In 2024 many people realized that “effective optimism” must first call out, and counter, dark forces that stand in the way of civilization thriving and nature evolving with the innovative brilliance that created life on Earth.
The February 1, 2001 publication of the Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome, Nature 409, 860–921, with its many co-authors, inspired the idea that a Global Genome Project should explore how experts and experiencers in a broad range of disciplines, and with a broad range of experiences, can share their findings and observations toward emergent, cross-disciplinary collaborative intelligence to save civilization and life on this planet.
The Global Genome Project was proposed as a strategic first step toward seeding a network that can grow to combat dark forces that target scapegoats and create bandwagons used by profiteers to control and manipulate humanity. A scapegoat is someone turned into an “outsider” through manipulation of public opinion. A bandwagon is a clan of “insiders” – buyers, voters, promoters – created through manipulation of public opinion such that those on the bandwagon accept a product or candidate or opinion without asking questions or thinking critically.
To say that climate change scientists scapegoated by supporters of the fossil fuels industry are like abolitionists scapegoated by slaveholding profiteers demands unpacking this analogy from diverse professional perspectives to show how scapegoating obstructs critical thinking and erodes freedom of speech and democracy. Let’s start first with these nine domains:
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- Democracy
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- National Security
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- Climate Change Mitigation
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- Scientific Integrity
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- Legal Precedent
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- The Arts (Film, Music, Visual, Writing, Other) and Innovation
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- Artificial Intelligence – Hearing the Wake-up Call
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- Equity – Hearing Diverse Voices and Multiple Points of View
- Learning from History – Freedom of Inquiry and Freedom of Speech
As diverse as these domains appear on first glance, all have been inhibited by the manipulation of public opinion (scapegoats and bandwagons) and the lack of a vehicle to harness the diverse collaborative intelligence of many unique individuals.
The aha! of 2024 was the realization that Suzanne Taylor’s essay competition could become what Buckminster Fuller called a “trim tab”:
“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth again: The whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. It takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole ship of state is going to turn around. So I said, ‘Call me Trim Tab.’” (February 1972 interview, Playboy)
This essay aims to serve as a trim tab, proposing a framework into which diverse experts and experiencers can contribute their findings and observations t(both success stories and issue reports) toward an emergent Global Genome Project. I briefly summarize nine proposed starting domains below:
Democracy, Policy and its Impact on Global Challenges
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- can be informed by this powerful
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- . The brilliance of Al Gore’s original 1992 book
Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose
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- lay in how Gore drew analogies to human psychology. That brilliant strategy needs revival now – our global threats are rooted in human psychology: greed, targeting scapegoats, infomercials that create bandwagons, control and surveillance.
Security: National, Local, Personal.
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- The United States is the most violent nation in the world by many measures: number of mass murders per year, size of the U.S. military budget, numbers of incidents of police violence etc.
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- and
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- both enacted gun control laws that radically reduced individual violence and mass murders, making public places and gatherings safer. Should we assume that most U.S. citizens are on a bandwagon that accepts as necessary for our national security a
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- about three times that of China and at least ten times that of most other nations? Suppose that experts in this field agreed that national security could be achieved better by reducing the U.S. $877 Billion military budget to about $300 Billion, still more than the military budget of China, and this would leave the remaining $577 Billion to spend on regenerative missions for national and global security. This is just one opinion. The Global Genome Project would gather many divergent opinions, not only from military experts but also from experiencers, including families who’ve lost loved ones because of military interventions.
Climate Change Science: Using Data Analytics to Predict Trends
On January 25, 2024 Diane Bernard’s story recounted the more-than-a-decade long struggle of climate change scientist Professor Michael E. Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor, University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Center for Science and Sustainability, known for his work on the hockey stick graph of global temperature change. Michael Mann’s books hold the fossil fuels industry responsible for climate change threats to humanity and to all life on Earth.
Conservative writers supporting Big Oil targeted Michael Mann and compared him to a child molester. Such scapegoating threatened to make other climate scientists afraid to publish their work. On February 8, 2024 Michael Mann won a million dollar+ verdict in that lawsuit, a victory not only for climate change scientists but also toward making scapegoating unacceptable in scientific debates and reporting. That day journalist J.A. Ginsburg noted that the CO2 reading at Mauna Loa soared past 425 ppm, recalling her analogy: “Michael Mann is the next Rachel Carson.”
