I just updated my LinkedIn profile for the first time in forever. They asked me to put up a summary of my goals, so I wrote this. I’ll post it here as well to look back on some years down the line. I will certainly specialize in one particular area, but for now my goals are broad and lofty, world-changing even. If you’re reading this and are involved with a project down one of these lines, let me know. I might just love working with you.
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I have an insatiable hunger for learning and spend hours a day keeping up on developments in technology, politics, and education. I’m passionate about how Internet technology opens up democratic participation in culture, business, and politics and think that we have hardly begun to explore what is possible through our connections with community. I intend to apply my knowledge to projects that aim to revolutionize commerce, politics, and education.
In business, I want to be part of creating a distributed system of community credit clearing that is free from the inflationary growth pressure created by money-as-debt from central banks. I think this is an important part of creating a sustainable economy that can confront the challenges of the 21st and 22nd Centuries. Community credit clearing helps commerce stay local while ideas can be shared globally.
In politics, I want to be part of weaning politicians off their dependence on money by creating open fora where issues are debated thoughtfully and the most important questions rise to the top through community moderation. In order to give force to ideas and policy over partisanship, I advocate for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), a system that forces the big two parties to compete against others by removing pressure to vote for the “lesser of two evils”
I will be involved in education, regardless of where my other interests take me. I have a vision for education reform both inside and outside of institutions that emphasizes using technology to spread access to information, connecting people and ideas, and abandoning higher ed business models that depend on scarcity of knowledge. My honors thesis at the University of Oregon focused on how intellectual property protection affects the spread of information and culture. I encouraged content creators to open up and spread their work as freely as possible, adopting business models that are not scarcity-dependent. I have applied this thinking to education in my recent study.
