Can cryptocurrency fight global poverty?

RSE contributor Jeff Fong has an excellent series running on Policymic about Bitcoin.

Earlier this week, Jeff asks, “Could Bitcoin Destroy Government Control of Currency?”

Today he writes about Bitcoin’s potential for humanitarians:

Basic financial services can be hard to come by in the developing world. Many regions simply don’t have the abundance of branch banks found in more developed countries and this lack of financial infrastructure is a major impediment to economic growth. While advances in mobile banking have provided easier ways to send and receive payment, Bitcoin could majorly expand on existing services and do so in a way that directly integrates users with the global economy.

Both are well worth the read. RSE will be at Bitcoin 2013 this weekend, and Jeff will be live blogging the event.

I was born and raised in a backwater in rural Maryland, in a small town much like Steubenville, Ohio. Steubenville’s latest claim to fame is the extremely disturbing rape committed, recorded, and broadcast to the world by 16-year old high-school football players.

Both athletes were both convicted of rape.

CNN responded by fawning about how “incredibly difficult” it was to watch, “as these two young men – who had such promising futures, star football players, very good students – literally watched as they believed their life fell apart.”

What? They knew exactly what they were doing. Perhaps if they cared about their football future they would have avoided raping an innocent girl.

CNN’s response is predictable, if perverted. Sadly, it’s deeply seated in America’s weird culture of sports-worship.

There are hundreds of other Steubenvilles (or Paternos) waiting to happen. It’s likely that thousands more have already happened and we don’t know about them.

Many girls probably never speak up about rape by star athletes, because they know how their communities work.

In small towns like Steubenville, athletes are exalted as heroes. They are routinely above the law – and certainly above the implicit, unwritten rules that govern good behavior and community life.

Athletes in my hometown would avoid fines and tickets, because the police ‘knew who they were’. In school they regularly skipped or were excused from academic standards that were applied to everyone else.

Most of all, they formed an unruly, aggressive, and often cruel gang of physically intimidating young men that prowled the community. They got drunk, angry, and vandalized things. And they were the worst to girls.

On the night of the crime, the two rapists sent around a photo of their naked, unconscious victim with the caption, “Bitches is bitches. F**k ‘em”.

How did they get away with this? Because everyone let them.

They were hometown heroes, our ‘local sons’. And they could stomp around the farm because they ruled the roost.

What kind of communities raise high-school athletes above common standards of decency? A community with a collective self-esteem problem – and no sense of what it means to be a real hero.

Yes, professional athletes can model discipline, excellence, and devotion to a craft. That’s superficially heroic.

But the world is not going to change for the better because oh-my-god-my-favorite-team X just won ridiculously-expensive-tournament Y. It’s also not going to end with oh-my-god-evil-rival-team Z wins instead.

And team sports don’t always bring out the better angels of our nature – as anyone can attest who’s watched drunken ‘adult’ sports fans brawling in a stadium. It’s raw, blind tribalism.

Hollywood football dramas would make you think athlete-worship is all about camaraderie and the underdog. Where’s the feel-good-coming-of-age story when people are torching cars and raping women after the World Cup? Or when athletes are beating their girlfriends?

Let’s get real: Steubenville, Ohio football is not exactly the Super Bowl. Most of these guys were not going to become star football players anyway. But America at large, and especially small towns are so starved for heroism and excitement that 16-year old jocks fill the void.

So many people deferred to the authority of these teenage boys that they thought they could get away with public gang rape. Adults, children, other teenagers at the party – everyone submitted to the sick behavior of these junior criminals. It led to this rape.

Why the bizarre worship of these particular adolescents? Because they’re good at playing a game where you throw balls around.

Put this way, it sounds really pathetic. And it is.

That’s a tragedy in American hero culture. We worship people who play games with balls, rather than people who have them.

Across America, most community or business leaders conform to the sleepy, deadened pace and dull future that haunts anyone with aspirations who’s born in a small town. Most small-town politicians are a laughingstock, or an unimportant fixture of the federal or party bureaucracy.

With all other ground for heroism surrendered to conformity, we get ball-throwing idols, rather than idols with balls. Don’t let the phrase fool you — this includes both women and men.

Take Jack Andraka of Crownsville, Maryland, another forgettable small town. He’s sixteen, just like the Steubenville jocks – though he lacks their history of sexual abuse.

Andraka single-handedly invented an incredible new cancer screening technology in his free time. He was rejected by labs hundreds of times and told that his ideas were impossible. But Andraka has the tenacity of a true nerd. He won. (His mother says, “We don’t go to much football or baseball… we sit around the table and talk about how people came up with their ideas and what we would do differently.”)

Jack Andraka wins an award from Intel

Andraka is a community hero. He has major balls to believe in himself, in his own judgment and creativity when scientists three times his age are telling him he’s crazy.

