Gamifying Sustainability
Fabric, the Platform — Annals of Doing Away With Financial Systems Devised at a Time of Virtually Unlimited Resources and Few Known Consequences.
Okay so, let’s say there was something beyond a currency as we know it. It would be legit––ledgered and bit enabled, so impossible to misrepresent or break. Across the world, it would assign value in ways that place sustainability, defined by the locale-tweaked components of Gross National Happiness, at the forefront.
What is the basis of this system? Gamified sustainability. Reward for meeting human-curated threshold goals and milestones. These include emissions, biodiversity, sewage, construction, travel, food security, water safety, everything.
Wow, humans solved global warming by turning sustainability into a game, turning video game logic toward more productive purposes than mining weapons or treasure that have no connection to the real world.
Games that, counterintuitively, get people sharing more, staying healthier and being more social (or not, there are many things of value in the solitary, non-shared, unquantified experience) and spreading a passion for life, rather than algorithms.
Okay, it’s not a game, it’s a platform. Uses the technologies that enable multiplayer games, Pokemon Go!, Uber… to track, verify, and compensate activities in a geolocated and task tied manner. These are all well developed and available “as a service,” There are many user experience aspects to resolve, including the intrusion that these technologies represent.
I call the concept fabric, call it what you will. Knowledge infill (KI) is the next emerging area of growth. Tying gamified activity to real world reality and visa versa (more on the former later) in ways such that sustainability — in all its varied, jobs-creating hues––is encouraged and abetted.
Fabric is necessary because the KI system that comes along must be constructed from the ground (blockchain) up, bundled in ways that sustain the earth’s climate within a habitable band. My concept is that a widely accepted bitcoin would enable this, as the currency creation and distribution would itself be tied to reaching sustainability and GNH milestones… and ledgered, so incorruptible.*
As I wrote in a comment to the New York Times on the eye-opening article Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe, “I feel we need to design a GNH and sustainability based (blockchain ledgered and bitcoin denominated?) economic system to replace one designed in the 18th century at a time of virtually unlimited resources and few known consequences.”
TBC…..
*Prediction: within the next few months, there will be a slew of articles in respected journals on how a bitcoin denominated, currencyless system can quickly work to position global industry on the sustainable side of the development equation. Call it fabric, call it an idea that has technically been around since the idea of workable equivalents of utopia.
*As brainstormed with “NS,” issues in need of further Knowledge Infill (articles in this series) include:
NS: yes we need to break up banks and yes we need to put a new system in their place…. that part I can follow you. these are pretty much non-negotiables if we want to survive. otherwise our econ sys will outlive our ecol sys (biosphere, us)
DA: my concept is that a widely accepted bitcoin would enable this, as the currency creation and distribution would itself be tied to reaching sustainability and GNH milestones… and ledgered, so incorruptible.
NS: the idea of the founders of bitcoin i meant. they actually had removing the power of banks in mind, creating a more equitable future etc
DA: of course … but not as a practical lever of sustainability … I think their aim was quite different and the sheer number of cryptos reflects that. what I envision is taking blockchain as a foundation and applying a certain lens of value that doesn’t yet exist to transactions…. sustainability.. it only works of course if the platform is useful and quickly ramps up… and if a complex and sophisticated valuation system flexible to apply to distinct regions worldwide evolves
NS: I think the sheer number of cryptos primarily reflects two things: 1. the popularity of the idea of decentralised currency 2. the gold rush phenomenon after the initial increase in value (that later turned out as volatility, but yeah blockchain is cool)
DA:So what needs to emerge just like after mess of dot-com boom is a major crypto with a pressing purpose. And tie it to a platform that funnels third party service transaction services encompassing individual creators and sustainability trending businesses to dispersion of the value defined in productive, earth-saving terms.
Not simply resource based economy. Localized Sustainability + GNH + ledgered, corruption free distribution of what would have been profits toward economically viable, yet sustainable, projects.
NS: your last comment: going in the direction of (possibly AI-assisted) “resource-based economy” a la The Zeitgeist Movement Global. the whats are out there, more and more ppl are on board with the idea — the specifics, the hows are interesting / need work
DA: what I propose is forum-like curation by groups as well as in house curation that far exceeds Facebook and Medium etc … so it is really Knowledge Infill … AI is actually relatively less weighted on the level that reaches the consumer…. The idea of the algorithm defining value of original works and no one getting compensated is part of what this solves … Beyond rampant taking of someone’s meticulously crafter work and distributing it on one’s platform for free (easy as a click), or altering it and intgrating it without compensation all the way down the line.The vacuum of expression that arises when a meme is valued the same as a novel.
