Why a massive transformative purpose?
An intrinsic part of human nature is to dream, to imagine possibilities, to envision what could be. Some only think about themselves, while others conceive new realities. Some only imagine, while others manifest their dreams and shape this world to an extent or another. Throughout history, we had both individuals as well as groups which had such powerful visions that they shaped human civilization, for better or for worse.
These people used whatever means available to guide the future in the desired direction, and a constant of this process is the understanding of available resources. And increasingly complex tools give way to increasingly complex visions being fulfilled.
Now, more than ever, humankind can dream big; the abundance of digital tools can shape reality in ways that a couple of years ago was considered impossible. This, combined with the democratization of technology, gives us the opportunity to progressively manifest more of our human potential.
Never before did we have freedom, abundance, and balance within nature in our grasp, as we do today. And given the current state of affairs the world rests in, we need to bring about change as fast and as coherent as possible. Thus the immediate need for a massive transformative purpose, both for individuals and collectives!
The tools available
As stated above, there is a direct link between fulfilling a vision and the tools available. In other words, current capabilities act as a foundation for future possibilities and the present blessed us with a lot of potentials. From digital tools of decentralization to exponential technologies and new social platforms, we now have the building blocks by which we can aim higher than ever before. And new social models based on abundance and sustainability is the goal.
Exponential technologies and abundance
One person that observed an instance of exponential growth is Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, which pointed out the fact that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. That roughly translates to the doubling of processing capabilities in a two-year interval. This came to be known as Moore's law and is often used as an example to explain exponential growth in technology.
Such an exponential growth pattern starts out very slow, but because each cycle you get a two-time improvement this starts building momentum. And after the growth starts being visible it quickly skyrockets.
There are a number of technologies that manifest exponential growth which results in exponential price decrease. The book ”Exponential Organization” - written by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest, and Michael Malone, compiled a list of price decreases for some of these technologies.
- drones: cost $100,000 in 2007 to $700 in 2013, 142 times price decrease in 6 years
- solar energy: $30 per kWh in 1984 to $0.16 per kWh in 2014, 200 times price decrease in 20 years
- full body medical scan: $10,000 in 2000 to $500 in 2014, 20 times price decrease in 14 years
- 3D LIDAR mapping sensor (used for autonomous cars): $20,000 in 2009 to $79 in 2014, 250 times price decrease in 5 years
- DNA sequencing: $10 million in 2007 to $1,000 in 2014, 10.000 times price decrease in 7 years
Peter Diamandis, co-founder and executive chairman of Singularity University, an institution that studies and provides educational programs regarding exponential technologies, presented six stages in the life of such a technology:
- digitized, anything that becomes digitize enters the same exponential growth we see in computing
- Deceptive, when something starts being digitized, its initial period of growth is deceptive because exponential trends don't grow very fast at first
- Disruptive, the existing market for a product or service is disrupted by the new market the exponential technology creates
- demonetize, money is increasingly removed from the equation as the technology becomes cheaper
- dematerialized, separate physical products are removed from the equation
- democratize, once something is digitized, more people can have access to it
Exponential technologies will eventualy leed to abundance and give us the opportunity to structure long-term plans based on tools that continually become better and more affordable. The current organizations that use this principle, have a ten times faster growth because they piggyback on the exponential curve and this influences the achievement of their goals.
The Blockchain and decentralization
Source
The simplest definition of this technology is a mechanism by which you can have rules without rulers. A blockchain is a set of very public and transparent rules to which people can adhere by their own free will. Basically, the blockchain acts as a digital third party that seeks to guarantee transparency, fairness, and inclusion for all participants.
Finance is just the first application, but anything that will require fairness and transparency will be able to be built on a blockchain. This will lead to the empowerment of individuals because it will create a level playing field, where anyone has the same rights and punishments, regardless of social status, skin color, sexual orientation, nationality or any other criteria of differentiation. I consider blockchain a digital tool of decentralization because it has the potential to disrupt monopolies and redistribute power in the hands of the majority.
Johann Gevers has a TEDx Talk in which he shares his vision of the four pillars of a decentralized society in a blockchain context:
- decentralized communications
- decentralized law
- decentralized production
- decentralized finance
Communication is the most important tool for cooperation, and although we have affordable global communication at our fingertips, almost anything can be monitored and censored if needed. Mass monitorization leads to metadata which can be used to influence people toward different agendas. Censorship in communication is being used stifle change, take as an example major social media platforms going down in Turkey and Egypt during the anti-establishment protests. If we had popular decentralized communication where no one is in control and the rules stay the same regardless of the outside context, this would be impossible. And blockchain will make this a reality.
