The world, including even the weather pattern, is different now than it was in '97 when my family first arrived to the United States. Today, the 11th, also marks my 111th day on steemit. Check the stats here: https://steemd.com/@mal402
I started out on steemit for the same reason I started getting into crypto 4 years ago: the money. While the moolah ($$$ in slang) is still nice, these days my passion come from the belief that the developments going on in blockchain and the larger decentralization movement will play a major role in helping our species tackle the problems that collectively confront us; by democratizing interaction and exchange with one another, we retake our productive value back from the hands of gaint corporations. Gone will be the days where we gift companies like Facebook data, only for them to trade this personal information as an asset to any merchant with money that wants to exploit it.
Don't get me wrong... I am not forgetful or ungrateful of how technological development has helped us along. I know that a few years ago, I was excited for what Facebook and Twitter made possible in the way it helped dis-empowered people in many societies organize and have a communal conversation that transcended locality. These forces were seen as good by people like me. We all observed the Wall Street protest and the ARAB spring that was happening across the world and thought maybe the era of hypnosis by television was coming to an end or at least had a viable challenge from the masses.
Today, however for many reasons - notably that Facebook has become an echo chamber for our own views, a place bots perform political influence and misinformation campaigns, and where our attention is ruthlessly monetized without regard to our health (see Emotional Contagion Experiments) - it's has become too clear that such institutions as this media giant cannot answer the call to liberate humanity. By their very nature, centralized authorities - powerful entities that administers the service which enable the faceless to interact and exchange with one another - are incapable of the resiliency in the face of political or physical confrontation. These organizations are profit engines that face existential threat that stem from international pressure of the status quo and thus, even if the folks that run it were willing, they would be unable to act as the responsibilities of being an employer and their family members leave them exposed. By the nature of the beast, no capitalistic institution has the anti-fragility to selflessly lead the people they serve. Profit is to the corporation, what prey is to the predator.
In ancient China, the empire and people saw merchants as a necessary evil that may organize vital economic activities but are never to trusted. As their long history repeatedly demonstrated, the self-interests of businesses naturally do not align with those of the masses or the state. The classic example of corruption where business interests undermined the well-being of the Chinese people was the sale of opium by merchants though it was outlawed by the state at the late 19th century. Thousands of years of rule taught them that those wanting to make money, would do it on the backs of the people if they can. The fact that merchants turn on the nation to make a dime is also echoed in Major General Smedley Butler's classic, "War is a Racket."
Somehow, in our modern world, we have been convinced, systematically taught, to love the businesses that by their survival instincts must be betray us. They have to make us feel undesirable to sell us the latest fashion, the big house and the new car. In our system, women and men must be made to feel ugly and impotent when they do not meet up to contrived standards so they feel the need to consume. Time becomes scare since we need to keep up everyone else, which at the same time increase our debt. The barrage of these signals implicitly teach our children that a person's worth is based on how much he makes. Material goods, in a very real sense, becomes the metric for love.
I think about the oil in Iraq and the war we fought after what happened 16 years ago. Why did we invade foreign lands? The ongoing story about how EXXON Mobile intentionally misrepresented the risks associated with the use of natural gases is another example in a long list. Yes, self-interested corporations will sell us out for money - even if not forced by competitive pressures in a capital scarce and debt-ridden financial system.
It has been 20 years since we moved to the West. I remember it was raining heavily and the wind was cold when we got off the plane in Omaha, Nebraska. That year Nebraska had the worst winter storm in decades. I remember we had no heat at our house when the blizzard hit. The howling winds outside juxtaposed with an unfamiliar and desolate scene of a winter wonderland. The snow was up to my waist then, at 6 years old, and the power lines were out and a tree fallen on neighbor's house. The cold months in Nebraska were different then. Now we get tropical rain storms with heavy hail. Unlike the heavy coats I remember wearing growing up, the frost is occasional and only when brisk wind sweeps across the bare plain does it get bitter cold. Snow is divided by weeks of warm spring weather.
This uncertainty about the fate of our environment seems to be mirrored in our social and political landscape.While it has recently become clear to me that our current institutions, by their foundation are incapable of freeing us - that in fact they will use the very ways in which we rely on them against us, to survive and prosper - we at least have hope now. The question out though is: Can we build better systems that are designed to help us as a global community to be proactive against collective threats? Can it withstand the corruptible forces of money and power? Can we go beyond pinning capital against labor, burning forests to repay debt, conflating pleasure with love, and bulS**T for wisdom just to make a profit?
Guess, we'll see.
Thanks for listening to my rant.
Follow me, I'm the crypto ranger.
Steemit: steemit.com/@mal402
Twitter: twitter.com/@mal402
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lam-hoang-22604a7b/
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