But he doesn’t stand a chance in the American small town. He’s an enthusiastic, compassionate geek with his heart on his sleeve.

He’s made the world a better place. But many people won’t notice, because they’re too busy painting their faces for the hometeam and high-fiving in the parking lot of Nowhereville High School. Touchdowns matter more than cancer.

We ought to consider heroes that show the mastery of a craft (yes, football is included), but also show wisdom, humility, compassion, creativity, courage and Andraka’s shining virtue: intellect.

Raping an unconscious girl and bragging about it to your buddies is cowardly and cruel. Real men -– real heroes don’t do it. Not one person at that party had the balls the stand up for what was right.

The Steubenville rapists are the bitter fruit of a culture that worships malicious cowards so long as they can kick a field goal. Until that changes, we can expect more of the same.

We don’t need more exalting of men who play games with balls. Good athletes are a dime a dozen.

But to find a person with the inner strength to say no, to be courageous and open, to invent and create, to persist, to fight, to tell the truth, to stand alone when everyone has gone mad at a party or anywhere else – that’s truly rare, and all our progress depends on the ranks of this tiny band of heroes.

So, as was their custom, they offered a feast of Cuy (Guinea Pig) to the shoe-givers.

Paul had tears in his eyes when he told me that the missionaries refused to eat this delicacy. He then brightened up when he told me that one of the reasons he liked me from the beginning was because I ate their potatoes.

I hate potatoes, but I love people.

Sharing a meal with my friends is more important than holding on to my preferences and customs.

People need help around the world, down the street, and maybe in your own home.

This is not the topic of dispute; the conflict seems to arise when determining how to help. Fortunately, social entrepreneurs are in general agreement that business provides the infrastructure necessary to lift people from poverty while, at the same time, solving some of society’s problems.

As entrepreneurs, we often get encouragement from reading start-up blogs or listening to podcasts on how to implement our ideas successfully. Not that this is a bad thing; I’ve gained much wisdom from these sources.

But as radical social entrepreneurs, is this enough?

It’s not that studying search engine optimization is fruitless; its success can be proven. Yet, I’m not certain that we should become so entrenched in traditional methods that we lose sight of other ways to learn. .

As radical social entrepreneurs, we need to attend more dances, read more literature and listen more intently to our neighbor.

These methods, although unorthodox, are needed to cultivate a more holistic approach to helping our fellow citizens of the world. Simply giving is not enough; sometimes, we need to step outside of our expectations in order to serve people best.

Sometimes, we just need to eat a few potatoes.

A guest article by Andrew Vrbas. Andrew is founder of Pacha Soap.

flickr: Cuorhome

Ricardo Radulovich is building cheap, sustainable sea-farms that could revolutionize agriculture, clean our oceans, and feed millions.

There are a billion chronically hungry people, and many more are malnourished. Humanity urgently needs to increase food production apart from overexploited fisheries and unsustainable agriculture on terra firma.

Such a revolution in food production is possible at sea, where boundless spaces teem with renewable agricultural resources. Enter Ricardo Radulovich, a Costa Rican water sciences professor laboring to freely share his potentially revolutionary sea-farming technologies.

Through more than ten-years of marine agriculture research, funded in part by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The World Bank, Radulovich developed low-cost sea-farm models suitable for even the poorest of coastal, pan-tropical countries.

These sea-farms harness the ocean’s natural trophic cycle, transforming uncultivated coastal waters into rich agricultural ‘ground’ producing predictable, year-round harvests of nutritious seaweeds, filter-feeder shellfish, and herbivorous fish—without requiring an inch of land, a drop of freshwater, or any additional input.

Sea-farms stimulate local supporting industries, and can spawn a variety of local, downstream enterprises in fresh and preserved food, nutritional supplements, animal feedstock, fertilizers, hydrocolloids, oils, and biofuels.

Moreover, these sea-farming techniques are valuable coastal resource management tools that address marine overfishing, bioremediation of polluted marine environments, and ocean acidification. Implementing Radulovich’s sea-farm models worldwide would feed many hungry mouths, offer much economic opportunity, and measurably improve marine environments.

Radulovich hopes to find financing to expand The Sea-Farms Project, which validates and documents a range of sea-farm models suitable for smallholders, community enterprises, and large-scale humanitarian endeavors.

His model is already cheap and effective.

The base sea-farm feeds five persons daily, year-round, from one-half hectare of diversified sea-farm plot and $200.00 (USD) in material costs. The Project builds upon this extraordinary foundation, assembling resources from four tropical marine research centers and developing research, training, and extension sea-farming units in Pacific Costa Rica, Caribbean Panama, the Gulf of Thailand, and Zanzibar, Tanzania.

