A home for a scattered lineage

Most of what shapes our lives online today is recent, loud and shallow.

Recommendation feeds decide what we see. Platforms rise and fall on quarterly earnings. “Engagement” sits where judgment used to be. We talk a lot. We remember very little. And the deeper questions – what is attention, what is a tool, what is a public space, what is a commons – are mostly treated as decoration.

Yet, decades before our current platforms existed, a scattered lineage of thinkers was already pointing at what would be at stake:

• Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013), asking how computers and networks could augment human intellect and raise our Collective IQ.
• Simone Weil (1909–1943), treating attention as the purest form of generosity and justice.
• Ivan Illich (1926–2002), warning that tools and institutions can quietly turn into systems that own us.
• Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), defending a shared public world and the integrity of factual truth.
• Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012), showing that communities can govern commons without a single all-powerful center.

They did not work together in one room. They did not design one artifact. But seen from 2025, they form a recognizable constellation: a group of people who, in different ways, tried to protect our ability to think and act together with dignity.

All of them are gone. Their books remain, their institutes and workshops remain, their language remains. What we are missing is infrastructure: a place in today’s social layer where this entire lineage can find a practical home.

Project WGN is a small attempt in that direction: a social protocol, not a platform, built under U.S. law as a working tool for people and groups who want to think and act together. At its core, it is an Engelbartian project, shaped and constrained by Weil, Illich, Arendt, Ostrom – and informed, at the architectural level, by the resilience lessons of Bitcoin.

This essay is our way of saying out loud:

• what we think this lineage is,
• why we see Douglas Engelbart as the north star,
• how the others refine rather than contradict him,
• and where, in our protocol, all of them leave fingerprints.

1. Douglas Engelbart – the North Star

Douglas Engelbart’s name is usually attached to the mouse, hypertext and a famous demo in 1968. That demo – often called the “Mother of All Demos” – showed a window into the future: graphical interfaces, video conferencing, collaborative editing.

It is easy to mistake this for a story about interfaces. It is not.

Engelbart’s actual question was much more demanding:

How do we use computers and networks to augment human intellect – especially our collective ability to understand complex problems and act on them?

He spoke of:

• Collective IQ – the capacity of a group or society to perceive, understand and respond to its challenges.
• Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) – groups connected not just by topic, but by the shared work of improving how they work.
• Dynamic Knowledge Repositories (DKRs) – living memory systems where the artifacts of that work (notes, decisions, rationales, experiments) remain accessible and usable.

In this view, technology is not a casino, a megaphone or a slot machine. It is a working tool integrated into how groups: sense their environment, deliberate, decide, record what they did and refine their own methods over time.

By Engelbart’s standards, our current social infrastructure is upside down:

• We have billions of people online – but very little Collective IQ.
• We have endless feeds – but very shallow memory.
• We have “communities” – but few that can clearly explain how they decide and how they learn.
• We have powerful tools – but they are tuned to engagement, not to the quality of shared understanding.

This is the starting point for Project WGN. If we take Engelbart seriously, “just another social app” will not do. What we need is a social protocol that treats his questions as design constraints, not as footnotes.

In Engelbart’s language, our aim is simple:

to make the social layer itself an Engelbartian tool for groups that need to think and act together.

That means:

• a backbone where Messaging is not small talk, but a space for real-time coordination and decisions, and
• Ideas is not a microblog for hot takes, but a Dynamic Knowledge Repository where conversations turn into knowledge that can be revisited and recombined.

Engelbart is the north star. But a star, by itself, does not describe a whole sky. For that, we turn to four other voices who extend and sharpen his vision.

2. Four vectors that converge

While Engelbart is our core inspiration, WGN openly stands on a wider lineage. Four voices, in particular, refine and constrain how we interpret his work.

2.1. Simone Weil – Attention and affliction

Simone Weil wrote little about computers, but deeply about something every digital infrastructure must take seriously: attention. For Weil, attention is not just focus; it is a moral act:

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

To attend to someone – especially someone in distress – is to affirm that their reality matters. To refuse attention, or to distribute it unfairly, is a form of injustice.

In a world of algorithms designed to hijack attention for profit, Weil’s voice cuts through. She forces us to ask:

• Who gets seen?
• Whose suffering is ignored?
• What does it mean when our public spaces are optimized for outrage, distraction and addiction?

For Project WGN, Weil adds a crucial layer to Engelbart:

• Engelbart says: raise Collective IQ.
• Weil asks: in whose favor does that intelligence operate, who receives attention, who is quietly crushed?

Concretely, this leads us to refuse an engagement-first model that treats attention as a resource to mine; to design spaces where important, difficult conversations are not drowned by noise; and to build tools that help groups pay attention to what matters, not just to what is loud.

