Projects

“If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough”

–Wes Jackson

We’re not “Just Another WordPress Blog”–we can’t afford it, and neither can our nation.

So…as more of you become more of us, we’ll be hatching everything from apps to games to databases to communities to many things we’re not even thinking of (yet), from our ideas, your ideas, plus the best, most creative collaborative work for the greater good we can collectively find, showcase, and contribute to, online, offline, or best of all, both! Why should you throw down with us?–feel free to skip down to the tale of the tape for the punch lines.

All project names are provisional, in honor of the first people of our country–projects get to name themselves, and they don’t do it until they’re at least five years of age (in Internet time). In the spirit of the site overall, we’ve grouped them into those that are primarily creative and those that are primarily political; nearly all are both, as politics should be, and creativity inevitably is, in the modern world. Click on their titles or images to help develop them, or join those already in progress. Click here to skip directly to the purely political opportunities…

Active

The Glossarium
In politics, words have power, which is why politicians are always creating them, and why this project, as a matter of foundational urgency in the post-truth era, is already up and running–in fact, some of you have already been contributing to it. The Under Line is that we can–and must–do better–come join us, help spread the words for 21st century political discourse, and try not to have too much fun doing so…

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Cicero
It’s clear from the last six years that one thing our polity badly needs is a shared body of facts to work with, and a shared environment to work on them. One thing Americans across the spectrum will still do together is play games. Enter Cicero, a gaming environment in which issues, not states, have electoral votes and you win them by answering a majority of questions about the issue correctly, questions that are truly fair and balanced, optimistic, grounded in both history and innovation. And that’s only what might be called the “exploratory committee” level of a game experience to include the inline creation of parties, issue ad campaigns, community-contributed content, and more. We created a version of this game for middle school civics classes some years ago, with limited, extremely boring (read: standards-based) content, and the metrics were nevertheless through the duomo–90%+ of users said they’re recommend it to friends, for example, with even higher percentages saying they’d recommend and play it even more if we added the features we were contemplating…

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Uncountabirds
Birds are literally our planet’s canaries in coal mines of all sorts, and highly charismatic into the bargain. We know from experience that when people care about birds, especially specific species, not just birds in the abstract, they’re more inclined to protect them, and with them the environment. It stands to reason that if we can convert more non-birders to casual birdwatchers, and more birdwatchers to birders, all over the world, they could become one of the currents that make a difference. In serious active development, Uncountabirds will use birding’s twin flames of passion–guides and lists––and migrate across every Net genre (except one) to bring our country’s most popular recreational pastime fully into the 21st century…

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Americopia
Have you ever read a news story or column and posted a really good response; added a classic forward to a share; or written a myth-shattering letter to the editor, only to realize wistfully a mere handful of people, if any, ever saw it, and it’s many packet years away now from exigence. Sure you have, we’ve all been the Post’s caricature of its readers, felt the burn of futility the media intended by lucying us. We, The People and The Fourth Estate are both spilling ink by the barrel but they’ve always gotten the last word. Until now. The next time you knock some pundit out of the park, We Want You to copy/paste it to us, along with a link to what you were responding to. We’ll take your response and publish it, first on a page and in our newsletters, then as an ever-growing searchable database of great responses and reactions, both positive and negative, to any and every political issue or trial balloon under the stars, as counterweight to the establishment and beyond; great stories, insights, and ideas from the people’s press for all of us to use…

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Quotedian
Do you have a quote related to politics, our country, life, or all-purpose inspiration? From a notable, or even better yet, one you made yourself? Are you game to share it for potential use as a header for an edition of this newsletter or one of our articles or pages, and get a free item from one of our stores–RTF Forever (books), Change Clothes (apparel), or Everything Everywhere (everything else)–if/when we use it? If so, carry on…

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Creative

Anytown
There are few things more certain to stimulate creativity and inculcate new levels of tolerance than seeing the world from a new perspective. Anytown will be a place where pets can talk to pets, birds to birds, trees to trees, houses to houses, cars to cars, and those who want to slum it can trek, in Internet time or less, into each other’s neighborhoods. You may think you’ve seen something like this online, but you haven’t–a place where dogs can create their own home pages may have won a Webby for Best Community once, but the community part of that offering (and every other like it) flopped, and today it’s just a print magazine. Why? Because this is the poster cat of Web 3.0 high concepts–it can’t work without a lot of scaffolding, and we’re not just talking about your fingers typing what the walls have always wanted to say…

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Dreamland
Imagine an ever-growing user-generated “field guide to dreams,” including actions taken in response and their results, daily maps of what was dreamed about all across the nation, dream communities for people who have similar kinds of reveries, a dream & dreamer hall of fame, a fully functioning wishing well for kids, even an insomniac’s café for those who can’t sleep at all. Many parts of our brain are actually more active when we sleep–in the name of leveraging every resource we have against existential threat, isn’t it time to listen to and share what they’re trying to tell us? No dreams, no future…

