It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

How To Build A Future We Want To Live In

-- By YunHsuanKao - 22 Oct 2021

Introduction

We want to live in a world where every human being possesses freedom of thought. Freedom of thought means the ability to be able to think as deeply and as broadly about everything as much as they want without any interruption. To achieve this goal, skills need to be learned, hardware need to be upgraded and mindsets need to be transformed.

Step One: Programming Skills for Human Race

We start by examining what is stopping us from obtaining the freedom of thought. One prominent factor will be social media services and gadgets in our palm. They are destroying our internal stream by creating the illusion of productivity in exchange for our attention, by giving us our constant need of being noticed, and by taking advantage of its users’ anxiety in the disguise of grating convenience.

How do we tackle this problem? We can only take back the control of technology with technology skills. We need to have sufficient programming skills to be able to alter what is being accepted as the norm. We need to understand the language of the machine to be able to make the machine work for us. On a personal level, having programming skills enables one to be free from interruptions of services and gadgets but still benefit from the connectivity and infinite knowledge base of the net. With the skillsets, one can fully control how the technology will work.

But if our goal is to rebuild a future where all humans can have freedom of thought, merely equipping humans with programming skills is not enough. Skills can help us free ourselves from the noise of social media and phones, but to change the structure of humans and the net, we need more radical changes.

Step Two: Building Personal Servers

The net is most powerful and efficient when it is free and so is human. The problem is that we access the net through services that its main purpose is surveilling human behavior to identify patterns for ads and control of the human mind. To the point that social media platforms are being understood by the younger generation as the same as the net itself. Obviously, radical changes needed to be made to remedy the situation, but what should the solution be? How can we benefit from the net without the downside? How can we establish the relationship between the two?

I think the answer lies in the power of personal servers. Using your own server as the node on the net enables one to establish a healthy and beneficial relationship with the net. The benefits include surveillance-free connection, the ability to design and limit your presence on the net, and most importantly, anarchist distribution of knowledge. As every human becomes a free agent on the net, accessing knowledge will become effortless.

Personal servers are meant to change how we use the net: from services with the goal of making money by selling user data to an independently-run website that no one has control over except yourself. Having programming skills with personal servers will allow people to build the environment for freedom of thought, but the question then becomes that are humans ready to give up their smart gadgets? Is mankind capable of choosing what is best for them?

Step Three: Mindset Transformation

The last step in the process of building a future we want to live in is a complete transformation of the human mindset. To explore the idea of the transformation, we need to examine the question of whether humans know what is best for them and the two sides of the argument. The negative argument is that we are animals of primitive desire controlled by dopamine releases and urges. We often make choices that are seemingly good for the short term but damaging to our society and wellbeing in the long run. Therefore, we do not have the best judgment when it comes to what is good for us and what is bad.

On the other hand, the positive argument can be made from two perspectives. Firstly, from the standpoint of history, humans do evolve and grow toward a more developed civilization. We embody the power to think and invent, which in turn brings us to where we are now. Secondly, we can learn from the mistakes of the past. The ability to learn from examples and stories is one of the most distinctive traits of a human. We don’t have to be burnt to know that fire is dangerous. That is not to say we as humans will never bring disaster upon ourselves, we often do, but merely pointing out that there is the possibility of making the right choice without experiencing a fire.

While we may never know the correct answer to the question, I am inclined to be optimistic about the future and that the mindset transformation will happen naturally. Humans will figure out that freedom of thought is more enjoyable than the constant notification from the phone and that privacy is more beneficial than having the right targeted ads. Then, we start building a future we want to live in.

---

You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

• #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, YunHsuanKao
• #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.