2.2. Ivan Illich – Tools, not cages

Ivan Illich watched institutions grow and saw a pattern: tools created to empower people could, over time, turn into systems that produce dependence. His answer was the idea of convivial tools:

• tools that people can understand,
• adapt to their own purposes,
• and walk away from,

without becoming permanent clients.

Applied to the digital world, Illich pushes us to ask when a “platform” stops being a tool and starts being a cage. From Illich, WGN inherits a suspicion of central platforms that own everyone’s identity and social graph, make exit costly, and turn “users” into raw material.

This is why WGN is:

• a protocol, not a monolithic service;
• software only, with reference apps that others can re-implement or replace;
• designed so that your social presence is portable across compatible apps, not trapped in one.

Engelbart says: build powerful tools for Collective IQ. Illich replies: do not let those tools harden into institutions that own their users. WGN tries to honor both: high-leverage tools, but always as tools – never as a compulsory habitat.

2.3. Hannah Arendt – Public space and factual truth

Hannah Arendt wrote about totalitarianism, propaganda and the fragile nature of public truth. For her, a healthy political life requires a shared public world where people can appear, speak and be seen as equals, and a respect for factual truth – the stubborn reality of who did what, where and when.

Without that, we lose not just arguments. We lose the very world we argue about.

Applied to digital infrastructure, Arendt’s concerns translate into questions like:

• Who controls what is visible?
• Do we still have a common reference for “what actually happened”?
• Are decisions about visibility and moderation transparent and contestable?

For WGN, Arendt amplifies Engelbart in two ways:

• Publicness: if we are building tools for groups to think and act together, we are also building parts of the public space in which they appear to one another. That demands visible rules, not invisible steering.
• Memory: Engelbart’s DKRs are not just technical repositories. They are guardians of factual history: which option was considered, which decision was made, what was tried, what failed.

In practice, this pushes WGN to reject opaque curation as a default; to treat indexing and moderation as forms of public responsibility, with explanations and records; and to ensure that important threads and decisions can be found and revisited, not lost in endless scroll.

2.4. Elinor Ostrom – The protocol as a commons

Elinor Ostrom spent her career studying how communities manage shared resources: forests, fisheries, irrigation systems, knowledge. She broke the conventional binary of “state or market” by showing a third path: commons governance, where communities, under the right conditions, can create their own rules, monitor behavior, apply graduated sanctions and resolve conflicts.

For a social protocol like WGN, Ostrom is not metaphor; she is blueprint. The protocol itself is a digital commons: many actors depend on it, many can contribute to it, no single actor should control it.

From Ostrom, WGN takes seriously questions like:

• Who can propose changes to the protocol?
• How are those changes evaluated, accepted or rejected?
• How are conflicts between different operators or communities resolved?
• How do we prevent both tyranny and anarchy?

Engelbart tells us to build a system that raises Collective IQ. Ostrom explains how that system can be governed in a way that outlives founders, resists capture and remains answerable to the people who depend on it.

3. Satoshi as architecture, not idol

Another name often present in conversations about resilience and censorship resistance is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.

Invoking Satoshi in 2025 is dangerous; the word is overused and often misused. We must therefore be precise:

• We are not building a currency.
• We are not issuing a token.
• We reject speculative casino dynamics as a foundation.

What Bitcoin gave the world, beyond price charts, is a proof of possibility:

• systems can be designed to be hard to shut down from a single point;
• participants can verify rules and history for themselves;
• when a center is captured, communities can fork and keep going.

At the architectural level, WGN takes inspiration from this:

• We design the protocol so there is no single switch that can silence everyone.
• We care about verifiability and auditable behavior.
• We accept that for true resilience, forking must remain possible, even if costly.

In that sense, Satoshi is not a prophet for us; Satoshi is a structural engineer who showed that censorship resistance can be built into the substrate. Engelbart gives us purpose. Satoshi helps us avoid a single choke point.

4. Why there is no necessary conflict

When you line up these names – Engelbart, Weil, Illich, Arendt, Ostrom, Satoshi – it is natural to ask: do they really fit together? We believe they do, if we choose carefully which parts we are carrying forward.

• Engelbart gives us the central what: raise Collective IQ with better tools, processes and institutions.
• Weil asks for whom this intelligence works and how we distribute attention.
• Illich warns about tools becoming cages and turning users into clients.
• Arendt insists on public space and factual truth.
• Ostrom offers a way to govern the protocol as a commons.
• Satoshi shows how to design systems that resist being turned off from above.

The potential conflicts come only if we misread them:

• If we take Satoshi as a prophet of speculation instead of a designer of resilient systems, we betray the others.
• If we take Illich as an argument against any complex tool, we betray Engelbart.
• If we take Arendt as a license for control instead of a call for transparent responsibility, we betray the commons.