Filing a lawsuit should not be the only way to get such matters addressed. Lawsuits demand time and resources that most climate scientists don’t have.
The Global Genome Project will block bots and hackers from filing fake reports or manipulating the rating system and be able to detect patterns emerging by gathering reports from both experts and experiencers, with a content filtering system that allows reports most valued (read, commented on, acted on, shared) to rise.
Scientific Integrity – Freedom of Speech in Science
- is more broadly impacted by scapegoating, and other forms of retribution, which can not only impact scientific method but also destroy freedom of speech, a prerequisite for democracy.
The Monsanto class action lawsuit for damages from the cancer-causing herbicide Roundup (first released in 1974) exposed how Monsanto scientists were routinely fired if they didn’t provide what Monsanto wanted – scientific confirmation that Roundup was “perfectly safe.” Monsanto closed in 2018 (taken over by Bayer) because of what this lawsuit exposed. The fact that this trial did not start until more than forty years after the release of Roundup, shows the power of industry and the inability of unconnected individuals to launch collaborative action. That class action lawsuits organized by lawyers are the only vehicle for redress shows the need for a public reporting platform. Filing a lawsuit should not be the only option. A lawsuit requires time and resources that most individuals don’t have. The Global Genome Project aims to provide an easier way to collect and organize many diverse individual experiences such that complementarities can emerge, enabling us to detect patterns (both positive and negative) sooner and to respond faster to early warning signals.
Legal Precedent.
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- Targeting scapegoats and creating bandwagons are both psychological influencing tactics that can subvert legal precedent. The year 2024 reaffirmed need for local updates toward addressing global challenges, from climate change to pollution to protecting our ocean, such that scapegoating does not become legal precedent. Timothy Snyder noted,
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- , that historian Eric Foner
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- linked storming the Capitol to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bans oath-breaking insurrectionists from holding office. Legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen made the case for disqualification, exhaustively and convincingly, in an August 2023 law review
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Those initiating the Global Genome Project recognized that in our current culture we assume that opposition (whether brute force fights or lawsuits) is our only problem-solving option, which highlights the great need for a vehicle to collect adjacencies and analogies in order to track and monitor emergent patterns over time so that we can initiate non-oppositional approaches to problem-solving.
The Arts (Film, Music, Visual, Writing) and Innovation
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- are one powerful way to communicate. Scapegoating was used to destroy the reputation of the talented filmmaker
Nate Parker, 2016 Sundance Award Winner
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- , who was predicted to win Oscar(s) that year for his acclaimed film, Birth of a Nation (2016) about the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion. A lawsuit by relatives of someone who committed suicide, leaving her young child behind, was trumped up by the media, effectively scapegoating Nate Parker and causing his film to be boycotted and its powerful message about the horrors of slavery to be ignored by the broad audience that his film should have reached. In 2024
David Oyelowo, who played Martin Luther King in SELMA, committed to work with Nate Parker
- to rehabilitate his reputation as one of this generation’s most talented filmmakers.
Diverse scapegoating instances, from Michael Mann (climate change researcher) to Nate Parker (filmmaker), show how ad hominem attacks can be used to block messages from being heard. They can go further to damage the entire career of an individual motivated to act as a change agent in a domain where those in power do not want change.
Artificial Intelligence Advances became a Wakeup Call
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- from late 2022 on, not only because of the surge of new developments in generative A.I., but also because public engagement with A.I. led to recognizing that A.I. can become a mirror, reflecting human weakness and can also offer warnings that we need to hear. A.I. can enable a surge of creativity that can potentially become a force for equity, harnessing
- , the collaboration of humans and A.I. in a continual feedback loop such that A.I. makes no decisions without humans in the loop.
But A.I. can also be a tool for scapegoating. Lizzie Wolkovich’s manuscript was rejected by Nature because one human reviewer said, “It appears that ChatGPT wrote this manuscript.” ChatGPT offers an easy way to accuse a scientist of scientific fraud and a hard-to-refute tool for scapegoating. Despite proving that her paper was not written by ChatGPT, Wolkovich’s reputation was tarnished and Nature rejected her paper.
