ars beta feedback

Cognitive Surplus

Why did I create and why do I believe in ARS? Simple: I want to harness the ‘cognitive surplus‘ of all of us in society, for the following:

  1. Provide new jobs to people (earning money in a ‘location independent’ way) who are either under-employed or unemployed.
  2. Create a platform in which people with ‘cognitive surplus’ (under-utilized brainpower) to do something meaningful with their free time, that can help augment their own intelligence, and also help others!
  3. Change society for the better: (If everyone was able to contribute 30 minutes of their free time (a day) to provide constructive critique to others– wouldn’t society advance as a whole?)

Why give constructive critiques?

With ARSBETA.COM, you can upload your pictures to get constructive critiques on your pictures, but even more interesting– you have the opportunity to provide constructive critiques on the work of others.

For example in this critique above, it took me around 2 minutes to type an 8-sentence critique. 4 sentences in terms of what I liked, and 4 sentences what I thought could use improvement.

By leaving a critique, this is how I benefitted (as the critic):

  1. I was able to truly analyze and understand the picture better– by asking myself what specifically I liked about the picture.
  2. I felt empowered because I was able to provide constructive critique on how the photographer could improve a future image.
  3. It makes me feel good knowing that I could use some of my brain-power to help empower another fellow photographer!

Check out ARSBETA.COM >


Aren’t people all just selfish, negative trolls on the internet?

This is the thing — I am probably the only weirdo in the room who believes that the internet is a good place; a place that can empower us, to do good!

Also for my personal ‘ground truth’ — I believe that 99.99% of humans are good, and only .01% of people are trolls. However unfortunately most people don’t leave comments on the internet– only the weird trolls (or people who feel very strongly or vocal about things).

I do believe that all of us wish and desire to help one another. I do believe there is some ‘natural’ embedded altruism in human beings. Otherwise– how would humans have been able to cooperate and have made it this far? Everything great that humans have built has been through mutual cooperation with other humans. A human being that doesn’t have the ‘gregarious gene’ embedded into their DNA probably wouldn’t have survived long.

I believe that photographers, visual artists, and individuals WANT to give constructive feedback– but a platform doesn’t yet exist for that! Thus, we built ARSBETA.COM as the platform which allows this!

What is cognitive surplus?

Cognitive surplus‘ is this:

  • Cognitive: Brainpower
  • Surplus: An excess

In modern society, we have excess brainpower and time– and we don’t know what to do with it! Many of us get home at around 8pm, and don’t know what to really do for the next 4 hours until we sleep. We might ‘Netflix and chill’, play video games, catch up on our shows or watch a film, or perhaps dick around on the internet. But the problem is that many of us end up squandering our time– because we have this hole– and we don’t know how to fill it!

I honestly don’t think humans are dumb, lazy, etc. I think the problem is this:

We don’t have any alternative options!

Or the options exist, but they have a poor PR/Marketing Team.

My moonshot

Thus this is my crazy vision:

What if all photographers was able to contribute 30 minutes a day, to provide constructive critiques to one another?

We would all thrive together as visual artists!!!

Even better:

What if social media was ‘fixed’— which would encourage cooperation, and mutual support, instead of some silly popularity contest?

The world would be a better place. We would all thrive more as photographer/visual-artists.


Why is social media broken?

We currently live in a brave new world of social media. Our minds are getting hijacked by these algorithms, which train us to favor getting more likes, followers, and other silly measures of ‘success’ and ‘validity’.

Social media currently favors these massive, monolithic advertising-platforms (Facebook-Instagram). We are the products. We are like the little eggs plugged into the Matrix, and our actions are being recorded by these companies for them to learn our preferences, in order for them to advertise more specific products to use to purchase.