...new approaches to climate-related insurance lines (flood, wildfire, etc.), re-location away from vulnerable areas, and sustainable building techniques and materials (even deconstruction).
At the same time, I wouldn’t write off this experiment as a failure. Rather, I think it highlights a lesson that social networks are often too reluctant to learn: rigid, one-size-fits-all platform policies are making people miserable.
But with the advent of initiatives that aim to extend life, comes a parallel force; startups rethinking the existing funeral and end-of-life planning industries. If the former group is made up of immortalists, then let’s call the latter group realists.
In the Information Age, only cities that repay their upkeep with a high quality of life will stay viable. People at a distance won’t be obligated to subsidize them.
In early 2019, for example, the founder of the Shanghai electric-car company NIO transferred 50 million shares into a “user trust.” While the founder retains voting rights over the shares, the trust enables its members to help decide how to use a portion of the company’s eventual profits. This was not an act of charity; in the disclosure documents,... See more
Jacob McHangama: Future generations will marvel at the new perspectives, voices, and knowledge that have come to light in the digital era and simply weren’t possible (or deemed desirable) in the age of analog. Where does all this leave expertise? Expertise remains crucial to knowledge production, but it must reflect genuine excellence in a given... See more
A Founder/CEO must be capable of both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism, carefully balanced against each other, the ratio tuned to the needs of the problems ahead of them.