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Uncountabirds
Birds are literally our planet’s canaries in coal mines of all sorts, and highly charismatic into the bargain. We know from experience that when people care about birds, especially specific species, not just birds in the abstract, they’re more inclined to protect them, and with them the environment. It stands to reason that if we can convert more non-birders to casual birdwatchers, and more birdwatchers to birders, all over the world, they could become one of the currents that make a difference. In serious active development, Uncountabirds will blow out birding’s twin flames of passion–guides and lists–and migrate across every Net genre (except one) to bring our country’s most popular recreational pastime fully into the 21st century…

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Songlines
Quietly, a people’s revolution in music has been taking place over the last decade; playlists have democratized the creation of music and creativity more generally. Now they need their “Rolling Stone,” where we can learn from the best and actively curate (i.e. not just collect, but prompt) this new musical genre, because great playlists can get you where you need to be and keep you there for as long as you need to be–we created nearly everything you see on this site under the influence of our Fired Up list (along with several others we hope to share soon), and we have many bars to go before we sleep…

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Mondial
One of the most useful cintamani we can pack and carry to guide and support us in the journey through chaos we’re facing is a worldview, yet too few of us have ever systematically thought through our own–if we’ve thought about it at all, leaving us as exposed to the elements as sleepwalkers. Mondial will be the first app/service that helps us put finger to pixel to create one comprehensively, festoon it with panmedia like a bower, share it, find like-minded fellow travelers–and contradictions requiring synthesis–in each of its dimensions, and more TBD…

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Njange
A njange is a traditional African savings society in which a group agrees to chip in a certain amount of money each month into a common pot. Every month, in a set rotation, one member of the group gets the money in the pot, a bundle that’s typically big enough to start or invest in a business, make a down payment, etc. In other words, peer pressure and support achieves what self-discipline on its own can’t. Using online community and escrow tools (to protect against potential bad actors), we’d bring this concept online, where it could be used to support investments both personal–green technologies in our homes and small businesses, better education for our children and grandkids–and global–new grassroots concepts & constructs, the new economy, and more, especially if we were partnered with relevant providers…

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Famapopuli
If we’re going to clear the air, both figuratively and literally, the distinction between “celebrities,” “elites,” and the rest of us, both in terms of who is celebrated and who decides this, needs to be erased. Famapopuli, a.k.a. the People’s Hall of Fame, started with a simple question: “Why isn’t [insert band name here] in the R&R Hall of Fame if Traffic is?” but the questions are much bigger and less frivolous (depending on what band you just mentally inserted) than that now, questions like: Why isn’t there a Hall of Fame for plumbers, for electricians, for landscapers, for nurses? And if there are, why aren’t they all in one place where we, the people, can find them, with high production values so we’ll want to? How might our fellow citizens feel about expertise if it were properly recognized outside the academy?

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Pysanka
A pysanka is a Ukrainian Easter egg, with its nuanced, intricate patterns, and in tech and entertainment, an Easter egg is a psychic or virtual reward hidden in plain sight. In Pysanka, we’ll create, collect, and celebrate the subtle and sophisticated (as opposed to the increasingly coarse and bombastic) in the arts, in sound, in writing, in science, seeking to cultivate greater observance/awareness in us all, helping find solutions that may only initially be visible in the corners of our minds, and a better, slower way of life…

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AllSport
Americans have long bonded over sports, which transcend ideological boundaries. But lately specific sports and specific teams have become increasingly ideologically siloed like the rest of life. Enter Allsport, which takes what we still easily bond over–fantasy–to the next level by requiring participants to field teams each week comprised of players from multiple team and individual sports, using fantasy football roster construction and scoring as template, breaking down barriers in the process, and helping return sport to the shared American experience it once was.

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Soothplayers
Who doesn’t at least secretly believe they can predict the future? Soothplayers is a game environment where players can test their mettle in a variety of categories by answering simple questions about the near term future–the number of named hurricanes there will be, what will happen to a specific company’s stock price, who will win the National League pennant, etc.–with new questions in every category every day. Over time, they’ll establish “nostrodaverages” (batting averages for predictions) and we’ll establish leaderboards. Along the way, each player will start laying out their long-term visions for the world so all can see what our best predictors think is coming next as they develop, through gameplay, the kind of forward-looking mindset we’re all going to need to have…

