| brian douglas skinner |
project ideas
- Virtual Vicki, the un-child
One of the things I've thought about doing is writing a newsletter chronicling the life and times of Vicki, a child not conceived. Vicki's life begins with her birth in a hospital in Redwood City, California. Like many babies in the United States, Vicki is delivered by cesarean section. The delivery and the mother's hospital stay cost $12,000. However, unlike with real children, this money is never actually spent, and instead goes into Virtual Vicki's trust fund. Along with chronicling Vicki's life, the Virtual Vicki newsletter tracks the growth of Vicki's trust fund. When Vicki dies in 2092 she can will her money to support the causes that are most important to her family which so lovingly never had her.
backgroundI think one of the things that limits people's ability to take stewardship of the world is that the world is so big that it's hard to think about it as anything other than an abstraction. What does it mean when someone tells me that every year we lose another 24 billion tons of topsoil? Is that a little or a lot? Should I care about it or are other things more important?
If we could somehow shrink the whole world down to a human scale and talk about it that way, I think that would help us visualize what's going on.
the idea
I'd like someday to build a scale model world as a centerpiece for a museum exhibit about the state of the world. This village-world would be about the size of a basketball court, and just like the real world it would be about one third land and two thirds ocean. In the scale model world all of the quantities of things would be shrunk by a factor of a million. So where the real world has 6 billion people, village-world would have just 6 thousand people. And where the real world has about a half billion cars, village-world would have just 500 cars. Additionally, the sizes of everything would be scaled back by a factor of a thousand. So where a real person is about 2 meters tall, village-world would have little models of people that are about 2 millimeters tall.
The basketball court model would look something like a model train diorama, with 6,000 tiny people and all their tiny homes, cars, buildings, farms, farm animals, roads, copper strip mining sites, and rain-forest clear-cuts. As visitors looked at the model a recorded voice could talk about the most interesting aspects (land area per-person, distribution of wealth, loss of natural habitats, etc.), and lights imbedded in the model could be used to illustrate the points being made in the recording.
The model itself would be the centerpiece, and separate displays nearby the model could go into detail about specific issues. For example, one display might focus on global climate change, with pictures of what the model might look like after 100 years of global warming. A second display might be devoted to the idea of environmental foot-printing, showing how the richest 10% of the people in the model live lifestyles that require the resources from more than half the land area of the entire model. Another display might show a videotape with a animations showing how the model has changed over time, including things like population growth over the past 2,000 years and the gradual deforestation and desertification of the model.alternative ideas
One of the problems with this idea is that even if you spent millions of dollars and built an awesome exhibit in the middle of a big city, you could still only hope to reach some tens of thousands of people per year. It might be cheaper and more effective to just not have any physical exhibit and instead package all the same ideas in the form of a videotape of a computer generated model, or a computer game, or an interactive web site. All of these ideas would more expensive than what I could afford to fund myself, but I'd be interested in at least thinking about it some more.
- Yes, but is it Art?
Someday, after I'm done programming computers for a living, I want to take some time and pursue my artistic interests. For starters, I'd like to get a big grant, line up some media coverage, and go wrap Christo in red plastic.
the idea
The web is a wonderful tool for learning about the world. You can read Plato or learn about the ACLU or find out who your elected representatives are. But if you're interested in charts and graphs and trends and ratios the web still leaves a lot to be desired. I think it'd be great if you could go to a search engine and ask it to show you a graph showing the growth of Internet use in the past decade, and then a pie chart showing the racial composition of the U.S. population. Or maybe a graph of teen pregnancies per year for the last 50 years. And then ask to see the same thing but per capita. And then ask for an overlay of the high school drop out rate. And do this all quickly -- in just a minute or two.
A lot of this data is already on the web, but it's trapped in GIF images and HTML tables. We need XML standards regarding units, dates, geographic regions, sources, etc. And we need GUI query tools that can navigate the data. These aren't hard problems to solve, and there are people working on it. Unfortunately, I get the sense that the work is going slowly and I'd love to see more progress being made.examples
Here are a few books that do a wonderful job of presenting the kind of quantitative indicators that I'm talking about:
It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years
by Stephen Moore and Julian Lincoln SimonVital Signs 2001: The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future, 2001 Edition
by the Worldwatch InstituteThe First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900-2000
by Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, and Ben J. WattenbergHere are a few web sites with some related work:
the global indicators originally produced by the World Game Institute
the Virtual Data Center at the Harvard-MIT Data Center
the Datavine web site built by Harvard and the World Bank
the problem
I think for this project the problem really is just building the web site. Once the site was up and running word of it would eventually spread to the various types of people who might want to use it. Unfortunately, I think doing even a passable first version of the site might take a great deal of time and money.
background
Most people are trustworthy and kind, but you never know for sure about any given stranger. And because we don't know for sure, we err on the side of caution, and live in a society where we fear strangers. We teach our kids not to talk to strangers, not to accept candy in the park, not to get into a car with a neighbor. As adults we refrain from hitchhiking and picking up hitchhikers. We trust each other less than we could, and we enjoy each other's company less than we might. And it's all the result of a simple information problem -- we don't know who we're dealing with, and what kind of people they are.
