Our economy is based largely on exploiting both natural resources and people for profit without regard to how it affects either the earth or those people. To protect themselves, those in power hide as much information they can about what they are doing. For example, corporate reporting structures are designed to keep lower-level employees ignorant of what executives are doing with their company. Similarly, news website paywalls keep people from knowing important information, even if it affects our democracy! When information is available to people, it is often distorted with complete or partial lies. Failing that, useless information is often used to distract people from important truths.

Many people in the world are working on solutions to these problems. For example, there are people working on data visualizations, which are better than raw, tabular data, but often do not have the necessary context to make them useful. There are many working on investigative journalism to get important information out to people, but these efforts do not decrease the amount of information that is overloading people. As a result, some people have resorted to protests to get out the word on information they think is important. However, this is still dangerous in our democracy because those in power will find ways to disenfranchise them by firing them from their jobs or even arresting them. Most importantly, none of these efforts are focused on enabling people to use the information once they get it.

Instead, people need to be empowered with information. That means giving it to them in the contexts where they can use it. For example, company information would be helpful when deciding whether or not to join or stay at a company; news about global warming would be more useful with tips on what to do about it; and information on a product’s supply chain is useful when deciding whether or not to buy it.

However, while such contextualized information can empower some people, it may not empower people who are not in those contexts. For example, an employee who can’t leave their job because they are in debt would not find the extra company information useful; most people are disenfranchised when it comes to making global warming mitigation policies; and many consumers need lower-priced products so they don’t break their budgets, rather than more moral products.

In other words, people need to be empowered with information in way way that guarantees that it is useful in some way. Even if they can’t directly use it, like information in a representative democracy, they deserve to know it because it affects their lives. Therefore, for the examples above, company information, global warming news and suggestions, and product supply chain information should be easily available — not just upon demand, but to others who may not think to make the demand.

Therefore, I am officially launching my initiative, Datagotchi Labs, to truly democratize information. This means that my products will be focused on this goal, and will always be free for people to use. Requiring them to pay for these capabilities goes against my motivation for creating the products in the first place. It also means that the products’ creation and improvement will be collaborative with any and all people who are interested in participating. While I have a couple of products already in their early stages, I plan to include interested people more in the creation of future products. In the meantime, I plan to involve everyone in the testing and improvement of the Inspect and Counteroffer products once I launch them.

Since I am now devoting myself to incubating Datagotchi Labs full-time, collaboration will start in the form of a Patreon page, where members can pledge a monthly donation to me (starting at $5/month) in exchange for updates, involvement, and early access to my work.

Even if you can’t afford $5/month, though, I would still like to invite everyone to the Discord channel to chat about products Datagotchi is currently working on, and can work on in the future! Find it here.

For further reading

• The Amazon Labor Union (ALU). https://www.amazonlaborunion.org/
• Dewey, J. (2008). Democracy and Education. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-h/852-h.htm
• ProPublica. About Us. https://www.propublica.org/about
• Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. https://www.twitterandteargas.org/