A new word, a new concept

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31797995

by elisk • 4 years ago

7 6 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi everyone, I want to tell you about a new concept, a new word, a new idea.

I have been talking for years about a new social construct, a new structure of conduct. Things like Facebook, the Internet, and Bitcoin are the those that make it possible.

For several years I have been trying to tell people about this new construct that I envision - and each time using all sorts of terms that I find appropriate at that moment, depending on the listener, or depending on our geopolitical and socioeconomic situation at the time.

And I have realized in recent months that one of my mistakes is that I am trying to explain something new with old terms. Then the listener hears a term he already knows, and gets a sense of what it is and what it is not, even before I have time to say one word about my new idea!

So today you are exposed to a new word in Hebrew and English, this word is: "שבד" (Sheved) in Hebrew and "Tride" in English.

What is a Tride? Hopefully this already lights up some associations - by and large this is a Digital Tribe - as well as in Hebrew: שבט דיגטלי.

What does it mean? This means, as mentioned, a new social structure. I feed this structure between our private homes, and up to a city and maybe even a country further down the road - that is, on the order of people involved. The tride is designed to provide a cultural response to a number of unmet needs in our current society, including:

Community - people want to belong, but with our constant movement in space, moving from apartment to apartment, from city to city, from country to country we have a hard time finding the relevant community - community is in my opinion a very important element in our daily lives that we all miss, and there are cultures - like the religious and the ultra-orthodox, for who it is easier first of all under the auspices of the community, thanks to the fact that they have a rabbi who knows how to take responsibility and tell everyone in the community what he thinks, and help the community develop and grow.

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elisk3• 4 years ago

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Cooperation - People want to work with each other but with the capitalist mechanism and existing regulatory structures we are limited to two types of cooperation: marriage, or company Ltd. Both may be good for their needs, but the company Ltd. comes with a lot of problems, and it does not represent the individuals in the tribe, it does not know how to take responsibility for them, and all a company Ltd. knows is to take the work and labor of an employee and give him immediate pay for it. For us as individuals it makes it difficult to build connections, relationships, and career or professional development because we are either committed to our business (and with it to board in many cases), or we are employed and must change employer once per period because the employer does not address the changing needs of the employee. And the needs of the employee in the twenty-first century have changed beyond recognition compared to the needs of the employee in the twentieth century in which the mechanism of a company Ltd. has developed and become established.

Economic Sharing - Here too we are confined to a very limited number of ways to have an economic relationship with others - most often it is a limited company and in some cases it is all sorts of weird variations of it in the form of non-profit organization, associations, and all sorts of different and bizarre things tried over the last couple of centuries - some ideas worked better, some less so - but we are left with a very limited lexicon of financial relationships that we could perform as part of a family or as part of a limited company or an organization.

Knowledge sharing - people want to learn and teach each other a different variety of things, some professional, some artistic, some conceptual - where do they share it? Today, wherever I go to express an opinion, I first receive a string of insults about my different thinking - and that is if I managed to overcome the variety of barriers we place on ourselves in the form of bots that prevent each other's posts, in the form of too tight and closed rules that allow nothing except for very specific topics. And knowledge is power, and there are those who understand it, and it may not always be comfortable and correct to share knowledge and information with the general public. Maybe it's even dangerous sometimes.

Growth - It has been said that in order to raise a child we need a tribe, but we in our current culture are moving away from our parents in the name of self-expression - moving away from their cooking, opinions, and criticisms - for better or worse. But as a father I understand that something is very wrong here. Today's parent is required to choose very little from a very wide range, and without intention, without control, without a credible opinion, we degenerate into a cultural mess - in science, on the planet, in philosophy, in our humanity, in everything possible - because we treat ourselves incorrectly, and there is no We to have an opinion that will give us the ability to adapt our perceived selves to the existing reality. The opinion we have comes in the form of Facebook posts, some sponsored and some not - and we have no way of knowing that. And every time an opinion leader becomes popular, his opinions start to play an economic role in their life, leaving us with an interest that hurts us, that exploits our confidence in the opinion leaders we have chosen.

