How we got here

Hello!

On Monday a grand piano fell out of a building and landed on top of me and the keys replaced all my teeth like in cartoons and I was knocked unconscious and I just woke up.

Did I miss anything?

Anyway, I’m thinking a lot about trust. Trust in institutions. Trust in each other. Trust in strangers. Trust in information sources.

Many problems got us to this point, but maybe the biggest is the obliteration of the internet into a thousand individual realities. We’re in the Low Trust society now.

Opaque adtech companies are determining what media companies live and die, with no accountability.

Grifters are exploiting the death of legitimate media — aided by brand safety tech that doesn’t work — to profit from misinformation.

That profit-motivated misinformation is being leveraged to fuel hate.

That growing hate reduces trust, enabling grifters to profit more.

With adtech systems shoveling money to inflammatory conspiracies instead of good-faith media, the calculus of the internet information system changes. It’s that simple.

So how do we wind that back and get to where we can trust again? That’s the good news: you, me, we, are already working on it by taking on what’s causing the chaos: the digital advertising industry. 

But we’d never confuse simple with easy. If it were easy, Nandini and Claire would have sorted this out years ago and I’d have to find some other job. It takes all of us together to fix entire systems.

That said: We have a plan. The digital advertising system has a lot of problems, and we’re going to keep diligently working to fix them for as long as it takes. 

There are a few ways to help:
1. Directly support the work we do.
2. Share our work, by forwarding our emails to a friend or following us on social (Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn).

Whether you joined us three years ago, three weeks ago, or just now, thank you for helping to make the internet a better place.

Now let’s get fixin’.

Fund the work