FAQ

We believe the consumer internet has become a public health crisis that echoes some of the circumstances we saw with cigarettes and opioids.

This is not a casual comparison. The tobacco industry knew nicotine was addictive and marketed to children anyway. The pharmaceutical industry knew opioids were dangerous and pushed them anyway. In both cases, profit came first, harm was minimized or hidden, and intervention came decades too late. For those crises, the cost was measured in lives. Though the consequences aren't always so dire for addictive tech (though they can be), the costs are real.

The technology industry has known for years that its products cause measurable psychological harm, particularly in children and adolescents. The internal research exists. The CDC has documented that half of all teenagers report four or more hours of daily screen time outside of school, and among that group more than a quarter show symptoms of anxiety or depression. The US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023, citing the collapse of in-person connection among young people. Industry insiders, including the people who built these systems, have publicly admitted they were designed to be addictive.

And yet the products have not meaningfully changed, because the incentives have not changed. Governments have been slow, fragmented, and outmaneuvered. The companies have had little reason to act. Waiting for either to solve this problem has not worked.

The Enclave Project is not a regulator and cannot compel anyone to do anything. What it can do is demonstrate that a different way of building technology is possible, and put pressure on both industry and government by proving the alternative exists.

For most people, most of the time, the internet works. You can video call your family, order groceries, find directions, read the news, and learn almost anything for free. That is real, and we do not dismiss it.

But working is not the same as being healthy for you. Cigarettes worked too — they delivered exactly what they promised. The question was never whether the product functioned. It was what it was doing to the people using it.

The commercial internet is extraordinarily capable and extraordinarily good at one thing: keeping you on it. Those are not the same as being good for you, good for your children, or good for society. The research is no longer ambiguous. Anxiety and depression among teenagers have risen in lockstep with smartphone adoption. Loneliness is at epidemic levels despite universal connectivity. The information environment has been so thoroughly optimized for outrage that basic shared reality is increasingly difficult to maintain.

The parts of the internet that work best tend to be the parts least touched by the engagement model. Email. Wikipedia. Group chats. Video calls. The open web before it was colonized by the algorithm. The engagement mill did not make the internet work. It made the internet addictive. Those are different things, and it is worth being precise about which problem we are trying to solve.

They have. And they have largely been ignored. What is different now is that three things have changed simultaneously.

The first is that the harm is no longer deniable. The CDC, the US Surgeon General, and a growing body of peer-reviewed research have documented the damage clearly enough that governments have begun taking action. The debate has moved from “is this harmful” to “what do we do about it.”

The second is that the alternative is now buildable. The cost of infrastructure has been falling for two decades. The tooling available to a small team today would have required hundreds of engineers ten years ago. The economics that made non-commercial internet impractical are changing quickly.

The third is that the commercial internet is losing its most basic promise: that you are talking to other people. Automated traffic now exceeds human traffic. LLMs are generating content at industrial scale across every major platform. The result is an internet increasingly populated by synthetic agents performing humanity, with real people caught somewhere in between.

Complaint without an alternative is just noise. We are trying to be something else.

The Enclave Project is a non-profit dedicated to funding and supporting a new category of internet application — one built around human benefit rather than profit, engagement, or growth.

Think of it as a venture fund for human utility instead of profit. We identify promising ideas for internet applications that serve a genuine human purpose, fund their early development, and hold them accountable to a set of principles designed to keep them from becoming the thing they were built to replace.

We call the applications we fund enclaves. An enclave can be a discussion platform, an educational tool, a messaging app, a search engine, or any number of other things. What they share is a commitment to the same set of principles: no advertising, no engagement manipulation, no data exploitation, radical transparency, and a legal structure that prevents the mission from being quietly dismantled by a future board or acquirer.

We do three things:

• We fund the early-stage development of enclaves, providing the initial capital that lets an idea get off the ground without the strings that come attached to venture money. Beyond capital, we offer hands-on guidance and shared resources to solo founders and small teams, drawing on our own experience building Airlock and years of industry experience.
• We review and certify internet applications as enclaves, giving users a trustworthy signal that a product has been independently evaluated against our principles.
• We advocate — publicly and in partnership with other like-minded organizations — for broader changes to consumer technology practices, whether through industry pressure, policy, or by demonstrating through our own portfolio that a better model exists and works.

