It is helpful to think of ethics as the values we believe in and virtues as the actions we take to create change around them.
I am optimistic as there is a wave of awareness in the market, cross generations, cross social demographics, cross borders around the growing need to act against climate change and the decimation of endangered species and ecosystems.
A broad ethical underpinning in place.
Yet when I ask myself what I can do to deepen awareness and initiate positive actions to mitigate environmental change, I invariably come up way short.
When your kids or employees ask where they can get reliable information, where do you point them? Where can they join groups in school or at work to learn more and truly make a difference?
This is the largest issue and the biggest opportunity we have today. Moving the mass market along the continuum from a broadly shared ethic to actionable collective virtues.
This question has been nagging at me for over a year as I run headlong into it with projects building new economies at the intersection of the blockchain, collectibles, and games.
As well, I’ve been inspired into action by the tireless work of my friends Bill Tai and Gigi Bresson and their respective non-profits ACTAI Global and Ocean Elders. They work at the highest level–with corporations and governments, with the United Nations SDG initiatives, with large donors. Hosting events globally to bring attention and rally resources around the plight of our oceans.
My thinking is at the mass market level, challenging the status quo with new ways to organize and act specifically suited to the times we live in.
Where we need real-time platforms that connect the experts and luminaries with the curious and active mass market, making it frictionless to find positive actions for everyone. From grade school students to each and everyone of us.
Every action helps of course, but not everyone has the expendable income to donate or feels satisfied with crowd funding solutions. A small percent of people are inclined to march and carry signs.
Coalescing this multitude of concerned people is where true change can happen. History has proven that profound reconfiguration of culture occurs only when unstoppable pressure comes from the bottom up, driving top down actions that impact laws and funding.
I’ve been trying to figure out how we leverage mass good will into some form of active participation.
Back at the beginning of the social nets, we looked to Facebook and Twitter for community building, information, and engagement. We thought incorrectly that posting was an action and a benefit.
We know better now, understanding that they may part part of the problem itself. Or maybe simple the wrong motivation foisted on an ill-structured platform.
With every change in culture, communications and community are always the frontier to crack anew for every era. Finding a pulse that fuses the need, the pent up energy with community structures using whatever capability for scale tech has to offer.
This is the missing link today.
Stories and their active impact and the episodic relationship between individual thoughts and cultural evolution is a never ending process of discovery. Always tough to harness, always powerful once you get it right.
This approach to incentivizing change from the bottom up is timeless, dating back to the birth of the Agora in ancient Greece some 2500 years ago.
I imagine Socrates on a stone dais in a public square, challenging the moral status quo with Plato listening intently in the crowd. Later on Plato himself on a dais with Aristotle the neophyte, then his disciple in the circle of engaged debaters.
From there on across the world, through time in some Alice’s Restaurant type of movement to a younger version of myself as a student, to me today.
It’s always how we tell the story and how we build community to engage around it that matters. Medium is not the message but it is the thread that brings community and communications together.
After 9/11, pre the social web, in every park in NY there were circles of people talking, crying, and arguing. We had email and cell phones of course, but building memory was a physical act that people did together in the flesh.
The world was smaller then as were our communications tools. Today we need something for our times.
I have a solution in development, and will send links for early users in the new year.
But one idea, one platform for today’s world is not enough.
The situation is too dire, the need too great, the world too large, and the possibilities for innovation around this truly endless.
If you have ideas to share, pushback to offer, or projects underway, this is something worth talking about.
