Hydra spawns a Design Activism Agency
This is a piece by Conor O’Higgins and Tristan Roberts, Bitnation Scholarship recipients to Exosphere’s Hydra 3 Startup Lab, which took place from January 11th to March 4th. It tells the story of what motivated them to join the program, their experience participating, and what they created as a result of their time in Chile.
In a dystopian world of government spying, assassination by drone, and growing income inequality, it is heartening to see a counter-trend towards equality. Radical decentralization promises a world where everyone has access to social power, and no one can financially coerce anyone else.
Nation-states and central banks have lost our trust, and have unequivocally failed to foster human potential. Decentralization of the power they wield has only recently been possible. The Internet is the major enabling technology, with new emerging technologies aiding and reinforcing its potential.
When we found ourselves in Chile, neither of us expected to form a company. Each had only discovered Hydra 3 a few weeks earlier, due to Exosphere’s partnership with Bitnation. We came to help Bitnation in their ambitious goal of creating an alternative to nation-states, but found ourselves introducing their goals and the blockchain technology they use to our peers at the program. In turn, we realized that a lot of people are ready for alternatives but aren’t yet familiar with the technology that enables their manifestation.
What is the blockchain? Why is it important?
The ‘blockchain’ is the key to radical decentralization. It’s a way of distributing information and computation in a way that is both transparent and cryptographically secure. Bitcoin is the most notable implementation of this technology, but lately Ethereum has gained popularity. While Bitcoin is like a distributed ledger, Ethereum is more like a distributed computer. It is stored and processed on a distributed network, and can only be edited with the consensus of the network.
Ethereum doesn’t just provide an alternative to traditional banking systems. With its technology any social system can be decentralized. ‘Disruptors’ such as AirBNB and Uber are likely to be replaced by autonomous organizations that do not require a middleman. Even more revolutionary is Bitnation’s quest to provide all of the same services that traditional nation-states provide, using the blockchain to identify citizens, notarize contracts, and resolve conflicts.
A company is born
Corruption follows power as surely as a shadow. We can build a future free of abusive power. The greatest obstacle isn’t technical (those technical obstacles have been hurdled over the past 6 or 7 years), but rather a question of adoption. People need to know that these technologies exist, and how these revolutionary new technologies can mitigate the problems that make their lives miserable: poverty, lack of access to drugs, geopolitical bullying, and income inequality.
It’s with this mission that Decipher Agency was born. We work in the field of evangelizing these new technologies, usually through marketing and design work. Our goal is to promote the concepts that the hearts of the technologically liberated generation already know will bring us a decentralized salvation.
Conor & Tristan are happy to discuss these matters further, and can be reached at conor@decipher.agency and tristanerr@gmail.com. For more info on their agency, check out www.decipher.agency.
To apply for the next Exosphere program “Exosphere Academy 2016”, visit www.exosphe.re.
