I was playing Blokus today, where competition is driven by the scarcity of space on the game board, and realized that the perception of scarcity is often more prevalent than actual scarcity – and thus we needlessly hobble ourselves by limiting things that are abundant. Similarly, our fear that something might happen to us (crime, identity theft, terrorism, etc. – whatever monsters we see on the evening news) forces us to add locks and protections that mostly just result in making it hard for us to access our own belongings and data and websites.
The context for this discussion is a website (nameless, sorry) that I’m interested in working on. The startup site, yet another type of social network, holds the promise of allowing for some very interesting and powerful interactions – but unnecessarily limits its users as it guards scarce server resources and data security. Furthermore, and I’m going out on a limb here, I suspect that these mis-perceptions are one of the reasons this startup has had difficulty in raising much-needed funds. Some examples:
In spite of these issues, and others, I’m still captivated by the underlying ideas that it represents and by what it could become in the future. Hopefully I can <a href="http://johnb.github.io/2007/11/28/even-more-rapid-development"event_item">rapidly prototype</a> my vision for an improved site and use it as a starting point to land a dream job.