In short, in my humble opinion, I think the answer to this question is yes, but not the type of voting in which I’m sure all of you out there are thinking.
This is a story about love, family, and passing things on from generation to generation. It’s a story about maximizing human potential, while bringing the truth into plain sight.
Most importantly, this is a story about hope, a hope for a brighter future for all of the beings of this planet.
One day, I believe that the people of this planet will achieve World Peace. From my point of view, life just sucks right now for the majority people on Earth, in one way or another.
But I do think we'll get there as a species. I mean, we've gotten this far without blowing ourselves up yet, so I think we still stand a fighting chance.
As I sit here and share my perspective with the rest of humanity, it's important to note that the date is 12-21-2021 A.D. in humanity's timeline. I am a human being, located in Golden, CO (the middle of the United States); and, as a white male that has traveled the world, while being given just about every advantage in life (due to the current state of the world), I can honestly say that I've made just about every mistake one can make throughout their lifetime, prior to having a child, and I’ve lived to tell the tale.
In fact, I’ve made so many mistakes in my life, at one point in my life, I remember my late father saying to me, "You know Adam, you don't have to learn every lesson the hard way." I also remember telling him shortly thereafter that perhaps he was right, but perhaps there were some lessons you just cannot ++learn++ any other way but through personal experience. I guess we were saying the same thing, just in our own way. I just know that I've made a lot of mistakes. And, the key to getting my life back on track after making each one of them, was owning up to it, by admitting that I was wrong, and forgiving myself, as I am only human.
Like most of you out there, I have a conscience. But it hasn't always been easy to tell right from wrong, especially when I was first starting out in life as a child.
We come into the world as children, innocent and full of wonder.
We're curious about the world around us and how things work (some more than others) and begin asking the other people that are around us questions in an honest effort to make sense of what’s really going on in the world.
As a human being, I can attest to this, as I know that I am an extremely curious person and have been since I was a young child. I know this because I also remember my father telling me one day of how I used to "put myself to sleep" as a child. Believe it or not, as a young infant, he and my mother started hearing loud thumping coming from my bedroom when they put me down for the night. To their surprise, the first time they opened the door to investigate what was going on in my bedroom, they found me raising my head up off the mattress and slamming it right back down again. They weren't really sure what to think of my actions, but they decided to let me keep going until I wore myself out and fell asleep.
This became a habit of mine, which my parents didn’t interfere with, and I eventually grew out of it. I can only imagine the wheels of wonder spinning in my brain keeping me up at night then as they still do today, at times.
To give you another example of my fascination with learning exactly how things work, not to mention an example of how different we all are as human beings, when I was about 7, my older brother received a Boombox (which was a portable stereo being the first of its kind) and a screwdriver and took them to my for his birthday from my parents.
Within minutes after he had opened his gift, he was already outside playing with his friends, having left his Boombox inside. As for me, I grabbed his Boombox and took it to my bedroom. Within minutes I had taken the entire thing apart and sat there in amazement questioning the purpose of each piece of technology. And, wouldn’t you know it, my father walked in at that moment. I was so frightened that I was going to be in big trouble for dismantling my brother’s birthday present, I shouted something like, “It’s ok Dad, don’t worry, I know how to put it back together.” And, I did, within a few minutes time.
Another thing that I found out later in my life was that my parents had decided early on in my life to raise me as a Protestant. The thing I find interesting about this decision is that they did so, not because they believed Christianity to be the Gospel (without a doubt in their minds and in their heart of hearts), but because my parents felt that the Protestant perspective represented a good set of morals (beliefs and values) in which to live your life.
In other words, my parents chose to raise me as a Protestant because it was easier for them to point to an example of a set of morals (beliefs and values) that someone else had already created in humanity’s timeline than to fall back on their own conscience, establish their own sense of right and wrong based on what they have experienced in life and know to be the truth, own up to their past mistakes with this new moral code in mind, forgive themselves for their wrongdoings with respect to this new code as they reflect on their past (as they are only human), begin living their lives by their newly established moral code, and choose to raise me (and my brothers and my sister) to follow their example, as opposed to following an example set by another human being that was written about by yet another human being in some religious text.
