I’m utterly inspired by Appolition and apps like it. We should have a compassionate society and infrastructure that allows everyone a real chance. But we don’t, so if there are ways to take matters into our own hands (while pressuring government), so be it.
Genuine, voluntary distribution of wealth from those with the ability to those according to their need. My view is that this is a simplified (likely oversimplified) version of what governments need to be doing to support those in need, but here we are. Needs must.
There would be no questions asked about what the money would be used for. If you need it and you qualify, it’s yours. The central account would distribute to neighborhood ATMs according to the local need, with contributions drawn from everywhere.
Withdrawal cards would be distributed by local aid organizations and linked to a specific neighborhood ATM. (Not a bank ATM: a separate machine.) The monthly withdrawal limit would be set according to circumstance according to a rubric; eg, a parent with kids would need more.
Privacy legislation is important but can’t guarantee privacy - just punitive measures for anyone who’s caught. Instead, bake it into the protocols. Make it mandatory. Human values need to be baked into the way the Internet works.
Hearken has shown that treating your community as coreporters is highly valuable both for newsrooms and readers. Social media has given everyone a voice. What if you redesigned content management to take that into account from the ground up? Not a CMS; not a forum. Something new.
Comments are horrible as a community platform. Slack as a side community has worked fairly well for sites like The Information. But I bet something much better is possible, that allows publishers to really leverage their community and gives readers more value.
I 100% agree with the idea that vast wealth - being rich - should be socially unacceptable.
Of course, these donut heads would never build better infrastructure or consider creating anything that actually helped real people live.
The vision for the web is a place without benevolent supercorps. Tim Berners-Lee said it best: “this is for everyone”. It’s all of ours.
The problem with self-contained network silos is that a single entity dictates what can be said, seen & heard. Benevolent supercorps again.
The problem with the native app ecosystem is app stores: an entity on each platform dictating what’s acceptable. Benevolent supercorps.
So it’s kind of a shame that the word “liberty” is mostly used by people who want to ride roughshod over everybody else.
The world needs more humanist technologists and fewer technical determinists.
@francesbell Decentralized data is core to this! But again: what can we do better with decentralized data than centralized? Privacy for sure
Core question: what can decentralized software do better than centralized, leaving aside ideology? My bet is on business use cases to start.
The problem is pressing. In a world where authoritarianism is on the rise, ethical software shouldn't track users in an identifying way.
Decentralization is not a value proposition, unfortunately. It's important to build great products that happen to be decentralized.
While "let's not build products that could undermine democratic society" sounds like a human problem, most users don't see the need in time.
It's not enough to build a product with a democratic ideology. You have to do the hard work of making sure you're solving a human problem.
Where decentralization communities failed was on desirability of their offerings to ordinary people. Projects were too academic / nerdy.
We now know that targeted advertising was used to attempt to swing a federal election, and that the administration wanted a mole inside Fb.
During the sourcing for Matter Seven, I used a veto vote several times because of founder sexism or racism. Made me sad every time.
TV needs to be a separate, first-class device, capable of playing content on its own. The friction of phone or laptop as controller is high.
Werd I/O © Ben Werdmuller. The text (without images) of this site is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
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