There are some interesting ideas out there.
There are some interesting ideas right in front of you.
This is one. Not the article, but its framing.
You and millions of other people share this looking glass. One time ago, humanity imprinted their stained hands into cave walls, to publish a hello to the world. Then we scribbled upon sheets of papyrus, and invented the first scrolling tablet. Later, we bound dead pulpy wood into a tree coffin injected with lead ink to form the book.
Then, we invented the greatest publication medium ever known to human-kind: The Internet. HackerNoon was born mortal, but then it reached up and stole fire from the gods. It came down to earth, and imprinted its electric charge into the internet.
Diamonds are pulled out of rock, but ideas are chiseled into rocks. How content is published matters, it is the framing that holds or binds it together, how it is held and experienced by people. How we publish is the material that passes an idea on across generations, so it can transform from the tangible into the medium of our collective minds.
In the past, those who controlled publishing were gods of censors or curation. Books were burned, ideas blurted out, free speech eradicated. Thought police controlled minds by choosing what to publish or what to ban. The minds fuel is an oxygen of ideas - if you deprive a person of the ability to freely discover that, you suffocate their humanity.
And so, HackerNoon was pushed from its home, exiled. The Smookes lit fire, and let censorship burn. Publication was to be by the people, and for the people. Their team labored together, and built a new publication. A site that would reach millions, and pioneer the future of publishing.
It is not a gift of the gods that are words are heard, it is the fire from our hearts that burn these ideas into wood, rock, or electric wire. The freedom to emote is how we discover the feeling of an other, and together we can promote a treasure of ideals worth believing forever.
The framing around these words was once only an idea, but put to words and work, six months later has now been built into a publication. This place is different, because it is the platform of you - decentralized publication, powered by those who are bold and brave enough to author in a time of censors. That is interesting, because it has taken humanity a long history to get here, to technology that can liberate itself, so your words can be spoken free.
Mark Nadal is an artist and hacker, a political activist changing economics at ERA. Disclosure: He's an investor in HackerNoon and contributed code to the 2.0 release for annotations, powered by the p2p GUN protocol.