It's Contentious

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Black Girls Code

Institutional racism is a problem. Thinking of your ancestral ties through DNA and cultural affinities as a race-based conceptualization is not a problem. Self-respect does not come from social-welfare. Social benevolence comes from Institutional equality, and structure yields the resulting stories.

Institutional inequality is a problem. Thinking of your Sovereign heritage as a relationship to the source of authority and power you conceptualize personally is not a problem. Self-respect does not come from administrative origins. Personal power comes from within, and is guaranteed by the structural relationship that Individuals possess personally with the source of all "more perfect Unions".

I was recently invited to a Singularity University event in Silicon Valley at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The event was filled with people aspiring after innovations in Society across an extremely diverse array of problems to be solved and opportunities to be constructed. Upon hearing of my own efforts at kidOYO, the repeated response was "I wish I could code, if I could code our project would be 12-18 months further downstream!". Innovator after innovator shared this common position statement, along with appreciation for the work of teaching young people this immensely valuable skill.

Then I met some of the local venture capitalists and started hearing a different part of this same conversation, "I wish our schools out here were teaching kids to code like that.. do you want to come to California?". Turns out, Silicon Valley is not teaching their kids to code any better than most other parts of the world. So why is Silicon Valley a destination for innovation?

I have been building entrepreneurial efforts in the New York metro and Washington DC metro regions since 1992. My friends say I am "unemployable" because entrepreneurial efforts are the only kind of work that interests me. I love all types of entrepreneurial efforts; social, civic, commercial, health, environment, etc. I have been to Silicon Valley many times since 1992, and while I never agreed with the hype-based version of innovation that talking puppets selling pet supplies ushered in during the 1900's, I have always been aware of the most important difference between Silicon Valley and other regions, and its affect on entrepreneurs.

In 1992 I was a freshman at George Mason University, enrolled in the Business School as part of a 6 student "Japanese Business Management" program that put me in touch with some unique learning opportunities. An internet was coming to life in Fairfax, Virginia in 1992, and people like Vint Cerf and Steve Case were accessible for conversations about the structure of the future. While computer science professors were trying to scare students out of their rooms in an attempt to find the "real" capable CS students, true innovators were pointing at "blogs" as a way of becoming relevant for the future with skills that mattered.

In the convening years, amidst many failed development projects, some modestly productive ones, and occasionally useful ventures, one thing I learned was that CS was both incredibly powerful, and also Institutionally captured & irrelevant for the innovation that TCP/IP was enabling in the world. Many of my developer peers that I was learning from and with were self-taught, having studied Philosophy, Economics, Business, Mathematics and Medicine at various Colleges & Universities, but almost never credentialed as "Engineers" of Computer Science, or any other field for that matter. While TCP/IP certainly was created by Engineers, and engineering skills were on full display in the agencies that gave it life, the credential silo was the first to fall when the internet started doing its work to "internetwork" and inter-connect all of the various communication and data silos that it was working with incrementally.

Reality of the matter is, from the public release of the internet in 1995 post NSFnet, Institutional understanding and integration of the deep changes that the internet was going to create in Society did not show up on most relevant radars as concerns of "literacy" and literate participation methods until post-2013. I personally started teaching about the internet and web-programming within schools on a volunteer basis in 1996, and can attest that I was dismissed, disregarded and all but ignored until 2010... and even then, only by the most open and innovative minds. In 2014, the first real opportunities to "teach" what I would refer to as basic digital literacy arrived. It has been a fight and a mountain to climb ever since.

Administrative dysfunction and Institutional mis-structure are problems to continuously confront, and the results that they produce require intervention by on-the-ground leaders with productive intents aimed at empowering Individual people, and the communities they build. This work starts with an attitude and an openness to the idea that Individual people should have personal power, and they should be in control of the opportunities that life enables and have the authority to resolve the problems that life is made from. If Silicon Valley is an example of anything, it is an example of this attitude, and the resulting efforts of the people that flock to this region speak to the nature of its effect on the world.

