Goal of the site

This website, in its ideal form, is a give-a-shit cultivation engine.

Its goal is to genuinely contribute to solving real-world problems by way of creating a community focused on a specific attentional practice which looks basically like this:

• Prioritization: what issue most needs solving?
• Imagination: What would a world where that problem is solved actually look like?
• Solutioning: How, exactly, would you go about getting us to that world, if you had what you needed?
  • The mechanism of the story itself exists to remove a bunch of constraints on this thinking
• Grounding: Say you tried it. What would actually happen? What’s the first thing that would go wrong?
• Iterating: If you could try again, could you deal with whatever went wrong last time? And if nothing went wrong, could you achieve the same ends with a slightly more realistic solution?

If everything goes right and we actually do create a community of people who are doing this type of attentional exercise, imagining a better world and how we get there, and then converting that imagination into fiction and sharing it, I think a couple good things happen.

• First, I think that true give-a-shit is something that ultimately needs to come from within, and such a community/framework seems very likely to kickstart that internal motivation in at least one person.
• Second, the actual in-world process inside the fiction is designed to move from pie-in-the-sky ideas down to achievable-here-and-now ideas. I strongly suspect that folks who engage in this sort of attentional practice — arriving at their own conclusions about ‘what needs to happen next to solve this problem’ — are going to be a lot more motivated to actually do something about those problems (e.g. joining a real organization in the space), as compared to folks who just hear about problems (e.g. folks seeing an Instagram advertisement to donate to those same organizations).

Why though

My basic hypothesis is that for any given problem, moving a small amount of already-interested people up its attentional spectrum is substantially more valuable than creating large amounts of general “awareness” about the issue. The problem is that the former thing is hard, and the latter is both easy and lucrative.

Let’s take bat conservation as an example, and draw out the ends of the spectrum:

• On the high end of attention, there’s this guy named Merlin Tuttle who has been advancing the cause of bat conservation since the late 50s. He’s responsible for saving millions of bats and meaningfully improving their public image. He rules.
• On the low end, there’s me. Sometimes I see ecology-related posts and ads on social media; I gave Tuttle’s org $200 in 2021 and can’t remember why, and have not given them anything since.

As far as the bats are concerned, one Tuttle is worth exponentially more than a whole bunch of unengaged Instagram followers like me; it’s not even close.

I think this concept generalizes well. If I had to put in a stake in the ground for what I think an ideal attentional arrangement for “allocating humanity against its problems” would look like, each person would have three tiers:

1. Give-a-shit attention: 1 or 2 issues that you consistently bring your unique talents, time, and resources to work to solve, in coordination with likeminded people, over long periods of time.
   1. Just to be clear, this tier isn’t for the Merlin Tuttles (what a NAME) — folks like him are in some sort of dedicated 0-tier of just full-throated lifetime passion — but it would include, for instance, people who regularly volunteer with his group. I think most people won’t ever have a 0-tier cause like that, and I think that’s probably fine.
2. Cheerleader attention: 5 or 10 issues where you’re going out of your way to amplify the efforts of the give-a-shit folks: donating money, showing up to protests, etc.
3. Baseline attention: everything else. These are problems where you know the basic stakes of the matter, but basically only engage with through the ballot box, should you be lucky enough to have one.

What we have today, instead, is a shallow attentional hellscape somewhere between buckets 2 and 3, where each of us follows dozens or hundreds of issues in the form of algorithmically-served content designed to keep us “engaged” by way of making us outraged or sad, but where the scale is just far too high to meaningfully do anything about the vast majority of what we see.

And even for causes and problems we care about, our typical day-to-day interaction takes the form of digital ads soliciting donations, because the organizations working on these things are trapped in the same attentional free-for-all that we are, and “please feel bad enough about this problem to give us some money” is pretty much the only available content option that fits the medium.

And of course this all holds for me, personally. I know my own give-a-shit is currently spread far too thin: I care just a little bit about a whole bunch of things, but I (as judged by my actions) don’t care enough about any of them to meaningfully contribute to their resolution, including the things that I both rationally and emotionally feel to be very important.

I know I’m not alone in struggling with this; this site is for people who recognize a similar pattern in themselves.

How the site tries to achieve the goal

In the short term, I hope Swap is good enough to draw in new site visitors, who then take the interview, join the Discord, and eventually start writing in-universe short fiction of their own, which gets published to the fiction hub.

