past
This is just a little exhibit down memory lane.
rating app
Conceived in 2015, built in 2016, this app was the most well thought out rating system of its time. Unlike generic criteria used by sites like Yelp, this platform was industry-specific.
Built on an confined budget of 5k (while sleeping in a broken-down van), the first version of the app was focused on leveling the stakes, i.e., If Agents had the power to make people homeless, we'd have power to wreck their reputation. The ability to rate & review previously lived in/ inspected properties, and upload true-to-life pics, was also one of the many important and well thought out features on here.
Although the app was 99% complete, we could not find that elusive balance between functionality and ethos (anonymity). We'd hoped the landscape of services we required for this balance would change by the time we got to the finish line, but it didn't happen. We had to make the decision to put the platform into cryo-sleep.
There's a possibility now with decentralized infrastructure to no longer compromise the ethos, but we're unlikely to resuscitate it. That said, if anyone is truly wants to take this challenge on, hit us up.
Food app
Getting food delivered from your local restaurant is convenient, but there's no relationship between the food you’re eating and the person who’s cooked it for you. It’s a transaction without a connection.
The seeds of this app were sown when we briefly lived with a Chinese family (where only one of the sisters spoke English). Yet we bonded with the extended family over an evening of communicating via a translation app, and an important link — home cooked food. The recipes that were shared with us by them, one would never find in a restaurant.
This app was about connecting cooks from different cultures (living in your city) with people that love home cooked food.
The front-end UI of this app was fully coded up, but the hard decision had to be made to not develop it further. The reason were not cut and dry, but in short, it was a combination of unreliable funding from our backer, while not being able to bypass a technical hurdle of implementing slowly evolving crypto payment solutions (vital for protecting our cooks from archaic food laws).
Despite that fact that everybody associated with the build was excited by the quality and utility of the platform, it wasn't meant to be.
startup connect
What began as a simple classifieds website idea in 2015 for unconventional entrepreneurial needs (that we actually had), evolved into something deeper, as we discovered numerous aspects of the startup world were fragmented and a sense of human expression absent.
The solution thus became 3 dimensional:
1) To place the Entrepreneur (not the investor) rightfully in the center of the ecosystem — the one with true skin in the game.
2) To consolidate key components of Startup assistance (People, Services & Knowledge) spread across many poorly thought out platforms in one spot for coherence and accessibility.
3) To deconstruct the system of sterile transactions (run by LinkedIn, Angelist, etc), and rebuild this for meaningful connections.
We truly sweat the details on this one, but an abrupt halt in the product's development in 2017, eventually became a long extended break, which led us to explore Twitter for the 1st time in our lives.
Following real time shifts in the global landscape over the next year, it became clear there were more pressing problems emerging across society. Our concerns (from Startup land) had now shifted to a more integrated view of the scenery, and the app was permanently laid to rest.
There is sadly no video of the functionality of this app, despite us having put the most amount of time into it (of our 3 projects). Fixing a 4-yr old codebase to facilitate a video is no longer a priority..
LOL 'npm update' and that graveyard of unmaintained dependencies.
now
In early 2020, we asked a question:
'What's next for Zen Black?''
There was no answer. Only silence.
But vital questions, tend to activate portals..
True to its unpredictable nature, when we stepped into the portal, there was no glimpse of the future. We were thrown backwards in a time-loop instead.
Deconstructing our life through a reverse timeline was a hell of a trip, but we're back in the present moment again, with a brand new Zen Black, Blog, 3 works of art and the answer to our question revealed.
FUTURE
Life doesn't provide direct answers, but it offers cues..
and we have been offered two.
Anti Expert
Truth has to be visible despite the discomfort of being exposed to it, and it needs to be challenged because no one has a monopoly over it. Without it, society's shadow gets pushed further into the abyss — and this is terminal to a civilization's health.
This is why we need Anti-experts.
Anti-expert is someone who possesses the knowledge & competency (sometimes, even qualifications) in their chosen field of expression, but is ignored or shutdown by institutions, media & the mob.
Even if some of them are not shut down/ignored, there is a blatant issue with being able to access their body of thought & work, in either an organized or well contextualized manner.
Platforms like Wikipedia are an embarrassment when it comes to the access of contentious/challenging topics that would do well from reduced censorship and establishment-friendly takes.
As for X (formerly Twitter) the noise to signal ratio will remain the issue. Its creator incentive structure is now algorithmically geared towards max engagement, which will muddle what is truly relevant with what's financially incentivized.
Anti-expert as a platform is about high quality curations of the life works of competent thinkers (published by them and/or their supporters), with cross referencing capability (i.e., others talking about the same/similar topics), opposing/contrary views (if any), the ability to seek clarifications, & finding overlaps and/or new insights (complementary exploration) from other fields.
This is NOT a social or commentary network. The core of it is about easy accessibility and connecting of relevant information.
Trust coin
There's a version of the future emerging from an intersection, a tension, between the 'known' and a 'feeling of change' that doesn't have a tangible form.
This 'known' is a lack of purpose & dignity for a significant number of talented & willing people who can positively shape the future of humanity. They're presently obscured by the noise, invisible, stuck in survival-only loops tending downwards, both, materially & spiritually.
But within them exists an undeniable resistance against the social values and disjointed economic incentives — of a world whose false narratives are being brutally exposed. They can no longer partake in the game as it was played until the turn of the decade.
Yet.. on the optimistic side of things, this resistance, reveals itself as a feature of human evolution, and a 'change' is on its way.
The 'change' therefore is a mechanism of recognizing these people, resource allocation, and support infrastructure, so they can step aside from pursuing low quality feed-the-machine games, and nurture their unique pathways & unusual talents, to the kind of levels where they become gifts for society.
We're not talking about improving a set of "in-demand" skills that make you a cog in a market of emergent shallow incentives, we're talking of people who see and feel life differently to the herd.
But this change is unlikely to work as a system of goal-based expectations or "I'll support you for 'x' months to see what you can do" type of low resolution approach. It's instead going to require developing the type of conditions within a particular space where, human (not machine validated) trust can flourish.
TrustCoin will be an important experiment. Without this, many of our current & potential bright sparks might fade away; worse, we won't know they ever existed.
This is why it's worth everything.
