Sustainability and how it can repair our bonds with those we've never met

Multimodal Draft 3 by Jordan Palmer

Today I have an elephant on my plate, the demands I’m facing, I mostly put on myself, but are real nonetheless. I have 5 classes and a lab for my first real semster at a university, and anytime in between that I am constantly working to better myself or my surroundings. Whether that be trading cryptocurrency, ubering, working in my home garden, or self teaching myself one of the many new hobbies I somehow acquire weekly. Three things I've been extremely interested in over the last year has been cryptocurrency and the impacts they can have on society and our understanding of how the economy and people connect and trade.

Cryptocurrencies by use of the blockchain and the tangle network will change the world as we know it. Every company that exists today will have a blockchain version entity of itself. The corruption that goes on behind the curtain of fortune 500 companies will no longer exist and if it were happening by way of the blockchain people will be able to see the recording of those transactions and data. The key to blockchain is decentralization which is the opposite of the Federal banking system the world's economy currently runs off of. The days of youtube censorship and facebook and google stealing our personal and private data are soon to be forgotten. I smile writing this knowing my future children may actually have private lives. By way of Civic the cryptocurrency that puts the identification sector on the blockchain can prevent these attacks like the Equifax social security fiasco, and Bitcoin, what's been touted as “Digital Gold”, can potentially end issues like inflation that's currently crippling Venezuela as I type this writing. Even in here in the United States we don’t truly know how many dollars are being printed by the Fed, a currency that kills inflation is something I am in support of but also something the current system will fight extremely hard to not let exist. Bitcoin has a limited supply, with twenty one million coins to ever exist. This is what prevents the government or controlling entities of the currency from creating more and flooding the market with new dollars and thus lowering the value of each. What also makes this currency so revolutionary is similar to the cell phone, it enables people to connect with one another regardless of location or distance, in a matter of minutes and what can be seconds. This feature plus the fact that with these currencies you become your own bank, and have complete power over your finances and thus eliminate the multitude of banking institutions that suck the wealth from each of us that are lucky enough to have one. I say lucky and eliminate for if you live in a first world country because the rest of the 6 plus billion people on earth don’t have access to these things, their lives are still ultimately ruled by this system nonetheless, but with bitcoin, or one of the other thousand, and I am currently not sure which one will be globally adopted or if it will ever be just one but maybe a use of multiple, but what I am sure of is that one of them will empower the rest of the world to have access to features we take for granted daily. Being able to transact and exchange with people over distances is a luxury the shouldn't be one.

I have also been interested in growing cannabis, essentially hemp since that is what's legal in North Carolina, although I do believe the plant as a whole is going to be extremely relevant and beneficial to society in the coming years. The next is the electric advancement the world is in transition to and speak mostly about the clean disruption that is taking place with renewable energy and electric vehicles. In about fourteen years the traditional motor engine displaced the horse in terms of a traditional and viable method of transportation. The electric vehicle is soon on it was to doing the same thing to traditional gas guzzling cars and trucks. This is going to benefit us the consumer in multiple ways like increased savings from transportation costs, decreased maintenance costs, as well as decreasing everyone's ecological footprint by decreasing our carbon dioxide output. As well as open some doors to new methods of earning income introduced by the new economy such as autonomous vehicles that earn us income taking people to work via methods already taking over like Uber, and Lyft.

I have heard faint voices of the new economy in numerous books i've read, such as Princen’s Heart of the Beast, but I do not believe my professors and classmates are seeing this in the same way I am. When I first read about “creating the new economy” I knew exactly what he was talking about. The author who wrote it over 7 years ago had ideas and I wonder, creating his writing just a year after Satoshi Nakamoto released the bitcoin whitepaper. I am already about 25% into this new economy and I must say the room is pretty empty here but I can see it getting more people funnelled in daily. We are roughly reliving the 70s with the internet movement. Entrepreneurs, innovators, and business are just now starting to grasp the blockchain and the new economy that it brings with it.

I would think a solid documentary narrated by David Attenborough would fill the niche of public awareness. Which is ultimately the only thing slowing all this down, besides mass adoption, which would surely follow. All of this is disciplinary to sustainability, regardless if no one that I know is talking or thinking about these things. The main issue in creating a solution is the fact that all of this is a paradigm shift of sorts, it drastically changes everything we know and understand to be true. Jobs will be erased and some people can’t cope, the same people that when I share some of this info with think I’m living a sci-fi fantasy, which sometimes truthfully i think I rather would. The solution definitely needs to find a way to ease people into changing core fundamentals that they operate on daily, and I am not completely sure how to do this gently. I believe if people were to see the full implications of what it could do for people in other countries it may be enough to allow us to feel vulnerable enough to change.