Law, in theory, should be a system that enforces the same rules for everyone, but the way the current law is structured comes with two major vulnerabilities. Firstly there is a monopoly on lawmaking and enforcing by governments, which have shown time and again favoritism towards certain individuals and groups. The second vulnerability is the human element of interpretation, even if we have a correct person making the decisions there still is a lot of room for error. A blockchain based law system would guarantee fairness and people would be able to set up their own laws for different interactions.
Production is one of the major ways in which wealth can be created, but because it’s mostly centralized, that wealth is not going to the people that actually do the work. A centralized production system made sense because it could easily adhere to regulations and quality specifications, but this lead to monopolies and unfair distributions of the rewards for that production. Blockchain has the possibility to create a mechanism by which decentralized production can adhere to any rules and specification so that the end product is the desired one. It also has the possibility to guarantee a fair distributions of the rewards in an automated and transparent way.
Finance is most of the time the reason why some things move forward and another fail, access to finance makes ideas move. But we don't have a fair system of distribution yet, because the gatekeepers are centralized and don't offer the same treatment to all people, more than half of the people in the world do not have access to financial services and thus live in an economy that moves very slowly. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have already shown that we can have a type of money that treats everyone the same, but blockchain will also create crowd-based lending platforms that will shift the decisions of financing into the hands of the people.
All major blockchains are collaborative open source projects. And they will continue to remain this way because if part of the code is invisible or if any one group is in control, this will invalidate it as a blockchain. We now have the technology of fairness and inclusion and it's fully open to human ingenuity. Whatever we need to be built, will be built.
Steemit and finance
The last ingredient in this train of thought is steemit itself, which is in a continuous growth and transformation. Ned recently announced that his next goal is to bring entrepreneurs on the platform to build their business and in a video interview he mentioned upvotes as a wage mechanism.
It is my belief that steemit can act as a means to finance the work of people that want to contribute towards a massive transformative purpose. In the past, I wrote about the Utopian.io model being applied to social activism and I will insert part of that text here.
For those who do not know, Utopian.io is a platform built on the Steem blockchain with the specific use case of rewarding contributions to open source projects. There are several types of contributions: suggestions, development, translations, graphics, tutorials and so forth.
The interesting part of the Utopian.io model is that the contributions in question are not necessarily made on steemit. Most of them are made on GitHub, which is a platform designed to facilitate the development of open source projects. On steemit we only see the post which proves the contribution was made. Utopian.io has strict submission criteria, in order to try to reward only the relevant contributions that bring value to the project. A team of moderators also exits to check all the submissions and if the conditions are met, an upvote is given as a reward.
The parallel between open source project and social activism is straightforward. Both imply passion and dedication from people that are not financially rewarded in most cases, except those that work in NGO's.
To exemplify how this model can be applied let's take Roșia Montană as a case, which is my favorite social and ecological cause in Romania. There have been several ways of actions: information campaigns, gathering signatures, cultural events, talking to local authorities and direct protests. All these things were done more or less by people that contributed their free time and helped when they could. But what if some of them were financially incentivized and could have contributed full time.
For most of the activities related to social activism there is no need for masses of people, but just a dedicated small team with free time to contribute. Let's imagine that an NGO opens an account with steemit, not for profit, but for rewarding contributions to their cause. Let's say that this NGO can form teams of three in 30 major cities. The time invested by those people increases with the financial gains. Thus the cause has a lot to benefit as well.
The Utopian.io model applied in the context of social activism has the capacity to generate nationwide campaign at a level of coherency rarely met. And the most important aspect is that the team coordination everything from steemit does not need to find finances, everything can be rewarded with a vote.
The bottom line is that steemit creates a context of outsourcing funding. We can now run offline project, post the proof of work on steamit and the community that believes in that project will reward contributions. Thus creating the possibility for teams to work pro-bono and still be financially incentivized to continue their work.
The convergence of these tools.
Al the tools presented above have high potential even on their own and create the possibility of impacting the world in a positive way, but the convergence of these tools is what I think really matters.
If we can position ourselves in the point where these technologies intersect each other we will have access to technological abundance, trust, and finance. I believe that this is as close as it can get to an ideal situation.
and our massive transformative purpose.
and our massive transformative purpose.
I choose to write this post now because we are building the
I do not want to impose my vision on anyone, but I feel that we have everything we need to aim for the stars and set up a massive transformative purpose to which we can aspire. I am not talking about changing the entire world, but we can surely better at least part of it.Thus, these are my proposals for the mission and vision statements:
Mission: Steemromania is a prosocial community that seeks to empower a sustainable future through digital tools of decentralization and exponential technologies.
Vision: Steemromania, a layer in the architecture of freedom.
Please feel free to voice your opinions regarding this proposal, we need to have a conversation as soon as possible and figure out the common direction we want to take. Or you can find me on discord: lishu#0022 .
