Human evolution has been enabled by community. As the name suggests, at the heart of any community is communication.
Unfortunately, our modern communication tools are predicated upon engulfing time, driving ad clicks and absorbing personal data. This is achieved primarily by stoking our tribalistic us vs. them nature through divisiveness and fear.
The impact of this is that, despite our ability to communicate instantaneously with an ever increasing number of people globally, our communication has never been worse. Rather than using our modern miracles to create a better society for everyone, they are used to relentlessly scream past one another.
Every morning people storm the beaches of social media with the same ferocity our grandfathers stormed the beaches of Normandy. The only difference is that, instead of fighting Nazis and liberating concentration camp prisoners, social media is used to dunk on strawman arguments from extreme and frequently misrepresented examples from groups with whom we disagree.
The idea for Networked.Community was originally formed in the wake of the Covid pandemic. We hoped this would finally be the unifying and motivating force to address the underlying systemic issues that allowed such a horrific event to happen in a supposedly advanced society. Unfortunately, the reality was, like everything else, Covid was used to drive us vs. them and gain political points and ad clicks. And nothing of value was gained.
Meanwhile, we are entering year three of the pandemic and, if anything, we seem to be careening toward a post apocalyptic demise. Covid is just scratching the surface, but when you factor in monumental debt, famine, war (now, in space!), income and healthcare inequality, climate change, and countless other mounting catastrophes…I don’t even know.
So…we should probably do something about this, right? Not looking up at our impending demise isn’t the right answer, but neither is shouting past one another within our respective bubbles.
Well, solving society’s systemic problems is the primary purpose of the Networked.Community. Better yet, enabling all of us to provide mutual support in solving society’s problems. Society is its people, afterall, and so who better than us to fix it?
One fundamental thesis is that, despite how convenient it is to believe so, there is no one person, institution or government responsible for society’s problems. The problems we face today are an evolutionary byproduct decades, centuries and millennia in the making. Not even the media, government or corporations are to blame. These are all just comprised of people, after all, all of which should be working together to address these root issues.
Going back even further, our problems are rooted in our ape, lizard and fish-brained biology, predicated upon fight or flight and survival of the fittest. We believe, however, that there are other alternatives than these. And we believe that, despite our place atop the great apes, we have within our control the ability to drive humanity’s next evolutionary stage.
Unlike every other social media platform, which is predicated upon maximizing ad revenue and gobbling up data to drive up them sweet, sweet stonks, our ambitions are not to make ourselves wealthy. In fact, we plan to ultimately turn over control of Networked.Community to a nonprofit, the Human Union, in which any profits will be returned to the nonprofit. And because nobody owns a nonprofit, society itself owns and benefits from such an institution.
Furthermore, we aspire to enable people to own, control and prosper from their personal data rather than trading our greatest currency to the highest bidder in order to drive more consumption.
We are making Networked.Community what social media should have been if social media had truly been social. Networked.Community is a decentralized, open and encrypted platform to enable people to support one-another and create a better community for society’s benefit.
If you’re interested in joining the Networked.Community and helping us create Society 2.0, head over here and let us know.
