What This Is
Rebuilding trust can be lonely work. You may be building an alternative to an ad-funded platform, making an institution worth relying on, or helping people find common ground. The work looks different, but you have more company than you think.
Here you’ll find writing and long conversations about what people are building, what’s getting in the way, and what it takes to keep going. Alongside their stories, we explore the ideas, patterns, and problems that connect the work.
The white papers are the spine. The Trust Apocalypse is the diagnosis — why trust has fallen over the past sixty years, on three fronts that feed into each other. Building a Catalytic Community is the blueprint — how a network of thinkers, builders, and allocators rebuilds what no single actor can. They are where the argument was first set out. The rest of this publication is what happens next.
No Ads. No Sponsors.
This publication is funded by the people who read it, and by nobody else.
That is a position, not a business model detail. A publication about trust that sold your attention to a third party would be arguing against itself on its own page. So the arithmetic here is deliberately simple: if the writing is worth funding, readers fund it, and if it isn’t, it stops. Nothing in between is sold.
What Your Support Makes Possible
Reader support keeps this writing free to read and free of ads and sponsors.
Everything here is free to read, and it will stay that way. There is no paywall, no members-only archive, and no early access for paying readers.
If you’d like to fund the work, you can subscribe below. You’re welcome to read everything either way.
How This Is Made
I’m Keiron McCammon, and everything here starts with me. I use AI in the middle, and anything I publish always ends with me.
I use AI for research: reading around a subject and mining podcast transcripts for ideas and quotes. I use AI to check every quote against the transcript and to assemble the citations. Numbers get confirmed against the final audio. Often I’ll work with AI to draft a first pass, then work the piece line by line until it says exactly what I want it to say. Before any post accompanying a podcast episode is published, the guest reads the whole piece and can suggest changes. Posts here can also be read aloud by a synthetic voice.
I am the one who decides what to publish, and I am the one who takes responsibility for it. This statement was written the same way.
Where to Start
Everything here arrives in a single feed, and here is its shape.
The white papers
The long arguments underneath everything else:
The essays
One per guest conversation, published alongside its first episode: what someone is building, what it is costing them, and what they have worked out along the way. Written to stand on their own. You do not need to have listened.
Topical posts
Shorter pieces on what the work is running into: the ideas and the problems, rather than the people.
The archive
The archive holds all of it, newest first.
The Show
The Spark of Trust podcast is about the people rebuilding trust — in communities, in institutions, in what we can know. Each guest sits for one long conversation, usually released in two parts. A companion essay explores the ideas underneath it.
It is not a show about how bad things are. There are enough of those. It is about the work, told by the people doing it, with the real numbers and the failures left in.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to support Spark of Trust’s mission to rebuild trust and help keep the writing and podcast free for everyone.
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Join the crew
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