Blockchain

for

Social Change

People are mostly irrational

• Example: will buy a latte everyday for $5 but hesitate paying 99c for an app.
• Example: will claim to care about the environment, but then litter cigarette butts

People are mostly good

• Care about others
• Care about the world
• But are biased/moved as they get older
  • lack of impact of change:
    • it's only my vote (#Brexit #everything)
    • who cares it's just a disposable cup
  • lack of long-term consequence
    • only one cigarette

Society has finite energy

• Activists yell all they want
• People realistically have lots of things to worry about:
  • family
  • work
  • food
  • downtime (remember #burnout?)
• It's hard to fit a global perspective in every day

Society is controlled hierarchically

• Big corporations make changes that threaten the commons / collective institutions (environment, the commons)
• These actions can be finalised between a very small group of people (ie: the board) but affect a very big number in society
• To respond/change this, it requires massive collective action:
  • Change.org
  • etc.

Why is it hard to execute change?

This dichotomy between control of resources and the masses (Marx)

Why do we need better collective leverage?

The people at the top are not bad people.

They for the most part, do not have bad motivations.

 

Facts:

• once you are 30, your personality becomes more rigid and you are less open to change
• when you're at the top, you don't have the time to listen to everyone's perspective, first-hand.

 

Why do we need better collective leverage? (cont.)

• We are all one human race, circumstance/luck/context is what differentiates our lives. Referring to previous slide-

• People realistically have lots of things to worry about:
  • family
  • work
  • food
  • downtime (remember #burnout?)
• It's hard to fit a global perspective in every day

Why do we need better collective leverage? (cont.)

We all make mistakes.

Missteps of a couple at the top * magnitude of affected = lots of error

 

Problems with hierarchy:

* masses must choose where to affect change

* things slip through

* biases propagate

"trickle-down" doesn't really trickle equally.

Why blockchain?

Stop. Contexttime.

 

 

Internet:

* zero distribution cost ^2

* anyone can communicate

* 'uncensorable' (^1) and open

 

Net good? Probably. (^1)

^1: see Worse is Better philosophy.

^2: better term is marginal cost, but you get the point.

Why blockchain?

Blockchain:

* zero trust cost ^2

* anyone can self-organise

* 'uncensorable' (^1) and open

^1: see Worse is Better philosophy.

Practically meaning...

We can build social systems that weren't possible before...

Some crazy ideas...

A currency that is ephermereal and based in reprocity.

 

Tokens are issued when a public key is signed between two people

 

How to think about blockchain and society

Think of a crazy thing we could do now.

Then think of if you had x100 of those crazy things, and how you would do it.

Recurse until StackOverflowException