The Root

Whether this is the root of all evil, or of something else entirely is entirely up to you to decide.

In a certain visual novel series, one may terribly try to describe the root as the sun, and this would get you certain looks from characters in said series for the description. Just a few centuries ago, if you suggested that the sun was the root of the solar system you would receive the reward of condemnation, and possibly an additional gift of having your middle finger preserved for eternity in your honor.

With these examples in mind, a logical human can only conclude that humans are inherently illogical. What has materialized as “progress” in the past few centuries first had to come from millenia of book burnings, and largely failing models of civilization. In it’s ~200,000 year history, only the most recent 400-500 of those years have been spent in a world of “modern science”.

One may ask why it took so long for the human race to adopt such a methodology of “progress”. A century before the Scientific Revolution began in the 1500s, the Printing Press came about and allowed for the widespread circulation of previously hand written material. Over the next few centuries, the literacy rate in Europe grew dramatically, and this would eventually lead to the invention and use of the modern state in the 1600s and 1700s. The US Constitution was drafted only ~350 years after the printing press, and at the time the previously established notion of a “monarchy” was now under heavy scrutiny for first time in thousands of years.

Only ~200 years after the ratification of the US constitution, far more mediums that enabled the widespread circulation of ideas had come into fruition. Namely, one of those being the internet, and built on top of it, the web. We’ve also now somewhat figured out how to “emulate” the output of human thought in a digital medium, though it seems that much more work is needed in this area.

In just 600 years, we’ve largely flipped the structure of society upside down, and dispelled many previously conceived notions of societal operation. This came about largely due to the ability to distribute ideas effectively across long distances, which in turn led to the “know-how” to create mediums that further made this process more efficient and effective.

Yet, this is a movement that is still in its infancy, as our world still has a strong notion of a minority of “developed” and a majority of “undeveloped” nations. Even in “developed” nations, citizens experience problems largely unique (eg. obsesity, mental health struggles, etc.) to the nature of the “developments” in their nation. Our time period is also likely the first in which we fear that human technology can “end the world”. Previously such “world-ending” events were largely religious.

When a large volume of ideas are circulated in increasingly short time spans, it is no doubt that many bad ideas will make their way through the mediums, and eventually be implemented in the world somehow. In fact, it’s quite common today to hear ideas circulated such as “ideas are cheap” or “ideas are a dime a dozen”. This is generally a kind of thinking that is oriented towards people building new products or services, as much of the burden of doing such a venture is on the execution and implementation details. Therefore, “coming up with good ideas” is often seen as a waste of time. Of course, such thinking was only enabled by systems that enabled universal human literacy in the first place.

Bad ideas are certainly not cheap when they are successfully implemented and widespread. In fact, they are quite expensive in both time, human life, and monetary value. Monarchies persisted for millenia, and many revolutions in different parts of the world had to be fought to dispell them. That only came after the few centuries it took to convince a part of the world that they were a bad idea in the first place. Of course, wars are quite monetarily expensive as well.

In business, the products that best solve their designated problems often don’t win, or are never brought into fruition because they have no potential at replacing the already established solutions. If smaller players cannot dethrone larger players, you get stagnation.

Social media apps format all content the same, and provide the same basic interaction tools (liking, upvoting, downvoting, commenting) for each unit of content. If a unit of content is best represented by another format, it cannot be shared on the social media platform. If the format’s medium that would best reflect the content is not widespread, then the content cannot be expressed in full. If the content cannot be expressed in full then many of its ideas are lost, and you get stagnation.

If you solely rely on the use of AI (or any technology that can automate creation) to complete tasks, your ability to complete such tasks is inherently tied to the ability of AI. If such a technology plateaus, then your ability to complete the task can no longer grow whilst you’re solely dependent on AI, and you get stagnation.

Thus far, we have quite literally failed at finding a scalable set of mediums that addresses the needs of 8 billion (and increasing) people on a single planet. This is in spite of the massive hardware and to an extent software advantages we have today compared to the last decade. If the species were to become multi-planetary, this is an even a bigger problem due to the need to understand the even greater number of personal contexts that entails. Stagnation is therefore fatal in such circumstances.

In the near-term, improving our usage of existing and emerging technologies can help address these challenges in the products we create on a daily basis.

As such, I figure it's best that I record my experiences and thoughts on developing apps that better enhance content-creation, and address many of the public mental and physical health challenges stemming from existing apps. In particular, a focus on "enhancement" of innate user ability (ie. enhancing their ability to understand themselves and navigate the world) is missing from many of today's products.

However, in the long-term something greater seems to be needed to address the scaling problems we are currently facing. Such requires going beyond current societal and industry ideas, and requires developing new and qualitatively different systemic foundations.

I don't know what the exact answer is at this current moment as to what those will look like. However, I believe it's essential that I document my findings and experiences to help put into context the eventual "understanding" of those ideas.

— 6/7/2025