Project WGN tries to keep the healthy tensions and drop the false ones. Engelbart remains the north. The others are constraints:

• Weil constrains what we pay attention to.
• Illich constrains how we build and deploy tools.
• Arendt constrains how we treat truth and public space.
• Ostrom constrains how we govern the commons.
• Satoshi constrains where power can and cannot be concentrated.

5. Where this becomes code: Project WGN

So far, all of this is language. Where does it enter the machine? Project WGN is our attempt to embody this lineage in a concrete social protocol.

At a high level:

• It is software only – a protocol plus reference applications.
• It is anchored under U.S. law, especially around freedom of expression.
• It is designed above all for people and groups that need to decide and act, not merely to perform.

5.1. Messaging – The hot flow

The first reference app, Messaging, focuses on what Engelbart would call the “hot” part of the work: live conversations, coordination and decisions.

Design questions include:

• Can we mark decisions explicitly, with their rationale?
• Can we trace back how a group arrived at a given point?
• Can we tell apart small talk from critical threads?

This is where Engelbart appears as structured collaboration and traceable decisions; Weil appears in avoiding an attention model that buries important work under trivial noise; Arendt appears in the care for factual sequences: who did what, when, in which context.

5.2. Ideas – The long memory

The second reference app, Ideas, focuses on the “cooler” part: distilling conversations into insights, linking ideas and revisiting them over time. It is our first step towards a Dynamic Knowledge Repository:

• posts are not just moments; they are units of knowledge;
• they can be linked back to discussions;
• they can be arranged in sequences, forks, alternatives.

Here, Engelbart is obvious. Arendt is present in the preservation of factual memory. Ostrom is present in the way this repository becomes a resource for governance. Illich is present in our insistence that this remains a tool communities can understand and adapt, not a black box.

5.3. One person, one voice – Levels of presence

Identity is a hard problem. Bots corrupt Collective IQ. At the same time, anonymity is sometimes necessary for safety and whistleblowing. WGN approaches this with levels of presence:

• Anonymous – text-only, for when showing your face is unsafe. Interaction from others is always opt-in.
• Identified – a brief, on-device face check to ensure that one human controls one account. We do not store facial measurements as working files; we keep only a verification photo on profile as a visible trust signal.
• Verified – documents and, when needed, a short live check. The highest level of formal trust.

Across levels, Weil asks us to pay attention to the vulnerable. Arendt reminds us that appearing in public has meaning; people who stand behind their words should have ways to do so with clarity. Ostrom guides us towards graduated responses: issues can trigger warnings, corrections, demotions – not just exile. Engelbart insists that for serious Collective IQ work, we must know when we are dealing with real, accountable people.

When something violates U.S. law or explicit protocol rules, the default response is to name the problem, invite correction and apply proportional consequences. Deletion of the person is the last resort, not the first instinct.

6. An invitation to a community, not a market

This essay is not a funding pitch. It is a signal to a particular community:

• people who have kept Engelbart’s work alive,
• readers of Weil, Illich, Arendt and Ostrom,
• builders and researchers who feel that our current platforms are structurally misaligned with human dignity and collective intelligence.

What we are offering is not a finished solution, but a place where this lineage can begin to take infrastructural form.

What we have:

• a working public description of the project, including an Inspiration / Lineage page that names Engelbart as our core inspiration and the others as explicit influences;
• a roadmap for the protocol and the first reference apps (Messaging and Ideas);
• a legal and operational frame (U.S.-based, software only, patent pending);
• a clear refusal to turn this into token speculation or advertising infrastructure.

What we do not have – and cannot invent alone – is the guarantee that we are doing justice to this lineage; the full design of governance for the protocol as a commons; the lived practices that will determine whether WGN truly raises Collective IQ or just adds noise.

For that, we need contact, critique and collaboration from the very people who have been thinking about these questions for decades.

7. Between thesis and server

Engelbart, Weil, Illich, Arendt, Ostrom – they did not live to see today’s platforms. Yet much of what they warned about, and hoped for, is now in play: we have tools with more power than they imagined; we have attention economies more extractive than they feared; we have spaces where truth and lie share the same stage; and we have, still, communities trying to solve real problems under all of this.

We can keep this lineage on the shelf – as thesis topics, conference citations and nostalgic tributes. Or we can try, with all the limits and imperfections of real code, to give it a home in the infrastructure people actually use.

Project WGN is one such attempt. It will change. It will make mistakes. It will need correction. But its compass is not secret:

• Engelbart is the north star.
• Weil, Illich, Arendt, Ostrom and Satoshi are the surrounding constellations.
• The destination is not a unicorn valuation, but a social fabric that helps us become smarter together, not just louder.

If you recognize yourself in any part of this map, this is an open invitation: help us make sure that, for once, the people who thought hardest about tools, attention, public space and commons are not just ghosts behind the interface – but partners in how the interface is built.

— Daniel
Founder, Project WGN
projectwgn.com