The Good Internet Project
Online platforms today are designed to maximize your time in front of the screen. They rest on code — algorithms, rules, protocols, and architecture — that deliberately and knowingly distracts, exploits, and turns your attention into their profit. TGIP changes that code.
A handful of tech titans effectively run the modern internet, and they depend on keeping you online and hyper-engaged, shocked and outraged, and clicking and scrolling. Their platforms are not neutral. Their algorithms are not accidental. The internet you experience every day is the product of deliberate design choices made to serve their interests, not yours.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a business model.
The underlying architecture of the internet — its code — reflects the values of whoever controls it. Unlike in the early days of the open, decentralized internet, it has become controlled by a handful of corporations. But the internet is malleable. The same tools that let them engineer your behavior can be used to put you back in control.
TGIP gives you control not merely by blocking or restricting. It engages you meaningfully with your own actions on the internet. Through questions, prompts, and reflections, TGIP enables your thoughtful mind to catch up with your restless fingers.
"The internet is broken."
— Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter
You may never have been asked how you want to be online. TGIP starts there, with an open conversation about your values, goals, and the life you are trying to live when you step away from the screen.
Those answers become your Vault — a living record of what matters to you online, offline, and in between. TGIP translates it into rules, behaviors, and architecture. Your values become your internet's code.
The Vault is yours. It lives locally. It informs every nudge, every check-in, every moment of friction TGIP introduces. Nothing generic. Nothing prescribed. Just your own words, reflected back at you.
Today's internet is vast by design — its limitlessness keeps you scrolling. The good internet reduces that scale to something your brain can actually navigate: minimalist environments, feed-free interfaces, curated access. Less noise, not less information.
Today's internet is engineered to be frictionless — too fast for deliberate thought. The good internet slows down at key moments, giving you time to choose rather than simply react.
Internet tools profit by distracting you, dulling your sense of time, and depriving you of agency. On the good internet, actions and behavior follow intentions and goals. Activity remains reflective and deliberate, not reactive and automatic.
The internet profits by keeping you out of the real world, engaged instead with commercial tools masquerading as online society. The good internet orients you to the physical world — to real relationships, real activities, real presence. It uses the tools of connection to help you build the kind that lasts.
Each tool addresses a different layer of the problem — from how you enter a platform, to how your network behaves, to how your offline life connects to your online one.
Genkan sits between you and the apps designed to exploit you. Before you open them, it asks what you're there for. While you're there, it keeps time. When you leave, it asks how it went. Simple, honest, effective.
Try the beta →Take direct control of how your network behaves. An AI interface lets you set rules in plain language — "don't let me access social media after 10pm" — and translates them into network architecture.
The bridge between your online values and your offline life. Not just nudges — genuine activation. Connecting your stated goals to the things you actually get up and do.
How tools and protocols are ultimately implemented may differ to suit different needs, but the foundation is the same: an internet built on its users' values.
For families and individuals who are already deeply connected — perhaps worryingly so. Too much screen time, too little autonomy, an online environment that pulls against your values rather than with them. TGIP helps you reclaim control without disconnecting from what genuinely matters.
For communities gaining meaningful internet access for the first time — where the benefits of connectivity are real, but so are the risks to language, culture, and social cohesion. TGIP offers the opportunity to shape an internet that serves the community's values from the very first connection.
A note on enterprise: Businesses and governments already do this. Corporate intranets are built around institutional values — filtered, controlled, purposeful. TGIP asks: why should that capability belong only to organizations? Individuals and communities deserve a values-based internet too.
The gap between what people want from the internet and what the internet actually delivers has never been wider. Most people know this. They feel it. They describe their own usage in the language of addiction — something they do despite themselves, not because of themselves.
The argument that nothing can be done — that users must simply accept the internet as it is — is precisely the argument of those who benefit from keeping it that way. It is the same argument made by polluters and drug companies: change is impossible, so don't try.
It is not impossible. The internet's underlying architecture is malleable. The same code that lets platforms exploit you can be rewritten to serve you. TGIP is the proof of concept — a demonstration that ordinary users, without technical expertise, can build a different internet for themselves and their communities.
This project began as a master's thesis at the University of Chicago. Everything is open: the research, the reasoning, the tools.
TGIP is actively seeking partners — researchers, technologists, community organizations, and aligned individuals who want to build a better internet from the ground up.
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