What would you say if you are asked “What do you imagine John Lennon would be doing now, if he were alive?” Aside from being a musician of course... I would imagine he would have been devoted to the Internet and start-up businesses, just because I believe the Internet is a great tool for peace, and people with a passion for changing the world are attracted to start-up companies. When asked to describe The Babels in the simplest way possible, I often describe the company as “one that John Lennon could have started, if he were alive”. ‘A product for peace’ - will the product lead to peace? This is the design concept that we keep firmly in mind at all times.

27th of April, 2017, the foundation of The Babels: There are so many invisible boundaries in this world, attitudes surrounding national borders, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. It is often the case that attitudes to such things were not a personal choice but projected onto us by someone in our lives in a top-down fashion, a parent, a teacher, a government or even society at large. It is human nature for people to perch inside the borders of their own community, and become critical of outsiders by looking at them through filtered coloured lenses. In this way it is not difficult for alienation to breed cruel feelings towards the unknown, while genuine emotion is reserved for fellow insiders. These coloured spectacles can corrupt surface-level judgements and small misunderstandings can pile up to cause conflict. This dynamic has stained history up to and throughout the 20th century. Even as I am writing this, I could possibly be hurting somebody, somewhere in the world. Or simply having a conversation in a bar, my unintentionally biased viewpoint may perhaps offend the stranger next to me. When working backwards from an ideal world it becomes clear, the ability to accurately conceive who someone on the other side of the border truly is remains elusive. I believe we need to empower our mind’s eye to improve on our biased perspectives.

One-sided stories often fill the insides of borders. Are you aware of the difference between what you were taught in history class and what is taught in your neighbouring countries? Is it not possible that what you consider commonsense or a sense of justice could be the opposite on the other side of the world? It is therefore important to be conscious of the fact that information is nearly always delivered with some bias, and especially important to be conscious of the social structure that reinforces this. Whether from history textbooks, Google’s search engine, or a timeline of a social media site, when the situation makes it difficult to convey multi-faceted information to people, empathy for the other side is taken away. Should we allow the opportunity for addressing this issue to continue to pass us by for the next few decades? I believe solving this issue should be the world’s biggest priority.

I consider the internet to be more conducive to a bottom-up structuring of societal sympathies, and the key to breaking through this problematic top-down structure. The power to make the world share in this process and step out of the historical boundaries on attitudes surrounding nationality, race, religion or sexuality is a possibility purely based on the internet. Technology such as AI, blockchain and collective intelligence harbour the capability to overcome, effectively melt-away and overwrite institutionalised discriminatory social structures. Technological solutions can overcome societal boundaries and overwrite prejudice, without international or global homogenisation, or through standardising philosophy, but something beyond all these is the future.

Here let me state again, The Babels’ vision is to create a “Product for Peace”. We provide multiple interpretations to social and historical issues and aim to help the human condition evolve and advance. With our products and technology, we aim to facilitate the end of the negative international relations of the 20th century carrying on into the 22nd century. We are currently forming a top team that tackles this gigantic ambition. Collectively we can make it happen, and the first approach is Historie. We aim to facilitate the removal of a society’s coloured lenses, to allow people to see the person in front of them as the human being they really are, and to stop the meaningless prejudgement of: “You’re Chinese.”, “They’re Korean.”, “We’re Japanese.”, or “I’m American.” We believe this is the smallest improvement that can be made towards the establishment of global peace, and the reason we founded The Babels.

Finally, let me explain why we named our company The Babels. In the bible, the Tower of Babel is a story of human cooperation, using a bottom-up hand in hand approach to constructively overturn the top-down status quo of the time. This is reminiscent somewhat of our mission and ideology. The Tower of Babel is often used to describe a fantastical and impossible scenario in a figurative sense. However, we found it suits such a project, where no matter how high the obstacle rises we will endeavour to challenge the truly meaningful issues and offer real, humanistic solutions to the modern struggles facing all societies. It was with this in mind that we started calling ourselves The Babels. It sounds cool, a bit like a band name, doesn’t it? Not as catchy as The Beatles but hopefully as inspirational. We would love to hear from you if you find these prospects interesting, or want to share your passion with us. Together we could build the Tower of Babel on the Internet. 27th April, 2017 The Babels inc. founder CEO/Radcliffe Takashi Onishi