Modern systems demand trust for entities one cannot feel toward

Evidence

Finally, it draws the object of trust further and further away from an intimate nearness. It increasingly demands trust for systems for which one can have no feeling. Under these circumstances one may anticipate a need for functionally equivalent problem-solving mechanisms which partly replace feeling as a basis for trust and partly restrict it to increasingly private functionings. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 291

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges to Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ — trust in expert systems rather than persons is exactly the ‘feelings toward systems one cannot have’ shift described here. Also the core mechanism for Stevens’s devotion to the Darlington institution.
• DEFINE: Clarifies Luhmann’s account of how system trust replaces interpersonal trust: functionally equivalent mechanisms substitute for feeling-based trust.