What if we just stopped using social media? I know, there is no "we", but it is what gives data the power to control us. What if we changed business landscape? In every sector of the economy, businesses have learned to deliver less for more, but that also makes them all particularly vulnerable to competition as the mood of the country shifts. The only reason they can get away with delivering less while using cash for stock buybacks is because everyone is doing it. No one is challenging them, and they're comfortable that will continue. What if we just started creating the exact same businesses that exist today, but with integrity? There are high barriers to entry in some sectors, but not so much in others. But what if we decided to start with how those businesses are financed? And produced things slightly slower, but better, and while treating people with respect? What if it became part of the ethos not to dream of becoming Tiktok or Youtube famous and rake in money for doing stupid things online, but to start fixing things that are broken? Could we manage to turn this thing around?
It certainly wouldn't be easy. If we replaced some of the hollow, self help-ish, get rich, crypto, AI, influencer clutter about how to win a game that's already been lost, and shifted to talking about creating the horizontal scaling our economy badly needs to be less susceptible to speculative crash and less susceptible to oligarchic concentration of power, we might be able to stabilize the current craziness. We're just not talking about what we could do, we're talking about what others have already done. Innovation isn't only in tech, it's in culture. This sort of change won't come from government. I don't think it comes from activism or critique of the existing system. It comes from organizing effort and resources around different values to taking back bits of power, piece by piece by rebuilding the failing myths of America into shared stories that actually work.
We take the despair, the fear, the powerlessness to control the current structure, and turn it into effort creating a different structure without waiting for anyone's permission, or for anyone to provide the perfect roadmap for doing it and share it on social media.