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Kinspir
If we’re going to work more with the rest of humanity on collective existential challenges, it would help if we got to know our fellow men & women better, and not just the elites we see here and in the halls of government. Kinspir would be a platform that would enable villages and village-adjacents around the world to share their day-to-day lives, culture, and more with the rest of us, in a structured way that would facilitate use and cross-cultural understanding, e.g. through the use of top 10 lists, brackets, diaries, recipes, comparative collages, and other well-established online formats, and include light, mobile-optimized communications/community tools. Participating villages would get a private space to connect with their diasporas as a community and a share of sponsor revenue, which should be substantial based on local CPMs…

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Vespucci
Amerigo Vespucci was the first to map America, hence our name. Vespucci is a gaming platform for mapping the Internet; anything and everything is online, so anything can be a map–a traditional geography, a periodic table, Leibowitz’s grocery list, a beautiful or ugly Hawaiian shirt–anything that illuminates any small multidimensional corner of the terra incognita that is the vastness of the Net. When a critical mass of maps has been created and stitched together, we’ll be able to “see” the Internet in multiple dimensions for the first time (e.g. from the perspective of different groups, different causes, etc.). And then things will really start to get interesting for our increasingly visual species…

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Post-Modern Games
We believe games are going through the same Hegelian process that the Net has, akin to other visual media. Like pre-Renaissance art, they were originally necessarily abstract, then techniques allowed them to become increasingly realistic. Now everything in our state of play–from the new generation of highly sophisticated board games that have revived the genre to mobile apps using the world around us as their canvas–marks a synthesis of abstract and real, not unlike the art movements from impressionism to the present day. Post-Modern Games will be the destination for those who believe anything can be a game–and should be, to help us feel our way forward into the future…

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Animystic
While developing the Faves section of the site, we were surprised, and dismayed, to find there aren’t any great sites dedicated to the two religious traditions that might best apply needed balm and perspective to our intolerant, divisive times: animism, which posits that all living things, not just humans, have a soul, and often that non-living entities such as rivers and mountains do too, and mysticism, spread across religions, but always emphasizing the essential mystery of existence before the tracks of all-too-certainty. It’s time to spend a start-up’s forty days in the desert to change that.

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Southpaw
Believe it or not, there’s no great site online for the 10% of the population that’s left-handed, and no great creativity portal either. We consider all creatives to be lefties (even if, for some reason, they write with their right) and very much vice versa, a place where creativity in all forms is recognized, curated, celebrated, supported, and engendered, where–and because–collaboration, not competition, is the realpolitik of new media.

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Political

The Glossarium
In politics, words have power, which is why politicians are always creating them, and why this one, as a matter of foundational urgency in the post-truth era, is already up and running–in fact, some of you have already been contributing to it. The under line is that we can–and must–do better–come join us, help spread the words for 21st century political discourse, and try not to have too much fun doing so…

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AllPolls
Public polling should be a core defense for democracy, providing independent assurance that our elections are free and fair, and promoting civic engagement by enabling the voice of all Americans to be heard. Instead it’s been used primarily to validate voter suppression and foment division. AllPolls aims to change that by pushing pollsters to conduct more polls of all voters and all Americans, rather than polls of so-called “likely” and registered voters, and pressing media organizations to publish and promote more of the former, less of the latter–and not to publish the results of “likely” voters at all.

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TrueWorth
Too often people do nothing because they don’t believe what they do makes a difference. This platform, which starts with the premise that your real net worth is based on the good you do in the world, minus the harm, not how much money you have, would use an individual’s contacts, their professional history, and social media mining to create a 21st century victory garden for every participant, one that grows as each action they’ve taken in the past, no matter how insignificant it seemed at the time, has more and more impact. A teacher’s “difference garden” would grow based on the achievements of past students, for example…

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Nus
There will be no resolution to the great existential challenge to our way of life-climate change–without changes to virtually every American’s daily decisions and activities. Today the best tools we have for this are “carbon footprint” assessments, which are about as effective as BMI calculators. What’s needed is the climate equivalent to a diet & exercise app like Noom, which has been shown in peer-reviewed studies to help nearly 80% of its users lose weight. Call it Nus, since Noom is just moon spelled backwards, take all the “tricks” said app uses deploys to “fool” users into losing weight, combine them with everything online community builders know about how to effectively use recognition to get individuals to make communal causes their own, and then, in the name of urgency, get all the industries (i.e. all industries, period) that would benefit from the new economy to sponsor a robust data-verified external rewards program. Are you in line to get it yet?

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HDP
The outmoded concept of economic growth is consistently wielded like a weapon by petrosaurs and other champions of the oligarchy. It’s time for them to be disarmed. People have been talking for years about getting rid of GDP as a measure of anything for years, there have been more than a dozen alternatives developed (the OECD’s is our current favorite), what are we waiting for? A political movement to settle on a new measure and force policymakers and the media to start using it instead. HDP will be that movement–it even already has a sticker you can plaster everywhere to help generate momentum…

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Project Reality
The returns on traditional political debates have been diminishing since 1960. Television has grown and changed dramatically in the last sixty+ years; in the same timeframe, political consultants have managed to completely game the relevance out of these events. They no longer provide any basis at all for voters to make informed decisions; the time has come for radical change in their formats. To us, the most fertile ground for innovation lies in the phenomenon that’s overwhelmed the broadcast medium since the turn of the century: reality tv. We’ve provided a few potential examples here; what we’re looking for are creative, media and political-savvy partners to develop compelling potential formats in detail, then work with us to sell networks and candidates on using and participating in them, respectively.

