Introducing myself to @tribesteemup

Hy, I’m Lish and I am a prosocial junky; this means that I spend my time thinking about and building behavior that is not only beneficial to the individuals, but to a larger extent of society. And since the steem ecosystem blessed me with a lot of opportunities that gave me financial stability without full-time employment, I can say that prosociality became my main concern; I am actively searching for people that are like-minded, with which to build worthwhile projects that positively impact society.

As I wrote in my original introduction post, one constant through all my life was refusal. I never came to peace with the idea that my life’s course was decided for me before I was even born and I did not have almost any say in it. The prospect of learning things in such a rigid and lifeless way had no appeal to me, but the system is broken so I finished 15 years of studies without any problems. But the next part is really fucked up, now I had to center part of my existence around money and sell my time for pieces of plastic with which I can buy more plastic. And after this lifeless life, at old age, you could enjoy a couple of years in peace and most probably sickness. Nope, I’ll pass on that menu.

But refusal on its own does not have a positive impact on society because it weakens social cohesion. In order to make refusal pertinent, we need to come up with alternatives that make things better. So my focus shifted from what is wrong with the world, to what is strong in the world so we can use this as a foundation for building a better future. And steem gave me exactly this opportunity, the possibility of focusing on what needs to be done and getting rewarded for posting this content. It’s exactly like decentralized financing and @tribesteemup is a the center of facilitating my work, thank you for that.

At the beginning of this year, we started organizing a Romanian community here in the steem ecosystem and I made some prosocial proposal that seem to have stuck with the people involved in building this community. We want to build the community on the principles of voluntary collaboration that is beneficial to more of the community than just the people involved in the actions. The teams present in the project have autonomy and consensus should be the way of arriving at any decision. We also recently applied for some funding in order to facilitate the bringing and supporting of three young prosocial journalists on steem and create a context in which they can pursue their work in any way they see it fit, without editorial impositions. So things are moving in a good direction with the Romanian community so I decided to go international.

So, very soon after going international I stumbled upon @tribesteemup and @kennyskitchen stumbled upon my content and here we are. Beyond the financial incentive that comes with being part of this tribe, I am really grateful for having the company of over 200 conscious content creators with which I can build a lot of wonderful things. So I will try to be more active on the discord chat and build some stable relationships.

I still am in the process of studying the prosocial side of behavior, sadly antisocial behavior was researched predominantly more and this says something about our current culture. We have way more knowledge about what goes wrong than about how we can maximize the chances of going right. But I will try to give a brief definition to put things in context.

Prosociality refers to behavior that benefits larger society and is either individual or based on voluntary cooperation with an emphasis on complementing each other and arriving at decision through consensus. This kind of attitude can build communities that have strong cohesion and can work very effectively together towards the desired goal. I also wrote about eight core design principles for a prosocial community here.

I also am a strong believer in decentralization; the current model of hierarchical structures that make decisions for us needs to change as soon as possible because its deeply flawed. Luckily we have the possibility of doing much better with blockchain because this technology gives us the option of having rules without rules, and that would be very refreshing. I really look forward to a future in which two or more individuals can write their own rules for interaction using blockchain technology and not have to rely on third parties to guarantee trust or punish those who cheat. This flexibility in collaboration could pave the way to a foundation for abundance, if human ingenuity is left to do its job in an organic way.

And I have one more confession to make, when we get brain internet which is at least as safe as a condom, I’m going in. The idea of having instant access to almost the entire knowledge of the human race is out of this world. I think this would lead to an avalanche of exponential innovation that would reshape at least our galaxy. I can’t wait to see the advances in brain-computer interface technology and how this will reflect on human interactions.

I am also thinking of starting a #prosocial project. I am not sure of the structure yet, but I think the curation of this tag is a centerpiece. So if this is something you believe in and you are willing to put time and effort into building such a project, please let me know in the comments or in Discord: lishu#0022.