It is tempting to say that companies did this to us, and mostly untrue. When Robert Putnam went looking for why American community life thinned out, the decline he found had already been running since the mid-1960s, decades before anyone had a feed. His accounting put roughly half of it on one generation replacing another, a quarter on television, and the rest on longer working hours and on suburbs built so that nobody passes anybody on the way home.

Look at that list and notice what is missing from it: a villain. Every item is millions of people making a choice that was reasonable on the day they made it. Take the job that pays better. Move where the school is good and the yard is bigger. Rest in front of the television because the day was long. Zone the shops away from the houses to protect what the house is worth. Nobody chose isolation. It was the sum, and the sum belonged to no one.

The attention economy arrived later, into a landscape already emptied, and did what any business does with an unmet need: it sold a substitute. That is worth naming precisely, because it is the same shape as the rest. An incentive nobody designed, that everybody answers, that produces an outcome nobody wanted. We are not outside it here. This project runs on the same internet and the same attention, and the discipline it keeps is not virtue. It is an attempt to be honest about a pull we also feel.

So the work is not to defeat anybody. It is to change what the reasonable choice produces. The models are Wikipedia, public-interest archives like ProPublica and the SPLC, and the working culture of organizations like the Red Cross: protect people's privacy, keep their data portable, let them shape the thing. The projects stay separate on purpose, so no single failure or buyout takes the rest with it.

There is no them. There is an incentive, and all of us inside it, and the question of what we build instead.