Manifesto

The web is dead, twice over.

Decentralization has become a myth as a few platforms concentrate the vast majority of what we discover, read, watch, and learn. Their primary purpose is not to transmit, but to retain. Knowledge has ceased to be a destination, and engagement has become the goal, while content has become a medium rather than an end in itself.

Shared content is no longer the material we explore, but rather what we calibrate to maximize retention, and its creation no longer serves either the message or the substance. Shared content serves the creator's continued existence within the flow and the survival of their visibility. Recent tools for automating content creation exacerbate the situation, and the models that once allowed for accelerating the definition of form are now those that design the content. The direct consequence is palpable, embodied by a significant increase in volume at the expense of substance. Pages and videos that resemble knowledge and a background noise that amplifies until it drowns out what truly mattered.

Yet, not everything has disappeared, and within the platforms themselves, beneath the surface, open archives still exist, sources that no one has closed, and articles written by people who expected nothing in return. A gigantic portion of collective intelligence is there, organic but buried, dispersed, and rarely sought after.

Wikipedia is one of these still-open spaces. In English, more than seventeen million articles are linked, verified and verifiable, often co-authored, and accessible to all. It is one of the few infrastructures of shared knowledge on this scale that was not conceived by and for an academic elite. Wikipedia is treated as a validation reflex, a footnote, a place for quick reference. Yet it is a continent of raw knowledge from which contemporary AI actors know better than anyone how to draw sustenance. Some of the most advanced models extract their knowledge from it, and yet, despite this almost mining-like exploitation, humans continue to traverse it for what it still allows: drifting, discovering, sometimes even playing, and finding what they weren't looking for.

Approaching a continent is not the same as exploring it. Wikipedia is a surveyed territory, made up of coasts and bays, plains and peaks, where mapping remains incomplete. Attention obeys the same physical laws as everywhere else: a few dense, busy centers attract all eyes, while a vast territory remains shrouded in polar darkness.

Forgotten places, secondary lives, concepts of the edge, and local stories far from the sun are the long tail of those places we never go to unintentionally. It is precisely there that the greatest part of the common good lies.

Noys wants to restore visibility to these places without claiming to correct the method or abolish the actions. By retaining the method, the feed, the swiping, the scrolling, the desire to move from one thing to another, but changing the destination. Opening paths rather than confining users to bubbles, and encouraging discovery rather than reflexive swiping. The rabbit hole ceases to be a trap and becomes once again a visual and habitable route.

Noys doesn't intend to fix the internet, but rather to offer, with complete humility, another way to access knowledge: simple enough to fit within existing habits, yet different enough that these habits don't always lead to the same bubble. The application is a side project, built to date without a solid business model or grand extraction plan, and is primarily intended as a pretext for exploring new technologies.

With our immense gratitude to Rich Gossweiler and Spencer Kelly, for the inspiration, technical approach and subtle signals that fueled this endeavor, to Garance Tresarrieu for the endless testing, to Guillaume for small bugs reports and big ideas.