Each unit will thoroughly document operations in order to develop a range of literature and media about sea- farming and related industry opportunities. These materials are key to implementing Radulovich’s sea-farm models and figuring out the socio-economic impact of 100 sea-farm enterprises spread around the world.

The Project supports policy structures that encourage sea-farming within coastal communities. It also promotes the use of seaweed-based foods designed to help these products to permanently enter the marketplace.

The Project continues Radulovich’s research dedicated to understanding the many positive environmental impacts of sea-farming.

Sea-farming addresses marine overfishing by providing coastal communities with food and economic alternatives, and by improving local marine biodiversity. Radulovich’s sea-farming shows measurable increases in baitfish and shark populations.

Second, the natural processes by which these sea-farms obtain nutrients, including uptake of dissolved nutrients by seaweeds through biosynthesis and filtration of organic matter and plankton by shellfish, are valuable forms of bioremediation that clean ocean water by removing excess nutrients.

And third, sea-farming ameliorates ocean acidification by sequestering considerable amounts of carbon.

Radulovich’s sea-farming technologies extend far out to sea. Open ocean seaweed farms are capable of bio-remediating much of the 250,000 square kilometers of marine ‘dead zones’—hypoxic bodies of water caused by excessive pollution —while also sustainably producing mass amounts of food. Seaweed farms in productive open ocean areas would increase biodiversity, boost baitfish stocks, and supply the emerging biofuel industry.

Radulovich has also experimented with farming terrestrial crops at sea on self-sustaining rafts that collect freshwater. This paradigm shift presents several distinct advantages worth exploring. For instance, the ocean just a few miles from shore is almost wholly devoid of insects and plant pathogens (and crop-eating birds and animals).

Crops grown at sea require no pesticides, tolerance for which is a primary reason for GMO.

Among other suitable crops, Radulovich envisions flotillas of citrus trees, and attendant harvesting and juice processing ships, setting to purpose the ocean’s boundless spaces, and the sunshine and rain which falls upon them. Eventually, seaweed farmed on the high seas, rather than petroleum, will supply polymers for a range of biodegradable ‘plastic’ 3-D printer feedstocks, forever transforming manufacturing.

Radulovich’s Sea-Farm Project, and the nascent Center for Sea-Farming Technology in Costa Rica, a permanent sea-farm technology transfer institute that will continue operations at the Project’s extension units, are significant steps towards achieving a ‘blue’ food revolution. Moreover, and in the manner of Norman Borlaug, Radulovich offers his agricultural technologies for free.

Watch Radulovich on Vimeo:

Ricardo Radulovich on Sea Farming at the Seasteading Conference 2012 from The Seasteading Institute on Vimeo.

A guest article by Ryan William Nohea Garcia. Ryan is from the Big Island of Hawai’i and now lives in San Diego. He does business development for The Sea-Farms Project. Ryan hopes someday to see a more peaceful world based on voluntary societies.

Voice & Exit is an upcoming conference featuring twelve short talks about major innovation in social entrepreneurship and radical community.

RSE spoke with conference planners Max Borders and Seth Blaustein.

RSE: How is Voice & Exit different from TED or another conference?

Max Borders: Well, I love TED. But where TED focuses more on technology and design, Voice & Exit focuses more on social technology and radical community design. We want to challenge people’s assumptions about the less visible architectures around them. We want to share our vision of human emergence and pluralism — all while celebrating the innovations that will take us to the next phase of social evolution.

Seth Blaustein: Agreed. TED has done an amazing thing with a simple idea — share ideas and stories that inspire and then set them free into the world through the internet. Voice & Exit is similar to a TED conference, but we have narrowed the content down into a more specific range of ideas. The ideas we curate all exist within a foundational principle, which is ideas that are leading us towards a more free, tolerant and vibrant world. Voice & Exit features thinkers that advocate for creativity that pushes social structures and organizations towards a world that uses persuasion rather than coercion as a dominant means of making social change.

RSE: You say ideas are pushing us towards a better world. What’s the trend?

Seth Blaustein: I think the underlying trend is and has always been that human beings thrive when they are living within a community that is more aligned with their underlying belief system. When in such a community,  we can find support and inspiration that nourishes us and helps us flourish.

Voice & Exit is a reflection of that idea. This isn’t to say that people thrive when living in homogenous communities — variety is essential — but sometimes it makes more sense to seek out those who want to live under the same basic principles rather than to fight against a tide of those who disagree and don’t want to live in the type of community you are advocating for.

We all have our ideals, and each ought to be able to live out those ideals as much as possible, so long as they don’t hinder another person’s ability to live out their own ideal.

Voice & Exit seeks to help open up the perspective that there are very real ways to go about attracting or creating a community that helps you thrive and find your own happiness. We want to showcase 12 speakers that offer some ideas and inspiration towards that end.

Technologically speaking, innovations in the world of the internet are making it easier every day to connect with those that have common interests and common ideals. Finding fellow visionaries and aligned individuals to help you change the world has never been easier.

