Tomorrow's Election Isn't As Consequential As What We Decide to Build

Love this. Politics determine our future - it's absolutely essential that we thoughtfully engage around the desired vs actual behaviors of our public servants and institutions, as painful as it is sometimes. It's refreshing to see someone talking about this. After my own heart.

My entire reason for getting a comp. sys engineering degree was to build better systems with better, more sustainable incentive structures. I firmly believe that COVID unraveled the way that it did because of poor systems design, leading to poor incentives, leading to an almost manufactured negligence. Our leaders might be guilty, but they're also victims of an unhealthy game.

It took me a long time to realize what you explained in your post - our business models have a huge impact on macro systems / institutional behavior. If we incentivize exploitative behavior at the business model scope, and then build an economy (and society) on top of those types of businesses, the resulting macro organism's behavior might not be very humane.

But business models that are engineered specifically for sustainability (not just ecological, but economic, behavioral, psychological, institutional) might give us a future where pandemics, wars, and ridiculous resource hoarding are effectively prevented through a beautiful sort of democratic self-regulation - no more depending on the good graces of kings and princes who are reacting to catastrophes that they don't fully understand. They can't - cognitive bandwidth is limited!

Like you said, blockchain is a huge part of the solution. From a strategy perspective, I see the following path:

1. Build SaaS products that generate a ton of revenue
2. Experiment with democratizing the ownership of that technology (via immutable ledgers / democratized asset management / blockchain)
3. Streamline the process of "exiting to automation" so we create a small pocket of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that feed into each other and grow based on everyone's needs.
4. [Long-tail] Use this cash flow to elect like-minded representatives who become incentivized by true democracy (everyone voting with institutional cash), and not a small minority of corporate donors (voting with corporate cash).
5. [Super-long-tail] Use that political + economic leverage to usher forth a renewably automated economy, where everyone has the opportunity to self-actualize in their own way. Full mobility + leisure: physical mobility, cognitive freedom, purely creative+cooperative endeavors, etc. Minimized suffering.

Obvs there are some huge, fuzzy questions to answer here, but I agree with the sentiment of your post: a sustainable future is right around the corner, and we can start building it now. What we need is effectively full-stack democracy: not just paying lip service to it via bicameral nonsense, but embedding the spirit of democracy all the way down into our business models with a fresh social contract.

Thanks for sharing! Would love to riff on any of these ideas any time. I'm curious - what's your short-term strategy?