You pick up your phone to do something.
Twenty minutes later, you’re still scrolling – and you’ve forgotten what it was you meant to do.
You’ve seen hundreds of posts.
You can’t remember any of them.
You almost shared something — but didn’t.
Because what’s the point?
None of it really goes anywhere.
And if you’re honest, it doesn’t really make you feel that good.
So you try something more meaningful.
You join an online community and at first it feels promising.
People seem to care about the same things as you.
But it doesn’t take long before things slip.
There’s too much noise.
Too little value. Too few genuine connections.
Good ideas disappear in the noise.
Useful contributions get buried in the feed and don’t accumulate into anything of value.
You don’t really know who anyone is, or what they’ve actually done.
And every time you join a new app or another community – you’re forced to start over.
Another profile.
Another version of yourself. But without any of your real reputation.
Years of real-world and online trust — the things you’ve done, the people who know you, the qualifications you earned and the reputation you’ve built — none of it stays with you.
And if you’re lucky enough to find an online community that feels ok – and invest your valuable time in building connections and reputation – none of it carries over into real life.
Offline isn’t much better
In the real world, most of us are similarly disconnected.
We barely know our neighbours – or more than a few people in our community.
We want to contribute something meaningful — but don’t quite know where to start.
We’re connected to everything…
but not meaningfully connected to anything.
A real community isn’t just communication.
It’s shared trust. Shared memory. Shared purpose.
And the ability to actually do things together.
Cooperation does work, sometimes
We see glimpses of cooperation and collective action online – but it’s the exception, not the norm.
Open-source communities seem to manage to build things together and more than 3.7 million people have helped create Wikipedia, not for attention, but as something useful for everyone.
And when something urgent happens, even ‘ordinary people’ step in. During the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, more than 3 million volunteers came together to search satellite images — contributing time and attention to a shared effort.
People want to cooperate. They get something from it.
A sense of purpose. Of contribution.
Of being part of something real.
But it’s the exception, because the systems we’re using are designed to capture attention.
For engagement and extraction. Not for cooperation.
Glimpses of what’s possible
You can see glimpses of what’s possible in the real world.
Swathes of people, all over the world, are trying to build something better.
Take farming as an example: The Yield Enhancement Network connects farmers who are striving to improve productivity, crop quality and reduce environmental impact. They help farmers measure inputs and yields, compare results to highlight inefficiencies and share practical ideas to help farms reach their full potential.
But the data is siloed, the feedback loops are limited and the knowledge sharing is niche when it should be mainstream, easy to find and build on, and accessible to all.
A system like the YEN could be continuously updated. Continuously refined.
Curated and adapted for specific locations by people all over the world.
Anyone, anywhere, should be able to take advantage of a piece of degraded land, and to draw from a shared, evolving body of farming knowledge to bring it back to life.
Take community energy as another example.
Organisations like Community Energy England are doing good work — and some communities are already generating their own renewable power, which is cheaper, cleaner, and more resilient than imported fossil fuels.
But community energy is still niche and developing far slower than it should be.
Now imagine if we cooperated. Not just on a handful of projects — but with an army of cooperators tackling the challenge on a global scale.
Thousands of people contributing small pieces: refining financial models, improving legal templates, sharing real performance data, and documenting what worked and what didn’t.
Making all of it easy to find. Easy to build on.
Easy to adapt and replicate anywhere, in any jurisdiction.
And imagine if every one of these contributions increased people’s reputation in a way that is portable – so it comes with you and is relevant in any other communities you’re part of.
Suddenly, what was a niche activity might just start to spread.
Eco-villages on steroids
The same patterns are everywhere. Well intentioned groups are trying to build new, more sustainable ways of living, but they’re stuck in their niches – not connected to a larger whole.
Groups are experimenting with how to manage land and define shared ownership and governance. The people behind the projects that are part of the Global Ecovillage Network and Open Source Ecology are developing valuable knowledge.
But it’s fragmented. Hard to find and navigate.
Difficult for other people to adopt and to turn into something practical.
Now imagine if those efforts were specifically designed to enable and support cooperation.
To provide ways for people to discover, connect, learn, contribute and replicate the learnings.
Imagine if the hundreds of thousands of people within these pre-existing networks had a way to interact, which surfaced valuable contributions and improvements and absorbed them into a growing body of knowledge. Including proven templates that others could pick up and use.
Instead of taking years to establish a new ecovillage it would suddenly only take months. Then weeks.
Economies of cooperation
You can see the same constraints in alternative economies.
Networks like the Community Exchange System prove that people can trade without traditional money. But they struggle to scale because trust is hard to measure.
Hard to see. Hard to extend beyond small groups.
But imagine if credit wasn’t based on abstract scores — but on real relationships.
Who trusts you.
Who vouches for you.
What you’ve actually contributed – in any and all communities you’re part of, both online and in the real world.
You can see how quickly things would change.
If credit scores were driven by the value of your real world and online contributions the world would be a very different place.
At the moment, the systems we’re using don’t enable trust to carry, knowledge to compound, or contributions to build on each other.
So good ideas stay small and disconnected.
The problem isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s that nothing connects.
What’s missing isn’t another platform. It’s a way for all of this to join up.
A way for trust to flow between people and communities.
For knowledge to accumulate and evolve.
For contributions to actually add up to something larger.
A co-operation system.
A system where:
Your contributions don’t disappear — they accumulate.
Your reputation isn’t reset — it carries.
Your communities aren’t isolated — they connect.
A system where anyone can contribute to a shared body of knowledge because the communities they are part of are connected as part of a decentralised ecosystem – an online global commons.
That’s what we’re building with PLANET, in preparation for the trust-based internet that is evolving.
Once you see it, it doesn’t feel speculative anymore. It feels like something that was always going to happen — once enough of us recognised it.
Join us to help create a system for cooperation — not just in one place, but across everything, for everything and everyone.