In an Age When Faces and Voices Can Be Faked, the Trust That Upholds Capitalism Has Begun to Crumble

01Is What Appears on the Screen No Longer Proof?

In January 2024, something happened in Hong Kong. At the Hong Kong office of Arup, a major British design and engineering firm, a finance employee joined a video call with people he believed were the company's chief financial officer and colleagues, and on their instructions made 15 transfers totaling 200 million Hong Kong dollars (about 25.6 million US dollars)¹. Yet every participant on that call other than the employee himself was a fake created with AI. The employee had initially been suspicious of the request, but it was reported that he set aside his doubts because the faces and voices on screen looked and sounded exactly like colleagues he knew¹.

What this case revealed was not merely a clever scam. Until now we have made transactions and promises on the premise that "if I can see the face and hear the voice, it is the person." Through a screen, that last line of defense has fallen.

The attackers, too, are changing. In November 2025, the American AI company Anthropic announced that it had detected and stopped a cyber espionage campaign that misused its AI, reporting that AI carried out 80 to 90 percent of the work, with human decisions entering at only a handful of critical points². We have entered an era in which work that once took skilled engineers days is carried out by machines, tirelessly and in parallel.

02What Lies Behind Our Suspicion?

In autumn 2026, Japan also saw a succession of announced data breaches caused by unauthorized access. Kyodo News, citing a tally by the security company Trend Micro, reported that damage from unauthorized access and similar incidents announced by Japanese companies and local governments had reached 600 cases by the end of September, already exceeding the total for the whole previous year and on pace to surpass the record³. The phrase "AI hacking" filled the news, yet at the time of writing, it has been noted that no organization has officially confirmed that AI was used in any individual case in Japan⁴.

I believe this is the heart of today's anxiety. We do not know what happened, who did it, or even whether AI or people were to blame. When the enemy cannot be seen, people begin to doubt everything around them. The state of mind expressed by the word gishin anki (suspicion that breeds imagined fears) is now spreading across society as a whole.

This anxiety does not stop at information. Apart from the question of AI, in 2025 securities accounts in Japan were hijacked one after another after IDs and passwords were stolen through fake websites and other means, and stocks were bought and sold without the owners' knowledge. According to Japan's Financial Services Agency, unauthorized trades through June numbered 7,139, with a total trading value of about 571 billion yen⁵. The assets shown on the screen were supposed to truly "be there." That they could be moved by someone else confronts us sharply with the question of what we actually rely on when we hold wealth.

03What Does Capitalism Stand On?

Let us look at how money itself is constituted. The Bank of Japan notes in our wallets no longer carry a promise that they can be exchanged for gold. A banknote is recorded on the Bank of Japan's books as a liability, and the law makes it usable for payment in all transactions⁶. The Bank of Japan states that, along with ensuring a stable supply of banknotes, maintaining public confidence in them is one of its duties⁷.

Legal backing aside, a 10,000-yen note passes from hand to hand as 10,000 yen not because the paper is precious, but because people in society believe that tomorrow, too, anyone will accept it as 10,000 yen. Stocks are the same: a share price can be described as the price placed on expectation and trust in the future, the belief that a company will keep generating profit. In the end, I see capitalism as a system that converts invisible trust into visible numbers and keeps them circulating.

Trust has one more important function: it saves us the effort of verification. Because we can trust the other party, we do not have to doubt every line of a contract or authenticate every note we receive. If doubt spreads, every transaction requires confirmation, and the bloodstream of the economy slows.

Today, most of that trust is deposited in electronic records beyond the screen. Savings, stocks, and salaries are rarely touched; they are simply displayed as numbers. Without realizing it, we have handed the very foundation of trust over to what lies beyond the screen.

04What Happens When Trust Collapses?

Japan has a painful precedent. On March 14, 1927 (Showa 2), in the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives, Finance Minister Kataoka Naoharu spoke of the failure of Tokyo Watanabe Bank⁸. In fact, it is said that the bank had not yet closed at that point⁹.

Even so, once his remark was reported in the newspapers, depositors' anxiety surged, people lined up in front of banks to withdraw their savings, and bank runs spread to other banks⁸. This was the beginning of the Showa Financial Crisis. Of course, behind it lay problems in the banks' own management, such as the handling of bills left over from the Great Kanto Earthquake⁸. Yet what lit the fire was a single remark.

What this event teaches is a stern law: trust moves not only on facts but on whether people can believe. I hold that words have the power to move reality, and the Showa Financial Crisis engraved in history how frightening that power can be when it works in a negative direction.

05When the Screen Itself Becomes Suspect, What Remains?

In 1927, what wavered was trust in a few banks. What is beginning to waver now is not trust in any particular bank or company. It is the very vessel that carries trust: the faces, voices, documents, and numbers that reach us from beyond the screen are all becoming suspect.

The boss on a video call, a family member's voice on the phone, the email that arrives, the balance on display: each may be real, or may be fake. In a society where we must doubt like this, can capitalism, which runs on trust as its fuel, keep moving in the same form as before?

I do not believe that trust will vanish here. What collapses is the trust we have over-entrusted to systems. Trust that loses its place returns to where it truly belongs. In Part 2, I will discuss where that place is, through our habit of seeing people by titles and numbers, the culture of trust the Japanese have cultivated since ancient times, and our connection to our ancestors.