From Personal Struggle to Collective Rebellion: The Why Behind Datagotchi Labs

Datagotchi Labs is a rebellion. While our mission was born from a deeply personal struggle—my lifelong journey to make sense of a fragmented and overwhelming world—it has evolved into something more. My personal path has now become our moral mission: to build a new digital economy that empowers people with information to increase their clarity, empathy, and solidarity.

This is the story of how my personal need became the foundation of a neurodivergent rebellion.

The Problem, From the Inside Out

For years, I grappled with mental and emotional states that are a direct response to infant trauma. This internal struggle created a profound sense of powerlessness—a feeling that the world was chaotic and unpredictable, and I was just a passive observer. It manifested as chronic anxiety, which often felt like a crushing information overload that left me in a constant state of fight-or-flight. My lack of trust and disinterest in socializing stemmed from an inability to feel truly safe—a feeling that manifested as a profound sense of being a “perpetual outsider” who was constantly freaked out by that confusion.

This personal, neurodivergent struggle is the microcosm of a much larger societal problem. Today, the average person is a passive consumer in a digital economy that preys on this exact same sense of confusion and isolation. The Digital Oligarchy—a small elite who seized control of platforms after 2008—extracts “rent” from us by feeding us fragmented, filtered, and manipulated information. The result is widespread digital fatigue, a sense of disempowerment, and, ultimately, a broken collective will. Social problems are experienced as individual burdens, making collective action nearly impossible.

This is the very same problem I’ve been fighting my entire life, just on a grander scale. I’ve realized that I am not just a software developer or a founder; I am a neurodivergent integrator. My entire life has been a journey of synthesizing fragmented information from different disciplines and connecting the dots that others miss.

The Digital Oligarchy’s Biggest Lie: The False Promise of Meritocracy

The Digital Oligarchy and its followers—e.g., venture capitalists and their funded startups—echo these lies, because they are selling a vision, not a reality. We, on the other hand, are “pulling back the curtain” on the whole show. We’re here to reveal the truth and show what is real. That truth is that meritocracy is a myth—the lie that our success is a direct result of our individual talent and effort, and that our failure is entirely our own fault. The current billionaires in our society got their money and connections from their parents! It’s a narrative that keeps us from questioning the system itself.

They use the very tools of technology to lie to us, promising individual freedom while deliberately breaking our collective will. They feed us a constant stream of fragmented information, turning our lives into a frantic attempt to grab a piece of the truth—the same way the blind men in the ancient parable tried to describe an elephant based only on the part they could touch. One feels the trunk and says it’s like a snake; another feels the leg and says it’s a tree. No one can see the whole elephant.

Our Solution: A New Digital Economy

Instead of fighting the Digital Oligarchy on their own terms, we will build a new digital economy from the ground up. Our mission is to empower a new class of rebels to reclaim the information commons—the original vision of an open, decentralized internet—and inspire collective solidarity. We’re doing this with a phased roadmap that leverages the very technology that was used to exploit us.

Phase 1: Empower the Rebels Our core product, Inspect, is the foundational tool for this rebellion. It’s a distributed, peer-to-peer tool for verifiable truth. Inspect is a free, open-source tool available on platforms like GitHub. It empowers Insight Authors (independent journalists and activists) to:

Create Insights: Connect disparate information into valuable insights, revealing that many problems are systemic, not personal failings.
Collaborate on Insights: Share and build upon these insights to create a shared, collective understanding—the foundation of solidarity.

Phase 2: Empower the Vassals & Build the Commons In the feudal system, serfs paid tribute to their lords. Today, the Digital Oligarchy acts as the new lords. Once we’ve proven our model with the rebels, we will expand our mission to empower businesses and brands—the new vassals—that are currently paying tribute to the Digital Oligarchy. We will help them reclaim their data and build new, more direct relationships with their customers.

The Tools of the Rebellion, Born from a Personal Need

Every one of our products is a direct answer to a personal problem I’ve faced:

Inspect: This is the ultimate expression of my personal mission. Starting as a mobile app to share news articles with friends and family members, it’s now a broader tool to transform confusing, fragmented information into clear, verifiable insights. It’s a direct solution to that profound feeling of being overwhelmed and disconnected from a world that doesn’t seem to make sense.
PMBoard: Born from my consulting experience for technology companies, PMBoard was created to manage the overwhelming, fragmented demands of product stakeholders. It mirrors my personal need to organize and unify complex information.
Collaborative Copilot: This tool is an extension of my core need to synthesize diverse perspectives into a single, cohesive narrative. It’s a system for integrating automation and data-driven tools like AI, designed to bridge the gap between individual understanding and a shared, collective understanding, allowing teams to move from fragmented ideas to unified action.
Counteroffer: This project was born from my frustrating experience in a broken job market. It reflects my desire to empower others and restore a sense of control in a system that deliberately disempowers you.

Our Uncompromising Moral Compass

Our business model is a direct extension of our mission. Our core product, Inspect, is free. The revenue from our spinoff projects funds the rebellion, ensuring we can build a more humane digital future without compromising our values.

This approach is guided by a hybrid moral framework that is both rule-based and practical, grounded in universal principles while remaining responsive to the unique details of each community. It’s a commitment to act with prudence, always seeking to do the greatest good for the most people, in a way that respects the dignity of every individual and is grounded in the lived experiences of our users.

This is more than just a company; it’s an authentic rebellion. It’s a belief that our collective well-being is not a byproduct of the system, but its very foundation. We will use the very tools of technology to organize outside the system, build our own parallel institutions, and create a more equitable future.