we

we is my passion project. started in 2018, I noticed the emergence of an abrupt chasm in the way that news and information is being generated and consumed by young people vs older people. Local news, the newspaper, magazines ect.... are traditional forms of up to date consumption for the ladder, but the shift to online instantaneous consumption has flooded society with an unprecedented level of information engagement, and every peer group and interest group has been scrambling to claim their stake in this war for online real estate. there was a hope for many technologists that the internet would truly democratize data and information, and a lot of that dream has been realized. but perhaps we've been to hasty in declaring any sort of victory, because fast forward through a couple major shifts in power, civil unrests, anthological paradigm shifts, and it seems as if the open net pendulum has begun to shift back into the hands of traditional market players. 

I think I can say that I foresaw this shift at least a year or two in advance. And sense then there has been a couple of attempts to try and slow down this process by activists and entrepreneurs, but I see most of these solutions as rushed emergency impulses, thought impoverished without really exploring and identifying deeply rooted ethical bugs in the ways in which we develop platforms and organizations and teams of people who in essence become lords of data and social interaction in the world. I think the engineers have a tendency to lean towards ethical haughtiness, and I'm implicated in this criticism, and perhaps am exhibiting some form of it right now. In the sense that we come into this field with a playful innocents and use that playfulness to shield ourselves from any ethical critique... because at the end of the day all we're doing is trying to make life simpler, more fun, and more efficient for everybody. And perhaps this was a fine naivety to operate for the early tech revolution. But tech runs the world now. Tech is the world market now. "The suits" as jobs called the industrial establishment are us now. And I'm not sure we've reconciled with that reality. 

Well "we" is an attempt to really reconcile with this reality. To me, the future of innovation isn't faster, smarter, more powerful, and more predictive. That stuff is expected, its almost nature. To me, the future of innovation is social engineering. A social engineering that is deliberate and that is thoughtful. All social media is social engineering, but its there's not actually any serious ethics design taking place. Its just an after thought and usually becomes some terms and conditions to simply protect companies from liability. There has to be more than that. Ethics in social media have to be as sound and as democratic as ethics in society. 

So in short, "we" is an open source content platform that hands the keys of power to the user, and makes the engineers the servants of the public and holds the engineers policy liable to the wills of the user base. 

In terms of the content and tech itself, it prioritizes live and recent + distance and local information over pure "relevancy".... thus attempting to fill the ga p that the new generation misses out on compared to the older generation. 

The content monetization schema is voted upon by the most active user base. As well as any other key engineering and product changes. 

This is an exploration. Both for me to stretch myself as an engineering and designer, and also for local society.