Max Borders: Well, as you know, social technology has not caught up with information technology. So, part of what we’re doing is getting people to think about new social operating systems — both formal and informal. What in the world are new social operating systems?

Well, in IT, imagine trying to run a really cool app on MS DOS! It wouldn’t work well if it worked at all. In the social realm, the clearest example of these are our legal systems. Because they are so inflexible, it has become harder and harder for people to “write new apps,” that is, form new ways of living. So, for example, we have legal codes that govern swaths of territory. Why should this be? Why can’t people subscribe to legal systems that have nothing to do with where they live?

Another example comes in movements like Seasteading and Free Cities. The idea is to have more decentralization and experimentation with both legal and social rules. Experimentation with legal systems offers people more choices in how they want to live — just as they have the choice to live in California or Texas.

We happen to think that better, smaller (and more decentralized) systems of governance will be more likely to survive and evolve. Along with new rules, new communities can sprout up. Some will be more communitarian, some will be more about business — but all will be more likely to make the world a better place. How do we know? People will move into them.

RSE: Is there a special reason why Voice & Exit parallels SXSW? Good weather in Austin?

Max Borders: (Laughs) Well, we are basically winging it. We live here and that’s when our chosen venue was available. When we saw it was the same weekend as SXSW I looked over at Seth and said “Like the old Chinese proverb says, this is a threat and an opportunity.” We consider Voice & Exit a SXSW off-broadway show.

Seth Blaustein: Right — it happened to line up with when we were looking for a venue! However, Austin is, we believe, is ground zero for some really amazing innovations to come in social entrepreneurship. What better time to do it than when hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs will be in town to network and share these ideas together with local Austinites?

RSE: Voice & Exit bills itself as “innovating for a non-coercive world”. Do we really live in a ‘coercive world’? What is the alternative?

Max Borders: We define coercion as using violence or threats to make social change. But we believe it’s possible to make the world better through persuasion — that is, if the rules are more hospitable to persuasive forces. We can create a lot of mini Utopias by giving people more options for creating social systems and communities?

If a smaller community or jurisdiction isn’t a good fit for us, can we make it easier to speak up (voice) leave if we’re not happy (exit)? We are moving to a place we hope is beyond partisan politics.

Partisan politics is a king of the mountain game. Whoever wins makes the rules. Why can’t we just have diverse sets of rules and let people live more how they like? We can. Ask Switzerland. Decentralization, choice and tolerance is a better path to peace and personal happiness.

Seth Blaustein: Historically speaking, we live in a less coercive world than ever. But if we are to consider the impact that coercion has on human flourishing, there’s still too much in the world. In many ways, the types of coercion that exist today are akin to a small kid giving a bully his lunch money on a daily basis. He knows if he doesn’t, the bully will take it by force.

Even if the bully had good intentions, for instance if he were planning on using the money to help pay his father’s medical bills, it wouldn’t make it ok to shake down the small kid. Ultimately, there is a lot of “latent” coercion in the world today. People are afraid of what will happen if they don’t comply. Most people don’t realize that governments can and often do act as such a bully, and that hinders our ability to act freely and cooperate with others.

We say we are “innovating for a non-coercive world” because we are showcasing visionary thinkers who are doing exactly that, changing how we perceive and behave in social structures in a way that opens up greater opportunity for peace and human flourishing.

RSE: Who are some of the visionaries who will be speaking at Voice & Exit? Why should I come listen?

Max Borders: Some of these folks are people we deeply admire. They are revolutionaries. Check out:

• Michael Strong (Free Cities Institute / RSE)
• John Papola (Emergent Order)
• Max Marty (Blueseed)
• Paul Green, Jr. (Self-Management Institute)
• Magatte Wade (Tiossan/ TED Global Africa)
• Max Borders (The Freeman/Superwealth)
• Sam Elick (BrainJuice)
• Dr. Don Beck (Spiral Dynamics)
• Jason Rink (Foundation for a Free Society)
• Michael Gibson (The Thiel Foundation)
• Jacob Sullum (Reason Magazine)
• Mary Ruwart (Healing Our World)

Don Beck will share content about the psychological bases of peace. Michael Strong will talk about the structures of peace through good institutions. If after hearing these folks you don’t leave inspired and changed by what you heard, I suspect you had on a blindfold and earmuffs.

Entrepreneur Magatte Wade, a speaker at V&E.

Seth Blaustein: Anyone who aspires to “make the world a better place” will love Voice & Exit. Each talk will be inspiring and engaging. The most organic way to create new communities is by finding others that are inspired by similar ideas. Who knows, you might meet a fellow problem solver at Voice & Exit and start something visionary together.

RSE: Thanks Seth and Max!

