Afterword: the evolution and (mis)use of (mis)trust

It is an established trope of popular discourse to suggest that the structures and opacity of digital environments are a major contributor to the crisis of mistrust that plagues contemporary society. This afterword instead suggests that such environments are neither uniquely or unprecedentedly untrustworthy. Drawing on the work of the contributors to the special issue, it examines the continuities and novelties of specifically digital mistrust and suggests they can be addressed through three central questions: 1) What kind of (mis)trust characterizes them? 2) How do people respond to this (mis)trust)? and 3) What kind of uses do they make of it? It argues that the answers to these questions provide the groundwork for developing a pragmatics of digital (mis)trust.