NS: Unfortunately, at 7 bn world pop we have no way of knowing how many already have the very same idea. the one who actually builds it matters. don’t dream (i know, dreamers are important) — roll up your sleeves! :)
Unfortunately also, ideas are worthless monetarily. No investor etc will give a dollar for an idea. Proof of concept is the minimum. If POC is good, investment may not be required ;)
DA: ok the articles I put up are the work I am capable of… prose stylist, idea perspn. It’s then about assembling a team or letting others take idea and run… but noting who put it together first. It wasn’t the coders or those whom the coders decided were the creative equivalent that their specific platform supports.
(i.e.––to be researched––Medium’s ecosystem of pushing content from specific types of creators, including in-house and the type of gig freelancers identified in Tyler Elliot Bettilyon’s Technologists Should Abandon Their Craft: Everyone is trying to break into technology, but I wish more people would break out. “Don’t start a law tech company, start a technology focused law firm.”)
How is this accomplished… by pushing the algorithm, feed driven idea that all content is equal and individual authorship is of little meaning. Certainly not worth compensating, because the engines of transaction flow have not been tailored to a digital content creation reality. Not just writing… Spotify… SoundCloud… all the artists who received nothing. Meme creators…
As explored in my Medium and the Missing… article Is Facebook a Timestamp for Original Content as an Asset? amajor way of cracking this open is to go into say Medium and find all the great content that has been put up for free and never compensated… then poach all that content put it on the new curated and crypto compensated platform.
NS: I’m that super annoying friend who tells you to get your ass off FB and take a course in XYZ and build shit :D Make it happen! Because:
Make sure you’re not someone who has the “idea” of “sparks coming out of a wire” and then people who had similar ideas build things, make electricity happen, light bulbs, motors,… and get all the credits for it as they’ve worked out the specifics. The first who dreamed of “putting lightning in a can” may be forgotten. Work out at least the specifics.
Or prepare emotionally for this outcome.
Esp. the “crypto-compensated” is sth you have to show in detail how it works. Could be a great idea, if it works.
DA: oh I have … Johnny Appleseed … but do you see what I am saying ? It’s blockchain verified where the idea came from, dated and stamped … so in fact this is a technique that can be used to extract value or royalty payments from existing platforms and funnel funds toward next.
My experience is an example … the cloud novels, the fabric music and its contributors.. dont even get me started on photos, doodles, and old content-centered blog sites that attracted 15k organic viewers a month before Weebly took it offline, because my credit card stopped feeding them.
This is the human level example of money being diverted to the wrong entities the ones who don’t create or place value on that which they host. Yet because they don’t pay, they can’t own the shit. Achilles heel. (First law of KI: a random Tom Waits live recording will ultimately garner more views than a viral Taylor Swift video). Long term, value will be identified in worthy content and that can be used sustain significant income for those within the platform I envision.
AI helps quickly identify the original and those layers of alteration that occur on web. Human KI curation boosts and compensates the original
NS: I like your notion of blockchain verified idea origin. But you need to tackle the problem of idea scope. Does “spark in a can” count as idea for battery even if it lacks all specificity?
Second, multiple people may have the same idea (co-creation). But yes, the patent system needs an accessibility overhaul for sure
Ghostwriter by day, Damon Arvid is a musician, composer, traveler, and cloud novel author by night. On the music front, he is currently arranging (and burying) the Fabric albums Summon These Days, Slowly Learning, Station to Station, Sunnyside, Namida, and Chasing Sun — WIP is Great Pacific Garbage Patch film soundtrack. All new tunes ledgered, graded, and verified as too legit to quit.
What follows is a key to the Damon Arvid ecosystem (Medium is designed to pull you out of one writer’s work and onto the next). Each hyperlink under Medium series takes you to a representative example from the series. The series-specific Contents drills down to navigate articles or episodes within a specific series. Think of what follows as a blog site key, organized within Medium through the hyperlinks below.
Medium series:
- Arisugawa Park (late-stage cloud novel)
- Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP — film synopsis)
- Fabric, the Platform
- Fabric the Music Project
- EVEN (Environmental and Engineering Neutrality Pact — early-stage cloud novel)
- What I Learned on the Internet (WILOTI)
- Medium and the Missing…. (little rants against the machine)
The Weebly blog endurancewriter has been discontinued for the mome, but is still, still perusable. A new site with exclusive content is in the works.
Fabric, the Platform — Contents
Chasm, Heat Lightning (Off The Rails)
Copyright © Damon Arvid 2018
Medium is simply a ledgered host for the material, my last month’s earnings were .02 cents — ultimately this material will be exported to a platform that values original content in a curated, rationally compensated way.
