This country was founded on democracy for a reason. The reason was people wanted to think for themselves. They wanted build their system of governance from the ground up and live half way up to the sky in that imperfect consensus called the public authority. They intuited that as individuals they were quite imperfect but as a group they could be quite good. Over the past two hundred plus years we have demonstrated this conspiracy against dictatorship can actually work albeit imperfectly.

Each age presents a challenge that seems initially impossible to overcome. There was the matter of the British King and his military and yet a revolution occurred and we formed this nation. There was slavery and a tragic Civil War and yet there was the Emancipation Proclamation. There was and continues to be racism, sexism, discrimination against disability, and still we bump along aspiring to be who we claim to be. 

But in this age we are at the beginning of a crisis that is brand new in the human experience. We will find a vocabulary for it over time, but for now let’s call it the Meta-trance. The successful trance is successful because a trance is impervious or at least successfully resistant to the facts of life. We, like children alone with the halloween bag of candy, have fallen lock, stock, and barrel for the sugar laden Meta-Trance of internet and media. The unique danger of this kind of internet trance is the reality of individual identity, experience and responsibility becomes another commercial party’s privately owned real estate. Algorithms are the new barbed wire of habit. We must without delay recover our shared reality to stabilize the drift of this fact free, trance driven, division of our population or we are done with this thing called democracy. 

We are not as cruel or crazy as we may seem in this time. There is hope and promise residing just below this trance driven phenomenon we are struggling with in our moment in history. This project will be dedicated to assisting in the recovery of our true national identity and aspiration. We may be small but we are persistent.