With some internal shuffles, the team I work within is looking for some new hires to do pretty much what I do. The way our team works is that we are all invited to the initial interview to get a sense of who the person is and whether they are suitable for the group dynamic. It was two years ago almost to the day, that I ran the gauntlet through the same process and I think it is a good way to do it, as essentially, the entire team (small team) opts-in on anyone who is hired, or at least has their voice heard and opinions discussed. Since we all work quite closely and help each other out often, even when delivering independently, trust is important.
I write about trust relatively often here, as I see it is important for many factors of Hive, even though this is meant to be a "trustless" environment. At the blockchain level, trustlessness is fine, but at the community level, it is vital, as it is the glue that holds people together and just like the trust connections created in computation and transaction - social interaction that doesn't fulfil or breaks the conditions of trust, means people step away and disengage, as they can no longer rely on social transfer.
I think that we have created a society that has diluted the trust in each other, by creating incentives that life the individual, even if to do so comes at the expense of others. This has made a lot of relationships transactional, where the only reason for the relationship at all, is to satisfy a narrow band of personal wants. Online, this is even more obvious, as there is incentive and reward to portray a certain image, even if one has to fudge the numbers or make it up entirely.
As a result of the disconnection from each other, we have also moved away from trusting each other, which means, not knowing each other very well at all. As has been said for decades now, "we no longer know our neighbors" and what this means is, we can no longer trust them. This results in everyone becoming more vulnerable to predatory actions, as we are all on our own, isolated from the group.
We have created a world of familiar strangers, people who we know at the level they have exhibited themselves online, but are largely unknown because what they project is engineered to position themselves favorably for their own end - whatever that may be. This has had a profound impact on us as a society in my opinion, as not only do people trustless because of this, when they do trust they have less experience evaluating their potential target of trust and therefore, are more likely to make errors in judgement that will "prove" that people are untrustworthy and only in it for themselves. This becomes a circular economy of trust that feeds it self and generates less trust over time, making people even more individualistic and isolated from each other.
The problem with a lack of trust in the interactions and relationships, is that it makes it increasingly difficult to collaborate for outcomes that require multiple human resources, as people are less likely to cooperate, collaborate and help each other by combining skills and capabilities. This means that while an individual might be able to have more freedom, as a society, we can accomplish less, especially in the largest things we face, considering we can't even trust each other to provide the information to the best of our knowledge, whether it be fake news or fake reviews - virtually everything is suspect.
I think that as we move forward into a world where what we have relied on continues to fail, we will have to find more ways to negotiate the treacherous waters of social trust in order to cope and survive. I think that blockchain will play a large part in this process, as it will be able to "mimic" trust mechanisms based on data that we ourselves don't have the ability to gather, interpret or evaluate effectively. This means that we will be able to have confidence in each other, despite not knowing each other - but what this will have to do is use the past to predict the future, meaning track record will have an effect on future possibility.
Currently, we live in a digital environment that at least at the surface level, allows us to traverse communities as an unknown, acting in different ways depending on the role we are projecting. But, if we imagine an ecosystem where that is no longer possible as there will be tethers of information that create our digital world profile, we could predict that people will start to conform to a social standard that best rewards us, essentially formalizing and codifying the game of life in ways that are every more granular and predictable.
This becomes dystopic, as life loses randomness and increases in programming, but with so many large problems to solve that are affecting us at a global level, since we aren't going to collaborate willingly, we might end up just being forced through technological design. Of course, what this would mean is that the incentives would have to change to move away from rewarding individual accomplishment and rewarding individuals for activities that support the group.
This is essentially how we have lived in the past as tribes when we knew each other, but fractured away from this as distances between groups increased in various ways. But, now we have reconnected ourselves at the global level, but don't have the social tools to collaborate in this way, as not only is communication a challenge, trust is almost impossible. But, here we are on Hive and while we might not have solved all the problems of the world, we are developing and testing the tools that are able to help us to not only connect and collaborate, but start shifting the incentive structure to reward generative activity and provide increasing resources to propel the energy forward, taking ideas into practice.
The direction may not be apparent now as most of us are still straddling the two worlds of where we have come from and where we are headed and the road ahead isn't clear, but we do know that what we have today isn't working and needs to change. as I mentioned a couple of times today in some replies, a lot of people focus their attention on what they can do and get, without connecting it to what it brings others. When it comes to any service business, the business needs to serve and that means, provide something of value for customers, where in this case, the customers are the community, ort some portion of it.
The benefit of a decentralized network isn't the ability to keep fracturing into more granular individuals, it is the ability to freely collaborate to areas where we feel are important to us and we can add value. There are lots of ways to participate and contribute and, there are lots of potential to benefit at an individual level while still benefiting the group. It isn't do one or the other, it doesn't have to be a zero sum game - we have the ability to compound our activities and form many overlapping groups that approach challenges from diversified positions, with each benefiting from the activity of the others.
Do you trust that the future will be better than the past?
There are lots of positions to fill.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]