Building Community
Strengthening the Local Economy
Lokkal is local internet, a digital town square, of, by and for the community, operated as a public service, with profits donated to or invested in the community.
Social network, search engine, calendar of events, magazine, forum, map, market, news-source... Lokkal is a local communication platform. Fostering all things local, Lokkal is like the old Yellow Pages robustly reborn, an interactive, user-generated table of contents to the neighborhood and city.
Local is the interface between online community and the actual "bricks and mortar" community.
Localism
Better local community is the solution to many of the problems facing society today. Better local communication, creates better local community.
Lokkal is practical, effective social activism: if you want to make the world a better place, organize your neighborhood. The local community is the most natural political entity.
Right now it's difficult for residents or visitors to know what is going on locally. Collective Human Intelligence, crowd-sourcing, boots on the ground, local people sharing what they know, produces the best database of local information.
Local curation is also the key to more civil online discourse.
A stronger local economy is the solution to many of the problems facing society today.
Lokkal is economic permaculture. Right now, the vast majority of money flows through, over and past the community. Lokkal catches that wealth, allowing it to permeate and percolate down, building up the community's economic water table, keeping the wealth circulating in the community, creating an economic dynamo.
Not only can we capture a large share of the advertising revenues now flowing to Facebook and Google, but we can make our own, non-extractive, local versions of Uber, Amazon, etc.
Like microfinance brings money to the little guy, Lokkal makes internet work for the individuals and small businesses, that are being left behind by the internet as it is.
Lokkal is like the Buy Local movement online; like a farmers' market, but digital. Like Farm To Table, Lokkal cuts out the middlemen.
Lokkal rewards content providers for their content. You build up the platform, you get the profits. Based on your viewership, Lokkal will pay you to curate what interests you: shoes, jazz, animals, toddlers, art, ice cream, bicycling...
Healthy Internet
Like public television or movie streaming services are a calmer alternative to commercial television, Lokkal, operating as a public service, is an edifying, healthier, non-commercial, non-addictive alternative to commercial internet.
How will stop society's race to the bottom, the incentive to cut corners, cheat, pollute and generally act in ways that give us short-term individual advantage at everyone else's expense? The obvious solution is to foster a communitarian point of view, to value and enjoy the rewards which accrue to the community.
When you organize the internet around a search algorithm, you get Google.
When you organize the internet around friends and family, you get Facebook.
When you organize the internet around neighborhoods and communities, you get better neighborhoods and communities, you get Lokkal.
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Globally-oriented search engines and social networks do not work well locally. Lokkal's strength is local curation. Thank you Google technicians, but we don't need your algorithm. We will present our own community to the planet.
Top-down mandates from a centralized authority do not work as well as collective, grassroots initiatives.
Multiple decentralized filters (Lokkal replicated in towns and cities around the world), resist monopolies, encouraging innovation, diversity and more equal income distribution.
(Jaron Lanier, the "Father of Virtual Reality," says that when you push everything through one filter you get a z-curve, a steeply peaked curve with very little room at the top. We see this with online music sales, where 5% of the musicians make 95% of the sales.)
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We upload content to Facebook. Facebook sells advertising next to our content, and keeps the profits. Google searches our content, sells ads alongside the search results, and keeps the profits. Can't we, the local community, make our own social network? Can't we make our own local search engine? Sure we can, and, collectively, we can make it better, more representative of the local community.
The solution must have a platform online, because that is where people's attention is. A new, radical technology, Lokkal is a grassroots revolution.
The problems we face may be very complicated, but their solutions might be very simple.
Permaculture catches rain-water in trenches instead of letting it flow off the land. The water in these little pools seeps into the ground, raising the local water table, creating a micro-environment, turning dry land into an oasis. It may be that the underlying aquifer is depleted, but the local water table is full.
So Lokkal keeps wealth circulating locally, catching the money that would normally be syphoned off, extracted by external interests.
Commercial internet, serving the interests of share-holders', must maximize user-engagement, inevitably leading to user-addiction.
Many people don't really care what they do online. They just want to be online. Lokkal gives them healthier, community-based content to scroll through.
If society is to survive, in any form in which we would want to live in it, we need a healthier internet.
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Once upon a time, community institutions (religious affiliation, civic organizations, etc.) moderated the individualism that is associated with capitalism. Community institutions have weakened, resulting in today's hyper-indivdualism. We need a new antidote to all this hyper-individualism, to realize that we are all in this together.
Someone creates art that expresses their personal vision, and sells it; bravo. Someone publishes a book and other people read it; very good. Someone acquires a personal fortune; there is a magic to that. But after, in addition to, and beyond all that there is belonging, creating community
Building a house for someone, putting someone through university, feeding or paying someone's medical expenses are all noble. But these are all person by person, principally benefiting the recipient and his or her immediate family. Lokkal: Building Community, Strengthening the Local Economy, works on a different scale, works for everyone, floats all boats.
The problem is that society is being divided. The solution is to bring people together.
The most natural community is local. Lokkal is community.
Localism resists the flattening, narrowing, disempowering forces of globalism.
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Out there in the vastness of space, gases aggregate, growing denser. Their increased gravity draws in more gases. At some point this cloud of gas becomes impossibly dense. That's when it goes plasma. A continuous, nuclear chain reaction is produced, and a star is born.
As Lokkal's community grows, it gains gravity and pulls more of the city into community. Then, at some wonderful moment, it goes stellar. A truer, more holistic way of thinking and experiencing is born.
A new technology is dawning. The internet, the world's brain, is still only a baby. Lokkal educates it.
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