Aaron Swartz: How to Save the World, Part 1

A couple years ago I was following random links on the internet and accidentally ended up on some blog where one guy made a comment like this:

>> I really want to make the world a better place, but in the current world I don't even know how or where would I start.

And it resonated a lot, as I've always asked myself how to make a better world too, but you can feel so helpless thinking about it! Like, doing an honest job, being nice to others and recycling is not really making the world a better place: it doesn't change the direction we are going towards, and there's always been people doing an honest job and being nice to others through history. You are just maintaining the trend of what humans do, not finding an inflection point.

I really admire Aaron Swartz, and the ideas shared in this essay are good. But I believe it's too focused on institutional politics, and through the years I've kinda developed a different view myself, so I'll share some additional, complementary ideas:

- Focus first on what you create, not what you consume. We keep trying to raise awareness on small actions for people to do X less wrong, as if putting your grain of sand on the problem currently on the highlight is going to make the world a better place, but... there are too many problems for that to be really transformational (even if it's true that the increased awareness might eventually lead to some bigger movements). We should be most morally pristine with the work we do, and stop trying to "pay our moral quote" through small feel-good actions afterwards. That's not a scalable approach to solve problems. I'm not a "be strict in what you send, be liberal in what you accept" kind of guy, but what's definitely not a good approach is "be lax in what you send and strict in what you receive".

- Psychology and complex systems have taught us that even if individuals can behave very differently, there are often bigger conditionants that shift the whole terrain and make every individual tilt along with it. Aaron Swartz seems to focus a lot in changing individuals; I think it's even more important to change the terrain, and for that we first need to identify the dynamics of the systems we live in. Meditations On Moloch [0] is a good essay to illustrate this idea and reflect about practical examples.

- Individual capacity alone is not a big deal in society. When it comes to power, money comes first, public prominence might come next, then networking and connections, and only quite below we might find individual capacity and a few others. Basically, being able to leverage the capacities of others is much more powerful than trying to polish and leverage only your own. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try to become a capable person yourself, and many are quite connected, but you need to understand the relevance of network effects if you are trying to achieve anything beyond your house. If what you create does not connect with others, if there's no bridge, then there's no hope. And here I'd usually argue for trying to create consensus, but with time I've seen that consensus through reasoning simply doesn't work well; so nowadays I'm much more focused on finding ideas and dynamics that can create "consensus through practical use": if an idea is good, well executed, connects with others and it has some reasonable way to scale from a few people to many more (so, it works well for both small and big groups of people), then you have a high chance to successfully infect the world with your ideas starting from your own town. Going Critical [1] inspired this last analogy.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[1] https://meltingasphalt.com/interactive/going-critical/