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Stamina
One thing we’ve learned in the last four years is that politics can be exhausting in its scope and speed, and even if Trump disappears into the clubhouse, the challenges he kicked onto the green for better lies (rather than taking them head-on) are going to acquire the chaos and confusion of battlefields. Stamina would be an app that would allow groups of friends to divvy up the political landscape, allowing each individual to focus on one area in depth and share the best insights/ideas for policy and action (their own and what they find) with the group, knowing others they know and trust are doing so for other issues they care about–then organize, with themselves as the seed/core community…

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Votes For Children
Never has a society so mortgaged the future of generations to come for its own pleasure. It’s time to give those generations a voice—and raise democracy to new heights in the process. We’ve laid out the case for giving all kids the right to vote—not just 16-17 year olds, crushed the arguments against it, and outlined the ways it could be done that are not only realistically responsible but raise the level of civic engagement in adults as well. Now it’s time to make it happen, and it doesn’t require anything nearly as daunting as a Constitutional amendment—nineteen states gave women the right to vote before the Constitution did, doubtless many cities and towns did so before then, and we live in a hyper-viral, army of one, hi-fidelity replication kind of world…

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FDTW
If we’re going to prevail in the challenges we face, we have to be less divided. There’s nowhere in America that’s more fractious and acrimonious than Twitter, and arguably no more politically embittering, scarring experience online than being the victim of a Twitter mob or caught in the cross-fire of a Twitter flame war. FDTW, aka the Twitter Fire Department, would be an online network of individuals across the spectrum dedicated to protecting those being mobbed and putting out the flames, with an important twist, liberal firefighters (publicly identifying themselves as such) would be defending conservatives who are under attack and vice versa. Don’t agree? Don’t join. But understand that “equivalence” has nothing to do with this, nor does who “started it,” and when you attack (or are attacked), we hope to be there…

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Comity
Beyond the above, while we don’t have to agree on everything, we do have to start knowing and respecting each other more. There are a lot of great programs out there that bring red and blue Americans together, but they’re episodic and don’t scale. Comity would be an app that matchmakes liberals and conservatives based on shared interests outside politics across all major social media platforms to ensure continuous, scalable engagement, leverages the latest thinking from the medium’s and academy’s best minds (many of whom we know) on motivation and community-building to maximize adoption and activity, and arms participants with best practices, as expressed in text and technology, on how to have productive political conversations (we know the people to talk to), as well as how to manage the attendant emotions, from top experts in SEL (whom we also know). Oh, and btw, uses anonymized text analytics (we’re related to people to talk to) to identify and redistribute the ideas and approaches proving to be most effective in finding common ground. Will we be talking to you, too? 🙂

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Wall Of Shame
If you’ve read our piece(s) on voter suppression, you know it’s by far the greatest top-down threat our democracy faces, and also that so much of it flies under the radar. The Wall of Shame is based on the Stalinesque proposition that a million uncast votes really are just a statistic. What’s needed to bring this problem home are stories–lots and lots of stories–from ordinary Americans who have experienced suppression in any one of its myriad forms (making known what those forms are is critical as well–if it’s truly a right, voting needs to become viewed as akin to breathing, not considered a test of moral character) presented in an engaging graphic format for both the media and citizens all around the world to see, and see, and see, until we have no choice but to rise up collectively against it. Sign here.

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Debunko
One of the critical threats to democracy is the generation and spread of right-wing disinformation, and the authorities can’t seem to be bothered to stay on top of what’s being said (let alone respond), so we, the people, are going to have to take matters into our own hands. The Debunko Squad–created by the team that brought together 20,000 teachers to answer 1 million student homework questions/week– creating the first online user & community-generated database to scale up– will be scouring the right wing digital airwaves for the latest, contacting fact-checkers et al for the straight dope, then developing engaging and circulating responses that, coming from friends, neighbors, colleagues, ordinary Americans,¹ in American-to-American, not expert or politico, language, should at least pour reasonable doubt on the boiling effluent and reduce it to simmer, if not turn it off completely. In the process, we’ll not only be learning and sharing what works in political discourse (a la Comity), but creating messaging on a variety of issues for pro-America candidates with an N of millions, without waiting for platform funding and development (Note: since we first put this idea forward, we’ve learned that Ukraine, Lithuania, and Estonia have been using a similar approach–all-volunteer debunking armies they call their “digital National Guards”–to successfully inoculate their populations against the steady stream of mind pollution flowing in from Putin’s Russia.² )

