoom

Dr. Victoria Lemieux, Associate Professor of Archival Science in the School of Information at the University of British Columbia.

Dr. Lemieux will read excerpts from her forthcoming monograph, Searching for Trust: Blockchain technology in an age of disinformation.

Searching for Trust explores the intersectionality of trust, disinformation and blockchain technology in an age of growing institutional and epistemic mistrust. It asks questions such as what is trust? What is truth? And, what do trust and truth have to do with a cryptocurrency that many associate with hackers and criminality.

Building upon the authors’ previous work exploring blockchains and other types of distributed ledgers through an archival theoretic lens. this book argues for an archival understanding of the formation of societal trusting relations. It further explores how the rise of computational information processing has gradually supplanted traditional record keeping, putting at risk a centuries old tradition of the “moral defence of the record” and supplanting it with a dominant ethos of information processing efficiency. Lemieux argues that this focus on information processing efficiency over the defence of records against manipulation and corruption (the ancient task of the record keeper) has contributed to a diminution of the trustworthiness of information and a rise of disinformation, with attendant destabilization of the epistemic trust fabric of societies. Lemieux asks readers to consider the potential and limitations of blockchains, as the technological embodiment of the moral defence of the record, to restore societal trust in an age of disinformation.

Lemieux is the founder and co-lead of Blockchain@UBC, a multidisciplinary research and education cluster focused on blockchain and distributed ledger technology, a Sauder School of Business Distinguished Scholar, and an Affiliate of the Institute of Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia. She is also an award winning researcher, author, and records, archival and cybersecurity professional.
The reading will be followed by a discussion moderated by Annie Tummino, Head of Special Collections and Archives, Queens College CUNY.