Congratulations, you’ve made it to retirement age, and without a pension or investment plan, you’ll have to hack your way through your golden years like you did your youth. Have no fear, with a little bit of innovative thinking and peer collaboration, you can seamlessly cruise through your elder dementia in style!
Many precarious workers do manage to make it to retirement, and it just might happen to you. Some Americans have turned to “outsourcing eldercare” by shipping their parents off to India, to live like a Maharaja on $2000/month. In Japan, the film “Mezon do Himiko” tells the story of a retirement home for elderly transvestites and homosexuals. They managed to fund their retirement from a successful Tokyo nightclub and wealthy donors.
But are Ledgestriders™ so well prepared for our retirement? Do you really think people will want to read your pitch decks, funding or job applications when you’re wearing a diaper? It’s time to start exploring options for people who aren’t part of the rank and file society before it’s too late.
But you are now 96 years old and your robotic care assistant accidentally sucked up your dentures into the opensource vacuum cleaner because the IoT fridge and stove were chatting away and inadvertently knocked the robot offline.
It’s really not a problem because a neighbour in your HackGrace has a 3D printer and (after downloading a free 3D file off Thingiverse) you manage to print a new set of teeth. Unfortunately, they are not the right size and you wind up gumming your food at that evening’s Disco Soup event, getting chunks of organic radish all over your sustainable milk-fiber bib. Since your robotic helper is on the fritz, you decide to wash yourself off in the hipster bathing facility but slip and break your hip.
Again, your mates have this problem covered and start using 3D printed bones to grow you a new leg. Unfortunately, the operation doesn’t go well and you get an infection, however, there is a cure for those with sufficient computational capacity: you can manufacture your own patent-free medicine based on your individual DNA.
Hooray! You win! you have advanced to the next level of retirement: that of constantly badgering your kids to come and visit you! But not everyone will be so lucky in the future, so it is time to explore the different possibilities that can be made to exist for people outside the “system”.
Over the next two years Edgeryders is convening a community around a next generation internet that supports humans to live well together. We are calling it Internet of Humans.
We’ll do it with everybody, leveraging community management, and the Edgeryders stack of open source technologies to turn the online conversation into collective intelligence. The whole process will be – and stay – open to anyone who wants to participate.
Together we will:
- collect experiences of human centric internet and digital tech solutions
- validate them through open discussion, both online and offline
- use this information to matchmake people and projects around opportunities to do collaborative fundraising and lobbying for the practical work of building and sustaining the solutions we need.
Want to get involved? Great! Getting started is easy.
Just pick one of the focus themes presented in the image above and tell us a story that explores scenarios for how manage/respond to that need in the not so far future. These stories can be accounts of your personal, first hand experiences or they can be entirely fiction speculations on possible futures to come. We are especially interested in exploring how/which people are currently contributing to a future internet that supports efforts to build humane, sustainable and equitable futures.
Contributors who’s stories engage others in thoughtful conversation are eligible for one of our Humans of Internet Fellowships.
When you are ready to share your story, create an account on edgeryders.eu and post your story here:
Tell Us About You - Edgeryders
How we are financing this:
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825652.
The post ^^ was based on a piece commissioned by Edgeryders from Jeff Andreoni