When I learned of this, I knew that I had no choice but to break the cycle, as he was raised Protestant, only to hand it down to me, without he even believing in it himself, not fully anyways (at least to my knowledge).
If I was going to consider myself to be a Protestant, it was going to be because I was a true believer and not because anyone else told me to or wanted me to be.
By the time I learned of this though, I had long questioned the idea of organized religion, starting from when I began questioning stories from The Bible in Sunday School and not getting answers from my teachers that truly satisfied my curiosities.
Along these same lines, I'm not sure when I came to this conclusion but, at one point in my life, I realized that everything I had ever read in my life was written by someone else and it was their interpretation of what they believe to be the truth on this Earth.
It was in this moment I realized that perhaps I didn't truly know anything for sure and I would have to re-educate myself from the ground up, in order to come to know what I wanted to know with certainty to be the truth.
From there, I began seeking the truth in a quest to discover my truth. I'm happy to report, I've found the latter. But I'm still working on the former.
To clarify, now that we live in a world where The Internet exists, there is an unlimited amount of information at our fingertips. One could spend a lifetime reviewing and analyzing what they find on the world wide web in their quest for truth and still not make much of a dent. Being that there is now so much information out there, it's impossible for anyone to know everything about everything. And, being that there is so much misinformation out there, it's really making it tough for the people to weed out the real news from the fake news.
With this in mind, it seems that the groundwork has been laid for the dystopian future that George Orwell depicts in his book "1984" (where the people of this planet lose control of their minds over time) to become a reality, which is something I warned the world about back in the year 2000 via my senior thesis paper in high school.
Fast-forward 21 years and the situation has only seemed to get worse.
Now that we are living in the age of deep fakes, not only can you not necessarily believe what you read on The Internet anymore, you can't believe what you read, watch, or even what you hear via any communication medium anymore and know with 100% certainty that it’s the truth, meaning that it actually happened on this Earth.
Not to intentionally scare any of you out there, but I firmly believe that, if we're not careful, meaning if we are not willing to share knowledge of what we know to be the truth through our own life experiences with our fellow human beings in a way that can be trusted, as our day to day experiences and interactions shift more and more toward/into a digital environment, we might get ourselves into a situation where only the highest levels of Government and/or massive corporations like the Google's and Verizon's of the world (those organizations and corporations that collectively own, control and surveil our infrastructure and communication systems) can actually piece together what's really happening in and between our respective societies.
If this happens and the people of this planet completely lose the connection with how things works and what's actually happening in the world around us, we may never be able to reconnect and push our societies back in the direction(s) that we as human beings want them to go.
In other words, at this moment in humanity's timeline, our societies and the laws that govern the way we live our lives are currently at risk of being highjacked by private interests, with some moving faster than others, as we are already starting to see this phenomenon play out here in the United States.
With these undeniable, disturbing, yet enlightening facts in mind, the big question from here becomes, what kind of world do we want?
To give you some insight into my current perspective of how I see the world and the direction that I would like it to go, when I was around 4 years old, my father joined the military as an Intelligence Officer in the United States Air Force. As with most military families, we moved around from one place to another every few years, even living in Germany overseas when I was finishing High School, which resulted in me gaining a global perspective prior to graduating.
It became clear to me over the years that, for the most part, it seems that all human beings want the same basic things in life: access to fresh/clean water, food, clothes on their back, a roof over their head, and the freedom to come and go as they please.
To give you an idea of how screwed up our priorities are, throughout the world, more than enough food is produced to feed the people of this planet, yet 811,000,000 people on this Earth live in hunger.
We can do better as a species, but I believe that we should do so out of the love and kindness in our hearts, above all else.
Along these lines, over the course of my lifetime, I've paid attention and took note of what I believe to be the greatest thing standing in the way of humanity realizing its full potential.
The good this news, I think we only need look in the mirror.
To be direct, I have a belief that humanity's "Great Filter" is ourselves.
