The rise of esteem in 2017

Where would human society be now if scientists had to gather or grow their own food? Technological advancement is achieved through our ability to co-operate and specialize. Time is an exceedingly limited resource and for a scientist to have the time to muse and innovate, someone else must take care of her/his other requirements. Gathering knowledge is an iterative process and with all the time in the world, a scientist would get no-where if he could not rely upon the building blocks of his own knowledge...whether he personally verified all of it or not.

As a result of working together, relying upon each other, human society gives itself the possibility to advance and flourish. This possibility is built upon a foundation of trust. Specialist segments of society do a job in which they hold the expertise and everyone else can spend their time concentrating on their own area or simply enjoying the fruits of modern efficiency.

Unfortunately, there is a problem. The problem is power. Over time, our systems of co-operation are always co-opted in order to serve a minority. No matter the harm, anything that expedites the aggregation of power will eventually occur. So, in the pursuit of dominion we find ourselves in our present situation. Many areas of our lives are now being effected by a failure of specialization. We can no longer rely upon our food production, science, medicine, education, laws, journalism or our currency....to name a few. They have all been corrupted one way or another to expedite the aggregation or maintenance of power. So what is everyone going to do now? Grow your own food, do your own science, find your own medicine, educate yourself then your own children, live by your own laws, research your own news, create your own currency? That's going to be extremely time consuming, desperately challenging and highly inefficient.

How have all these vital areas of human co-operation been corrupted? Ultimately, if you have enough money, you can corrupt any system because in our predominantly centralised societies, there is always a weak link. The money ultimately comes from central banks that have the power to create it for nothing whilst generating obligations at interest backed by laws written for them. They therefore have virtually unlimited power and leverage over any person, company or institution. The corruption spreads out from there. Central banks are privately owned by the shareholders of other banks which are in turn shareholders of the largest companies in the world.....pharmaceuticals, energy, food, construction, media, telecommunications. They all want to make money any way they can and the best way to make money is to control the law. The best way to control the law is to buy the governments and the best way to buy governments is to put the power to govern is as few hands as possible.

Given the use or abuse of power never goes unnoticed for long, it becomes necessary to cover up the obvious and grotesque injustices that are typical of anything it touches. All of this inevitably leads to a massive degradation in the foundation of trust that enables society to function along with a catastrophic degradation in available information.

The biggest failure in this whole monstrous mess is a failure of accountability. Accountability is a gardener and left to it's work, we would more likely be living in a garden rather than a weed-choked swamp.

As a global society, it has become extremely urgent for us to find a way to reintroduce trust to many of the systems and areas of specialization upon which we rely most heavily. Critical to this effort is the ability to source and disseminate high quality information. As it stands, those with the power hide or degrade more and more information that is pertinent to solving the world's problems. The higher quality information is hoarded and hidden which prevents anything useful from being done with it. Power is not interested in solving the world's problems, it is interested in serving itself. The idea that a central authority can ever know what is best is absolutely ridiculous because what is best is always seen through the lens of self-preservation. All knowledge that does not directly conflict with a person's right to privacy should be available to all.

Blockchains, Steemit and Steem

Steem is a distributed ledger, or blockchain, that ensures that the history of transactions taking place across it's network are extremely difficult to prevent or alter. Steemit is the first iteration of functional utility that has been launched...a secure, censorship resistant, blogging platform with an incentive structure that rewards various contributions with both money and reputation.

It is the reputation measurement, tied to identity and working in tandem with financial incentives, which may form the basis of a powerful solution to the issue of trust and specialization. The magic ingredient here would be accountability. If you are a journalist and you publish your stories on Steemit, which is financially rewarding you, you are unlikely to want to tarnish your reputation lightly because the information you publish can be fact-checked and you will be held accountable for it. The cost is damage to reputation, earnings and future opportunities....very expensive.

Presently the reputation figure is rather general purpose, with greater specificity, the metric could have more value. For example, someone who has a high reputation for being a talented artist does not necessarily deserve a reputation for the insightful analysis of scientific journals or producing original and factually accurate news stories.

As the Steem economy and user base continues to grow, functionality adjustments or new applications will continue to be made that will enable different specialist activities to make use of the Steem blockchain. They will have the opportunity to build a reputation in their fields of expertise and gradually, the information they provide, tempered by accountability, will shine a light on all the garbage and rapidly set a new benchmark for integrity from which we can rebuild trust and co-operation once more.

I hope Steemians truly grasp the incredible value that Steemit and Steem are demonstrating. It is astonishing that in the midst of a global propaganda war, there is a platform that enables anyone in the world to publish anything they want for free whilst earning money and esteem. Like the 150/1 rank outsider that somehow eludes detection until it crosses the finish line in first place, the market certainly does not understand the power of Steem and I am happy for that to continue, at least for a while.

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Happy Steeming