Take a look at the Reddit item I linked, it's my own (uncharacteristically brief, you're welcome) essay.

I've been digging into literate on this further, and ... there's some general support, though the overall picture's somewhat mixed.

My starting observation was that, while the ability for two parties to voluntarily communicate might increase their trust, the ability for a party (or parties) to unilaterally surveil others, particularly at scale, is almost certainly corrosive to trust. Issues such as comprehensive systems surveillance (user logging and monitoring on computers), cameras, microphones, etc., come to mind.

In reading on the topic, there seems to be a great deal in sociology, particularly Durkheim and Weber, addressing the point. I'd observed that every major empire has had a strong religious component (with the possible exception of the Mongol Horde), and that religion didn't start breaking down strongly until ~18th and 19th centuries, under the onslaught of both science and reason, and improved communications.

JoAnne Yates and James Beniger have both written extensively on the nature of communications technologies and practices especially within commercial contexts. Beniger's The Control Revolution in particular details the evolution of commercial and commodities practices in the Americas starting before the American Revolution. A significant feature especially prior to the 1830s / 1840s, at which point the telegraph provided instant communications especially of prices was that movements of goods required agents, working at a distance, and with considerable independence and autonomy. Beniger describes the counterflows of goods and financial records, generated at each transshippment point (each triggering a transfer of goods, a financial transaction, and a trust relationship between originator, buyer, and agents).

I'm not saying that the trust was always well-placed, but that there was no real alternative, other than setting up rules, perhaps some form of non-realtime checks (multiple agents rather than one, say, such that outlier behaviour might be observed), and a very strong reliance on reputation. This is reflected even in the language of business communications, which is based on establishing and maintaining trust -- later streamlining of external and internal communications in the early 20th century removed much of the ornate 19th century language and replaced it with the no-nonsense, strictly-business correspondence of the 20th century. Email, texts, and Tweets have stripped that further still.

Beniger specifically mentions bureaucracy as a technology, by the way.

And yes, scale has a ton to do with this. Another notion I'm looking at is that networks (I'm looking at interpersonal / social, as well as technological) directly affect information flows through size, topology, cost functions, cohort selection, protocols, and more. (Yates appears to be studying a fair bit of this, though I'm not sure to what extent her views are as technical or information-theoretic as mine.)

Bureaucracies are, by the way, generally very efficient, so long as they can be subject to efficiency constraints. They do get hidebound, in that a bureaucracy is a mechanism for formalising information flows (literally "creating forms" -- a major class of business correspondence), and that there's always a problem between a tightly-specified limited grammar and the Real World. (See: things programmers believe about time, time zones, names, places, etc., etc., etc.)

There's also the matter of dealing with information at scale, for which I find powers of ten a useful-if-rough organising concept. Treat these as ranges, with [previous bound] ~< n ~<= [stated upper bound], and yes, with fuzzy edges.

10^0: Full focus. An item.

10^1: Reasonable scope of daily focus. A short list.

10^2: An information-gathering scope, it's possible to be at least generally aware of each item. A long list.

10^3: Stressing the bounds of even skilled individual un-managed awareness. A compilation of lists, a book. Pre-Gutenberg Europe had about 30,000 total books (volumes, not titles), and few libraries exceeded 1,000 total volumes.

10^4 - 10^5: Some sort of organised management system is necessary, can be paper-based. About 300k - 1 million books are published annually ("traditional" and "self-published" respectively).

10^6 - 10^8: A formalised and electronic system is probably necessary at this point. Statistical treatments quite helpful. The largest libraries contain ~24 million volumes.

10^9 - 10^11: Statistical treatments almost certainly necessary.

10^12+: Big data, machine-learning. Multiple levels of abstraction required to humanly comprehend scales. A galaxy's worth of stars. Total number of cells in the human body.

I use books, notes, and index cards considerably. The sense of information scale (and tractability) as I range from 1 card to 10 to 100 to 1,000s is interesting and visceral.

Now make those people and organisations and businesses and systems, and try to work with them ....

See:

Beniger:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/control-revolution-technologic...

Yates:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/information-technology-and-org...