The way I see it, one thing I've also noticed is that The Internet has literally connected individuals from all over the world, individuals who have now had the opportunity to share their life stories and viewpoints with each other, in one way or another, instantly via electronic means, which has allowed humanity to begin breaking away from the religious dogma in our thinking. In this way, a collective conscience among the people of this Earth has slowly started to form, one independent of the more codes (beliefs and values) established by organized religions that exist within and across our respective societies. And, I think this is a good thing.
This gives me hope and a belief that humanity is getting itself on the right track. What this literally means to me is that humanity is waking up. We're starting to create and share knowledge and formulate our own opinions, despite what we've been told by our previous generation(s).
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against organized religion per se. And, I do believe that everyone should be free to practice their religion, as long as, in doing so, you don't harm other beings on this planet.
It’s just that I don’t consider myself to be a religious person.
However, based on the personal experiences that I've had in my life to date, I do consider myself to be an extremely spiritual person and believe that there has to be some creative force out there that we as human beings all came from and are connected to, which is why it makes so much sense to me that we all have so much in common and want the same basic things in life.
Most importantly, I’m beginning to realize that, above all else, all human beings simply want to be free, free to think, do and say whatever they please, as long as they are not harming another being on this planet, or harming the planet/environment itself.
Furthermore, from my perspective, it seems to me that we've reached a point in humanity's timeline where most people are now aware of “The Golden Rule” and would prefer it if we could/would all live our lives according to it on Earth. However, if you aren’t yet aware of this age-old rule, depending on who you ask, the Golden Rule, in so many words, translates to "Treat people how you want to be treated." or better yet "Do not do onto others as you would not like done onto you."
And, some might even refer to this concept as the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP).
But the sad reality that we are still facing today is that, depending on the organized religion you might subscribe to, your organized religion's beliefs and values may not be compatible with The Golden Rule. For instance, some religions require you to literally kill your family member, as an honor killing, if you find out that they are attracted to a member of the same sex.
I don't care what the name of your organized religion is and/or what people, actions, and events have been recorded throughout your version of human history that have inspired the formation and retooling of your religious doctrine(s) over humanity’s timeline, but should the existence of a God as most human beings understand the concept of God to be today prove to be the truth over humanity’s timeline, something tells me now that murdering your family members because of who they are and passing it off as an honor killing is NOT part of "God's Plan."
However, because I don't live in a society where these actions are tolerated, perhaps it's not my place to question the moral code (beliefs and values) of these human beings. I guess all I'm suggesting to humanity is that those human beings that do, should.
In other words, right now, anyone reading this article that is living in one of these societies that allows honor killings of your family members should be asking themselves, "If there is a God, do I really think that taking such an action against my fellow man is really what God wants?"
In this way, if we are aware of what's actually going on in the world around us, meaning what is going on in and between our respective societies, and we are willing take a step back and rethink what we've been told is right and wrong, we may come to realize that, if we are truly honest with ourselves, we'd be better off letting our conscience be our guide in establishing our own moral code, which will allow us to be more confident in our current viewpoints and push for the change we wish to see in our societies based on this newly established moral code.
Doing this may not be easy for some, if not most people on Earth. But I believe that doing so is mission critical for the survival of the human species, as continuing to practice organized religion, in this day and age, is only creating unnecessary division between the people of this planet, which is preventing humanity from maximizing its full potential. If there is a “God,” I think that this was and has been God's plan all along.
To clarify, if there is a “God” out there, I think his/her/their plan all along was/is to spark life into existence in a way that humanity would come to the realization on our own that we are all one and the same, see the error in our ways, and make a decision to course correct. It seems we had to make all the mistakes that we could possibly make, in order to learn from them, so that we can pass those lessons on to the next generation. In this way, we won't have to keep starting from scratch and sustainable progress in humanity's timeline can be made, so forth and so on.
One approach to reaching this state of enlightenment as an individual, one that I know works well (through my own personal experience), is to pretend you're stuck living the same day over and over again, like Bill Murray’s character does in the movie "Groundhog Day," until you figure out the meaning of life, meaning what life is all about and how it should be lived.
You'll have your good days and your bad days, but if you are willing to be honest with yourself and admit your mistakes when you fall off track, you are able to forgive yourself for making those mistakes, and learn from the experience, just as Bill Murray’s Character does in the movie.
