Change is never easy. Even normal change, small incremental improvements to an existing system are difficult. People are simply comfortable with what they are used to. It’s even more difficult when a system is being upended or replaced.
Take farming for instance. For centuries, it was a small, organic process in which a family grew enough for themselves with enough left to sell in the local market so they could by other necessities. Then, it grew into what we now call industrial farming. At first, this seemed like a great idea. The yields were massive, making more food available to more people at a lower price.
Now, we are aware of problems caused by this method of farming. Those massive yields are only possible with large amounts of pesticides and fertilizers that can have negative health consequences. They also rip all the nutrients out of the ground, destroying its ability to grow food for decades before nature restores those fields to something that can produce food again.
So, what should we do? Throw up our hands and accept our fate? Forcefully control people’s behavior to get a few more years out of the soil before we end up with the same result anyway? No, we look for solutions. There is now a class of farmer called regenerative farmers that adapt their methods to actually put nutrients back into the soil. Already, fields that would have been fallow have been brought back to a fertile, nutrient rich state. The problem is getting more people to sign on to those new methods, to break away from what they are comfortable with. Fortunately, those numbers are growing.
This same pattern repeats over and over throughout history. Someone invents a new device or process, or endeavor, and at first it is laughed off by those who don’t see the potential. How many people saw the early designs of the Wright brothers and wanted nothing to do with it? The first computer was the size of a large room and couldn’t do hardly anything compared to what we take for granted today. The motorcycle could have been a dead technology if no one saw that it could be much more than a high maintenance horse. Who would have thought that a relative handful of untrained farmers and merchants in North America could take on the most powerful empire on the planet?
All of these endeavors could have gone nowhere, and would have gone nowhere if not for the visionaries who put them forward in the first place and the early adopters, the people who could see the potential, who were willing to take a risk and spend their own time and money to support this thing that no one had ever heard of. After all, to get to the computer I’m typing this out on, and smartphone I listen to podcasts on, we first needed the ENIAC. But to get the ENIAC you needed the people who designed and built it. Beyond that, ENIAC’s designers needed someone to take a chance and get them the money to build it in the first place.
TARTLE and the movement we are building is similar. For years now we have become comfortable with a system in which we unthinkingly agree to convoluted terms of service that would made any lawyer question his life choices, terms that give faceless mega corporations the power to track and know virtually everything about us and to take that information and sell it to other parties who most likely do not have our best interests at heart.
TARTLE represents a paradigm shift in how that system works, in giving people the power to take control of their data once again. To make it work though will take some time, just as with all of the examples listed above. It will take time for the movement to gain steam. Fortunately we have had a large number of early adopters who have been willing to take a chance, to try the new system. We are incredibly thankful for all of them and their willingness to join us in this new endeavor, an endeavor that will not only allow people to get paid for their data but will help change the whole way we look at data.
Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