Equity – Hearing Diverse Voices
Edward Bernays, who launched his career rallying American public opinion behind entering World War I., in 1928 shifted to apply his “art of propaganda” and he became known as the “father of modern public relations.” Bernays was retained by the American Tobacco Company to convince women to smoke. Vera Sharav, Holocaust survivor, recalls the backstory of the recent film, “Thank you for smoking.” Bernays, a mind control expert, exploited women’s memories of the suffrage movement, cleverly choosing equality as the basis for his campaign of deceit. He convinced ten fashionable women, including his own secretary, that they were “lighting torches of freedom” toward improving the status of women by smoking as they marched down Fifth Avenue in the 1929 Easter Day parade. They lit up cigarettes as a symbol of their liberation.
This story made the front page of the NY Times, persuading many other women to take up smoking, to the detriment of their health and the benefit of Bernays’ client, American Tobacco Company.
December 6, 2023 marked the Centenary of the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) with little fanfare. ERA has still not passed one hundred years later. In the United States under President Biden, women raise 2.2% of funding, while men raise 97.8%. Either men are 48+ times smarter and more capable than women, or something is wrong.
Many women have experienced career setbacks where a single man could block a woman from getting her Ph.D., block her book or paper from being published, block her from being credited for her work. And yet in 2024 it remained extremely difficult to pool these experiences to see patterns and to enable collaborative action. Women in 2024 were given no other option than to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit in isolation, which most cannot afford, and they are stigmatized if they do so. The backlash for exposing means that most women do not expose.
Learning from History – Freedom of Inquiry | Freedom of Speech
- By 2024 mob violence and polarization had reached such extremes that the election of 2024 was compared to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, prompting many to wonder whether the U.S. was heading toward another civil war.
Historical comparisons show that profiteers use similar scapegoating techniques in varied domains, from the fossil fuels industry to the slave trade. There are striking parallels between the scapegoating of abolitionist editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1830s) and other instances of scapegoating. In the case of Lovejoy, slaveholding profiteers targeted Lovejoy as their scapegoat to make all other abolitionists afraid to speak out. Events of 1836 – 1838 illustrate scapegoating techniques similar to those used today.
These events launched Abraham Lincoln’s path to the White House. On a cold winter day in Illinois, January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln delivered his first major public speech, known as his Lyceum Address. In this speech Lincoln’s ability to predict went beyond seeing ominous signs of Civil War to uncannily forewarning humanity of the threats of 2024.
Two recent murders inspired Lincoln’s speech, both committed by angry mobs of white men. The first was the lynching of Francis McIntosh, a free black man who had committed no crime before he was attacked, first by an angry policeman, then by a mob in St. Louis in 1836. The second was the murder of a white newspaper editor, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, who spoke out, deploring the heinous murder of Francis McIntosh. A mob of white men donned top hats and swallow tail coats to feign respectability when they murdered Lovejoy on November 7, 1837 in Alton, Illinois (Lincoln’s home state, supposedly a free state) across the river from St. Louis.
These two scapegoats, first a black man, whose murder triggered the second murder of a white man, moved Lincoln to wonder how he could address the evil of slavery and showed that even a white man who spoke out against slavery paid with his life, which meant that debate, the foundation of democracy, was itself at risk. Twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln in his Lyceum Address asked his audience:
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times.
Lincoln’s omen then has reared its ugly head again. The January 6, 2021 Attack on the Capitol was compared by Congressman Jamie Raskin to the mob attack on The Alton Observer when Elijah Parish Lovejoy was murdered.
Propaganda Bandwagons vs. Individual Critical Thinking
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark noted that “if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, . . . we’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Successful advertising creates a bandwagon effect to make a brand or actor or candidate popular. Sometimes a bandwagon, a great surge of support, is a powerful way to draw attention to the need for action, whether to address climate change or to value the “black lives matter” movement.
Parallel techniques of mind control have been observed across many domains, whether profiteers scapegoat an abolitionist, or Nazis scapegoat Jews, or Big Oil advocates scapegoat climate change scientists, or the chemical industry scapegoats Rachel Carson and others who expose pollution, or ocean profiteers do not scapegoat, but ignore, oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, or women who expose abuse experience a backlash and become scapegoats. Those who profit typically start by ignoring. Later they move on to scapegoat when they can no longer ignore someone who points out that change is needed in a domain where they are reaping profits.
In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1967), Buckminster Fuller applied his metaphor of Great Pirates to those leading corporations and governments who amass power through a “divide and conquer” strategy where increasing specialization is used to control and exploit the masses. Circumscribed knowledge, affording the comforts of being expert in a small domain, make people acquiesce in their subservience, almost without realizing. Fuller saw specialization, and lack of cross-fertilization, as weakening, not only every individual, but also the fabric of society.