For those of you that haven't seen this movie, Bill Murray's character goes from someone that is generally disliked by others in his life (because he's generally a bad person) to being someone that is generally liked by everyone in this small town he's visiting because he realizes the error of his ways in life, learns what it means to be a good person, and decides to act that way.
This didn't happen all at once and especially not because he read some religious text and all of the sudden he instantly knew right from wrong in all things in life. This happened as a result of literally being forced to relive the same day over and over again, without anyone explaining to him why or even how what he was experiencing in his life could be possible.
Through a series of trial-and-error experiments, questioning what was happening to him and checking his actions against his conscience to gain a newfound sense of what was right and wrong, he began living his life in a way that he did because he believed it was the right thing to do, not because someone else told him it was the right thing to do. From his experiments, he learned that, regardless of our differences, all human life has value, as we are all one and the same and, as human beings, we deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.
In short, in the movie "Groundhog Day," Bill Murray's character establishes his own moral code, independent of religion, because he was faced with an uncertain reality and realized that he'd have to think for himself and make his own decisions in life in order to reach his full potential.
Another key lesson that I've learned in life through personal experience, a notion that was also reinforced in the movie "Groundhog Day", is that the while all human beings deserve to be treated fairly and equally, we are not all the same and we're certainly not equal. The people of this planet all unique in some way, born with varying talents and abilities, or types and levels of potential. But, because many of us haven't gone through what Bill Murray's character went through in the movie “Groundhog Day,” they may not be realizing their full potential. After all, if you recall, in the movie, Bill Murray's character seems to only realize his full potential as a human being, essentially becoming the local town hero overnight, once he decides to break free from his old ways and commit to living his life by a new moral code.
I would take this a step further and assert that, in order to realize our full potential as a species, we need to find ways to come together, regardless of our perceived differences, and focus on the things that make us truly unique as individuals in an effort to figure out how to use our talents and abilities in a way that best compliments each other as we work together for the betterment of humanity. I would assert that these are the differences we should be focusing on, not the labels that may have been given to us by our parents, and/or the labels that society has given us, and/or the labels that we may have even assigned to ourselves, which only seem to be creating further division within and between our respective societies.
Whether we realize it or not, there are countless ways we are divided by labels within our respective societies and thus our power weakened as human beings here on Earth. It seems, we’re in a situation where every line that can be drawn has been drawn at this point.
At this point in humanity’s timeline, as if dividing humanity up among 195 countries wasn't division enough, we now have various systems of governments in play throughout the world, which are typically dominated by two political parties with polarizing viewpoints, creating impenetrable systems of gridlock to sustainable progress, almost as if it were done by design.
Studies on human beings have been conducted.
Marketing/Advertising now exists in the world because it works. Marketing messages have been formulated, tested, and are actively being deployed in ways you would never imagine ensuring that they have the desired influential impact on the their chosen targets (think Mad Men).
With this in mind, it seems that there are those out there that are very aware of how our bodies and our minds as human beings work.
Social media, not the mention the media in general, is now a thing and content that is created by media organizations and shared by influencers is being impressed upon the masses in a way that is causing people to focus on our perceived differences in order to keep us divided within our societies as opposed to focusing on the things we have in common, not to mention celebrating our individual “God” given talents, which should be bringing us together at this point in humanity’s timeline, paving a way for sustainable progress for all in humanity's timeline.
In the United States, we are seeing this playing out right now with Whites vs Minorities, Men vs Women, Republicans vs Democrats, Baby Boomers vs Millennials, and Natives and Transients.
As a human being, first and foremost, I find the current situation in the United States to be a sad state of affairs. But, as I’ve said before, I do believe there is still hope for us all.
But the recurring theme here is that we must first acknowledge that we are all human beings. We don't get to choose what reproductive organs we are born with, what type of parents we are born to, what color our skin is, or even where we're born. In this way, every human being on the planet is a victim of circumstance. This being the case, we each deserve a way to influence the world around us to ensure that it moves in the direction that we want it to go and, if we can't achieve the change we want to see in our respective societies, we should be given a path and the freedom to live elsewhere, assuming we decide we want to leave the place where we currently reside as a result of this misalignment. If not, this misalignment is bound to fester and spread, which may eventually cause an uprising that leads to violent revolution vs peaceful evolution.