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A-Lago
Another great post-Trump danger is that, ahistorical as we Muricans are, we’ll soon forget³ just how chaotic evil he was. If we do, the trauma he normalized with his actions will be a hole in our defenses the next strongman, Trump 2.0, will be able to roar right through, and thus beyond. So we need to find ways to ensure nobody forgets; simple ways, not litanies; booster shots, not full courses of treatment that cause even fellow travelers to run screaming at us for the exits. Fortunately, there’s already a good little inoculation that just needs updating. Before Trump, his role model Richard Nixon was the most corrupt president in nearly all our lifetimes, if not history, and the reason everyone knows this, reflexively, is that every political scandal since then has had -gate, as in Watergate, appended to it. 44.46’s administration was more corrupt than Nixon’s, Harding’s, and Grant’s combined,⁴ so it’s time to change hotels, time to develop a strategy, create materials and execute a campaign to get the media and everyone else to append “alago” rather than “gate” to every scandal going forward. A change that will, as side benefit, make its perpetrators sound loopy, blousy, over the top, alien, ridiculous, not the Machiavellian masterminds they’ll belligerently fess to if we don’t accept them as postmodern American gods…

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We Were There
In the same spirit, and under the more than reasonable assumption that we may need to deploy more “active measures” to combat Trump & his supporters’ relentless efforts to leverage our collective amnesia re: anything that happened more than a week ago to rewrite the history of the worst presidency in the history of our country–by far–but do so without overwhelming our audience, We Were There will be a daily newsletter that engagingly recounts and documents the lowlights of our seemingly endless national nightmare day by day, from January 20, 2017-21 to December 31, 2016-20, filled with reminder cameos from every fascism enabler who hopes you’ll forget their own role in the darkest period in our history since the run-up to the Civil War, and vital Big Truths hammered home daily against Big Lies (e.g. about the “great Trump economy” and the COVID “Act of God”), all to ensure that as November 5th, 2024 approaches, not a soul forgets, viscerally, why, once again, we all need to vote as if our lives depend on it, because they do, again.

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The Bomb Squad
One consequence of four years of incompetence and malice is that there’s now unexploded political ordnance all over the government and the world, too much for Biden to defuse before it blows up. Every time it does, you can be sure Trump and his allies will be on the air lying their a**es off about what he did and how different it would have been if he were still president–Afghanistan is a classic case of this on so many levels. The Bomb Squad, like Debunko, will be a small army of ordinary Americans formalizing what we’ve discussed, gathering and distributing the truth through social media, living documents, signs, stickers, and more, all the ways in which Trump, intentionally or not, is really the one who, like any other authoritarian, should be held 100 percent accountable for the problem. And the media should be held 100 percent accountable for how it’s covered until they’re as afraid of offending us as they are Trump and his supporters.

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Theft ’24
It’s only taken two decades for many Americans to wake up to the reality that thanks to voter suppression, Election Day starts long before the first vote is cast, and the real campaign is not between two candidates but between us and the powerful forces opposed to our right to vote. Theft ’24 (and its successors) will bring this home to the people by giving the real, relentless, and never-ending “election before the election” the same kind of high production, highly visual coverage TV networks provide on Election Night, both as visceral edutainment and as an empassioning springboard into the best tools and other offerings other organizations have made available to fight back, complemented by the best thinking and execution of the medium’s best online community builders, many of whom we know–and know hate what’s happening in our country…

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Vote Counters
Even though between 1-2% of all votes are cast provisionally–enough to potentially tip dozens of Congressional races (and flip six states with a combined 76 electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election), there’s no public contest-specific accountability for these ballots at all. While we may eventually, abstractly know how many were cast overall, we have no idea, in any given campaign, how many provisionals were cast in that race, who those casting them voted for, how many were rejected, who the votes rejected were for, what the reasons for rejection were (by candidate), the demography of the rejected votes, and therefore whether we, the people (as opposed to the unelected and the partisans), should consider the official results legitimate. Vote Counters would change this by (a) getting every American who voted provisionally the info they need to find out whether their ballot was counted or not, and if not, why not, and (b) providing a mechanism for them to provide us those details so we can compile what happened to these ballots in every race. It should take only collecting a fraction and publicizing same to start motivating officials to do the right thing, both in treating these votes fairly and reporting them out to us, which should quickly snowball out of control, in a good way…

