Humanity’s Challenges and Breakthroughs in Science and Technology That May Help – Part 4

In this fourth installment, we look at how technology is both an asset to help us surmount challenges we face in the 21st century, as well as a liability. This last weekend, 60 Minutes, CBS’s flagship TV news magazine reported about a whistleblower who filed complaints with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against Facebook, her former employer.

I joined Facebook back in early 2006. I was writing a small business blog at the time and was looking at how social networks could leverage opportunities for new companies. Facebook was among about 30 different social networks that I test drove but soon it asserted its dominance. Today Facebook has nearly 2.9 billion monthly users. And it has added other social media platforms to its offering including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. These all have between one and two billion users. Only YouTube from Google is as pervasive on the Internet.

Digital Reliance: The Bad

When I joined Facebook I saw all of its potentials as an online forum, a digital space where there were no national borders, and opportunities aplenty to engage the global community in collaborative ways. My naivete.

That Facebook is long gone if it ever even existed. Today it is a media giant and cash generator for its investors. Its online presence makes it a principal influencer of thought and purpose often appealing to the worst in humanity.

Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower on 60 Minutes, worked there. She is a computer engineer with a Master’s Degree from Harvard. In her whistleblower complaint, she states that Facebook has promoted misinformation, hate speech, and incited violence through its pages because that makes money, increases traffic and sells more advertising to get more clicks. Facebook executives have denied that any of this is true. But the evidence as presented in the whistleblower complaint contradicts the company’s leaders.

Not only is Facebook misleading its users and investors, but when it describes its newest software algorithms to create meaningful interactions and content, it hides a reality that it is in the business of pushing negative communications because this gets more eyes and makes the company more money. And it’s true of audiences, whether they are Trump supporters in America or Modhi supporters in India, that racism, bigotry, antisemitism, anti-Muslim, and anti-vaxxer rhetoric are all good for Facebook’s bottom line.

Facebook tells you they monitor hate speech and misinformation, but the truth is they haven’t the staffing or means to look at much more than 10% of all of these messages and postings. Facebook’s final defence is that the divisiveness and hate found on its platform reflects current global society and cannot be blamed on them.

The growing reliance on our digital presence in the 21st century in examples like Facebook is not helping us to overcome the challenges we currently face. If anything applications like Facebook exacerbate them.

Digital Reliance: The Good

There are technological innovations that counter this negative Facebook narrative and here are some examples.

Digital Online Collaborative Communities 

SEEDS is a digital platform and online community that encourages global collaboration and rewards participants for their pursuit of happiness and collective self-actualization. I recently joined the SEEDS community and have written about it. Seeds (lowercase) is the digital currency used to reward members of the community for their efforts. Seeds can be exchanged for non-digital currencies when needed.

Microloans

Another good example of a digital presence that is a solutions maker is Kiva.org. I discovered Kiva back in 2007, a microloan operator aggregating capital from hundreds of thousands of lenders to provide money to Developing World entrepreneurs with little access to banks and other financial lenders. Recently I surpassed 100 loans that are helping to seed new projects in more than 40 countries. The unprecedented repayment rate of 99% with nary a default is unmatchable by any bank or other financial institution. Kiva launched Kiva U recently to educate young people in wealthier countries about similar-aged compatriots in the Developing World. Truly a bridge builder, Kiva is using the Internet the way I always ideally envisioned it rather than spreading disinformation and fueling hate for profit.

Funding from the Crowd

Crowdfunding represents another innovation of the digital age. A means of raising and exchanging money for projects deemed worthy by the general public, crowdfunding is a financial social movement offering real or digital currency to those whose ideas and products attract investors. The reward for crowdfunders is usually a premium of some kind, maybe an early release product, or bling. The most popular of these sites include Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Fundable, GoFundMe, and one less talked about, Mightycause that crowdfunds not-for-profits.

Digital Money Exchanges

Exchanging money has gone digital over the Internet with the advent of mobile phones and access to the Internet. In the Developing World where there is a large number of people who don’t have bank accounts, it is a challenge to move money over any distance. Exchanging money electronically used to be a bank-to-bank or Western Union thing. But now there are many applications to use to replace these antiquated and expensive exchanges. One site, WorldRemit handles money at low exchange rates for more than 130 countries. In Kenya, WorldRemit partners with a smartphone app developer, M-PESA, a collaboration involving the local telecommunications company and a number of East African banks. Today M-PESA operates in 10 countries. But M-PESA doesn’t need a bank to move money. Its mobile phone app allows users to buy and sell goods and services and store the value of the exchange in a secure cloud on the Internet. And the service fee for each transaction is a fraction of what it used to cost. And if you want to turn the exchange value into cash you can pick it up at designated locales.