To me, it seems that, in addition to paving the way for George Orwell’s “1984” to become a reality, the groundwork for this vision for the future of humanity has already been laid as well, as this was/has always been the promise of humanity's latest governmental invention, democracy.
The troubling thing about democracies is that we're starting to see evidence that they are not only capable of being highjacked by private interests, but they are also actively being highjacked by private interests, at least that’s what’s happening currently in the United States.
It’s important to point of that I live in the United States, not because this is the place where I was born and therefore consider it to be my home and always will.
As a self-respecting human being, I live in the United States because the State has been successful in creating an environment in which I, as a human being, currently wish to live.
In other words, I live in the United States because, even with all its problems, I think there is still hope for humanity and that humanity might be better off trying work with what we have started here in America vs starting from scratch.
However, I do believe we are at a pivotal moment in United States history and thus humanity's timeline. Should my environment change in a way that pushes the United States closer to the future for humanity that George Orwell warns us about in his book "1984," I will have no choice but to start looking for a new place to live, in earnest (pun intended).
I guess this article, a thought piece if you will, is starting to become more about humanity's true nature. It seems to me that we'll never be satisfied with the status quo, as someone, somewhere, will look at the world around them and think to say, "There's got to be a better way."
I know that's how my mind works. I also know that, in this way, I'm just like my father. He was never short of innovative ideas, as his mind worked the same way.
By this point in the article, you might have noticed that I still haven't fully answered the question I raised in an earlier part of this thought piece, which was, "What kind of world do we want?"
Unfortunately, I'm not able to answer this question, at least at this time in humanity’s timeline, because I don't know. And, I would venture to say that no one individual on the face of this Earth knows the answer to that question. How could they?
To clarify, we know what we know now (or at least what we think we know and what we know we don't know about ourselves and the world around us). But what do we know, truthfully?
I’ve come to realize of the course of my lifetime is that we can’t be 100% sure of humanity’s history, as it seems that there’s a different version of humanity’s history depending on who you ask, where that person is from, and what that person may have experienced in their lifetime.
Furthermore, history seems to have been written by the winners throughout humanity’s timeline and continues to be rewritten to this day to better serve those in power within any given society.
Thankfully, we’ve found ways to connect with others within and across our respective societies, in the modern world, and share our own knowledge so that we can collectively start determining fact from fiction. But, with the introduction of Social Media into our lives, in recent years, it seems we’re now getting most of our news and information from our social media applications, those which have (whether you realize it or not) have been programmed with algorithms that create personalized news feeds to increase each person’s individual interaction with the application (among other things), in an effort to create more data on you than can be collected, analyzed, and monetized for that Social Media company’s financial gain.
What this tells me is that, believe it or not, we’ve literally reached a point in humanity’s timeline where people sitting in the same room can have a very different perception of reality, what has happed in the world to date, and what is currently happening around them, because we’re getting our information from our chosen mix of social media news feeds, which are being individually customized by social media companies, whom we now know are included in that list companies that have already highjacked the United States Federal Government. It pains me to have to say this, but this undeniable phenomenon should be causing every person on Earth to begin questioning everything they read, see, and hear, in an effort to determine fact from fiction.
I guess what I’m saying is that all we can ever know with 100% certainty is what we believe to be right and wrong, to be The Truth, at any given point in our lives. Yet, at this point in humanity’s timeline, although it seems the picture ++was++ starting to become more clear, we only know what we know as individuals, as a system that is capable of aggregating public beliefs and opinions at a global level all the way down to the individual (in a way in which the level of privacy (the level of anonymity of the individual) is controlled by the individual), does not yet exist. If it did, I think we could use this system to more quickly to sort things out.
Whether we want it or not, with these thoughts in mind, perhaps this type of voting system is what humanity needs now more than ever, or at least I thought so, back in 2012, when I originally founded Follow My Vote.
To give you a little more insight into Follow My Vote's origin story, around the time when President Barack Obama (44th President of the United States) began running for office, the conversations in my house started become more and more focused on politics and our individual family members concerns with the direction the United States was headed.
