From Subject to Citizen: The 4th of July and the New Era of Human Capacity Startups

The 4th of July is a day to celebrate the most important parts of the American idea. For me, nothing is as important to our sense of national identity as the belief that people always have more they can achieve and more they can give. On this holiday, it's worth pausing to recognize a new generation of startups founded upon that very same principle.

A fascinating story circling around the internet these days is the recent discovery that Thomas Jefferson replaced the word "subjects" with "citizens" in the declaration of independence. Whether it was just a typo or an actual inflection point in the language of the Founding Fathers, we don't know, but regardless, the difference between the terms is significant.

The difference between subject and citizen is all about agency to create the shape of the future. Citizens engage and participate in their own destiny, and as such, the shift from subject to citizen required an expansion in beliefs about of what individuals were capable. That expansion continues today, as it gets harder and harder to think that the differences in economic achievement around the world have to do with talent or capacity.

Bill Clinton often says something like "talent and creativity are distributed equally across the world, but opportunity is not." That's true, but it is not only opportunity that is distributed unequally. Our assumptions about what people have the capacity to do have dictated the shape of our institutions, which in turn has segmented the world into the capable and incapable.

From the moment people enter schools, we begin to make assumptions about what people can and can't achieve and put them onto tracks that make those assumptions self-fulfilling prophecies. Good luck to a kid determined to be slow early on. For people who come from poor places and poor backgrounds, these assumptions begin even earlier than that.

The internet, however, is creating a new playing field that is reshaping not only who achieves what, but what we believe people to be capable of in general. While the fact that talent can bubble to the surface like never before is exciting to me, what's even more exciting is the creative startups who are trying to give the masses access to recognize and share their smarts and talents like never before.

One of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley is Quora, which is basically a question and answer site that creates a context in which experts and insiders share deeply founded knowledge with each other. The idea driving the founders is that the vast majority of the world's knowledge is locked up in people's heads, and they should be sharing it.

Not dissimilarly, my company Assetmap assumes that people have more of the day-to-day resources their friends and communities need, but that information about those resources is locked up in people's heads and thus constrained in it's ability to be helpful. Catchafire and the Extraordinaries are taking these same sort of ideas but putting them within the specific context of letting people who care about social change better contribute their knowledge and resources to the groups they care about.

Companies like Supercool School, Udemy, Unclasses, and more are trying to break the perception that education can only be shaped by educational institutions. Instead, all of these platforms recognize that everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn.

In addition to startups that are giving everyone better access over their knowledge and resources, and everyone the ability to teach and learn in new ways, there are a whole generation of social startups that are all about breaking down the barriers to people using their talent and agency in the developing world. I write all the time about Appfrica's model of marrying web development training skills with economic opportunity with venture capital, and they are just one of the organizations I see starting from the premise that the key to development is not giving people things, but knocking the barriers to people using what they have out of the way.

In different ways, all of these startups are focused on unleashing human capacity. Their presumption is first, that people have more to contribute to their own lives and to their communities than they currently realize or are currently able, and second, that a successful future looks people giving more and enabling one another in ways unimaginable today.

I can think of no belief that better breaths live into the legacy of the first 4th of July's shift from "subjects" to "citizens," and hope to see these organizations and the mindset they embody flourish as we dig deeper into the 21st century.

Photo credit: Envios