Starting a company - devlog
Good morning! Today is day 1 of me formally starting a company.
Technically I’ve been running this business since June 2024 when I quit my dayjob at Snapchat, but it’s been “in stealth” thus far1.
It’s called Prosocial Engineering. As in, professional social engineering. And also, prosocial social engineering. Its logo is one of the memes that originated in our lab - the yellow hat2.
It’s an open source marketing company. I take in clients who want to change minds for a purpose. This can be of large group of minds, like marketing a product to consumers in a specific cohort, or a small group of minds, like specific investors, philanthropists, or other kinds of individual gatekeepers.
“open source” is the unique part. We have very effective methods for changing people’s minds - but we ALWAYS announce it first, and fully document it & post mortem it. This guarantees that our work is always “good” - if the marketing campaign works, BUT the subject becomes aware it is a marketing campaign, and is upset & changes their mind back, that’s GOOD. This is the safety “eject” button that the receiver is allowed to push for any reason, at any time.
A positive side effect of running this business is cleaning up the information environment in any of the territories we operate in, “raising the epistemic waterline”. Before we can effectively propagate information, we begin first by doing a “full sweep” of the network. This involves:
(1) taking a snapshot of all current beliefs, and
(2) observing the process of belief change (where does the change originate, how does it propagate through the network, how does it reach full saturation, what defense mechanisms are present, if any)
Once this process is complete, healthy information propagation becomes very easy across the entire network (buying, selling, recruiting, collective sense making, match making). This process fails if there are already other agencies operating on the network, and may be hostile to attempts to “clean up”.
Here is how one member described it poetically:
See v1 of the website here: https://prosocialengineering.org/. My immediate goal is: money. There are a lot of projects that are ready to launch that are sitting on deck that I would like to fundraise for. We also have a lot of services that we can offer that I’m looking for paying clients for.
Rough roadmap of the next few months:
Launch Anatomy of an Internet Argument, do weekly case studies, grow a community around it & monetize the artifacts3
Teach everyone how to setup their own “open culture science base station”, and how to connect your instance to the global network of cultural ambassadors4
Perform a “mic check” across the full network. This is like putting in a material in a human body that shows up in CAT scans so you can look for blockages, but for our information networks/collective language5
I think this is the general direction of the business. The marketing work can be paid for directly by companies that want it. The research work can be funded either by philanthropy/grants, or by those same companies (a failed marketing campaign doubles as a successful research experiment we can publish, if it surfaces why people did not like thing/what the origin of the resistance was).
Some of our work inside specific territories may grow big enough to become its own thing. For example, at some point we shifted focus to operate on the culture of peer review & science communication, the result of that was the creation of the brand “ORI - Open Research Institute”. This is currently still running as a project/experiment by Prosocial Engineering, but may spin out one day.
“Stealth” is in quotes because, technically, every single step of the way from the very beginning has been publicly documented. And yet, I’ve managed to maintain a lot of secrets from a lot of parties on a “need to know” basis. This is great because, as I hope you’ll understand from this post, we’re in the business of information management, and this gives me confidence that our open-source methods work, despite the constraint of full transparency.
A popular “influencer”/contributor in the network wears a yellow hat in their profile picture - but several others wear it as well, online and in real life. This “overloading” of meaning ontop of an existing symbol is a well known technique for hiding in plain sight.
This is essentially an internet wide game to study & influence subcultures, with full awareness & proper guardrails. It tilts the playing field from the average hostile internet interaction to wholesome, productive, and positive sum. At worst you learn about people you consider your enemies, at best you “convert” others and propagate what is good & true. It turns “culture war” into “culture science” and acts as a way for us to recruit cultural ambassadors in every corner of the internet.
This is essentially teaching every community how A/B testing works, and connecting them with at least ONE other disconnected network on earth, so they can perform A/B testing from wherever they stand. This is the best defense against unwanted surveillance - to be able to see your culture “from the inside” and from one or more trusted vantage points “from the outside”. Together they form a complete picture of your information network.
Most humans only exist in one isolated network and so cannot perform any kind of triangulation to trace the origin of changes to their language/culture/memome.
This will also involve writing down all the work, research, and insights we got from all of our experiments in 2025. We’ve only written one of these case studies, see “my first open source psyop with etymologynerd”
The trick here is to find a payload that’s worth propagating. These mic checks are “very noisy” & easily abused, unless they surface information that is useful for everyone.
Can you 'splain it to me like I'm 12? 🙂
I think we can do the "anatomy" sale like this:
target a domain on X, and we will send our agents to (1) identify and mediate arguments (2) engage in 'arguments' in a good faith way
besides for this practice we will document our findings in an agreed structure before hand
--you get: a positive influence on the culture you chose, interesting data on how people there deal with conceptual conflicts, and a document that captures these findings