Living Rough, Creating Social Tech

Help me make manifest a long deferred dream.

For decades, I've been longing to follow my bliss, to pursue my vocation, as Richard Bolles would say. Yet, during all that time, I allowed anxieties—about making a home, about finding someone to build a family with, about clinging to whatever job came my way—to stymie that mission. Aping at a normal life, I told myself that if I could just manage to achieve and then maintain the basics, I'd be able then, and only then, to realize the ideas that have held me for so long. No more.

Rather than spend one more day worrying and wishing, I've embraced a life living on the street, devoting 70+ hours a week not to a steady stream of appeals to employers, but rather to fulfilling my purpose on this planet: to create mechanisms that facilitate mutual regard and civic engagement. I've never lost sight of my vision.

Imagine a world in which the capacities we bring to our existence, the very human proclivities that make us the full persons we each are, are honored and held as worthy and meaningful. Imagine a society that looks to those patterns of human behavior that defy rational ideals not as faults to be disparaged but as potentials to be harnessed. Imagine moving beyond mere empowerment to enleverment—to tools that bring greater ease and efficacy to social and political life.

Now imagine that all starting with a dating site. Wait, wut? Yes, that's what I said. After all, the above sounds awful grandiose, no? We're talking about a whole new technology platform to support this vision. A dating site affords a manageable scale for initially building and working out the bugs in such a platform. A shake-down cruise, if you will.

Well, actually, not a dating site: a courtship site ⇒.