In 2009, a man arrived at the world-famous Sun Studio in Memphis, TN for a private tour. He told David Brookings, the young, aspiring musician giving the private tour, that his name was Steve Eason. David had been briefed that Eason was a big figure in the music industry, very famous, and so Sun would have to be very careful to preserve his privacy. Eason was also darn ill; he'd been hooked up to some gear that followed him around the studio.
The kid had never heard of Steve Eason, but he gave a passionate tour. At the end, David handed Steve a CD with music on it, hoping to land a record deal. A month later, Brookings got a message from Apple, asking him to come join iTunes to curate Rock & Roll playlists.
And Steve Eason? He wasn't a musician, or even a record producer. The man receiving the Sun Studio tour was Steve Jobs, who had been in Memphis to receive a kidney transplant for pancreatic cancer. He was staying in a house bought by a man named Eason, but Eason was - in fact - the doctor Jobs had scheduled to perform the transplant surgery.
Brookings has worked at Apple to this day.
In truth, more people go by alias names than you'd expect. Without checking a driver's license (and, depending on the sensitivity, maybe some utility bills), you may never know if someone is who they say they are.
Also, I have friends I've met offline, who have moved around to different countries and swapped devices. It's always a big pain trying to establish trust once your physical relationships go digital. There are only so many challenge-response questions to ask them (i.e., things only the two of you know). In reality, our digital and offline lives are intermingled; they each inseparably affect the other, and sometimes it feels like identity problems are turtles all the way down.
I mean, you have to understand that the actions of the globally dominant "West" (North America, EU, Australia, and their allies) in the past 20 (and further beyond that) years have done a lot to undermine trust in them also.
Fake news to lead people into the Iraq War (a 20 year quagmire which only cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars for minute changes on the ground), an inability to defeat ISIS which meant the US had to rely on Iranian militias to beat them. On that note, I think the whole history of US-Iran relations is enough to undermine faith in the "West" as it stands.
I'm not saying other axes of power are better, but trust isn't a competition, it's very possible for people to trust no one outside their few close acquaintances. Trust has to be earned, and the "West" doesn't do a good job of it.
Geopolitical entities have been using the Internet to undermine trust in "the West," broadly speaking, for at least half a decade. Warfare has always included disinformation campaigns (they called it "propaganda"), but never has it been so viral.
I could at least envision a world where cryptographic identity is taken for granted. Think Keybase for publications. Sign articles to prove authenticity.
The cryptography involved is largely a solved problem. Software engineers did it with Keybase, and it's easy enough to use that people with very little cryptographic ability can prove who they are to the Internet (assuming they're an established identity with social accounts, or they have trustworthy people willing to vouch for their identity). But we'd need browsers/clients that have the ability to display proof status on messages, and it would have to be nearly as easy to use as existing clients like Twitter.
I hope we start building businesses that repair trust, rather than harm it. Making everyone distrust everything might benefit a few opportunistic parties in the short term, but in the long run everyone loses.