Radical Social Entrepreneurs is co-sponsoring Voice & Exit with Peace Through Commerce, a group of entrepreneurs who build businesses to promote peace in violent parts of the world.

Consider supporting Voice & Exit at their Indiegogo page.

What’s the economy of the future? For designer and SMLXL founder Alan Moore it’s ‘open-sourced’, ‘bottom-up managed’, ‘co-created’, ‘mass-customized’, ‘adaptive’, and ‘human-scale’. Don’t be put off by the jargon, Moore’s argument in No Straight Lines is simple and compelling.

The world has changed and our major institutions from markets to politics are splitting at the seams in a struggle to adapt.

Much of Moore’s book is a straight-forward survey of modern ideas about what he calls the ‘post-industrial economy.’

In the post-industrial world agility and creativity reign supreme. In business, firms can no longer afford to be rigid hierarchies. Their employees can no longer count on a 30-year career in only one area, for only one employer. One-size-fits-all education can’t prepare us to thrive in this new world.

Unaccountable, opaque bureaucracies can’t solve social problems without local knowledge of the communities they govern. Communities themselves are suburban wastelands with no public spaces for togetherness or merrymaking.

Moore goes deeper still, arguing that this structural mismatch is making people feel alienated. Our yearnings for authenticity, human connection, and true community reveal themselves in our behavior on and offline. Think Burning Man and World of Warcraft guilds.

People without a community and without a sense of pride in their craft turn to rampant consumerism for fulfillment. Culture becomes the decadence of conspicuous consumption rather than a search for meaning.

Fair enough. RSE is all about addressing these disparities.

The diagnosis of No Straight Lines is spot-on, with one serious problem.

Many theorists of the ‘post-industrial economy’, Moore included, position themselves as enemies of the industrial revolution and capitalism as a whole. Moore makes liberal use of a caricature of supporters of open markets.

These ‘market fundamentalists’, as he terms them, are reactionaries. They oppose the impending post-industrial world because of their allegiance or financial interest in ‘hypercapitalism’.

Leaving aside the mixed-blessings of how industrialization came to be, Moore seems to think that today we are suffering the bitter fruit of laissez-faire capitalism.

This is false.

“What vitiates capitalism,” said an earlier writer on human social evolution, “is not its growth but its immaturity; that the use of [private] capital … has not been properly extended to community goods.”

Moore’s chief examples of today’s dysfunction are precisely in the areas run by power, coercion, and bureaucracy. These areas are dominated by politics, not entrepreneurial markets.

Education in the West is almost entirely controlled by top-down bureaucratic standards. By and large, schools are not created by entrepreneurs, but by political will. Is it surprising that they fail to create the innovative learning that people need for ‘post-industry’?

Zoning and assorted other top-down regulations restrict the shape and function of communities. Discriminatory tax codes prevent holistic communities with a single land title from forming (think common interest developments like resorts, hotels, or universities).

Instead, politics favors dispersed suburban subdivisions, where all residents must rely on the municipal bureaucracy to solve their collective problems. Poor management of public funds leaves little money behind for the common spaces that Moore craves.

Indeed, the area most clearly disrupted by major changes in technology are the markets least dominated by political bureaucracy.

Moore refers continuously to the innovation and creativity of the tech sector. This should be no surprise. But it is inconvenient for his thesis.

The tech sector is not yet fully a ward of nation-state legal and regulatory machinery. With some serious exceptions, it is a closer approximation to laissez-faire than markets like manufacturing, which were long ago captured by special interests and had their structure distorted in favor of established interests.

As the case of San Francisco’s ride-sharing start-ups shows, even clean, community-enhancing innovations of the sort that Moore would love find their biggest challenges in politics, not laissez-faire.

In the end, Moore calls for a ‘new operating system’ for humanity – one based on mutuality, openness, free-participation, trial and error, and decentralization. I couldn’t agree more.

But Moore’s new operating system sounds suspiciously like entrepreneurial markets stripped of some of their more corporatist features.

If we are heading into the post-industrial world, we should strip ourselves of the biases and sloppy language of the past. If capitalism just means a decentralized structure of open, entirely consensual and peaceful exchange then how does this oppose the radical leveling tendency of modern technology?

Capitalism, defined strictly as consensual exchange and entrepreneurship, is the driving force of the innovations lionized by Moore.

To view the post-industrial economy as, in essence, capitalistic does not mean embracing consumerism or defending the public and private abuses by corporations.

The best way we can fight the meaninglessness of consumerism is by allowing people to band together entrepreneurially and create new firms with new philosophies, new schools with new methods, and entirely new communities with new creative ethics.

Misguided regulation crushes the start-up school or the small artisan of Moore’s post-industrial world first and foremost.

The true mismatch is between Moore’s optimistic and compelling sketch of our shared future and the cynicism and sclerosis of politics. That is, politics in the abstract. If we believe all things are in upheaval, then rearranging political parties or piecemeal reform simply won’t work.