We are not a regulator and cannot compel anyone to change. What we can do is demonstrate that a different kind of internet application is possible, fund the people willing to build it, and make the case loudly that the engagement mill is not the only model on offer.

The Enclave Project was founded by a group of technologists with over a century of combined experience building the types of applications we are now trying to replace. We know how this industry works because we worked in it. We know what questions were asked, what was prioritized, and what was sacrificed. That experience is not a liability. It is the point.

The Enclave Project is funded entirely by donations from individuals and organizations who believe the problem is real and the solution is worth building. There are no venture investors, no corporate sponsors, and no revenue streams that could create conflicts of interest with our mission. The people who fund us are not customers. They are believers.

In the early stages, that means us — the founders — along with anyone in our network willing to put money behind the idea before it has proven itself. As enclaves launch and demonstrate results, we expect to grow our donor base to include individuals, foundations, and institutions aligned with our mission.

We are also honest about what we are asking for. Early donations fund experimentation, not certainty. Some enclaves will not work. That is the nature of this kind of effort, and we will not pretend otherwise to make fundraising easier.

It is a fair question, and we do not dismiss it. Good intentions have a poor track record in this industry. OpenAI was founded as a non-profit to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. It now has a for-profit subsidiary, a $157 billion valuation, and a commercial product competing directly with the companies it was supposed to be a counterweight to. We are aware of that history. We designed around it deliberately.

Three structural protections are built in from the start.

The first is legal. Our certification process requires that every enclave, including any organization we build ourselves, include a provision in its founding documents that prohibits conversion to for-profit status and requires that assets be transferred to another qualifying non-profit in the event of dissolution. This provision cannot be amended by the board alone. It requires a higher threshold of approval specifically to prevent a future leadership team from quietly dismantling it when the financial incentives become tempting enough.

The second is transparency. We publish our revenue sources, expenses, and progress against our stated mission annually. We do not get to define success in private. If we are drifting, it will be visible.

The third is accountability to the enclaves themselves. The same criteria we use to certify enclaves apply to us. We are not exempt from the standards we enforce. If we fail to meet them, the people and organizations that rely on us have grounds to say so publicly.

Our goals fall into three areas.

For users and families.Every parent should be able to find healthy alternatives to the applications their children currently use — tools built to educate, connect, and create rather than to addict. And for all of us, not just children, we hope to contribute to a measurable decline in the amount of time people spend staring at screens — not by asking people to resist systems specifically engineered to defeat their willpower, but by giving them better alternatives worth choosing.

For the industry.We want to demonstrate that a different model is possible, and use that demonstration as pressure on commercial technology companies to examine their own practices. We also want to show technologists that venture funding is not the only path — that building a non-profit technology product can be as intellectually rewarding and financially sustainable as a privately funded startup. The incentives are different. The work is not.

For the broader ecosystem.We want to contribute to a public conversation — alongside researchers, regulators, and other like-minded organizations — about what healthy consumer technology actually looks like. And we want to build an institution durable enough to outlast its founders, one that can fund and certify enclaves long after the current moment has passed.

We are not naive about how long this takes. The tobacco fight took decades. We are starting anyway.

This is one of the harder questions we face, and we want to be upfront about it.

At the enclave level, we measure whether each enclave is meeting the goals it set for itself at launch. A discussion platform might measure the quality and depth of conversations. An education tool might measure learning outcomes. The metrics differ by purpose, which is the point. What they share is that none of them measure how long you stayed or how often you came back.

At the Enclave Project level, we track how many enclaves we have funded, certified, or maintained certification for, how many have reached self-sufficiency, and how many users they collectively serve. We publish our financials annually.

At the broadest level, we are trying to contribute to a reduction in harmful screen time, particularly among young people. We cannot claim sole credit for any movement in those numbers, and we will not try to. But we will track them, cite the research as it develops, and be honest about whether what we are doing is making a measurable difference.

We will report on all of this publicly, every year.

