Humanity Involved Protocol
We are at an inflection point of social change, with decades of socioeconomic erosion, systemic racism, and a sharp increase in political divisiveness and violence. When combined with unrestrained and unequal technological advancements and a shrinking community sector, the outlook for my generation is bleak. For any chance at meaningful change, the only way out is through technology that promotes social wellbeing, local advocacy for pressing issues, and the actualization of the citizen to retake their place in democracy. These efforts shouldn’t be restricted to activism or voting, they should be direct, local, and impactful; every community is suffering in some way, and all of them can be improved. Our job now is to be unrelenting. We must not let institutional monopolies, lies, and apathy make us give up - we must keep up the hard work of creating new and better societies for future generations.
Thankfully, due to hard work of countless individuals, the tools for this are at our disposal. They need only a couple tweaks, beneficial integrations, and a little hope on our parts to unleash human potential as well as what we all seek — truth, cohesion, efficiency, and dignity. The problems it addresses are simple: Media Monopolies and the death of local journalism; Civic Engagement and the failed potential of the internet; and Building the True Internet - of the human, by the human, and for the human. The solutions have brought me to, and continue to be inspired by, RadicalxChange: the power of Blockchain for trust, privacy, and fluidity; Human Progress Incentives, to promote participation, collaboration, and effective problem solving; and the Democratization of Power, leveling the playing field for all through collective power building. Creating radical, groundbreaking civic technologies combining these ideas to solve these problems is the sustainable way forward. A highly accessible, fluid, and distributed laboratory for democracy where every community can govern themselves is necessary, so that success can be reproduced at large scale, and downsides can be mitigated.
The Humanity Involved Protocol is the next generation of media, abandoning the failure of social media to bring us together, and embracing distributed community protocols for truly free and fair participation. Algorithms should not be optimized for hate and outrage, but rather for civic participation and community improvement. It’s the handshake between the Human Protocol – establishing if you are human, the role you’ve played in your community, and your personal self-governed identity – and the Involved Protocol, which establishes the most pressing needs locally, what issues are most discussed, and the extent of interaction between users. Both protocols are distributed on the blockchain. Identities are self-owned, and incentives are set up with staking, where you need skin (money, trustworthiness, etc...) in the game to endorse what’s being shared by others. Of course, this will be set up as a cooperative democracy, where every participant on the network is a shareholder, and can offer or request to change the system at any time.
I believe the Humanity Involved Protocol addresses every theme of the fellowship: Governance is achieved through a distributed blockchain, where trust and transparency rule; Property is addressed through digitally recorded property rights on shared original content; Data is established by default - users own and are in charge of their data; and Competition is facilitated not by “exit to community” but by starting from community: cooperative community ownership of the network, its wellbeing, and its performance.
My ideal demo day deliverable is the local journalism part of this project. This would require a basic blockchain identity on a graph database, a news market, and a staking protocol. The staking protocol would require independent verification with proof of the validity of a story, along with a small monetary sum to guarantee skin in the game. Then the market would promote the most verified stories, and suppress the most disproven ones. Finally, simply viewing the story would require a fraction of the cost of verifying it. As a result, those that invested in the true story, along with the author, would see a small financial increase, and large increase in trust, while those that invested in the debunked story would see large financial loss and a moderate decrease in trust. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing, and is a solid foundation to be improved on. Through collective consensus building, based on trust and market effects, we can take steps towards healing a fractured society.
There exists a future where we love, trust, and collaborate together on the challenges facing humanity. If we stay stuck, unable to discern basic facts from fiction, we will stall and die. While there is no perfect solution to our current problem, I deeply believe in the vision I’ve laid out. We are very close to unlocking human creative and its potential, but there are still a couple roadblocks. Distributed community protocols aim to revolutionize media, radically centering data ownership as the foundation, and building on new governance models that haven’t yet experienced their potential widespread use. This does rely on the the goodness of people, and willingness to try new things. But if we can’t take a leap of faith here, and allow citizens to more effectively govern themselves, then we were doomed from the start. When this succeeds, power monopolies will be kept in check, human dignity will come back to the focus of society, and a better 21st century model of human interaction will have been laid out to capture the unimaginable wealth that comes from human connections.