The problem is bigger and broader than Fuller’s insightful metaphor. Restricting climate change scientists to work only with other climate change scientists, or women to work only with other women to improve the status of women, makes it unlikely that there will ever be sufficient critical mass to counter the powerful forces resisting change. Alignments can be created by the Global Genome Project.
Learning from Past Models
In 1961 R. Buckminster Fuller conceived the concept of World Game, a powerful vehicle to teach critical thinking and raise awareness of global co-dependencies.
World Game was typically played then by several hundred college students in a university gymnasium. The concept anticipated the Internet because it needed a persistent global online environment and technology that we now have to realize its full potential as a distributed global problem-solving tool. After Buckminster Fuller’s death in 1983, the World Game concept retained some adherents but generally lay fallow, awaiting a comeback that started in 2024.
An early seed of the Global Genome Project was inspired by World Game, expanding on the work of Zann Gill on earthDECKS where DECKS is an acronym for Distributed Evolving Collaborative Knowledge System and also evokes a DECK of story cards collected by means of the Global Genome Project platform. earthDECKS reporting, and work with The Ocean Foundation on ocean plastic, clarified the need to move beyond a single problem focus to tap the emergent power of collaborative intelligence in a cross-disciplinary, cross-problem network. GGP Reporting grew and evolved from 2025 – 2050, stimulating new learning by integrating the best of human contact and personalization with the potential for global sharing online. Lifelong learning and “learning by doing” evolved beyond being catchy phrases to drive a global World Game platform, harnessing the old dictum of E.F. Schumacher to “think global” | “act local.”
The distinction between collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence is that collective intelligence pools “the wisdom of a crowd of anonymous responders” to come up with a typically better-than-average consensus result. The key word here is consensus. In contrast, collaborative intelligence advances as natural evolution advances, acknowledging the uniqueness of all players in a non-anonymous, non-consensus-seeking ecosystem, such that of many experiments, those with most impact rise to exert more influence in the ecosystem. Collaborative intelligence preserves diversity (a distributed network of non-anonymous contributors) as synergies and unpredicted serendipities emerge.
The Global Genome Project saw a shortcoming in our common assumption that “we must have consensus” to begin, an assumption that explains our delayed climate change response. As psychologist Irving Janis noted, consensus-seeking behavior causes groups to sink to lowest-common-denominator results. None of the models below was broad enough or powerful enough:
The Better Business Bureau offers a simple model where individuals can, at no cost, file an online complaint in about 15 minutes against a business for defective products or services. Since most businesses don’t want a negative story online, some restitution occurs. But this program is limited to individuals with complaints against businesses, and businesses that decide voluntarily to respond. BBB specifically excludes gender issues and is not a powerful enough model to tackle the interrelated challenges that humanity faces.
GROUPON illustrates one way to pool individual bargaining power for lower prices.
VAERS is a voluntary Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. However, in the 1980s vaccine manufacturers negotiated from the U.S. government immunity from liability for adverse effects from any product called a “vaccine.” So VAERS performs no service for individuals reporting because individuals who believe a vaccine caused their medical condition have no claim, unlike the users of Roundup, which was not exempt, but for which there was no reporting system.
Workers’ Unions are one collective bargaining model with a long, complex history. Some have been highly effective in bargaining for their workers in a particular industry, but each union is limited in its scope and membership.
The Global Genome Project sought models that do not require consensus, recognizing that consensus-seeking collective models are inadequate for the grand challenges we face. GGP sought to develop a model based on collaborative intelligence. One possibility was to extend the principles of some online markets.
Professor Alvin Roth, Stanford Nobel Laureate solved a complex online market problem by developing an online market for kidney donor-recipient exchange.
Each kidney donor has unique requirements, as does each kidney recipient. The logistics of matching and of rapid donor-recipient exchange are critical.
Professor Jason Hartline, computer scientist working on peer review systems, is exploring how LLMs (A.I. Large Language Models) perform in scoring natural language comments made by human peer reviewers of each other’s work. Can LLMs improve the peer review process to make it fairer? He assesses LLM performance using the performance of multiple human reviewers as one way to improve LLM performance.
The questions asked in 2024 were: How could the online market for kidney donors-recipients be extended to a broader online market of content contributors-content recipients? And how could the online market for peer review be used to rate content in such a system? How could such scoring also address questions such as those raised by the Lizzie Wolkowich story above? And how can these precedents be extended to a more complex ecosystem of contributor-user exchange with peer review commenting?
