The earth is just fine.
What we have to do is listen to what the earth is telling us,
and we need to save ourselves.
People say we have to save the planet.
Viktor said it differently, years ago, and still does.
The planet is not the system that is failing.
The systems we built to talk to each other are.
Traffic is gone. Email no longer reaches people.
Simulated AI decides the answer, steered by a narrative.
We would soon be inundated with information we would not be able to process and organize, and the net effect of that would be immunity.Viktor Grant, Insights Magazine, on why Earthgrid was created
An entropic system decays unless you keep feeding it.
More ads, more notifications, more of your hours.
A syntropic system sustains itself.
Every member who uses it makes it stronger for the next.
Earthgrid stands against enslavement and entropy.
It stands for living systems that serve people's highest aspirations.
Nothing here claims to save the planet.
A system that does more with less is the only claim we can measure.
Free is the entropic offer.
It hooks you now and sends the bill later: your contacts, your reach, your judgment.
A gift is the syntropic offer.
Given first, measured, and passed forward to the next person.
Your Earthgrid account is our gift to you.
When you want more, you contribute a clear amount up front.
The feed is built to hold your attention on a schedule it sets.
The inbox is built to be sold to, not read.
Now simulated AI sits on top of both.
It answers before you ask, and it answers for someone.
People choose these systems every day, by supporting them.
That is not a failing. It is the only door most people were shown.
Phones, email and social feeds may dominate.
You can still turn one off and use the Grid instead.
What we replace, and what we do not
We do not replace your phone.
We replace what your phone keeps interrupting you with.
The feed becomes a community you chose.
The blast becomes a message from a name you trust.
The spider's ranking becomes your listing, first, by right of membership.
An email open is an image load.
Images are now loaded overwhelmingly by machines, not people.
Every mainstream dashboard counts those loads as engagement.
So lists are pruned of humans and filled with machines.
| What was counted | Result | Where it came from |
|---|---|---|
| Tracked email opens, 55,375 of them | 90.1% came from a mailbox provider's image proxy, not a person | List Refiner audit. Measured. |
| One live event campaign, 1,432 log rows | 1,278 rows were a machine. 154 were a person | List Refiner audit. Measured. |
| Addresses that responded to that campaign at all | 85.4% responded only as a machine | List Refiner audit. Measured. |
| Earthgrid's own traffic that could be classified | 86% came from data centres or known bots | Earthgrid's own logs and classifier. Measured. |
| Everything Earthgrid's systems ever recorded | At most 2% came from a signed-in human | Earthgrid's own logs. Measured. |
| About 102,000 Earthgrid accounts | 348 people generate a third of all member-area activity | Earthgrid's own logs. Measured. |
| Clicks to member listings, Earthgrid 1.0 | 233,505 in 2011. 8,189 in 2014. A fall of 96.5% | Earthgrid's own click log. Measured. |
Our own logs are in that table on purpose.
A page that argues against inflated numbers cannot inflate its own.
Immunity means you can send a great announcement
and people are so flooded they never notice it.
The figure quoted at the time was that 88% of all email was spam.
So Earthgrid built text messaging to trusted names instead.
In 2003, one text to a hundred people in Los Angeles.
Thirty-five showed up with one hour's notice.
It worked because the sender was a person they knew,
with one identity and a reputation. That is still the design.
When an idea is outdated and no longer viable,
it should be eliminated to make space for a current one.
Earthgrid's first search engine dropped an event the day it ended.
Current, not historical. Authority is the big platforms' game.
Most of the web is the past, kept to look authoritative.
Keep the past and you crowd out the present and the future.
We're cleaning up the Web one Web site at a time.A mentor of Viktor's, quoted in the Insights interview. Still the mission.
Buckminster Fuller said the minimum system is four events.
Earthgrid reads that as four people.
In Hawaii, eighty or ninety people came to community meetings.
Viktor split them into teams of four, one project each.
A garden. A community farm. A community center.
When all four agreed on a two-sentence announcement, it took off.
That is what Earthgrid models.
Small groups, a clear statement, tools that do not distract.
There were always three Earthgrids.
The .com builds websites. The .net connects members.
The .org is for charitable and humanitarian organizations.
Good work, often behind a website that does not show it.
We are still constructing it, openly.
What is built already works for a nonprofit today:
Contribute first, in whatever measure you can.
Then receive more than you gave, and pass it on.
Live chat for two thousand people at once, in 1994.
A directory of member sites against the spiders, in 1996.
A search engine for things that change, in 1997.
Text messaging to trusted names, in 2003. A messenger, in 2004.
Viktor does not claim to have invented these alone.
He calls them seeds the planet gives to several people at once.
What Earthgrid did was build them, quietly, and keep them running.
Thirty years on, the prototypes are built. Now they are for you.
Earthgrid plus our members is fixing the internet one website at a time.Viktor Grant, Earthgrid
Your Earthgrid account is our gift to you.
Join, list your work, and bring your people with you.