Innovation, purity, Tabula Rasa - we lack a playground where our rules can be defined. Establishing a school is a matter of decades and hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases. A limited company has to meet a wide range of requirements and many times the companies that are set up fail - but we still have to pay for them and the cost of setting them up and maintaining them. A city or a new town is generally an idea that no sane person would even consider as an option, unless of course he has oil fields that yield several million barrels a day.

The Trides we are going to establish are going to give us an answer in the form of whatever is chosen for the needs we are choose to focus on. There will be trides who choose to be democracies, and there will be trides who choose to be dictatorships. There will be those who grow quickly and disappear as fast as they came, and there will be those who will take a lot of time to grow and mature but eventually they will succeed. There will be economic, erotic, pirate, futuristic, outdated trides - and all of these will be Trides.

What is special about trides is that they are what we want them to be. Each and every one of you may choose to belong to one or many trides, or choose not to belong to any tride.

These trides will give us a new tool to work with - a new concept that we will define for ourselves as we see fit. A concept whose job is to be the subject of your message, not to be the message itself (although it will be just that at the beginning of its path).

And with this explanation of what a tride is, what it can be, and what I think can be done with it - I declare the establishment of the first tride: Tride One, pun intended

My Tride will deal with a variety of things that motivate me personally - and some of it will probably be to explain the trides themseves and the tools that trides can use to operate themselves (Bitcoin, crypto, DAOs, programming, and the extended digital world), write and experiment with these tools themselves (hopefully most will be open source so that other trides can use it as well), and of course develop this tride… grow it, build it, and hopefully it will give me personally tools to deal with the not so simple reality of everyday life, and maybe to others who will find interest in the general idea or this specific example.

whatistride• 4 years ago

Can you explain in detail what tride means?

elisk3• 4 years ago

A tride can be many things - a facebook group focused on certain topic, an NFT project I've noticed are very tribal in behaviour and form, a pirate ship would be probably considered such a tride.

A tride can have a leader, someone who leads it, or it can have a council - a group of people who are in charge of the tride. Back in the Roman and Greek days they'd have two kings - one military, and one political - I imagine trides experimenting with such systems to explore what works for each individual tridal organization.

I see human congregation as individual organisms who operates as a whole via the inidividual composing it, the same way a human body is an organism that operates thanks to the individual contribution of each and every organ.

How will this reflect in human trides? I hope to see many different and diverse trides that will explore the various ways of living and cooperating together. It's one of the primary things that draws us to computer games - we can create any kind of societies in them that we want to be part of, and I don't think we should just accept the few ways we have to do so today in the current cultural framework.

dvh1990• 4 years ago

The idea you are presenting is very broad, and the explanation doesn't really help narrow it down to anything practical. How would you implement this in practice? How would such a "social construct" operate?

With that said I think that there's a need for digital clans nowadays, similar to multiplayer gaming clans, but for more "serious" games. Could this be it?

elisk3• 4 years ago

Yes! An excellent example!

I imagine trides building from various inspiration, "clans" in the multiplier world is one - do note that some are "top-down" kind of approach, e.g. they have a leader or a group of leaders, while others still have a "bottom-up" approach, where everyone is part of the whole and have a similar weight in it.

Assuming I understand your question correctly - some trides will form a military-like structure, e.g. a top commander and some kind of heirarchichal responsibilities tree stemming from the top.

For example, in the tride I'm building currently I'm the one responsible for it - how will decisions be made? That remains to be seen - and that's one of the goals of the tride to figure out for itself (at least for ours), I'm assuming it'll be tied to some aspects of the way the tride will decide to conduct itself financially, if at all.

For example, we might decide that the tride has a small community pool of funds which we use to support community lead efforts, projects, and initiatives - e.g. we might want to utilize some of the new Dall-e and other AI software to produce content and generate revenues as a result - I'd imagine that the project would have a champion (appointed or self declared) which will be sort of CEO for the initiative, while the tride itself will act as a board of such an initiative.

Let me know if it provides some clarity on how something like this can operate - but do bare in mind that this is just one simple example and a very specific case...

favourable• 4 years ago

Seth Godin talks about tribes in his book, called, well...Tribes[0]. Worth reading. He has a few interviews on Youtube where he talks about finding your people (if you don't want to read a whole book).

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Tribes-We-Need-You-Lead/dp/1491514736

A new word, a new concept

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