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Full Service
With all respect, both due and gratuitous, to our fighting forces, there are many ways to serve and even die for our country without wearing a uniform, carrying a firearm, or even working for the government at all, some of which actually involve more risk, require more courage, and/or have greater (positive) impact. At a time when appreciation of the values of public service, the greater good, and non-violence are all both at a premium and a nadir, Full Service will be endeavoring to identify categories of service, both public and private, worthy of being valued and honored as we do our men and women in the armed forces,⁵ determining and designing the form(s) such recognition can and should take (e.g. official state-sanctioned medallions for gravesites), developing processes to identify and certify individual Americans who qualify for this recognition, and lobbying the government and private funders to bring these programs to life. For political reasons, and because it’s the right thing to do, the project would also be dedicated to finding and supporting appropriate additional ways to honor individuals in the armed forces and their families/family members for conduct both on the battlefield and off, on a more meaningful, case-by-case basis than the more or less pro-forma forms of recognition provided today.⁶

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The Mach
Short for The Machiavelli, the world’s first online museum of politics, to be funded by Facebook, Google, and other social media platforms in fractional atonement for the damage they’ve done to our democracy, where, as in our best museums today, visitors will learn by doing, in this case absorbing in the process, to the intracellular level, the media and political literacy needed to never be fooled by disinformation, “just politics,” and the whole greasy, ever-inflating bag of dirty tricks again, the nature of which is why it has to be online; an offline musee could never keep up with the information arms race between government and the governed. In fact, it needs to–and will be dedicated to–ending that race, on a positive note, by recognizing and rewarding the campaigns, both within its confines and the wider world, that persuade, motivate, and empower without manipulation or dishonesty.

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Free Press
A concept based on the premise that maybe, just maybe, one of the reasons Americans are so vulnerable to disinformation is that the quality of “free,” purely ad-supported sources of information⁷
have steadily degraded, while increasingly the best sources have disappeared behind premium pay walls that most Americans either can’t afford to penetrate or don’t see why they should. In Free Press, the political parties and their allies would identify a basket of news sources meeting minimum objective metrics and other criteria⁸, balanced between left and right⁹, and mutually agreed upon. All content contemporaneously published¹⁰ would be fully available free of charge to the entire public at OEM rates, ie very, very substantial per user discounts¹¹, paid by the government. In the interest of fairness and market competition¹², the sources in the basket would turn over/change completely from year to year.
¹³ In addition to providing all Americans with free access to quality information sources, Free Press would also (1) validate, via bipartisan participation, the existence and value of a free and independent press, objective truth, and a common shared fund of knowledge, and (2) by providing high quality liberal, moderate, and conservative
balanced basket, strongly encourage all Americans to view all news stories via the lenses of multiple perspectives.

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Rippletide
Thanks to the Net, political campaigns are increasingly financially powered by we, the people, but most of our contributions are blown on TV ads (because campaign condultants get a cut of every ad buy) that haven’t worked since the 20th century, and nothing gets done in government without the approval of the 1%. Rippletide (a tidal wave of those “tiny ripples of hope” we put out every time we contribute) would be a platform/service that enables small donors to pool and direct their contributions, forcing politicians to spend our donations more efficiently, give us a proper seat at the table, and take action on the many solutions that 70-80% of us agree on that darksters and special interests have been blocking…

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Class Action
Government can’t police bad corporate actors alone; traditionally, we the people have used the legal system to complement its efforts. Our most powerful weapon has been the class action lawsuit, which in recent years pro-business (at all costs) courts have eviscerated as a tool for us. When confronted with uncomfortable conversations, businesses like to “take it offline;” we’ll be doing the opposite. Using a combination of load-balancing techniques developed by crowdsourced expert systems, reciprocity technologies developed for e-commerce/online finance, and online community-building best practices, Class Action will galvanize rapid, sustainable, and scalable collective action that will make the corporate-judicial state wish it had left OG class action alone. Bottle, meet genie…

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VoteLock
Or Lock the Vote. Hackers from around the world know everything about the security of our election machinery–shouldn’t we know too? So let’s get the right questions to ask election boards from white hat hackers, create a nationwide community of citizens who can get answers, and get those answers rated by top electoral security experts in the field, with content and services from the top voting rights and voting security organizations integrated throughout.

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Dead Seas Scrolls
One of the most powerful artifacts in the U.S. Holocaust Museum is a simple television set with a seemingly endless scroll of laws the Nazis passed against the Jews in the 1930s, as if they woke up each morning and asked themselves: what else can we pass or enact to crush these people even more than we already have? Over the past three+ years there have been issues–like the environment and immigration–where it definitely feels like Trumpkins have been working from the same playbook. The Holocaust Museum didn’t have YouTube–we do–allowing us to apply the power of what it’s done to reach much larger audiences, not just with respect to specific issue areas, but line by line within them, spelling out each and every one of the slippery, slipshod, gratuitous, and spiteful macro-aggressions involved. Whether we do this before 11/3 to get out the vote, between 11/4-01/20 to keep our fellow Americans standing strong against the Trump-Putin-Xi axis, or after 01/20, regardless of who “wins,” our mission will be the same: to generate video scrolls that make the citizenry more and more determined with every loop to systematically eradicate every jot ‘n tittle of these un-American acts as relentlessly as they were generated, and never forgets what happened here and how.

