In a Moon: A Manifesto for an Internet Worth Living In

We are all creators. We are all consumers. And at the end of the day, we all need to eat.

For too long we’ve tolerated an unsustainable version of web economics - platforms with display ads and surveillance metrics intermingling with our ideas, work, and attention. We have watched as these platforms offered us a home only to decay to the point that we no longer feel welcomed. Those arrangements have fractured us: they reward distortion, hoard value at the edges, and turn attention into friction rather than fuel for collective creation and our creative natures. Once there was a partnership between us, “the User”, and the platform which benefited and supported our digital infrastructure. We now have on the page two desperate fiends fighting for the promise of a micro-transaction. We are no longer foreground and background but prisoner and captor. Is it no wonder we have chosen to leave that web behind?

All is not lost! It is our resolute belief that the open web can be free in a deeper sense: not free as in cheap or subsidized by exploitation, but free as in equitable and without the biases of platform or algorithm. We believe beyond a doubt it is possible to break the reliance on existing business models and reward individually based on value received. Herein we propose a new way forward: one built on individual recurring gratitude to others, rather than interruption revenue mediated by platforms.

This is not to say that we believe the platforms will go away or no longer play a role in our web. They are still vital to building digital places for us to occupy, explore, and relax. It is merely that there needs to be an abstraction layer above the platform that can guide what we reward. In the real world we have this in the form of money. On the web we argue here that it can be kudos, a record of attribution, and a bit of maybe money whose value is determined later. It then becomes our reputation as a supporter of the work of those we admire, use and rely on which grants us status and enriches us in this new web.

We acknowledge that we too are a platform in an earlier phase of an inevitable enshitification, albeit one with an inherent interest in the power of the crowd. We are founded with a simple, public idea (kudos) and it is our hope that others will be able to use this simple idea going forward much in the same way as we have borrowed it from the pre-existing ideas of dividends in corporations or royalties in the music industry.

In a Moon is not about rejecting existing support structures. It’s about providing a new way to individually reward those whose works we depend upon without getting in the way of creation. In a world where value is hard to ascertain at the moment of consumption we believe that retroactive allocation is the way that individuals can support the livelihood of their creators.

Our ecosystem’s motivation:

1) Equally work for big and small entities without regard to their size, social status or even corporality.

2) Be driven by the attribution rather than the artifact so that it is lightweight enough to be universal on the scale of the web.

3) Have an economic feedback loop that promotes distribution and rewards social sharing. The messenger and the message may each participate.

4) Be unfettered, uncensorable, and free to explore, discover, and add.

5) Embrace a transaction where value is retroactively allocated to work on the scale of the internet as well as make it reversible such that tricksters can be actively disincentivized and thwarted.

We invite builders, thinkers, and participants to join in designing and growing an open web that pays its participants in proportion to the gratitude they inspire, not the ads they tolerate.