This is not an expression of ‘market fundamentalism’ or ‘hypercapitalism’. It’s the sober acceptance that political institutions are also a technology. And they’re long overdue for some of the creative destruction that Moore has sketched so beautifully.

RSE is pushing for exactly this: to take the enterprising spirit that has worked wonders in technology into politics, education, and culture. Is the post-industrial economy just RSE, writ large? Recommended.

But ride-sharing isn’t quite like catching a cab or even an Uber.

Instead of managing a fleet of taxis, each of the three manages their own cooperative ride-sharing community. They don’t own the cars, pay the drivers, or even act as dispatch.

Passengers use mobile apps to directly request rides from any nearby, participating driver.

The apps show information like driver ratings based on previous passenger experiences. The ratings cut both ways, so drivers are able look at a prospective rider’s rating before accepting the request.

Sidecar on the iPhone

The apps also facilitate payment via a credit card linked to the user’s account. Passengers simply indicate how much to pay their driver and the app takes care of the rest—this is also where the companies hope to profit, by taking a bit off the top of each transaction.

Unlike using a taxi or a limo, payment is treated as an optional ‘donation’. The idea is that by treating payment as a ‘donation’, it becomes legally equivalent to giving a friend money for gas.

Since there is no set rate or obligation to pay a particular amount—or any amount at all¹—the trio qualify as ride-sharing, and therefore aren’t subject to licensing requirements … maybe.

In September, The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and the San Francisco Metro Transit Authority (SFMTA) both issued cease and desist orders to the companies. All three start-ups elected to continue operations.

On November 13^th, the CPUC came down on Lyft and SideCar²; it’s unclear why Tickengo evaded the fine, but not the original cease-and-desist order.

Lyft and SideCar are continuing with operations while they negotiate with the CPUC. A general petition has also been started as a show of public support.

Ultimately, these new business models don’t fit into the current regulatory framework, so there is a lot riding on what the regulators and the courts do next.

Legal interpretation aside, the underlying concern is that consumers are being put at excessive risk out of a lack of oversight.

But ride-sharing has oversight — it’s just private.

For example, Lyft vets all applicants and only approves around 5% of would-be drivers. The process includes background checks as well as basic training. Vehicles must also meet minimum standards for maintenance. Beyond that, the company carries insurance coverage for up to 1 million USD over drivers’ personal policies.

Community driver sporting Lyft’s trademark pink ‘carstache’. Photo courtesy of checkdoublecheck.blogspot.com

SideCar and Tickengo have taken similar measures to improve safety and mitigate risk.

These companies represent competing regulatory systems, not just ride-sharing.

People may want the security of uniform standards for drivers and vehicles. But there is no reason these standards need to be set by a central authority.

If the system certified by SideCar or Lyft loses credibility, it withers and dies. These competitive pressures are on the side of the customer.

In addition to oversight from each of the service providers, the networks themselves enjoy a form of self-regulation via the ratings system which establishes a member’s reputation in the community.

Reputation is an old form of social technology. Knowing Bob’s reputation can help you decide if you should trust him; it also makes Bob want to be trustworthy because if he’s not, others will eventually find out—with negative consequences for Bob.

In this case, Bob the driver risks never getting another ride request and Bob the passenger risks never getting another ride.

But ride-sharing is only part of a much larger wave of P2P markets or what’s being termed ‘Collaborative Consumption‘.

RelayRides and Getaround enable P2P car rentals. Airbnb helps users rent out extra rooms to vacationers. Vayables connects travelers with locals who act as tour guides.  And Taskrabbit … is for just about everything else under the sun.

These platforms allow people to create brand new markets and better use the resources they already have at hand.

But exactly how these new systems figure into the current political-economy is anyone’s guess. Many of these platforms threaten a host of entrenched interests, so backlash should be expected.

Given that the CPUC’s raison d’etre is to manage and regulate, its attitude toward these companies is no surprise. The SFMTA has the additional incentive of protecting its coffers. Taxi licensing is under the SFMTA’s purview and the monies brought in are considerable — ride-sharing networks could cut into an important revenue stream.

We should not forget that officials who claim to be ‘protecting’ them from ‘unregulated’ start-ups may have biases of their own.

Despite all that, government isn’t monolithically against the start-ups. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has actually been receptive to ride-sharing and the broader ‘sharing economy’; even if what that translates into politically is unclear.

Ultimately, the genie is well out of the bottle. Whether or not these particular companies survive may not matter in the long run since they’ve already given us a proof-of-concept.

After all, shutting down Napster didn’t stop file-sharing so there’s little reason think ride-sharing and other P2P markets wont find a way as well.

