This technology matters.
We have an opportunity to help people liver freer, more resourced lives than ever in history.
I believe we are all global neighbors
Around age five, someone asked me what I would do with $1 million. The answer came easily — “Well, first I’d save the whales, then I’d save the rainforest, then I’d protect the seals and the dolphins…”
From age 10, I was volunteering around my community — in senior- and assisted-living centers, doing environmental cleanup, in childcare, in veterinarian clinics, in wildlife and endangered-animal refuges. At 16, a Nova program on Doctors Without Borders providing immunizations and medical attention to rural African villages shifted my focus internationally.
In all these experiences, I learned that
A decade overseas
SRI LANKA
I started working in developing countries in 2004 in a rural village in Sri Lanka. I volunteered at a school that had the first 24-hour internet connection in the country, thanks to a scrappy local educator. Being the first white person to spend more than an afternoon in the village, they weren’t quite sure what to do with me. I got a lot of stares, more bug bites than I ever knew possible, called a witch (for the first, but not for the last time), and deep immersion into the possibilities of grassroots entrepreneurship.
THE BALKANS
From there, I went on to work with USAID to bring freelance markets to economically depressed Eastern Europe. At the time, Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, had a 48% unemployment rate. Long before Upwork, our goal was to leverage the power of telework to help talented locals earn international wages, generate enough momentum to establish small businesses and cause a ripple effect in creating more local jobs.
GABON
The next project took place around the country of Gabon furthering ecotourism, carbon-credit, and tech-education initiatives. In Sri Lanka, we had limited electricity and a tap with running water in the back of the house. In the village in Gabon, we were without running water, collecting and storing the brown fluid from the river in buckets and big canisters, and without electricity — a challenge for a project working with students on computers. There, I learned to entertain myself in 12 hours of equatorial daily darkness, was often greeted by points and screams of “La Blanche!” (“White lady!”) on the street, and got called a witch for the second time (by a three-year-old streaming tears of fright).
HAITI
Ultimately, I fulfilled my dream of working with Doctors Without Borders — first after the earthquake of 2010, then during the subsequent cholera epidemic. Humanitarian aid is a much different world than international development, and the emergency work took its toll. It took me years to come back from the post-traumatic stress that ran rampant through our volunteers. But working with French, Italian, Swedish, Japanese, Belgian, Korean, Ghanaian, and myriad other heroes, I could not be more proud of the work we did — during the cholera epidemic alone, saving more than 5,200 lives in two months (more than any other team in the country).
So, blockchain what…?
In 2017, I attended a conference in which the whole first day was talks on what are called “startup societies” — ways we can test and experiment with new systems that might better serve humanity. [The founding of America as escape from religious persecution was the creation of a startup society.] The second day of the conference was entirely technical talks on Bitcoin and blockchain — I had no idea how the two coalesced.
Confused by all the jargon, I was getting ready to walk out of the room and let the techies talk to each other when someone leaned over and whispered that the next speaker coming to the stage had cured a village of Ebola using blockchain technology. I had no idea what that meant, but I was hooked. [Ask me how she did it.]
Shannon with spoken word artist, director, and rights activist Prince EA at BlockCon.
Once I started to see the potential, I kept finding more and more. The humanitarian use cases were numerous. This technology has the potential to change the way ID functions, give us more privacy and security on the internet, revamp our voting systems, save lives through better medical records, secure land rights, shorten an strengthen supply chains, and save time and billions of dollars moving money around the world.
The internet brought about a paradigm shift in that we needed to change how we conceptualized communication in a digital age. Blockchain technology is going to create as deep or deeper shifts because we are now taking about value and assets rather than information.
And for the first time in history, we can do it without middlemen. We have long needed banks or insurance companies to verify or underwrite our promises to one another. This will open up global commerce and exchange, and facilitate entirely new systems with no JP Morgan, no Lloyd’s of London because the trust is built into the technology.
What really excites me is what that will do to our concepts of community. The philosopher Marshall McLuhan talks about how we shape our tools and our tools shape us, and we shape our rules and our rules shape us. Consider how your cell phone has changed the way you think about communication.
When we have direct contact with the fisherman in Bali, the rice farmer in Uganda, the tailor in London, what will change about our ideas of “Who is in my community?” With our online platforms becoming some of the largest, borderless nations in the world, direct and peer-to-peer technologies stand to rework our entire mindset around who our neighbors and who are our “local” providers.
There is a saying used by some in this industry that the founder(s) of Bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto) is female, not because people believe it was a woman (though that’s possible — the person or team who created it is anonymous to this day), but because the intention is to be for the people. It is inherently bottom-up, inclusive, fair, transparent, and honest. Those are very “yin” or feminine characteristics. This technology stands poised to open anachronistic systems, remove inefficiencies, cut costs by thousands of percentage points, and bring more people in to share in the new wealth of resources.
And many will suffer — it will cost gatekeepers, rent-seekers, and middlemen dearly. Those who are ready to adopt transparent and inclusive systems will thrive.
Will you join me?
“I’ve been at this 35 years, writing about the digital age. I’ve never seen a technology that I thought had greater potential for humanity.”
— Don Tapscott, Writer
I’m here to help —
let’s talk!
Chat with me
There’s nothing I love more than nerding out on this stuff. [Well, maybe eating — I really love food.] If having a conversation would be valuable, I’d welcome a chance to learn more about what interests you, why you’re here, and how I can help.
