Welcome to FutureProof!
Post 1
What is it all about, man?
Hey everyone. I wanted to make a more formal first post for this blog thing, as I’m planning to do quite a bit of posting and I want to sort of set it up so that all of the future ones will make sense. That means we need an ‘About Me’ post in which I spill my guts about what has caused me to decide that blogging is a good idea.
First, background. I have a bachelor’s degree and an MA in philosophy; which I used to teach. I published my first peer-reviewed book on the subject (Formal Dialectics) in 2018 with a boutique British press called Cambridge Scholars Publishing. They’re great. I highly recommend them if you’re interested in getting a serious peer-reviewed academic book put out. They’re boutique, so the books are expensive, but let’s be honest: most academic books are.
Two years ago, I got sucked into a biotech company, where I wrote things like patents and whitepapers. I directed their research and things went quite well, but eventually it just became apparent that I was not a culture fit and thus it was better for me to strike out on my own. Which is interesting, because you’ll recall from the previous paragraph that my background is in philosophy and NOT physiology. However, I was somehow able to catch my stride and make real headway, which has convinced me to make another grand choice: medical school.
That’s right, folks. I’m doing all of this because I can’t work a traditional job while taking loads of intensive science and math at the undergraduate level (which I have to do, to go to med school… they’re called prerequisites, and I didn’t take them my first time around). I drive for Uber, and I’ve done a few books which provide me with a modest income, but now the story of the blog comes up and this is where things start to get really interesting.
This blog was born out of my involvement with a small-but-growing hacker collective known as Cent. You can find my Cent profile here. From the very first moment of my engagement with the community, I felt like a fit. And as time has gone on, I’ve launched a novel and written a number of short stories and poems for the audience over there. They’ve always seemed attentive and appreciative and it’s hard to put into words the feeling that this gave me. I didn’t know it could really happen that way, and I’ve published quite a few writings over the years!
The main driver behind my interest in Cent was a man named Jaron Lanier, whose works I’ve been following for about a decade now. His book Who Owns The Future? predicted, accurately, that I had torrented it, and then in December of 2019, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now predicted that I was listening to it. The man just seems to be a few steps ahead of most anyone else in the technology game, and he put me into exactly the mindset I needed to be in to see what Cent really is, and what it will become.
Lanier maintains that the main thing social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google) do involves manipulating our emotions to get us to buy stuff. He calls this methodology bummer because it works by making you feel bad, then showing you something for sale in the hopes that you buy it.
But that’s not how everything will be for much longer. In fact, shortly after discovering Cent, I’ve found two other fairly impressive attempts at a non-bummer user activity model. They’re called The Brave Browser and Publish0x.
Publish0x is a crypto-based publishing company which rewards readers and content creators through an incentive system in which there exists a pool of money which users then award to themselves and others. If you like a story a lot, you can give 100% of your tip to the author. If you hate it, you can keep up to 80% of the small chunk of change to yourself.
The Brave Browser is a privacy-protection device designed to keep Google and Facebook from tracking you all around the internet. It also allows you to earn, again, a small amount of cryptocurrency just for using it and allowing ads to occasionally appear on your screen.
You’ll notice immediately that both of these platforms are invested in users in a way that I personally haven’t really seen since those lame old games when the internet first came out that tried to make it possible for users to earn cash somehow just by spending time on a website. I remember spending hours on one that was like a tree of dollar bills and somehow supposedly I was earning money by playing some silly game. If that account is still out there somewhere, I hope it is accruing compound interest!
And so the story of this blog is a simple one—I was at a transitional point in my life, when suddenly I fell into a cryptocurrency based community that did the opposite of what Facebook does, at least in Lanier’s view. Cent made me feel good about myself and my writing, when most of the rest of the time I’ve been doing it most of what has happened has been an attempt in one way or another to bum me out. Brave and Publish0x have the power to generate a modest revenue stream, along with Cent, and Medium, and of course my books on Amazon.com (find Formal Dialectics here and Further From Home here) and Uber.
All of this is to say that I am writing this blog for a specific purpose: I want to catalogue this journey that I’m going on so that other people can benefit from the things I learn. Whether it has to do with selling eBooks on Amazon or some sort of affiliate marketing promo that works gangbusters, I’ll start with what I’m up to, explain how to do whatever it is I’m on about during a given issue, and then offer suggestions for readers to apply these insights to their own efforts to make a living online.
I’m looking forward to the journey here, and I hope you are too. Be sure to stop by my website to have a look around. If you want to, you can sign up for an account there which will let you post comments and even get email notifications when I release new content.
Cheers!
-Dylan
