what technology is actually worth building

the technologist ethos

there are fundamental issues with how most tech is designed today (alienation, polarization, centralization of profits/externalization of costs, distraction, etc - and many people are aware of it), but several of these issues are also pervasive in many "tech for good" initiatives.

"good for whom?" might one say. just like many of the "benefits" of modernity/industrialization, how aware are we of the systemic impacts/consequences of such "good", especially on others who might not be benefiting as much from it? how much are we invested in really understanding it? in the dominant "move fast and break things", or even in the philanthropic shallow impact metrics culture, not much.¹

if we understand the extent of the metacrisis and how most technology today is accelerating the rate of existential and catastrophic risks, it's sufficiently scary to make us question: what does mature, wise technology look like?

there's also a lot more talk today about AI alignment and values alignment, but not much alignment amongst humans themselves on what values are, really? academic conversations on ethics and metaphysics also suffer from academic biases, often not dialoguing with other fields of knowledge, epistemologies, ways of knowing, wisdom traditions, etc...

the technological metamodernism course notes do a great job of introducing a few key lesser known perspectives, such as axiological design, powerful research on values, a few philosophical cornerstones of metamodernism, and many resources that i'll often refer to for further understanding/navigating the dominant memetics/narratives in both mainstream and smaller tech sub-cultures (the listening society book as a whole introduces essential distinctions for any technologist/designer/politician [or any human, really], but that can be challenging to navigate).

diome.xyz's research also presents several key frames that both clarify the underlying dynamics of our human predicament and explores what are emergent approaches to developing technology for a regenerative society, going beyond just "humane tech".

i recommend spending a good amount of time digesting these references, as they've been very transformative for me (it's been 5 years brewing and changing things on the inside)...

also, a relevant and more accessible introduction for people completely new to these perspectives is: bret victor's what can a technologist do about climate change? (which focuses on climate, but the reflections he brings are much more applicable than that)

so, after exploring all that, what's worth building?

for me, in short, it's: regenerative systems & tools for self-management, coordination and collaboration (so we can create thriving societies).

now, the answer of what's worth building "now*" is a lot more challenging after we've gone through the philosophical bump. for me, what's worth building "now" depends on a blend of your unique self expression (what's yours to do) and strategy/situational intelligence (what's feasible now).

a few frames that orient me in this space and might also help:

• systems for more conscious learning, living and collaborating.
• systems that extend/improve our OODA loop - i.e. our meta-cognitive processes of sensing, sensemaking, decision-making, action, learning.

there are some people like fifty years, OS fund and futures-oriented funds focused on long-term civilization-altering tech like AI, GNR (genetics, nanotech, robotics) and deeptech in general.

there are others like betaworks, gitcoin/giveth, huggingface and protocol labs, who are supporting many initiatives taking the open-source, modular approach, which have more transformative effects in the present. i have my doubts about how far they can go in their purpose of "fixing the internet", without a deeper architectural intervention such as holochain/synapsis, but nonetheless i see them as valid attempts at improving our current state of things and creating alternatives to our centralized dominant systems. (somewhat like web 2.5 applications)

if these initiatives can work in a similar way to SEEDS, which don't pose to be the final solution (create the next 'regenerative worldcoin'), but are very aware of the self-terminating crises we're in and aim therefore to provide viable transition paths (tools for enabling regenerative economies), i think that's a fair and important attempt, to have truly functional alternatives to our exponentially growing degenerative systems.

though i must say i never really took the time to understand the depth and limitations of IPFS/filecoin, so that's a big knowledge gap on my end (that i intend to solve soon).

we are here to - learn, create, heal, share and play

regenerative systems also imply this holistic (4d) view, but this isn't always the case. we can regenerate the earth at the expense of degenerating some relationships, for example. so i think a challenging yet good frame here is coordination across paradigms.

which aspects of life is this (supposedly) regenerative game really regenerating?

given this context, a few frames on what's worth building for me:

default modes of being: learn, create, heal, share, play

metrics v1: awareness, clarity, effectiveness, efficiency, fulfillment?
metrics v2: regenerative, collaborative,

tech game dynamics:
-> automation, augmentation, optimization