Hey yâallâ
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UpTrust: Building a better internet for civilizational well-being đŁ
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Some of you know that while Valerie Danielâs been running The Relateful Company for the past couple years, Iâve been running a tech startup called UpTrust whose mission is civilizational well-being through better conversation online.
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The incentives online today lead to the (now well-documented) polarization, fragmentation, âpost-truthâ 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).Â
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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 weâre here for.
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Iâd like to give all of yâall on this email list an exclusive invite to the beta platform starting in Marchâexclusive because weâre not sure when (or if ever) weâll 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.
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It'll still be unfinished, with really powerful features still unreleased. We'll want your feedback. But I'm excited because I know that weâthe Relateful communityâwith our ability to truly love an incredibly wide set of human experiences, opinions, and ideas, while also not shying away from difficult or contentious truthâwill be an incredible starter culture that can seed the diverse future of discourse everywhere.
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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 Iâm 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 Iâll speak more about it, and include the exclusive waiting list sign up links. Thanks yâall. I'm very happy to finally be sharing this with you!
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The Little Island: My Kind of Deeply Spiritual Childrenâs Book đď¸
Read-aloud on Youtube (esp from 2:19 - 4:00)
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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 weâre both unique and one, saying it both directly and metaphorically at the same time, without needing to be pedantic. Hereâs a key part, where a kitten is conversing with a little island:
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âMaybe I am a little Island too,â said the kittenââa little fur Island in the air.â And he left the ground and jumped in the air.
âThat is just what you are,â said the little Island.
âBut I am part of this big world,â said the little kitten. âMy feet are on it.â
âSo am I,â said the little Island.
âNo, youâre not,â said the kitten. âWater is all around you and cuts you off from the land.â âAsk any fish,â said the little IslandÂ
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[ ⌠the kitten catches and threatens a fish ⌠]
âAnd the fish told the kitten how all land is one land under the sea.â
[...]
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âAnd 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.â
Also apparently the author Margaret Wise Brown was a radical woman, waaay ahead of her time (she was born in 1910).
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Oldie but goodie: The muddy cup, the cleaning the house with dirt metaphor đ§ź
This doesnât 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 itâs worth sharing.
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Thereâs a personal growth trope that things seem to get worse before they get better. If youâve 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 donât know and where your professional talents are under-developed.
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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 âmade it worse.â In this metaphor, awareness does the shaking, and the mud is all the shadow material youâve been repressing, projecting, and otherwise hiding from yourself.
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(2) The dirt under the rug: The room looks clean, but then you lift up the rug and are shocked by whatâs underneath. Awareness is the lifting up of the rug, and the stuff underneath is all the karma you havenât dealt with yet. .
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The second metaphor is better in some ways because thereâs no illusion that youâll ever have a perfectly clean house. Stuff we havenât dealt with, like dirt, accumulates, and every so often weâre 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 infiniteâweâll always be confronting more truths and some of them will be uncomfortable. Getting rid of the illusion that weâll ever be perfect allows us to enjoy the perfect imperfection of now, including the process of cleaning up itself.
Whatever internal mess youâre starting to see as a result of relatefulness is probably not newâyouâre becoming (more) aware of it. Sometimes the cup needs to stay still, or the rug needs to stay unswept⌠but when youâre ready, facing it will lead toward a cleaner, more authentic space.
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May your days be filled with love and wonder,
Jordan (and The Relateful Company) |