Hey y’all—

UpTrust: Building a better internet for civilizational well-being 🟣

Some of you know that while Valerie Daniel’s been running The Relateful Company for the past couple years, I’ve been running a tech startup called UpTrust whose mission is civilizational well-being through better conversation online.

The incentives online today lead to the (now well-documented) polarization, fragmentation, ‘post-truth’ meaning making crises, mental health probs, and deterioration of civil discourse at all scales. (Also problematic: the vast majority of the training data for AI comes from petty and divisive conversations). 

We are creating a different incentive structure that systemically rewards truth and love instead. We're built on better algorithms and relatefully informed foundations about what is and what we’re here for.

I’d like to give all of y’all on this email list an exclusive invite to the beta platform starting in March—exclusive because we’re not sure when (or if ever) we’ll open UpTrust to the general public. Be a part of establishing the culture that can engage humanity's biggest problems and potentials with nuance and compassion, allowing disagreement to be generative. Join us in taking all the incredible insights from fifteen years of Relatefulness and scaling them into the best conversations on the internet.

It'll still be unfinished, with really powerful features still unreleased. We'll want your feedback. But I'm excited because I know that we—the Relateful community—with our ability to truly love an incredibly wide set of human experiences, opinions, and ideas, while also not shying away from difficult or contentious truth—will be an incredible starter culture that can seed the diverse future of discourse everywhere.

The waiting list is not quite ready yet, so against all marketing advice, there's no call to action this week. Today, UpTrust is a really cool thing I’m sharing, which I hope (1) offers some hope in what can feel like confusing and overwhelming times, and (2) shows ways Relatefulness applies in domains like technology that may otherwise seem distant. Next week I’ll speak more about it, and include the exclusive waiting list sign up links. Thanks y’all. I'm very happy to finally be sharing this with you!

The Little Island: My Kind of Deeply Spiritual Children’s Book 🏝️

Read-aloud on Youtube (esp from 2:19 - 4:00)

I love how direct and present this book is. I can feel how it comes from a different place, being with things as they are without judgement, transmitting a timeless, deep understanding of how we’re both unique and one, saying it both directly and metaphorically at the same time, without needing to be pedantic. Here’s a key part, where a kitten is conversing with a little island:

 

“Maybe I am a little Island too,” said the kitten—“a little fur Island in the air.” And he left the ground and jumped in the air.

“That is just what you are,” said the little Island.

“But I am part of this big world,” said the little kitten. “My feet are on it.”

“So am I,” said the little Island.

“No, you’re not,” said the kitten. “Water is all around you and cuts you off from the land.”
“Ask any fish,” said the little Island 

 

[ … the kitten catches and threatens a fish … ]

“And the fish told the kitten how all land is one land under the sea.”

[...]

 

“And it was good to be a little Island. A part of the world and a world of its own all surrounded by the bright blue sea.”

Also apparently the author Margaret Wise Brown was a radical woman, waaay ahead of her time (she was born in 1910).

Oldie but goodie: The muddy cup, the cleaning the house with dirt metaphor 🧼

This doesn’t go as deep or provide as creative of a perspective as a lot of the things I like to write about, but I find it so useful that I think it’s worth sharing.

There’s a personal growth trope that things seem to get worse before they get better. If you’ve been numb feeling your body, the first sensations you feel are usually very painful. When you start to set boundaries with your family, you often hurt people or seem to be more alone. Taking on new responsibility in a career suddenly shows you all that you don’t know and where your professional talents are under-developed.

There are two common metaphors for understanding this:

(1) A muddy cup: leave it alone and the dirt settles on the bottom. The water above appears to be clear, then you shake it up and it seems like you “made it worse.” In this metaphor, awareness does the shaking, and the mud is all the shadow material you’ve been repressing, projecting, and otherwise hiding from yourself.

(2) The dirt under the rug: The room looks clean, but then you lift up the rug and are shocked by what’s underneath. Awareness is the lifting up of the rug, and the stuff underneath is all the karma you haven’t dealt with yet. .

The second metaphor is better in some ways because there’s no illusion that you’ll ever have a perfectly clean house. Stuff we haven’t dealt with, like dirt, accumulates, and every so often we’re going to want to deal with it or else our space will get lumpy, moldy, etc. Another way to say this is that truth is infinite—we’ll always be confronting more truths and some of them will be uncomfortable. Getting rid of the illusion that we’ll ever be perfect allows us to enjoy the perfect imperfection of now, including the process of cleaning up itself.

Whatever internal mess you’re starting to see as a result of relatefulness is probably not new—you’re becoming (more) aware of it. Sometimes the cup needs to stay still, or the rug needs to stay unswept… but when you’re ready, facing it will lead toward a cleaner, more authentic space.

May your days be filled with love and wonder,

Jordan (and The Relateful Company)

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