The Keeper
Steve C. Landes
Steve C. Landes is a trust architect: he works on how trust is broken and rebuilt at three levels at once — in people, in organisations, and in the infrastructure between them. He is the author of Rehumanizing Trust (Practical Inspiration Publishing, 15 September 2026).
Trust fails at three levels at once: in the human, in the incentives of an organisation, and in the infrastructure between organisations. A serious answer has to work at all three. That conviction organises everything on this site.
One idea, three instruments
- The story. Rehumanizing Trust — trust as it is felt: fractured in everyday digital life, rebuilt with dignity. The widest door into the work.
- The ledger. The Velocity Suite — trust as an operating cost: the trust tax priced on real numbers, and the practice that recovers it.
- The receipt. CRAIN — trust as infrastructure: an open protocol for organisations to signal trustworthy conduct to one another, with no owner and no central watcher.
Background
Steve’s career runs through cybersecurity and risk: he is a CISSP, a past president of the Dayton chapter of InfraGard (the FBI’s public–private partnership), and has led cyber-threat-intelligence work for major organisations. He writes the weekly signals and essays on trust, risk and the long game, and speaks on rebuilding trust in digital life.
The five principles
Everything — the book, the practice, the protocol — is held to the same five commitments: dignity (trust extended with consent, not taken), redemption (a way back after a lapse), a human in the loop, explainability (you can always see why a judgement was made), and a refusal to become surveillance.