To give you some background here, throughout my lifetime (at least as far as I could remember), my father had always been proud to call himself a Republican. I distinctly remember him saying from time to time over the years that, “Once I learned enough about the world, I would be a Republican too.”
To this day, I'm proud to say that I have never been affiliated with any political party. In fact, if one were to put a gun to my head (which believe it or not has happened to me in the past) and told me to pick a political party, I would tell them to pull the trigger. But I digress.
To get back to my story, after a series of frustrating political conversations I had with my parents, and my father, in particular, which were notably typically centered around the hot button issues on which Republicans and Democrats can never seem to agree. These issues were always top of mind to us, as these issues were/are the only ones that seem to be regularly discussed in the news media. In fact, many arguments in my house started based on someone’s reaction to what was being discussed in a news story my family was watching on TV. Over the course of weeks, months, and even years, we finally realized that these conversations weren't really going anywhere. It couldn't be clearer to me that the labels that we had assigned ourselves, such as Republicans and Democrats or Baby Boomers and Millennials, were getting in our way.
To make matters worse, from one conversation to the next, I wasn't really getting to know my parents any better than I did before, which was my primary motivator in these conversations. In fact, these conversations, and the frustrations we experienced as a result of not being able to get through to each other, were actually driving us apart. I began to believe that if we were to remove these labels and try our very best to not include them in our conversations, it was highly likely that we'd come to realize that we agreed on more than we disagreed. And, being that my goal at this point in my life was to strengthen the relationships I had built with my parents to date, not weaken them, like my father had done so many times in his life, I took a step back from the situation, my situation in life, and said, "there’s got to be a better way."
I shared these concerns with my father who seemed to believe that I was right, as I could see in his eyes that the innovative wheels in his brain had already started spinning.
He then said something to me like, “What if there was a game you could play at home with your family members so that you could get to the heart of what your family members believe and why without the conversation erupting into an argument before it even gets started?”
It could be done in an anonymous way, once 3 or more players decide to join, so that everyone one's family feels free to share what they truly believe (without being/feeling coerced to vote in one way or another) and other members within the family (perhaps with conflicting viewpoints) would have the opportunity to gain, or at least consider, a different perspective from their own, knowing that someone in their family feels a certain way about a specific topic.
We then realized that through this interactive and enlightening game, one of us may end up changing what we believe about any given issue based on new information that is presented to us, while avoiding the infighting we had experienced in our previous political conversations.
If it were to be done anonymously, being that our minds work in the way that they do (and it’s hard to keep our wheels from spinning), we then envisioned this game being extended into every household on the planet and, before you’d know it, humanity would have accurate data (an accurate database if you will) that anonymously showcases what every individual believes on any given issue.
Needless to say, I was sold on the idea of this game and wanted to play!
Not only did I want desperately to play this game with my mother and father, I wanted to play this game with my brothers and my sister as well. I really wanted/want to play it with my entire family throughout the course of our lives. Knowing that it did not yet exist, I hoped one day that I’d have a part in bringing it to life; and, from there, I begin planning my approach to doing so.
Over the course of a few years, as I continued meditating on this idea and all the good things that I might be able to do for the people of this planet once I/humanity had access to this data, I realized that if the people of the United States were to integrate information on their elected officials in Washington D.C. and how each member of the House Representatives and every United Stated Senator have voted on various bills as they passed or didn’t pass through Congress, we might be able to leverage the data gathered from playing this game to begin holding the elected officials in the United States accountable to voting in ways that truly represent the will of the people in their various jurisdictions.
Armed with this idea, I decided to quit my lucrative day job in the digital marketing industry and returned to my alma mater in Blacksburg, VA (where Virginia Tech is located -> 10 years after graduating with a B.S. degree in Marketing Management), to focus on this startup full time.
It was only when I got to Blacksburg, VA, did I come to realize that the United States (and the world for that matter) was facing bigger problems as a society, if you can imagine that!?
