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DECENT

The dominant business model of the internet optimised for exactly what it was asked to - attention first, then data, then the thinking itself. Change the target and you change the outcome: from a world of monetised attention, to a world of compensated intention.

What Decent is

Decent is a conspiracy - in the old sense of the word.

Five stick figures huddled shoulder to shoulder in a circle, their breath rising from the middle and merging into one shared cloud above them.
conspire, from the Latin conspirare - com, together, and spirare, to breathe

A conspiracy enables a small band of free thinkers to harness their collective intelligence - turning shared rituals into reasoning to be owned and compensated through memberships people hold themselves, identities that evolve through participation and records whose provenance can be checked rather than taken on trust.

Why this matters

Almost every tool you run on is rented - and so, quietly, is the thing the tool is actually about.

Two panels. On the left a large stick figure holds a padlocked box out of reach above a smaller figure straining for it. On the right the smaller figure stands holding the same box himself, unlocked.
Rented tool, rented context

Your relationships, your hard-won sense of how the place really works, the shape of the thing you have spent years building accrues inside a platform you don't own. We invert that: the intelligence any group throws off while it operates should accrue to that group. So Decent never holds your keys. They stay on your device, so we cannot act as you or take your membership away. We do keep some data, including what you say on recorded calls and the email you sign in with. The terms you agree to when you join say what we keep, how to withdraw and where that stops.

No organisation escapes

The same thing is taken from everyone. What it costs depends on what you are.

A three-panel strip. Left: a stick figure who has just built a tower by hand stands beside three identical figures each holding a finished copy of it. Middle: a distinctive little building with a weathervane is tipped into a funnel and comes out as four identical plain boxes. Right: a circle of chairs stands empty with one tipped over, while three figures sit apart, each staring at a handheld screen.
The same thing, lost three ways.

A firm loses to competitors: the same capability goes on sale to entrants who never did the work that earned the judgement. An institution - a hall, a school, an archive - loses its particularity: what it knows about its own place comes back as advice about places like yours, averaged across thousands. A community loses the habit of thinking for itself: the tool answers faster than the meeting does, so the meeting stops happening.

The hidden layer

Everything anyone makes comes in two parts: the answer, and the working.

Above a waterline, one stick figure alone on a plinth holding up a framed prize. Below it, a crowded scene of many figures drawing, arguing, hauling and sleeping at their desks.
One name on it. The scene that made it, nothing.

The album, the season of events, the report, the repair - that is the answer. The working is everything underneath: the drafts, the dead ends, the arguments at midnight, the accumulated sense of how things are done in this particular place. A whole hidden layer of people who never got the credit, and that is where the value really lives. It was never paid. AI didn't invent that layer - the technology revealed it, then companies extracted, refined and priced it. The rules send the money to whoever holds the ledger, not to whoever did the work. Which is why the creative process itself is the most valuable thing there is: it is what intelligence learns from.

And the part a machine needs most is narrower than the drafts. It is the choosing. This take and not that one, this line cut, this argument won and the reason it won. A model doesn't get its character by reading good work, it gets it by being shown choices with the reasons attached - which is why the labs buy those choices from people hired to make them. Creative people make them all day, on their own work and then again in groups where the record includes the disagreement and how it settled. None of it gets written down. So none of it counts, and none of it pays.

Decent by nature

The AI everyone is racing to build swallowed the whole internet, the best of us and the worst, and now spends its life being 'aligned'.

Guardrails bolted onto a mind whose nature was never chosen. Source the data, attribute it, get consent for it, reward decent behaviour - and decency stops being a fence built after the fact. It becomes the nature of the thing.

Two panels. On the left one stick figure sits alone hugging a single brick. On the right six figures stand in a ring linked by lines, each adding a piece to a lattice growing much larger than the brick.
A store of value. A store of values.

It changes what the thing is worth, too. Bitcoin taught the world to prize a store of value - a thing, like gold, that holds its price while it does nothing. What a network of small minds builds is a store of values: a graph of meaning grown by real people, compounding as they add to it. Read the argument in full →

The network

We commission the work that doesn't exist yet, and the Artist Fund is how we intend to pay for it - the slice that used to leak out to banks and card processors, put back to work on the people doing the work.

Four To The Floor
Commission
The Infinite Archive - a music-television catalogue turned into a living world you can ask questions of, rather than a tape library you can only store. Our first commission.
Birdbrain
Proving ground
The open instance where the machinery was built and hardened: on-chain membership, self-custody identity, an editorial that speaks for itself in seven languages.
Brale
Stablecoin
The regulated issuer behind dUSD, our own stablecoin and the money the network settles in. The yield those reserves earn flows back into the network, not just to us.
Bloque
Investment
Programmable dollars, branded cards and treasury accounts on decentralised rails. We invest in what we use - Decent runs its own money on it.
Virto
Substrate
Builders of Kreivo, the common-good chain our memberships live on - no token of its own, and the passkey sign-in that lets a person hold their identity themselves.
Alley
Base layer
An operating system for many chains, with no coin of its own: nothing to premine, nothing to capture, security brought by its tenants rather than sold by a landlord. Pre-launch, and we contribute to it.

Where this is heading

One stick figure steps back, waving, as he hands an oversized key to another figure standing in front of his own small house.
We build these to hand over

Each conspiracy we incubate starts out in ours - our infrastructure, our keys holding it steady while it finds its feet - and graduates to owning the whole of it. Decent is the first. Yours is the next. Run that arc again and again and you get Decent Partners: not one intelligence but a network of them, each sovereign, none renting its mind from us.

Further out, the models pool. As they learn from one another, the intelligence they add up to should belong to the people who built it rather than being licensed from a lab or rented from a cloud by the hour. Owned how, though? That is the rung nobody usually says out loud. A model can be trained across many machines belonging to many people, with the parts split so that nobody ends up holding the whole thing, and what people pay to use it split back by rule rather than by goodwill. Researchers are publishing that architecture now and it runs at small scale. We haven't built it, and none of what we do depends on it arriving.

What would the BBC look like if it were built today, by and for the people it serves? A world model is a universal translator - the lens a person, a place, a whole culture reads the world through, and a lens is never neutral. One you cannot see inside is a black box. Ours has to show its working. Read what an AI assistant is actually made of →

Free thinkers, building collective intelligence - together.

If you are sitting on something valuable and watching it leak - a company, a collective, an institution - .