We gotta take the power back!

Hello fellow steemers, if indeed that is the correct term? For this is my first post on this most ingenious platform!

I am myself in the digital industry, mainly a web developer but also head of communications and what my junior would call the brand police for the organisation I work for.

Greater than the sum of its parts

I started with web design in 1997 with HTML, then ASP, before getting into PHP and MySQL, and all the technologies in between. I would say I have an eye for design, and so CSS/SCSS is a particular passion.

When I started out all those years ago, there wasn't the ecosystem there is today with things like GitHub and NPM, if you wanted to do something, you wrote it yourself, and to this day I do prefer to do this where I can.

It's a balance between creating something that integrates perfectly with you other code, and not reinventing the wheel where something works well, has a sensible API, and a good community surrounding it.

It helps me create things that are greater than the sum of their parts, that extra polish that takes something good to feeling seamless and intuitive in every aspect. If someone doesn't realise there is a person that built it, I have done my job properly.

Living in the Matrix

How technology has grown and changed over the last 20 years, and seems to be accelerating at such a pace. My experience so far I hope is giving me insight into the next phase of this technological revolution - taking the power back!

Life feels a little like the matrix at the moment, everything is trying to tell us how life should be, do well at school so you can get a job, pay taxes and pension, borrow loads of money so you can surround yourself with with the latest trendy things, get a dog, and photograph all the best bits so you can show the world just how well you are doing. All ideas transmitted by actors vying for control of us.

Under New Management

How thankful I am for technology, this thing that's starts out with scary (to other people) code, such that we have been left to our own devices, and now that we have the ball rolling, they are starting to have to play the game under new rules, new management.

Like the web development, the general technology ecosystem is developing, tools to make it more accessible to the non tech. Tools that cut out those controlling middlemen, to enable us to make our own decisions and enact them with privacy, transparency, and security.

With the web we have enabled data to flow freely, those who want control over us now realise the power of this global communications platform and see trying to get control over it - there is a war going on out there, net neutrality, filtering, data collection, and our trump card - encryption.

Through encryption, we have invented mechanisms that enable us to communicate securely in plain sight, and now the ecosystem is maturing to make this incredible, complex, yet ingenious technology accessible to the masses.

Financial Meltdown?

The global financial crisis of 2008 showed me we have been taken advantage of, stolen from, and hopefully it has spurred people into taking action.

It certainly spurred Satoshi on as he delivered his whitepaper on Bitcoin in 2009, standing on the shoulders of giants, he envisaged making a distributed immutable ledger, cutting out the middleman and enabling secure trustless exchange. This is of course Blockchain, which if you are a steemer, hopefully you will know all about.

Blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt those trying to control, monitor and steal from us, and could in theory rewrite how we do business with each other entirely.

Central banks and other governor entities will be the big losers here, no longer will we need banks to store our assets, which will cause liquidity issues and no doubt a bit ripple effect, it could even plummet us into another recession, but it will only drive more people toward decentralised people powered services.

Already to me it seems crazy that we trust this system of cards and account numbers that compared to Blockchain has such limited security and privacy features for the user, once you understand it's potential it is a no brainer.

I can even imagine a completely different way of interacting with government, with way less centralised services, pay as you go instead of taxation, and decision making done by consensus. We will probably join a voting collective to fight for the issues we want, and fund groups to research and proxy our votes through micro payments.

Removing barriers to micro payments will also change how we perceive value itself, this website is a perfect example of that.

The Next Phase

I think we are near the tipping point, all the ducks are slowly moving into alignment for the next phase of this revolution, Blockchain is a good rush at the moment, non tech people are moving in to claim their piece of it, hopefully along the way they will see that long term it is not a bubble.

Me? I am pretty late to the crypto party too, but I hope I am in it for the right reasons. I certainly throughout my life have come to question the status quo more and more, and through my abilities and experience in tech, feel now I can see the bigger picture, and am empowered to add my weight to the technologies I think will underpin the future I want.

We gotta take the power back!

So as a band I like and admire, Rage Against The Machine said on their first album all the way back in 1992, we gotta take the power back!

How do you feel about the current status quo? Are you going to take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes?