About Metro Decisions & Web 3.0
The next part of my professional life's work.
The first time I cracked the boundary of the first dosh point was sometime back in 1995. I had just moved to Atlanta with my wife and growing family and in a community where the average 3 BR house was going for about 150k, we were making > 100k in my household. It was a ratio I’m not sure I ever matched again, then again I asked for it by moving to a beach town in Southern California. At the time, and for many times again, I was an entrepreneur running my own little business called Metro Decisions.
One of my epiphany moments was when I learned, way back in the 80s, that LA’s grand theft auto machine ran on a core engine of Toyota parts stolen from the affluent Westside. The way people talk about crime, you would never guess that the highest number of perpetrations were happening around the economy of the Camry. Why? Because most people who can afford a Camry and whose taste is for this type of family vehicle carries car insurance. So the very common fender benders are likely to be covered. Thus there was a black market for these parts, not always purchased from the Toyota factory. So while the conventional wisdom about crime focused on the ‘inner-city’, drug economics it was yuppie Santa Monica where the booming numbers were. So I asked myself why are cities not data driven like what all my corporate customers are?
Since it was natural for me to ask such statistical questions about everything in life, years before I reviewed a galley print of Freakonomics for Dubner and Levitt, I decided to name my company Metro Decisions. But I have only managed all of these years mostly just to take care of my own family. Now I think I have a little breathing room for a number of all of the ideas that I never realized and social media never really took up. Despite my anonymous letters to both Musk and Bezos and my 30+ years in the business, nobody has picked up on what I think to still be fairly necessary ideas. You want to know something crazy? I still think these ideas are useful.
At any rate, I can see mountains that I cannot climb. I have also decided that my peace of mind is a little bit more important than my bank account. Even though my kids are completely independent, I’m still something of a backseat personality. I still eat last. My rewired instincts are still for Dad jokes, and I still am mostly satisfied by Debussy. I still scoff at the likes of Adam Neuman (WeWork) and SBF (FTX), and I guess I’m just too skeptical of the wisdom of the core driving principles of the crowd of software engineers who run things in America. Yet I readily confess that I did not possess the balls to risk it all and learn the VC shuffle, even though I was once invited. So I can’t even claim to know enough about how it properly works. On the other hand, I bought most of my BTC when it was below 3K per coin, and my Amazon stock when it was around $300. So I still think I have good instincts. All that said, I’m working (part-time) to pass the baton to the next generation.
My work with Free Black Thought has put me in touch with a growing number of people who appreciate what marginal wisdom I have amassed over the years. Similarly, I think my professional record doesn’t stink either. As Squirrelly Dan would say, “I certainly appreciates you readers to my Substacks.” I owe that to the woman from The (original) Well who told me “You never know how your writing will affect someone.” She went on to tell me what an impression and change I made in her life. So I press on. So for these reasons I will continue to reach out and ask technically and ethically capable folk to consider my ideas, in their own journeys of discovery. Everything that needs building has not yet been built. So let’s build it, shall we?
These major ideas are as follows:
XRepublic: Collaborative Virtual Parliament (after Limberg & Barnes)
WWID: Broad spectrum identity self-definition
Lorite Interrogator: Philosophical Affinity Sorting (after Stephenson)
LastID: Complete commercial & relationship management (Circle Protocol)
Boxtag: Multidimensional Comment Karma
Here’s the same old video that I made before the Pandemic.
Also props go to Dick Hardt formerly of Sxip for some inspiration long ago.
If you are interested in continuing a conversation or any level of participation in Metro Decisions, please send me an email. I’ll join you up with Slack and we’ll keep this going. My expertise is going to be multidimensional database design & ops in a cloud-based Kappa architecture. I should have some ML in all of that too. I absolutely have the vision, I absolutely don’t have the money, and I will make the time one way or another. This is an enduring interest. It’s about building systems that help us retain and expand our rationality, the scientific process, socratic dialog and decentralized power sharing & democratic processes.
Also if you have the scoops on any Web 3.0 businesses that are pointing in at least one of these directions, I would appreciate tips and pointers.
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One of the ideas that has been just sitting out there for almost a decade is that of smart cities, and surely this is a part of that. In one of those cozy little meetups I attended on Venice Blvd several years ago, this idea popped up. Why have dumb street-sweeping? Why not track the actual street sweeping machines and let people know when the trucks are a short distance away from where their cars are parked? This can be done with a system that has already been proven by {Uber, Lyft, Grab}. An accurate system can provide a 15 minute window so people can drive their cars around the block and immediately go back to their parking space once it is cleaned. The architecture for this kind of system will get cheaper over time. These are the kind of ideas I love. How about you?