Reclaiming the Promise of Connection

The Beginning

Growing up in a small town in Eastern Iowa, I'd feel the social and conformity pressures that come with that kind of place. But small towns also meant you couldn't avoid people you disagreed with - at least within a certain range. Everyone went to the same high school, the same stores, etc. The cultural range was narrow, but being social animals with the geography limiting the people we're able to relate with, forced interaction across whatever differences existed in a way that's become increasingly rare.

"It's a big world out there" was a saying that floated around - more abstract comfort than lived reality. Socially, the world beyond our town didn't feel real, or in any way impactful to me. Long-distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive. Pen pals took weeks to exchange letters. Meeting people from other countries, outside of a handful of exchange students each year, required the kind of money and access I didn't have.

Then came IRC chat rooms, and later ICQ. I started talking with someone from China who was going to school in Malaysia, trying to get better at English. We'd discuss food, travels, culture - just genuine conversations between people curious about each other's lives. Years later, I met up with her in London. That abstract saying - "it's a big world out there" - had become concrete. The internet made something impossible suddenly ordinary. My world was expanding exponentially while the world itself was getting much smaller.

This wasn't just about me connecting with individuals across the globe. It was part of two parallel revolutions happening simultaneously: one in human connection, and one in access to information.

The Dream

Those early forums and chat rooms weren't utopias - people could absolutely be assholes. But bad behavior wasn't rewarded beyond the moment. There was no financial incentive to be divisive or inflammatory. No algorithm amplifying outrage because it kept people engaged. If someone was consistently terrible, communities would ignore them or they'd get banned, and that was that. The infrastructure was neutral.

People had to learn how to use the tools, had to want to be there. The friction meant that those who showed up generally wanted actual conversation, or at least weren't being paid to ruin it. It was unmonetized, self-selected, human-scale. We believed that if we just removed the barriers - distance, gatekeepers, cost - and didn't create perverse incentives, human curiosity could flourish.

At the same time, another group of pioneers was fighting a different battle for access. Academic knowledge sat locked behind institutional paywalls, with universities paying tens of thousands of dollars per year for journal subscriptions. Publicly funded research remained inaccessible to the public who funded it.

Then came PLOS - scientists creating open-access journals because they believed knowledge should be a public good, not a commodity. Aaron Swartz and the guerrilla open access movement argued that "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." The GPL and Linux proved that collaborative, open models could not just compete with proprietary ones, but surpass them. Wikipedia showed that human knowledge could be a commons, maintained by everyone, available to anyone.

The vision was unified: remove gatekeepers, create commons-based peer production, trust that good faith collaboration and open access would naturally elevate quality. Information wanted to be free; expertise wanted to be shared. And people were willing to pay real costs for this vision - Aaron Swartz faced prosecution and ultimately took his own life. Scientists pushed against institutional skepticism to publish open access. Developers worked for free to build Linux. They believed it mattered that much.

The Fall

Let me be clear: these technologies are genuinely remarkable. AI can now translate languages in real-time, analyze vast datasets, facilitate connections at unprecedented scale. We have access to more information than any generation in human history. The capability isn't the problem.

The problem is what we're optimizing for.

The advertising model discovered something: outrage keeps people scrolling more than understanding does. Tribalism generates more engagement than nuance. Algorithmic feeds learned to serve us content that triggers emotional responses, not content that advances our understanding. The metric became "engagement time" rather than "truth-seeking" or "clarity."

What we gained in reach, we lost in depth. Those IRC conversations I had as a teenager were small-scale but genuine. Today's "global connection" is often algorithmically curated to maximize conflict, optimized for performance over conversation, parasocial rather than mutual.

Now AI is amplifying the problem. When you can generate infinite content at near-zero cost, the current incentive structure says: whoever floods the zone fastest wins. The same technology that could elevate discourse instead optimizes for spam. We're in a race to the bottom where volume matters more than reasoning.

I had my own moment of reckoning with this a few years ago. I had an idea about possible solutions to our unhoused population and was excitedly explaining it to a friend who was getting her master's in public policy. She listened patiently, then said: "That's not how cities work. That's not how city funding works."

It was humbling. I thought I understood a complex system because I'd read some articles and had strong intuitions. But intuition isn't understanding, and access to unlimited information doesn't automatically give you clarity. I realized I had little to no true grasp of the subject - the budget structures, the political incentives, the constraints cities operate under, the research on what actually works.

And here's the thing: our current information ecosystem doesn't help bridge that gap. We got the access those pioneers fought for - sort of. But we lost the quality signals. Information became free but also became weaponized. The openness that empowered also enabled misinformation. We have more information than ever before and less clarity about what's actually true or who actually understands the problems we face.

The Path Forward

We don't need new technology. We need to fix the incentive structure.

What if we measured what actually matters? Not how many people clicked, but whether ideas are supported by evidence. Not how long someone stayed on a page, but whether the conversation advanced understanding. Not whether people agreed, but whether they engaged substantively with reasoning.

This is what ReasonSmith aims to do. A simple response like "Amen!" scores low not because agreement is bad, but because it doesn't advance discourse - it provides no logical argument, no evidence, no substantive contribution to understanding. Evidence and logical reasoning score well because that's what actually serves collaborative truth-seeking.

We're inverting the incentive structure. Quality of reasoning over volume of content. Evidence over assertion. Clarity over virality. Collaboration over performance.

But here's the reality: quality research and reasoning take time - time most people don't have. I could see myself funding local researchers to investigate our local problems with the kind of depth my friend had about public policy. I could see funding aspiring journalists to research national and global issues with actual rigor. We're exploring models for funding researchers who demonstrate consistent evidence-based reasoning and depth of subject matter expertise.

But we're not building this in isolation. We're figuring out how a funding model should work, what safeguards are needed, and what types of research our community values most as a discussion on ReasonSmith itself - using the platform to shape the platform.

We're also making it easy to move from digital discussion to in-person meetups. The internet connected us globally, but we lost the local. Those IRC friendships became real when I eventually traveled and stayed with people I'd met online. We're building tools that use online infrastructure to facilitate offline relationships - using technology to bring people together, not keep them scrolling.

We're standing on the shoulders of those earlier pioneers. PLOS showed that open access matters, but so does quality control. GPL and Linux showed that collaborative models work when they have the right structure. Aaron Swartz reminded us that access alone isn't enough - we need both accessibility and quality. ReasonSmith is trying to synthesize these insights: the openness of Wikipedia, the quality standards of peer review, the collaborative model of Linux, the accessibility Swartz fought for - applied not just to information, but to reasoning itself.

This is about reclaiming the original dream with the wisdom of what we've learned. Those early internet pioneers believed that removing distance and gatekeepers would let human curiosity and good faith flourish. They were right about the potential and naive about what structures would be needed to sustain it. We're not trying to invent something new - we're trying to recover what we lost when we let the ad model hijack the incentive structure of human connection and knowledge-sharing, but with better safeguards and measures.