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Goldyledon
From its inception, America has always moved forward by creating new frontiers, and increasingly those frontiers have been generated through basic research–idea seeds, cotyledons, that grow into gold. Recent decades have seen this research steadily decline as we’ve first lost sight of its purpose, then, increasingly, the mindset and the will required to ask the simple questions, born of nothing more than passionate curiosity, that are the keys to unlock new worlds. The Goldyledon project will be dedicated to getting back to where we once belonged by first returning to where we lost our way, zigging where we let others zag us, and taking the road not yet traveled by forward until the inquiring nature that got us as a society and species where we were replaces the Enquirer paradigm that’s prevailed since. What do woodpeckers have to do with it? Join us and find out…

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Turntout
You work hard for your money. And every other second a politician is asking for more of it, or another group you belong to–a union, an environmental group, a trade association–is telling you they need to get more into the fray. A lot of this money is wasted, frankly, on disorganization, dysfunction, and new suits for the condultants who keep pouring it into TV ads because they get a percentage of every buy. What we need is a Consumer Reports, a Charity Navigator for electoral politics that tells us what groups deliver the most registrations, of different voter types, per dollar spent; which groups do the same when it comes to mobilizing volunteers, generating crowds for events, and, above all, getting our fellow Americans to the polls on Election Day (or earlier), especially per dollar spent. Let’s develop a service together that will maximize the value of our donation dollars and get all groups to straighten up and fly righter.

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Proof
The lack of true transparency is a major barrier to restoring faith in expertise. In an era in which even top research periodicals “publish by press release,” and information space is practically infinite, Proof would apply carrot and stick community-based pressure on the media not to publish research and survey results from providers who aren’t willing to make available (within applicable privacy constraints, and in user-friendly form) the raw data sets on which their conclusions are based, along with a universal tool set to allow readers to analyze the data themselves, with links to this combination of tools and data in every article in the popular press that references the research, raising science literacy in the process…

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Swift Boat 2024
God willing otherwise, but we have to be prepared for the real possibility of serious violence on the part of Trump supporters in the run-up to the 2024 election and beyond, and that our men and women in uniform may well be asked to choose sides. Swift Boat 2024 will be dedicated to ensuring as few of those who serve as possible believe one of the most insidious lies of all–that Trump and the GOP are the military’s true champions. Help us engagingly compile and distribute the myriad disproofs that collectively send this BT to kingdom come where it belongs (PS That Atlantic article only scratches the surface)

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The Apologist
Donald Trump never apologizes for anything, so we’re going to do it for him. The Trump Apologist will be an account on the platform formerly known as Twitter that many times a day apologizes on his behalf for one of his many lies (the most egregious ones only–we have 50,000+ to choose from, after all), vile attacks on other Americans (especially those not “in the game”), and flat-out screw-ups…

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Trump Verbatim
Republicans have worked overtime to make Joe Biden look too old to be president, but have you ever read a verbatim transcript of a Trump rally, press conference, or interview? With whatever charisma the man has stripped away, what’s left is appalling, even when “cleaned up” by his friends in the “liberal” media–nothing but word salad, and clearly far more demented than anything Uncle Joe has ever stumbled through. Since the average voter will never take the time to read them, Trump Verbatim will do the reading for them. We’ll set up a text to speech app that does nothing but read Trump’s words in the completely objective monotone such apps are famous for, and let the meme-o-sphere do the rest.¹⁴

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Trump Trump
From the same transcripts, we’ll also create a corollary app, a simple game we’ll continually add to, in which we’ll take the factual errors he’s made and turn them into multiple choice questions voters can answer for themselves. Odds are pretty good, we believe, that even uninformed voter will be able to answer a lot more correctly than Trump did, and each time they beat him best-of-five (with leaderboards included to incent them to share with friends), it will be a reminder that Trump is not just like them–he’s dumber and more ignorant, and if their self-esteem is what’s low enough to support him, is that really who they want leading us?

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Nothing here giving you that tingling feeling yet? No problem. There’s always tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow. When you’re in creative politics, thinking outside the ballot box, something’s always missing that needs to be built, and we’ll be adding projects as we think of them, and as we all write (because unlike the traditional/corporate media, we don’t write about problems–ever–without including solutions, too).

Or you can avoid the wait, if not the lines: send us a project you want to do!

