I was referring more to the mutual trust building that your "intermediary" colleagues facilitate.  My concern would be that after a few years of almost exclusively online working there will be fewer and fewer common r/w intermediaries available to facilitate trusting relationships.  Nearly all business relationships will become "virtual" and it is so much harder to tell the charlatans when you don't have eye contact, body language, social and verbal linguistic cues to work off.

The parallel I would draw is with marketing.  In small communities where everyone knows everyone else you don't need brands as a proxy for quality.  You know the supplier, their skills, attitudes and track record.  In a huge urban community you only have the barest symbolic cues to go on - and it is precisely these that the "science" of marketing seeks to manipulate.

So a product/service comes with all the "emotional values" and apparent qualities that you are looking for, but it reality is a piece of crap.  It was just that their marketing department knew what you would be looking for (as indicators of quality) and manufactured false cues and "emotions" to make you think you were getting what you were looking for.

And the beauty of the process is that many think that the product/service was great (even when it was actually crap) because they can't admit to themselves that they'd been had. (ref. US Republican politics -  which are brilliant at persuading people that they have exactly what the electorate want - give them the opposite - and then afterwards persuade people that they actually got what they originally wanted...)

notes from no w here