The Good Begins With Fail

I have a cliche dream. In the dream I invent something that generates a lot of money, succeed by the standards of the world, and then turn that success into something that levels the playing field for people worldwide. That is, helps to create what I call The Good. The money part is taking some time, though, and I occasionally need to remind myself why I'm doing it to generate some motivation. Hence, this. A blog about creating The Good, the ethics of getting there from here, the political atmosphere required, and new discoveries or ideas that might help.

But. The chaotic good blog begins with a fail. I write software, mainly web applications, and I recently decided to get into developing for the social graph. I ended up writing an application for Facebook called Flights To Friends. The application performs a useful service in that it tracks airfare to your friend list, but in my own mind one of the advantages to this service is that it would not be cannibalizing to existing travel. That is, it would cause people to travel more than they otherwise would, with no corresponding costs, certainly a good thing for the travel industry. It would fill seats. But we're talking air travel here. And air travel is, of course, the greatest contributor to carbon emissions (per traveler) of all travel options.

I think this dynamic often happens: we accept a long term, or not-personally-affecting liability in trade for a short term gain. It is exactly this type of thinking, that the short term exploitation of something that carries no financial cost (currently) can be used to get a leg up in the world, that led us to our financial crisis, to toxic chemicals in our groundwater, to irresponsible corporate governance based on unrealistic expectations of executive staff in regard to quarterly earnings. And what drives it? It's cliche. It's greed. I want to succeed so that I can make more of my dreams into realities. These dreams pertain, to a great degree, to creating a fairer and more just world for all of humanity. But if, in the pursuit of those dreams I contribute more to a less just world, with no guarantee that I will ever actually get to the point where my more just world can be effected, it would in the end be better that I did nothing at all.

I would posit as a first principle that The Good requires us to never push the costs of a given action off onto The Other.