In spirit, an enclave is an internet application that exists to serve the people who use it — real people, not bots, not synthetic agents, not algorithmic proxies for human behavior. It is a digital space built on the assumption that the person on the other side of every interaction is a human being, and that human being deserves a platform that works for them rather than on them. Like a public library or a public park, an enclave is built for use, not for profit, and has no interest in keeping you longer than you want to be there.

Technically, an enclave is an internet application that meets a specific set of criteria covering mission, organizational structure, revenue, user experience, privacy, transparency, and technology use. These criteria are evaluated and certified by The Enclave Project. Meeting them makes an organization eligible for funding, certification, and inclusion in our directory of enclaves.

For the full criteria, see the Enclave Eligibility Criteria.

See the Enclave Eligibility Criteria for the full list of requirements.

Open source and enclaves share a common spirit: the belief that software should serve its users, not exploit them, and that the barriers to accessing good technology should be as low as possible.

But they are different things. Open source is a licensing model. It governs who can see, use, and modify code. Enclaves are defined by their mission, structure, and values, not by how their code is distributed. An enclave's code may or may not be public. Some enclave software will be free. Some will charge a reasonable fee for services. Both are acceptable.

We expect enclaves to compete seriously with their commercial counterparts. A great enclave discussion platform should be good enough that people choose it over Reddit. A great enclave productivity tool should be good enough that people choose it over Google Docs.

What enclaves are not required to do, and what open source often does, is give their technology away for anyone to modify or build upon. There are good reasons to keep parts of an enclave's codebase proprietary, including security and the integrity of the product. The Enclave Project requires code access for audit purposes, not public distribution.

A co-op is owned and governed by its members — workers, customers, or both. The democratic structure is the point. An enclave may or may not be member-governed. What defines it is its mission and the commitments it makes to users, not its ownership model.

A B-corp is a for-profit company certified for meeting standards of social and environmental performance. B-corps can still have investors expecting financial returns, can still run advertising, and can still be acquired by companies with different values. The certification is meaningful but it is not structural protection against the profit motive.

An enclave is neither of these. It is not defined by who owns it or how it is governed internally. It is defined by what it will and will not do for the people who use it, and by a legal structure that makes those commitments hard to reverse. A co-op could qualify as an enclave. A B-corp almost certainly could not, unless it restructured as a non-profit.

Not necessarily. Enclave-certified software can charge for its services. A reasonable subscription fee, a one-time purchase, or usage-based pricing are all compatible with being an enclave. What it cannot do is make money from you in ways that work against you. No advertising, no selling your data, no engagement tricks designed to keep you on the platform longer than you want to be there. What changes is not the price. It is who the product is actually built for.

Some of them are, in the right context. A notification that your doctor's office has sent you a message is useful. A notification engineered to pull you back into a feed you already decided to leave is not. The problem is not the feature. It is who it is designed to serve.

Personalization can help you find things you genuinely want. It can also narrow your world to a smaller and smaller version of itself, confirming what you already believe and hiding what might challenge you. The difference is whether the algorithm is optimizing for your benefit or for your time on the platform. Those are not the same thing, and on the commercial internet, the answer is almost always the latter.

Enclaves are not designed to be spartan for their own sake. They are designed to remove the features that serve the platform at the user's expense, and keep or reimagine the ones that genuinely help. That line requires judgment, and we do not pretend it is always obvious. What we commit to is asking the right question: does this feature serve the person using it, or does it serve our metrics?

Yes, with constraints. AI can make an enclave cheaper and better to run. It cannot be used to deceive users or undermine the principles the enclave was built on.

LLMs and agents are encouraged as operational tools. Acceptable uses include content moderation, search and discovery, accessibility features, development tooling, and administrative automation.

Prohibited uses: generating content presented to users as human-authored without disclosure, operating synthetic user accounts or personas, behavioral profiling, and any use that conflicts with an enclave's privacy or anti-addiction commitments.

Any LLM-generated content surfaced to users must be clearly labeled. This applies to content the platform or its users generate.

Three things: structure, transparency, and consequences.

On structure, every enclave's founding documents must prohibit conversion to for-profit status, require board-level supermajority votes for material mission changes, and transfer assets to another qualifying non-profit if the organization dissolves. These are not policies a future CEO can quietly reverse.

On transparency, every enclave publishes an annual report disclosing revenue, expenses, and progress against its stated mission. If an enclave starts prioritizing its own growth over its users, that drift shows up in the record.