…

1. One minor difference between the three is that Tickengo users indicate a dollar amount they’re willing to ‘donate’ along with their intended destination as part of their ride request.

Lyft and SideCar use a formula to determine a suggested ‘donation’ amount based on criteria like the length of the ride and the average amount ‘donated’ for similar trips—users are still free to deviate from the suggestion.

2. While not a ride-sharing sevice, transportation start-up Uber was also fined $20,000 along with Lyft and SideCar

A guest article by Jeff Fong. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes about the intersection of politics, economics, and technology.

The New York Times recently published an article called “How to Live without Irony“.

The (slightly cranky) piece diagnoses hipster culture as the malaise of spoiled and superficial Millennials. They (as a Millennial I should say ‘we’) can commit to nothing. We are meticulous planners of our image. We use irony to deflect anything that might betray genuine emotion or seriousness.

Ironic living, writes the author, “is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise.”

Unfortunately, the author suggests Millennials should fix themselves by using fewer inside jokes and having less eccentric wardrobes.

She just doesn’t get it.

Why do we get all our news from Jon Stewart and the Onion? Because the real world appears so absurd that it’s often hard to tell the difference between a farce and the evening news. Why not choose late-night comedy instead? It’s a lot less tragic.

Even if we don’t understand all the gory details, Millennials are aware that American society is not healthy.

We jail more people than anywhere else in the world, mostly for a War on Drugs that Millennials do not believe in. Our leaders regularly lie to us (the truth hurts), and people who actually tell the truth are punished by those in power.

We can’t find jobs (and we can find even fewer that are meaningful or offer upward mobility). We can see investment bankers floating down on golden parachutes (paid by us) while we’re paying off our gargantuan student debts (or more likely, not being able to pay them).

An honest look at the future Millennials face makes NPR ask, “Are Millennials the ‘Screwed Generation“?

It’s hard to be sunny. “What happened to the future?” venture capitalist Peter Thiel asks, “We wanted flying cars and instead we got 140 characters.” No wonder we have an insatiable appetite for stories about dystopias. Forget big dreams, let’s update our Facebooks instead.

Besides, living without irony is scary. It means committing to some vision of the world and exposing yourself and your emotions to others. Where will that get us, when so many of the people on top seem to thrive on dishonesty?

Politicians, business people, even sports coaches — where are all the high-profile cases of integrity that we can aspire to? Why be the lone voice of earnestness when cynicism pays?

Our institutions make it even harder. We’ve spent most of our short lives in schools with walls plastered with inspirational posters telling us to ‘Live your dream!’ and ‘Reach for the stars!’, but (ironically) we were too busy pretending to learn while cramming for standardized tests to read them. It’s not like we had a choice.

Why don’t we believe in anything anymore? Why not, damn the torpedoes!, struggle for some sacred ideal?

Because everything is too big, too impersonal, and we can tell the game is rigged. This has been the implicit lesson of most of our schools, politics, and much of our economy for our entire young lives.

We started RSE to fight this cynicism. To help connect people who do not revere authority, but challenge it by creating things that are better. Who get it done. Who are not afraid to live openly with who they are, and who do not hide from their voice of conscience when things get tough. Irony is a powerful weapon, but it’s not a way to live.

If the future is dark, then we shouldn’t hide from it. We should make the creative rebellion against today’s cynicism a lifestyle; to find, in the depths of our winter, that there lay within us an invincible summer.

It would be terrible if irony vanished tomorrow. We need it to fight back. Irony deflates the pretensions and lies of those who otherwise would prey on our youthful naiveté. We ought to use it to make a laughing stock of those who are doing humanity harm.

But we need to stop using irony to hide from uncomfortable truths.

So instead of living with grave seriousness, let’s just live honestly. A world without irony would be lacking in honesty, and a lot less fun. Because believing in the future and facing absurdity every single day takes courage — and a healthy appreciation for the ironic.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the New York Times opined, “A Big Storm Requires Big Government”

Cynical NYT editorials notwithstanding, the reality of the storm was quite different. (We are not a political community and have no interest in arguing the partisan politics of the editorial.)

FEMA centers throughout affected areas were mysteriously ‘closed due to weather.‘ Where formal disaster centers remained open, their behavior baffled many:

“The objective is to get the disaster survivors into a centralized facility where they can register for all of the different federal programs,” [FEMA press relations agent] Frank Lepore says, including both FEMA aid and help from the U.S. Small Business Administration. To register, he continues, they are directed to call an 800 number, after which FEMA will dispatch damage assessors to determine what claims they’ll pay. “That is the message of the moment: To get people into the system.”

Without bureaucracy, 800-numbers, or ‘systems’, recovery was quickly taken over by citizens themselves. ‘Occupy Sandy’ — a spur-of-the-moment project of Occupy Wall Street veterans — converged on Brooklyn. They communicated using social media, and even set up a wedding registry on Amazon.com to crowdsource donations.