Why Us

Why should you throw down with us? Because we’ve been responsible over the years for dozens (and dozens) of new media firsts, from the first online museum exhibits to the first homework help service (which eventually grew into a community of 20,000 educators helping more than 1 millions students/week) to the first online political games. Because we did the seminal research that defined online influencers (a psychographic category we created in 2002), why they’re so important, and what they want. Because we literally wrote the book on online community-building for community pioneer AOL. Because from the early days of multimedia to the present, services we’ve developed and launched have gone on to win every prestigious industry award, including 20+ Webbys–and counting. Because we’ve proven we can pull together hundreds of organizations into coalitions that reach millions daily and generate new paradigms for entire fields–in weeks. And because we understand, all too well, the secret to success in new media–persistence–and what that really means…

PS Some of the groups we’ve worked with include the ABC, Adobe, the American Council on Education, AFT, AIR, America Online, Apple, ASCD, Barron’s, Britannica, Cartoon Network, Chorus America, College Board, CNN, CPB, Discovery, Disney, Edutopia, EDC, ETS, Gilat, Highlights for Children, IBM, Kaplan, the Library of Congress, Lucasfilm, the MacArthur Foundation, Merriam-Webster, Microsoft, MTV, the Museum of Science and Industry, National Geographic, the National Academies of Science, the National Park Service, NCTE, NEA, Nestle, Nickelodeon, Noodle, Noodle Partners, NPR, the National Science Foundation, NSBA, NSTA, PBS, Pearson, PIJAC, Princeton Review, Ringling Brothers, Rolling Stone, Scholastic, the Smithsonian, SRI, TCI, the U.S. Department of Education, Viacom, World Book, and many more.

Which should tell you the other big secret of new media success—cast a wide, wide net; in our experience, and that of every one of the tech leaders we know best, “focus” is for the fragile, also-rans, and losers….

¹ Ask a typical Trump supporter why he/she believes the latest outrageous lie being spread by some rando on Facebook over an expert in the field marshalling an impressive set of counterproofs in every possible form, what they’ll almost invariably say is it’s because the rando is “a regular American like me.” Which is why we can’t leave this job to the government or elites of any kind–thanks to decades of carelessness, greed, and callous elitism by many individuals and institutions we used to trust, we, the people, need to hear from we, the people to know what to believe.

² And given that most GOP disinformation is either directly copied from or modelled on Putin’s, what works for them should work for us too

³ With the help of Hell’s restoration artists

⁴ None of them, for example, repeatedly put our national security up for sale to the highest foreign bidder, let alone pocketed the proceeds. None of them tried to corrupt and destroy the democratic process our nation was founded on, let alone repeatedly, let alone for nothing but personal gain

⁵ In all cases, these honors would be as close as possible to those received by the military, with recipients given the option to have them literally identical or distinguished in some way–e.g. gravesite medallions could either just say “US” like military medallions originally did, or could indicate their non-military category, eg “activist,” “volunteer,” “diplomat,” etc. Why? If you join, remind us to tell you the story of what happened when one of us succeeded in getting our high school to give varsity letters to the math, forensics, and debate teams 😉

⁶ In talking to fellow Americans in the service, it’s become clear that many military honors have devolved to the level of participation trophies–and don’t get them started on the “thank you for your service” reflex (think of it the way you think of “thoughts and prayers”). There’s no deep understanding of the sacrifices that have been made, let alone a recognizably personal reflection on what has been done and/or what it has meant, without which many in the service can feel completely disconnected from the civilian world they find themselves in (and that way madness lies)

⁷ E.g. broadcast & local news and the generic Net

⁸ For example, as the American Bar Association used to do for judicial nominees, the leading fact-checkers would be called upon to validate that proposed sources are highly factual in their reporting, rather than regular purveyors of mis- and disinformation

⁹ Balanced both in terms of the distribution of the sources included and the distribution of individual pieces of content via the interface of the service–each content provider would be given an equal number of promotional slots of equal weight per week in the interface to be used solely as the publishers wish, with no interference or editorial input from the government

¹⁰ Archives would be excluded unless publishers wish to include them

¹¹ The discount would be extremely stepp since the marginal cost for publishers to add subscribers online is close to zero–server costs + in some cases, moderation, and in most cases each month, each publisher would literally be getting paid for nothing but standby availability (since few Americans are going to fully avail themselves of the opportunity every month

¹² And to prevent the service from [further] fostering unhealthy relationships between specific publishers and the government

¹³ Which would essentially mean that participating publishers get a year to upsell and lock in millions of potential customers to their premium rates via year-long free trials paid for by the government, further incenting their participation

¹⁴ One of Trump’s most effective tactics has been flooding the zone with s***. Verbatim is an opportunity to turn this against him–there’s hundreds of times more compromised, demented garbage in what he’s said than can ever be thrown back at Joe.

“You call yourself a community? Where are your cathedrals?” — Anonymous