Finally, how can a range of individuals (academics, artificial intelligence commenters, activists, asylum-seekers, biodiversity experts, blacks, children, climate change professionals, disabled, doctors, elders, environmental scientists, immigrants, injured, Muslims, indigenous people, oceanographers, scapegoats, scientists, soil regeneration experts, students, women, and many more) report (both positive and negative) and look for others with complementary expertise or experiences to initiate, not just one-to-one, but potentially one-to-several or one-to-many unique exchanges? The mix of category types in the example above is intentional. Each is a tag, and each individual, incident or content item can have many tags, e.g. Lizzie Wolkowich belongs to multiple categories: academic, artificial intelligence commenter, environmental scientist, scapegoat, woman. Searching one tag should pull up her experience and show how it is connected by its tags to many other experiences, people, resources, and opportunities in an ecosystem where keyword tags are complemented by timestamps, geo-location and affiliation tags.
The Global Genome Project decided in 2024 to extend these models via GAIL [Global Action Improv Lab], acknowledging that we will only learn by improvising, that we must keep trying new experiments, and that we must acknowledge the unpredictability of each experiment.
What neXt?
The Global Genome Project (GGP) launched the neXt forum in 2024 to convene those concerned about the great challenges humanity faces. The great wakeup of 2024 harnessed “effective optimism” to identify dark forces and support empowerment of many individuals through the collaborative intelligence platform that GGP committed to build. The large objective was to remediate or avert the Tragedy of the Commons (Garrett Hardin 1968), ultimately benefitting everyone.
The Global Genome Project launched GGP Reporting to gather through its online platform both positive progress stories and issues from diverse experts and experiencers, enabling those looking for precedents (both positive and negative) not only to “zoom out” from individual expertise or experience to see a metaview of connections, but also to bring thought leaders with diverse expertise and experiences into a collaborative intelligence network to co-support each other toward achieving critical mass to address our challenges from 2025 to 2050.
The Global Genome Project noted that if U.S. legislators can pass a vaccine mandate “for public safety,” then they can pass gun control laws “for public safety” and they can address many of the challenges above “for public safety.”
But the Global Genome Project also realized that our problems are rooted in “idealism capitalism,” which celebrates capitalism as empowering the individual, an ideology that is no longer true. When corporations were granted personhood, capitalism stopped celebrating human individuals, who were turned into consumers and disempowered by corporate personhood entities.
The Global Genome Project aimed to restore the original idealistic values of capitalism by empowering individuals within online markets with appropriate safeguards. A campaign was launched to
– remove corporate personhood;
– make campaign donations to politicians transparent; and to
– empower the Global Genome Project to work effectively with, but not “inside,” any national government because saving our planet is for everyone.
2024 was the year that the Global Genome Project, in collaboration with GAIL [Global Action Improv Lab], and other organizations, launched a 21st century re•vision of World Game, which started first with GGP Reporting, gathering reports from a global distributed network, sharing reports of successes and problems, to grow a knowledge-sharing network. Many joined forces to end scapegoating and cancel culture and to restrict the use of bandwagons such that advertising dollars spent on bandwagon building must be transparent. The aha! that effective optimism must first face dark forces brought three related insights.
First, the mission of starting and growing a Global Genome Project network led to asking, “How can we grow our capacities as critical thinkers so that people of all ages are not so easily bamboozled, so we are all thinking for ourselves?
Second, the potential for broadly accessible A.I. tools can both provide a mirror to reflect on existing human weaknesses and also offer potential to support collaborative intelligence of humans and A.I. agents. Though A.I. can be abused, it can also be used to support those committed to constructive change.
Third, by moving beyond the “correct vs. incorrect” mindset, we can stop censorship battles and restore books to libraries. We can stop believing that those in power have “correct information” and should choose the “correct narrative” and decide what constitutes “misinformation.”
The Global Genome Project started by identifying individuals aligned with its mission, focusing first on domains with sufficient critical mass to launch, later adding new domains and challenges such that each could support others. By 2050 GGP served an ecosystem of diverse voices, enabling decision-making to focus first on issues, not candidates. Exploitation and abuse could be so rapidly called out and addressed that issues were not time-wasters. Stories of progress became models, easily translated and adapted for other contexts. Everyone celebrated that a bygone “Dark Age” had inspired a growing, evolving learning network, continually discovering new alignments and creating new alliances.