(A note to the optimists: I always talk mean, and this post is destined for non techie, and anti-techie audiences. I hope you won't be too offended.)
The Anarchist Black Cross Network exists to support anarchist and rebel inmates, sending letters, funds, books, and publicising their struggles. Maintaining public attention can mean the difference between life and death for prisoners of war, especially those who have fought the police, or don't pass as straight. Obtaining medical care and preventing horrendous abuse are often obscenely difficult, and publicity is often equal to safety.
Thus, there are a bazillion support pages out there on the internet. Most are as simple as a wordpress with letters and updates from the fam. Many have paypal accounts attached, so they can ask for donations. Most of these prison support groups will not respond positively to anything that feels new-fangled and expensive. Many of these groups are explicitly anticapitalist. So, if they are reading this, here's whats up.
Steemit is a mix of wordpress and facebook. Steemit is ripe with the noises of suckling sycophants. Steemit is ugly. However, steemit's ugliness and screechy futurism attempt to justify their existence by paying people to post content on steemit, to upvote each other, and to comment on the posts of others. They claim to describe their opaque and optimistic method of giving money in the white paper, but the blast of benevolence i saw when i attempted to read it made my eyes bleed. The short version, i assume, is that they play around with crypto currencies, jiggling their capital in the greasy deepness of day-trader waters to attract investment and speculate like a Soros. What it all adds up to is an attempt to make culture into currency. This is both horrifying and hilarious, somehow.
I propose to take as much money as they are prepared to give us, as a concerted effort among prison support organizations and support groups. It will amount to a bunch of hassle, and small change for most people involved. However, the site could potentially create from nothing a modest grip of money over the course of a few years.
The cost is this:
Posting letters and updates about your loved ones and homies once or twice a week.
Clicking an upvote button whenever it's convenient, preferably while you are wasting time at work.
Trying not to be visibly grossed out by the magnitude of Peter Thielishness that swirls like a hurricane over steemit at all times, so the techie goons give us more money.
Profits:
The amount of money you can make off of steemit is directly correlated to your network effect on the site. By yourself, you can't upvote yourself. Two friends can upvote each other once. Four friends get upvoted three times and the votes count for more money. There are squishy limits on how many times you can upvote people per day, and posting multiple articles everyday is considered trashy. So my idea for the take is this:
Lets say twenty groups make steemit accounts. All of them by the end of each week have upvoted each other. If you get a nickle for each upvote, you got a dollar next week. Not worth it. But next week, since you already got the dollar, steemit gives ten cents to each person you upvote. $3. If we all act like robots and stick with the model, the accounts would roll up like the fibbonacci sequence.
The actual process is way more convoluted and bullshit, to prevent robots from consuming the blockchain. But a grip of people could, i think, really get something going for people like Michael Kimble, Jennifer Gann, or Chelsea Manning.
Sean Swain, theoretically, is going to be released into the wild at some point in the future. Economically, mentally, and emotionally, that will be an extreme day. It would be a significant boon to have a few hundred, god forbid a grand or two, for the guy to live on and to eat, while adjusting to the climate changed reality outside of prison.
I don't mean for this to be simply anarchist prisoners, either, but i think that the prison support networks between ABC chapters, Books To Prisoners programs, and radical blogs can create a coherent mode or ettiquette that could garner the attention of folks like FAM, and other groups that sink into social fibers deeper than the kids in skinny jeans and dark hoodies. Steemit.com will benefit from content focused on the dystopian nature of reality, and the suffering of humans in meatspace will be funded against.
Thank you for your time.
This could be exactly what Steemit needs. A dose of reality. An injection of meatspace rot into the gleaming futurish perfection.
Welcome to Panoptiquarium, whales and minnows alike.