Hakiri

To experiment is good. Just a few of my experiments turned into successful projects but I do not regret for wasting my time on the others. Each experiment helped me understand better the topic I was diving into and also made me a better person a long the way.

It is pretty sad that the majority of people avoid starting experiments because, a) experiments are often treated as projects, and b) projects could fail. Fear of failure is a huge thing nowadays. It is a bit ridiculous because the whole purpose of the experiment is not to make something work (make it successful) but just to test if something could work and as such experiments lead only to conclusions and nothing else. Sometimes experiments lead to successful projects though, but that is rare as I mentioned in the beginning of this post.

I am sure that this post is pretty meaningless to most of you but please understand that I am trying to convey a message here which I hope makes some change. The message is that people should do their own personal experiments all the time, checking, verifying and breaking the established dogmas. It is just a healthier way of living and it makes things a lot more exciting.

Although I often endup breaking and disjointing stuff in order to see how they work, a huge part of my life is based around building and innovating new things. This is the reason why I would like to draw your attention on why I believe that social networks are stupid, hopping that my words will motivate you to pursue different ideas/concepts instead of sticking to whatever concepts someone’s lack of ideas head has come up with in order to keep the masses in mental prison. Think for yourself!

Social Networks, in their current form, are organized around the group. This is the only point I would like to cover as I am afraid that this post can quickly turn into a rant, which is definitely not my intention. Social Networks are organized around the group. For example, each social network follows a directory like structure. The root of the directory is the network itself, considered also as the universe. Then, there are several subtrees that represent either different social groups or in general different kinds of entities, which combine people into groups. Finally, after too much nesting, we find the individual, which is at the bottom as being the consumer. If you study economics and research on VAT (a tax levied on the difference between a commodity’s price before taxes and its cost of production) you will see that the end consumer is the actual body that pays the price. Social Networks are very similar to what VAT is to economics.

However, the problem here is that this type of structure is not only stupid but also against what social networks are supposed to be. It is true that people conglomerate around shared interests however, they don’t work as a whole. Instead, each one of them contributes to the whole in unintended ways and each one of them perceives the group in a different way, their own personal way if you like. For example, if I am a hacker and also a cool hunter, then social network will perceive me as such but looking from the top as being part of these groups. However, I don’t look at my status in the same way as I am also part groups unknown to the social network and also unknown to myself. Therefore, if social networks are the mechanism that will free me from the burden to connect with like-minded, how that can be done when even I, the individual/consumer, do not know where I belong and will that deficiency in the way social networks are structured a fundamental glitch that will prevent people from expanding their potentials and perception? I think so!

Therefore, social networks are stupid and they are nothing more but a system that collects, analyzes and resells personal data, whether that will be in a direct way or indrectly though ads or whatever. They wont help you expand or keep up with friends but simply make you build your online profile which does not represent your true identity as they are not organized around the idea to enable the user/individual. Not to mention that your data is not yours anymore as it cannot leave the network that it belongs to.

Me is represented by what you reed here. It is also the person that visits those conferences and does that kind of research. Me is also the guy that collaborates with those and those and me is the chaos in what I am supposed to be made of. Putting an organism around me (my virtual self) is like locking myself in an apartment with only people that my frontdoor decides are suitable for my likings, not knowing what I really want. Therefore, free yourself of the social networks. Look around yourself. Opportunities are laying around.