“Grassroots Have Taken Over Sandy Relief” declared one headline. Doctors put out cardboard signs offering free treatment to the injured. Kids set up bake sales to fund relief. People with generators dangled plugs out of their windows to let others charge cellphones in areas without power.

Volunteer fire companies — affectionately dubbed ‘Vollies’ — hauled emergency aid in human assembly lines. Hotels, restaurants, even private homes, opened up their doors to the homeless.

These random acts of kindness and cooperation are so surprising because they break with our usual way of living. For a moment, we are no longer atomized individuals unified only by market and politics — but members of a community for mutual support.

Although we typically think of social entrepreneurship as building a business, making money, and doing good for the world — community-building is radical social entrepreneurship at its finest.

Self-help and mutual-aid aren’t just good policies for disaster relief — they’re the backbone of independent and self-governing people. We ought to consider whether the spirit ignited by Sandy should be allowed to dim and fizzle with the end of the rain.

What Lansdorp and the team at Mars One are proposing is a human landing on Mars using only current technology and private financing by 2023.

photo courtesy of Mars One

The catch? It’s a one-way trip. A one-way ticket lowers the cost and technical difficulty enough to make the ambitious time line possible, according to Lansdorp.

The plan would unfold in multiple stages, the first of which are designed to remotely establish a base camp. Human arrivals would begin with the 2023 mission, followed by two more settlers every two years thereafter.

Upon arriving, colonists keep themselves busy with the necessities of survival. Maintaining solar arrays, cultivating plants in special greenrooms, and servicing life-support systems are full-time jobs.

Additionally, the daily upkeep would double as an around-the-clock research project in biology, alternative energy, and space technology.

As for financing? Reality TV.

The idea is pretty ingenious, actually. A venture this audacious, this singular in the record of human history, could hardly fail to generate interest–and that’s what Lansdorp is counting on.

If everything goes  according to plan, monetizing the TV rights would cover the initial investment and then some. The settlement is also designed to gradually become self-sufficient, meaning costs should decrease over time.

The potential media exposure could also help attract partners and affiliates.

After all, who wouldn’t want to say their company helped humanity traverse the heavens and descend upon Martian soil like conquering Olympian Gods? Charmin Ultra — proud sponsor of Interplanetary Colonization since 2023.

Laboratories of Government

But assuming the technical and financial hurdles are surpassed, one still has to wonder how a future network of Martian communities would be governed.

Settlers would not only need to adapt technologically, but also socially to create a society of any size or complexity.

Just as technologies like cars or planes would be completely useless as-is, so too would many forms of existing social technology — cultural and governmental institutions.

Groups like The Free Cities Institute and The Seasteading Institute are already working on creating more responsive, more adaptable models of governance using entrepreneurially-created law, governance, and community as the building blocks.

Common among these projects is not only the belief in implementing better sets of rules, but also placing governments in competition over citizens.

The theory is that by having a number of small political units — with residents and businesses free to relocate as they please — competitive pressure would force cities to adopt better and better legal and political practices as they compete to attract a mobile population.

Competition between political units already exists on some level. Multinational businesses and investors already migrate toward the most favorable legal and political environments, applying significant pressure on governments in the process.

Mobility for most people, especially the poor, is impeded by national immigration laws. Competitive governance seeks to give the same mobility enjoyed by multinationals and the wealthy to all members of society, thereby increasing government responsiveness across the board.

Perhaps some of these projects will produce concrete results for future generations, and perhaps   the results would be useful if Mars One succeeds.

Rules for ‘Martians’

But more interesting is to wonder what types of governmental and cultural practices might develop independently on Mars — and how instructive they might be for rethinking our own institutions.

Given the current prohibitive cost of a two-way trip, Martian settlers would likely be safe from either  corporate or colonial oppression.

Instead what comes to mind is Robert Heinlen’s classic novel about a future society on the Moon. Heinlen’s work depicts alternative legal, commercial, and even familial institutions emerging from humans adapting to an unforgiving environment.

Settlers in a Martian colony might be subject to very similar circumstances.

Destruction of either persons or property could easily end a fragile human settlement, so one could expect non-violent dispute resolution to be the norm.

And even if multiple settlements were to take hold on the planet, the extreme risk associated with violence would strongly deter inter-settlement war.

Social norms developing under these conditions might greatly curtail political violence out of the societal habits ‘locked-in’ during the earlier, formative period.

Of course, all of this assumes that Mars One is able to get its vision off the ground– figuratively and literally.

Either way, we’ll know within a decade if everything is going according to plan.

And while I wont hold my breath until 2023, I’ll definitely keep a hopeful eye on the project and maybe watch some reality TV while I wait.
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A guest article by Jeff Fong. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes about the intersection of politics, economics, and technology.