The website has three parts, which each serve a specific purpose. Here’s a closer look at each part and its strategy:

1. The novella: Swap, sets up the world, and tells the story of the first human to be selected by aliens to be empowered to change the world; he gets the ability to teleport, and sets up an organization to un-fuck as many things as possible.
   1. Its main goal is to work well as a standalone story, so that people come to the site to read it. This is unfortunate because it means that I need to write a good standalone science fiction story, and I’ve never done that before, but I’m trying very hard to do so.
   2. As of April 2026, I’ve got 2/3rds of it planned out, about 1/3rd of it drafted, and a very small amount of it published to the site.
   3. The goal is to publish serially, in chapters, as they become available.
2. The interview: This is an interactive component that makes the world personal to a site visitor, and gives them a lightweight/10-minute taste of the core exercise.
   1. Its main goal is to bind the community together; taking the interview is mandatory before you can join the Discord channel, such that the community on that channel will all have something important in common, as well as familiarity with the attentional practice.
   2. Also as of April 2026, the interview prompt is in a very early iteration, and a major secondary goal of having new folks take the interview (and send me the transcripts) is that these will help me refine that prompt and make the interview work better.
3. The fiction hub: The goal is to have an SCP-foundation-like, wiki-style site where community members can tell their versions of the uplift story. E.g. “Aliens gave X ability to Y group of people, and here’s a story about them doing Z thing with it, and how that went.” Ultimately, these are superhero-vs-system stories, and can be as big or small as the author wants.
   1. This is the long-term engine of the site and mission. A whole community of people telling a new kind of story, which is how they would go about un-fucking a particular problem if they were given the resources to do it, and what would happen as they tried. I think there’s honestly just a ton of potential here.
   2. The iterative nature of it, I think, is also key, because we can take productive advantage of the human/internet instinct to correct and fault-find. Here’s an example loop:
      1. I come up with two characters. One has a backpack that fully-cures all diseases within a 5 mile radius. The other is digitally untraceable. They work together to exert political influence on countries to make everyone institute ranked-choice voting, by way of choosing to include or exclude destinations as they tour the world.
      2. I tell a story about a particular adventure these characters have, where they offer tickets priced at like ~$1bn per seat, to an exclusive event where they promise to cure aging for the attendees, which they prove to be within the capabilities of the backpack. After gathering the world’s richest folks in one spot, they bomb the whole place, and then talk about the positive fallout that that has going forward.
      3. I publish the story on the wiki, and it kicks off a discussion about whether killing all the billionaires would actually help us or not, and whether the backpack-team would be better served by some other approach
      4. If I like any of these ideas, or if I hate them, then I can tell an iteration of the story — fine, that first world failed, the backpack team gets to Try Again with knowledge of what happened last time, and so here’s what they do next.

Nothing here makes any sense because I’m reading this page before reading Swap

Major spoilers:

In-universe, here’s the framework for how we end up with superheroes-vs-systems stories:

• Earth is visited by advanced aliens.
• ~10 million alien interviewers, working in pairs, abduct every human on Earth. They do this not by physically abducting the people who are here, but instead by creating exact molecular copies of them, on a secondary planet.
• Each human copy is interviewed, one by one: what are humanity's problems, what do solutions look like, and what specific capability would you need to personally go solve them?
• After everyone is interviewed, the aliens select some humans (2 to start) and actually empower them with whatever they asked for in the interview.
• But the selected copies ("Originals") never return to Earth. They stay on the interview planet.
• Instead, fresh copies of those same people are created, debriefed by their Originals, given the tech they asked for, and then sent to a full copy of Earth created by the aliens for the purpose of their experiment.
  • These individuals are the "Empowered"
  • The original Earth isn’t touched. The aliens can create planets easily, and can copy matter, so the Empowered individual is given a copy of 2026 (or 2027, or whenever) Earth, where the only thing about it that is different from our Earth is that the Empowered folks are on it.
• The Empowered team then tries to execute their plan. When they die or fail, the process iterates: the Original can reset their Earth copy, create a new Empowered version of themselves, and try again with knowledge of what went wrong, which they share during the initial debrief.
• Each failure also triggers new teams of Originals being selected — starting at 2, doubling each time up to a cap of 256. Teams can also expand, from 2 being the minimum set, to larger groups.
• If nothing goes catastrophically wrong, but the Empowered team eventually dies (e.g. of natural causes), those Earths persist; the Original, who the aliens make immortal, can observe long-term consequences from those worlds.
• But not every run can result in a new Earth sitting around forever: The Original must periodically choose which running Earths to keep and which to recycle; they can’t have more than 5[maybe] active at a time.