"All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people."

"Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way."

"As alternatives proliferate, however, those who take the responsibility of teaching find little social and moral consensus on what they should be teaching—what we need, what life ought to be. In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media. It's a lot to ask of a child to find a way through all that alone."

"Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone."

"What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen."

"Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence."

"I know no reason why our media could not create a similar community of the imagination, as theater has often done in societies of the past, but they're mostly not doing it. They are so controlled by advertising and profiteering that the best people who work in them, the real artists, if they resist the pressure to sell out, get drowned out by the endless rush for novelty, by the greed of the entrepreneurs."

When I was young I totally believed in the early promises of the internet. This idea that anything was possible and we would work together to build whatever futures we could imagine. Reflecting on it now, it seems that a million tiny cynical profit-seeking compromises have transformed our online spaces into these howling voids of alienation and scams.

circlefinder is what I had imagined back then and I'm finally able to build it.

It's more of an interactive art installation than a company, really. I am the only engineer. Nobody is financing and there is no need for financing. The vision is incompatible with venture capital and blitz-scaling. All the rich start-up founders I know are miserable anyway.

circlefinder is, at its core, a platform to help people find each other, build local communities together, and support each other. That's it. We monetize by helping to sell tickets or (in the near future) sell merch and reserve venues. This allows our platform to be a participation economy instead of an attention economy and abandon all the stupid tricks that other platforms use. For example, advertising is distracting, so abandoning it brings clarity.

This is an app built with love for my friends. So we can find an improv jam or a fun show or a makerspace or a nonprofit to volunteer at or the next cool bar to check out. And sometimes they need help and I want to make sure they can find the resources they need to get through it.

No advertising, no boosted posts, no nudges, no chatbots, and no bullshit.

In a world filled with noise, let's just make a quiet space and hang out.

Be excellent to each other.