Three Projects: A Civic Response to Billionaire Control
For several years I’ve been writing about what democracy needs to survive and the people responsible for its freefall. The trilogy I recently published: The Architecture of a Silenced Press, The Great Extraction Event, The Architecture of Chaos, diagnoses a rigged system. Billionaire-acquired and consolidated news and information pipelines that manufacture obedient pawns. Captured government extracting wealth from all of us to enrich themselves and their billionaire donors. Respectful conversations among neighbors replaced by intentional algorithmically amplified outrage.
The diagnosis is necessary but it is not sufficient.
A meaningful democracy rests on three pillars: an informed, educated, and engaged society. Each pillar has been assailed for multiple generations. Writing about the intentional dismantling of our democracy is only part of the response. Building the infrastructure that defends and restores the pillars is the rest of the response. That work needs to be done by people who understand what is being lost and have the technical capacity to build a countervailing alternative.
Many of you know that aside from writing and public speaking about the billionaire capture and twisting of the American experiment, I've been building. With a small volunteer team, including longtime collaborator Golda Velez and a network of volunteer developers, Civic Works has built three working demonstrations of what civic infrastructure looks like when it is designed for citizens rather than for billionaires. I want to show them to you.
These are demos. They are not yet production platforms. With your support we can change that.
Action Engine — for an engaged society
When you sign a petition, RSVP to a rally, or click a “call your senator” button on Mobilize.us or EveryAction, your name, email, and often your address get logged. For years that was acceptable because Mobilize and EveryAction were controlled by a non-profit. Their stewardship was aligned with the people whose data they held. A few years ago, both were acquired by private equity. The data is the same. The risk is not.
We are now in an environment where the Trump administration is prosecuting activists in Texas as “antifa,” where the FBI raids journalists’ homes, and where the database of who attended which protest, signed which petition, called which senator, is no longer hypothetically dangerous. It is actively dangerous. The infrastructure that progressive organizing has depended on for the last decade is now owned by people whose first obligation is to investors, not to the safety of the people in the database.
Action Engine is being built for that environment. It aggregates civic actions: calls to representatives, rallies, townhalls, candidate debates, volunteer events, mutual aid coordination, and voter registration efforts, from vetted local, regional, and national organizations. The system ensures action quality before distributing to subscribers based on their location and the issues they care about. Distribution flows across CivicSky, Mastodon, and Bluesky through a federated model. Action analytics are aggregated and provided to the action-sponsoring organization, never exposing individual identities. When ready for production it will be deployed and hosted under EU jurisdiction, protecting activists and participants from US-based legal overreach.
Action Engine will be the structural replacement for Mobilize.us and EveryAction. The promise is civic infrastructure designed for the people who show up, not for investors or government persecution.
CivicSky Media — for an informed society
CivicSky is being built as a social platform that pays authors, journalists, and content creators, curates trusted news, and integrates civic actions in your feed. It will also pioneer an invite-only virtual space for "Kitchen Table Democracy" called CivicSpaces. The platform will include Substack-style monetization for authors, will be subscriber (not advertising) supported, and include premium tiers for elected officials engaging directly with district-validated constituents. News will come from trusted sources like ProPublica, AP, and the Guardian.
CivicSpaces is the part I'm most excited about. It's invite-only Kitchen Table Democracy-style deliberation in small groups, designed to address vital societal challenges such as healthcare, voting rights, climate action, and more. The approach is modeled on patterns from earlier DeepMind Habermas Machine work that helps bridge intentionally polarized individuals. When a group reaches consensus, that consensus gains momentum with consensus from other groups working on the same imperative. At scale, it generates a civic action campaign that flows back through Action Engine until societal solutions can be implemented in law and policy.
Walk through the demo and click through CivicSpaces. The four-state walkthrough shows what facilitated deliberation actually looks like: lobby, active discussion, synthesis, consensus, and action loop. This is what a platform looks like when it is designed to bridge polarization rather than amplify it.
Alonovo: Informed Consumer Economic Action
(Because Knowledge IS Power)
When we buy a product we are supporting the behavior of a company. Do they treat their workers fairly? Are they minimizing their environmental impact? Are they lobbying to undermine societal protections and tax responsibility? How much do they pay their executive team vs. average worker salaries? Are they anti-union? Do they embrace diversity? Are they collaborating with ICE?
Indivisible, 50501, and other large organizations have provided important information about boycotts and companies to avoid. This project will help guide consumers toward supporting companies that are evolving and investing to be better societal partners, moving beyond maximizing profits regardless of the costs borne by those affected by egregious behavior.
Why this matters
Many, including myself, have written extensively about the challenges we face today due to the coordinated billionaire attacks on democracy, equality, justice, and economic fairness that date back to the Lewis Powell Memorandum of 1971 and the Reagan administration. The work is published. Writing about it, speaking about it, and continued analysis without long-term countervailing infrastructure for democracy will not stop us from falling beyond a point of no return.
These three projects together demonstrate the integrated vision: economic action through Alonovo, protected civic action through the Action Engine, democratic conversations on CivicSky that transform into societal action. Each has been constructed by a small team committed to the vision and mission, supported by generous donations received thus far. Each project is deliberately designed to live in a structure that cannot be acquired and subverted from the public interest.
We are now in conversation with potential partners, mission-aligned impact investors, and aligned family offices, about the resources necessary to scale all three to production. The legal operating structure under discussion is a hybrid public benefit corporation coupled with a non-profit 501(c)(3) parent, with Action Engine as a separate EU-based non-profit, with the intent to wrap the whole structure in a Perpetual Purpose Trust (similar to Patagonia) within three years to make mission durability a permanent legal fact.
This is real work, real infrastructure, real architecture. Not a thought experiment, not a manifesto.
How you can help
Significant money has already poured into the upcoming mid-term election cycle. Massive campaign donations and dark money will continue to suffocate our democracy until we have tangible and effective tools to organize and fight back. In our present post-"Citizens United" America, short-term political contributions remain vital. For a fraction of what will be spent on the election cycle, we can build and implement the infrastructure to first defend democracy and then strengthen it so that future generations can address the complex challenges of tomorrow, not continually relitigate the human-made problems of yesterday.
If you believe in our mission and understand our approach, you already know that our success depends on resources we don’t yet have. If you are a mission-aligned investor or know someone who is, please reach out to us.
There are three alternative ways to support Civic Works:
Donate to Civic Works: your donation keeps the volunteer team building.
Pledge $5/month at launch: when CivicSky goes live, if you choose, your pledge can convert to a recurring subscription, supporting necessary secure computing, development, support, and operations.
Write about us: share our work on social media and with journalists, academics, and others that can further our effort.
The extreme concentration of wealth (and therefore, the consolidation of power) was built deliberately, across decades, by a coalition that knew exactly what they were building. The architecture of democracy must be built deliberately, by people who know what they are defending.
The work continues.
— George
Good to pursue concrete action. I'm in.