On consequences, The Enclave Project conducts ongoing certification reviews. Certification is not a one-time award. Enclaves that fall out of compliance lose it, along with the funding, endorsement, and directory listing that come with it.

No structure is drift-proof. But legal constraints, public accountability, and active certification review make drift harder to execute quietly and easier to catch when it happens.

Airlock is the first enclave. It is an invite-only discussion platform built on the premise that every message is written by a human being.

Most discussion platforms are designed to keep you engaged. Airlock is designed to be useful and then get out of your way. There is no algorithmic feed, no engagement metrics, no notifications pulling you back, no advertising, no affiliate links, and no economic incentive to keep you on the platform longer than you want to be there. When your session ends, it ends.

Access works through a vouching chain. You are invited by someone who was themselves invited, and that person is accountable for who they bring in. If someone you vouch for violates the platform's principles, that reflects on you — and your own standing may be affected as a result. This is how Airlock maintains the assumption that you are talking to a real person — not through technology alone, but through social accountability at every link in the chain.

Airlock is also where we test our own principles. Every design decision we make there either reinforces or challenges what we say an enclave should be. It is our proof of concept and our ongoing experiment.

Airlock is invite-only. You need to be invited by an existing member.

If you know someone on Airlock, ask them. If you don't, the best way to get on the list is to get involved with the Enclave Project — as a volunteer, a donor, or someone building an enclave. Early access will be extended to people who are actively participating in what we are trying to build.

We are not trying to grow fast. We are trying to grow well.

There are several ways to help, depending on what you have to offer.

Contribute your skills. Enclaves need people to build them. Particularly in the early stages, many will rely heavily on volunteers before paid staff are in place. Software engineers, designers, researchers, writers, marketers, and community builders are all needed. If you have a skill that could help an enclave serve its users better, we want to hear from you.

Spread the word. The Enclave Project and the enclaves it supports succeed when more people know they exist. Share the Welcome Letter. Talk about the problem. Point people toward alternatives when they complain about the platforms they are already using.

Donate. The Enclave Project is funded entirely by people who believe this is worth doing. Donations fund early-stage enclave development, the certification process, and our advocacy work. Every contribution helps.

Use enclaves. Choosing an enclave over its commercial equivalent, even when the commercial option is ubiquitous, is a meaningful act. Adoption is what proves the model works.

Build an enclave. If you have an idea for an internet application that could serve a genuine human purpose without the engagement mill, apply for funding. Beyond capital, The Enclave Project offers guidance and support drawn from our own experience building Airlock, shared resources, and a network of people working on the same problems. You will not be building alone.

Give feedback. This is all really new, and the point isn't to be right, it's to get it right. To do that, we need to listen, and we need real humans to talk to. If something isn't working, say so.

Yes. The Enclave Project exists to fund ideas like yours.

If you have an idea for an internet application that serves a genuine human purpose and can meet the enclave eligibility criteria, we want to hear from you. We fund early-stage projects — you do not need a finished product, a team, or prior funding. You need a clear mission, a credible plan, and a commitment to building within the principles that define an enclave.

The application process will soon be available at enclaveproject.org.

Possibly. If your organization serves a genuine human purpose and is already avoiding the practices enclaves prohibit, you may be closer than you think.

The certification process starts with a review against the Enclave Eligibility Criteria. If you meet them, you qualify. If you are close but not quite there, we can tell you what would need to change. Organizations that want to convert from for-profit to non-profit status as part of that process are welcome — we would rather help an organization make that transition than turn away a product that is already doing the right thing.

Organizations that are already enclave-aligned — Signal, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others — are exactly the kind of partners we want to work with, whether or not they formally seek certification.

The application process will soon be available at enclaveproject.org.

Start by reading the Enclave Eligibility Criteria. If your company is already meeting most of them, that is worth knowing — and worth sharing internally.

If you think there is genuine appetite for the transition, get in touch with us. We are happy to talk through what certification would require, what the conversion process looks like, and how The Enclave Project could support the effort. We would rather have that conversation early than watch a product that could have been an enclave drift further in the wrong direction.

The application process will soon be available at enclaveproject.org.