To clarify, within a few months of my return, Follow My Vote was accepted into a startup incubator called NuSpark, where our app idea and business plan were called into question with the introduction of the Lean Startup Method. While at this NuSpark, which was a startup in and of itself, I was introduced to the concept of Blockchain Technology (or Distributed Ledger) and the notion that it could be utilized as the underlying technology for developing an open-source end-to-end verifiable voting system capable of securely hosting government sponsored elections. The major difference between this voting system and the voting systems that are currently used in the United States is that, with this voting system, the people ++could++ vote securely using their own electronic devices and the election results ++could++ be independently verified by all participants.
Not only was my mind blown, but I also found this to be extremely coincidental, as the first election that I had the opportunity to participate in was the United States Presidential Election of 2000.
For those of you that don't know, in the 2000 election, Republican candidate, George W. Bush, squared off against Democratic candidate, Al Gore. And, this election, more so than any other, made quite an impression on me, as it was one of the most controversial elections in United States history.
Based on how things played out with respect to the 2000 election, I had already bookmarked the lack of transparency in United States elections and their results as a societal problem worth tackling. In fact, I considered it to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, and most fundamental problems plaguing society then and to this day.
I still maintain this position as of today; and, the reason I say this is that we already know that the United States Congress has been hijacked and we have the data to support that assertion. Therefore, ensuring that United States elections are being conducted in ways in which their outcomes can be trusted should become of utmost importance to every American, if only to stop the bleeding.
Facing this realization, the Follow My Vote Team pivoted away from our original app idea and began focusing on building this type of voting system instead.
The thing is, although we officially kicked off that ground-breaking project in 2015, in working to bring the MVP of our secure open-source end-to-end verifiable voting software to life over the years, the Follow My Vote Team came to the conclusion that, in order to fulfill the promise of blockchain, we must secure the front-end of the applications we develop to the same standards as the blockchain backends (distributed ledgers/databases) and that the only way it seemed possible was to first develop a decentralized application (dApp) development platform, which has led to Follow My Vote’s latest pivot. Once this dApp development platform is up and running, we intend to pivot back to developing our voting/polling software as a dApp or series of dApps.
In summary, the Follow My Vote Team has realized that, in order to build secure software that is capable of hosting polls and elections securely online in a way in which the results can be anonymously and independently verified, we must first build a new type of app store for our apps to live, apps that are capable of securely connecting to all of the blockchains out there that are capable of storing data in a secure, irreversible and publicly verifiable way.
The interesting thing here is that the need to have to build such a software development platform in order to bring voting securely online only showcases that the technology we are using today simply isn't secure.
In fact, if you ask the experts, they will tell you that nothing on The Internet is secure. The apps on our smart phones are not secure. There are only safeguards keeping us safe.
But one thing I’ve learned about safeguards is that there are always ways around them.
To be crystal clear, this is why the Follow My Vote Team and humanity at large is in the situation that we are in; and, I would assert that the only way out of this mess is simply to rebuild, everything, from the ground up, so that it will be able to run off this next generation technology.
Like I stated earlier in this thought piece, it seems that human beings had to figure out all the wrong ways of doing things, in order to get them right. This is one of those situations and moments in history.
But need I remind you that this is a story about hope!
The good news is that, being that we're going to need to recreate all of our software applications and tech systems over time in order to get things right, we are going to have a lot of new dApps to build AND, they are going to not only be secure, they are going to be software applications that are more easy and faster to build than ever before.
Along these lines, one of the Follow My Vote Team's goals in developing this dApp development platform is to cut time to market in half, if not more.
It's also important to point out that dApps built on this dApp platform will be built on a secure and transparent infrastructure so the truth can't continue to be hidden or re-written throughout humanity's timeline.
This means that we are living in exciting time folks!
Once secured, technology is nothing to be feared, not even pure Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The thing about Artificial Intelligence or AI that very few people realize is that AI runs on software applications. And, the good news is, it’s the human beings that program the software that the AI systems and robots run on. In other words, AI is only as intelligent as we human beings make it. For these reasons, I firmly believe that technology, in general, is here to save the people of this planet. It's meant to be understood and harnessed for the betterment of all of the beings of this planet, not just humans, or at least I believe this to be the case.