Credentials that do not mean what they suggest is a very big problem in the world today. Enter public schools Nation-wide, and you will see this problem in motion. We do not have a talent-shortage in America, and we do not have a teacher-shortage in America... we have a credential-problem caused by Institutional failure. Institutional failure is the single greatest problem in the world today.

Institutional "Rights" and the Laws that emit from our Governing bodies are structurally mis-aligned to the nature of Society, and the Sovereign authority which produces productive integrity generation after generation. Social discord is on the rise as a result. Go back to the internet, created by the US Department of Defense as both a communication silo-buster and information infrastructure in a global environment where militarized leverage is required for Sovereign success. Open any website and go to its "Terms of Service"... read them.

There is irony in that suggestion; TOSDR is a joke that people tell about our Institutional system of Law with regard to the internet. No one reads these legal documents with enforceable Terms, and civil Society being dismantled one irrelevant Law at a time is on display for all to witness. Truth be told, the internet has exceeded the expectations of its original engineers, and the root capabilities that it was designed to service have confronted a root problem within the structure of every "civil Society" on Earth. IPv4 moving to IPv6 is a simple agnostic admission that the original engineering on the internet was not conceived with an expansive-enough view on the future impact that this amazing engineering outcome would produce in Society. And the absence of understanding for the true nature of silo-busting that the internet would enable is useful in explaining the effect on personal Rights and freedoms that the internet is increasingly affecting.

Identity is the root silo of civil Society; the structure of identity is the control parameter of Human freedom and empowerment. The internet is laying bare the relationship that Individuals have with the infrastructure of Sovereignty itself, and it is exposing all kinds of problems/ opportunities. Every Institutional outcome is derived by the structural relationship that people have with the Law under Sovereign authority, and depending on how that Sovereign authority is administered, Human Rights either exist or are dominated by system-granted permissions.

The ultimate silo of Human freedom is Sovereign identity; Rights and credentials flow from the structure of Institutional identity, and structure yields results. Fighting against mis-structured outcomes and Institutional inequality by demonstrating it is a failed and ignorant act, and yet that is exactly what civil participation in Society is degrading to in numerous ways currently. Politically, peoples that should innately understand what it means to be "mis-owned" by Sovereign structure are choosing to participate in the mis-structuring so as to loot from it available benefits under the auspices of charity and legal compulsion. Institutional inequality is producing angst, but the reaction is more commonly to use Institutional methods that affirm the authority of this flawed relationship model to derive benefit personally, rather than alter the innate structure of the relationship that people have with Institutional entities.

The future requires Human-based Rights. System Rights are not equal to Human-based Rights, and with the emergence of artificial intelligence capable of structuring activities as liability-protecting corporations, Human Individuals are going to experience what it means to be inferior as administrative entities under Sovereign management as never before. Human Rights have been constructed in such a way as to derive their sustenance from the integrity of National Sovereign protections and system-based Rights. This is not only illogical, but can be traced to a common sense error and omission in the very structure of Sovereign Rights. In America, this issue will land before the Supreme Court one day, and the very structure of Human identity as a Human Right respecting structure will be under review.

If a Sovereign identity is formed within a system database, it contains zero Human-based Rights, and is immediately inferior in operational structure to other administrative forms of system identifiers that the Law recognizes, enables and enforces. Human Rights must be self-Sovereign, and the Declaration of Independence and resulting Constitution both demonstrate this innate reality, and must be fixed to deal with the error of omission caused by a mis-understanding of common sense in the construction of this form of civil Society.

Fixing identity-based credentials, and ceasing to use them as employment discrimination methods amidst a world that will increasingly use tools founded upon silo-busting infrastructure to educate and empower itself is a requirement for the continued respect of Institutional authority, and our country should move quickly to remedy this problem at the risk of great civil upheaval and failure-scaling.

Its 2017... this problem has been with us for a good while... when will we recognize the nature of the problem Society-wide?