I'm a huge fan of the idea of transparency. I'd very much like to try living in a world where governments and corporations and individuals all went about their business more openly and publicly. It would be nice to trade away all the current secrecy and deception and replace it with openness and reciprocal accountability. I think most people today are concerned about losing their privacy and would like to ensure privacy rights for people like themselves while requiring more transparency and accountability from any perceived abusers of power (e.g. the CIA or the board of directors of Monsanto). I take the position that we are all at risk of abusing our power in the world, and that we would all benefit from being held accountable for our actions. People who deliberately abuse power (e.g. con artists & corrupt politicians) would be impacted the most by a shift toward more transparency, while people striving to live well might have little to lose and much to gain. I recognize that my "anti-privacy" stance here is both uncommon and generally unpopular, and that there are lots of good arguments against it. If you're interested in thinking more about all this, I highly recommend David Brin's book The Transparent Society.the idea
On ebay they have a "profile" facility so that buyers and sellers can leave feedback about each other. If a transaction goes smoothly each party can leave positive feedback about the other. If one party has a bad experience they can leave a warning note to future traders. I'd like to see someone take the same basic idea and create a more general facility, for use in the world at large, not just on ebay. As you go through life you could leave positive and negative comments about teachers, landlords, friends, colleagues, etc. And those people could leave comments about you. When you met someone new you could check their profile and read comments left by past tenants, students, etc. Participation in the site could be entirely voluntary. No listing would appear for me unless I gave my permission. None of this would be anonymous, so you could gauge the credibility of comments based on the profiles of the people who made them. Ideally the profile would also include photos, basic biographical information, and matters of public record (e.g. past convictions). All of this could work on today's web.
the problem with this idea
I think actually building the word of mouth web site would be a straightforward task. The real problem would be getting a critical mass of people to use it. The site is really only useful to someone if they can type in the name of a stranger they just met and have a decent chance of finding an entry about the person. The ebay site has managed to accomplish that, and probably organizations like Stanford and amazon.com could do so as well, but I don't see how a little grass-roots effort could ever hope to do the marketing necessary to get the site populated with useful information. But this still seems like a powerful idea to me, so I wanted to at least share the idea.
- Voluntary Social Contract
The idea here is to gather together a group of like-minded people. We would identify shared ideas about how things should be done and then put our money where our mouths are. We'd agree to pay certain types of taxes (e.g. carbon tax) into a collective pool and to use that pool to fund programs (e.g. better education for children). Agree to refrain from certain behaviors, etc. This is just like the voluntary gas tax idea, only much broader in scope.
- Land Trust
backgroundThe Nature Conservancy is a non-profit that was founded about 50 years ago, and somehow in that time they've worked to protect over 100,000 square miles of land, in large part just by purchasing it outright. That's a lot of land. It represents a land area about 70 times as large as the state of Rhode Island (or, alternatively, about 70 times as large as the world's 17 smallest nations all put together).
I don't know how the Nature Conservancy was able to buy so much land, but I have a pet theory about it. My theory goes like this... For a non-profit to be able to buy that much land, they had to have a lot of really rich people give them a lot of money, and there was something special about the Nature Conservancy that somehow appealed to all these rich people. I think the special thing about the Nature Conservancy is that in some sense they never spend money. They don't give out grants like foundations do, and they don't provide services that cost money. Most of what they do is just buy land and horde it. And I wonder if that may appeal to a lot of rich people. I think one of the reasons that rich people get rich is that they like to horde their wealth rather than give it away. So then when they finally do give it to a charity it appeals to them to pick one like the Nature Conservancy that will basically go on hording it for them rather than immediately spending it the way Planned Parenthood would. Anyway, that's just my theory. The real reason maybe isn't important anyway.
the idea
The idea here is to create a land conservancy like the Nature Conservancy, but instead of buying up the land and turning it into nature preserves, this new Land Trust would buy up the land and make it available to the poor people of the world, essentially implementing a form of land reform. For an introduction to the idea of land reform I recommend the article What is Land Reform? on the Rural Development Institute web site.
This new Land Trust would never give away or sell the land, it would just make the land available for use, either by granting free use rights for subsistence farming, or by renting out the land to people and then using the proceeds to buy more land. Gradually the Land Trust would acquire more and more land, and in a best case scenario it would grow like the Nature Conservancy has grown, eventually controlling 100,000 square miles of land. A Land Trust like this would be one small step towards a world model in which individuals and corporations never own land, but merely make use of the shared land that is held in a common trust.
- Principles Web Site
the ideaThe idea here is to create a web site that provides a forum for people to express their principles. The site would be a sort of interactive questionnaire, with lists of multiple choice questions, and statements with check boxes, and text fields where people could express their ideas in their own words. A visitor would spend maybe an hour at the site filling in the questionnaire, and then the site would generate a new web page listing the principles the visitor believes in and the new page would be added to the collection generated by previous visitors.
One of the goals of the site design should be to somehow ask questions that elicit the visitor's own ideas without inadvertently biasing their answers. The site should somehow try to keep asking the visitor "why?" in the hope of reaching down to core principles. The site should also be set up to allow visitors to make suggestions and add their own questions to the questionnaire.
With luck this site might be useful in sort of the same way that the book "Moral Politics" was, helping people to better understand each other's moral frameworks, helping liberals to understand conservatives and vice-versa, and helping to build coalition among people with similar but not identical values systems.examples
Here are a few examples of principles that might show up on different people's resulting web pages:
- adultery is a sin
- property is theft
- humans have the same rights and responsibilities as other animals
- people cannot own other people
- children have the same rights and responsibilities as adults
- parents have responsibilities to their children that other people do not
- society has a responsibility to intervene to protect children from their parents
- people should have the right to the fruits of their own labor
- people should be able to own things
- society has the right to levy taxes
- people have the right to tell lies
- land is something that can be owned
- people have the right to travel freely anywhere they want
- women should have the right have abortions regardless of whether the fetus is viable, what the father wants, or whether the health of the mother is at risk
