TownSquare

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Profit driven capitalism and AI is replacing jobs like never before. People are either overworked, losing their jobs, or cannot find jobs. To stimulate the economy, the government prints money in the trillions. This causes the floodgate of inflation to breach, and people are now drowning in a cost of living crisis.

As this downward cycle continues, people becomes desperate like fishes in a pound of evaporating water, driven by only the most primal instinct of survival. Gone are the days of pursuing higher human conscience via philosophy, art or discovery. Our civilization is now collapsing into chaos, as we are at each other's throat for the dwindling resources. 

But it doesn't have to be like this, and we do have enough resources for everyone. They are just not being shared humanely under capitalism. Capitalism is designed for money to generate money, or in other words, for the rich to get richer.

We can save our civilization, if we find a way to transcend capitalism and distribute resources in a sustainable manner. It turns out that there is something to do just that, which is information. You see, information sharing is the secret ingredient that must precede every resource sharing. 

Think about a simple tribal society, the hunter who catches game will share with the rest of the tribe, even though he did all the work. This could be due to reasons below:

The small size and close knit nature of the tribe is such that information flow like the above serve as carot and stick for good behavior that leads to the long term survival of the tribe.

Today, we have become so good at production technologies, or "catching game", but we do not have the required level of information technology for a complex society like ours. With such imbalance, people with the resources don't know whom to share it with beyond the capitalist goal of making profit, and people without the resources can't tell who's hoarding them.

In order to make up for the imbalance, we need to upgrade our social technology to enable the type of communal interactivity that is conducive to sharing. It would be some kind of social platform that makes everyone visible and reachable. The user would be able to message everyone in the plaform, and make a post seen by everyone, without the prerequisite of having to accumulate followers. It is also purpose agnostic, so the user can also filter by any set of criteria to find anyone or group of people for any specific purpose, not just for sharing. For example, you are starting a band, so you filter every guitarist under the age of 30 in your city, then message all of them. The goal is to encourage interactions so people get to know each other well, which again is a prerequisite for sharing.

To enable such level of interactivity, the social platform should limit its service area to that of a city, which is where its users most care about and where a feedback loop of its impact can be felt. Ideally, it should be a public good provided by the city. Just like how cities have physical infrastructure like road and transportations to enable physical exchange, they should also have a virtual infrastructure to facilitate information exchange.

And this is the idea behind TownSquare, a social network for and by the city's inhabitants. TownSquare should also be open sourced, so we just need one city to build it, and all others can follow suit upon seeing its benefit. This way, we save our civilization from collapse, city by city.