And, the cool thing about software these days is that it can be developed as open-source software code, which means that it is publicly inspectable at any and all times. So, you can always be assured that the software is working as it should and that there is no funny business going on in front of your eyes or behind the scenes when you use your apps.
What's even cooler is that the dApp development platform the Follow My Vote Team is building is meant to be a completely open-source project owned by the tech community at large and will only run open-source dApps.
This means that there will be ++nothing to fear++ when using dApps running on this dApp platform.
In this new era, there will be limitless job opportunities for anyone that wants a job, as there will no shortage of work. However, we may need to re-educate ourselves from time to time and learn new skills, like how to develop dApps, in order to keep stay competitive in the workforce.
Humanity has got a ways to go on the dApp development platform, but Follow My Vote has received grant funding to support the project for the time being and hopefully through to completion. And, as I alluded to before, the dApps we plan to build will be geared toward helping people solve their own problems within society, with the first dApp being a voting/polling application called, Pollaris.
Who knows? One day we might build the functionality for the game I wanted/want to play with my family into Pollaris along the way. If not, I sure hope that someone else out there builds it, as I believe that this type of voting dApp could be a path to World Peace.
Note that I clearly didn't get the chance to play the game I've been talking about throughout this this thought piece with my mother and father, as this game does not exist yet and my father died on 10-4-2019, at the age of 62.
Sadly, until the last few weeks of my father's life, these labels continued to get in the way of my family members coming to truly know each other, inside and out.
To give you an idea of the damage these labels had on my family, my older brother and my father got into fighting so bad one day, my brother didn't visit home for almost 10 years and really only returned home when my father was essentially on his death bed. It broke my heart to hear them have one last political conversation with each other and see them actually listening to each other, knowing they were finally having a breakthrough, yet it was the last time they'd ever have a chance to have such a conversation in an effort to get to know each other better.
If we had been able to play such a game when my father and I initially realized that there was a need for it, or at least that we had a need for it as a family, the last 10 years of my father's life and our family’s life could have been a lot different. You just never know.
The good news is, there is still hope that my son or daughter gets to play this game with my wife and I, should we decide to have a child and we all decided we wanted to play this game.
If my would-be family were to get the chance to play this game, I think we'd get to know each other better than without it, and perhaps even better than I ever knew my father. My child would likely come to know what I truly believed in and why (before I died), even if they didn’t agree, which would allow our family to pass on knowledge/information/wisdom from one generation to the next. And, who knows, my child might even be able to teach me and my wife a thing or two about how the world works and what’s going on in the world around us in the process.
At this point, I cannot stress the importance of family and being there for each to make sense of the world and what's going on in the world around us. I can say this because, not only did I choose to re-educate myself over the course of my life, at one point throughout the process it seems that I might have lost my mind, if only for a second, but that's a story for another time.
The important thing to know here is that it was my mother and my father that helped me find it again. They helped me gain a sense of what was going on around me and happening to me in my time of need. In this way, families are like time capsules, trusted sources of information passed down from one generation to another generation.
Once I had a solid footing, I started collecting/storing information on my own (in my mind and in my files) that I considered to be the truth from what I could find online.
The crazy thing is that when searching online, I tried to find record of some moments in history I thought I could remember, but I couldn't find any supporting information about them online. It's almost as if these events in human history had been erased from humanity's timeline.
With this in mind, now that we've reached this point in humanity's timeline, I think it's time we prioritize copying all the knowledge/information/wisdom we have to the blockchain in a way that it can be corroborated by others as being true or false. But, yet again, I digress.
That's just it. My concern here for my fellow man is that, based on where this world is headed, the connection we have between each other may one day be the only thing we have left, if that. Right now, between all of humanity, I believe we have enough material to arrive at The Truth. So, let's build on what true knowledge/information/wisdom we have while we still can.
In summary, I guess all I am saying is that we need to be careful about what we pass down to our children, meaning from one generation to the next, and acknowledge that the closer we align ourselves with The Truth, the better off humanity will be, at least in my humble opinion.
After all, I believe that it's the truth that will set us free and allow humanity to pass though “The Great Filter,” which again I believe is ourselves.
I'm up for the challenge. Now, the question becomes, who is coming with me?
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