Prosocial Engineering is an open source intelligence agency. Our purpose is to establish & maintain "clean information highways" across the full range of society's hierarchies - the "widest" open trust network.

We do what intelligence agencies do, but transparently and "for good" (generally: monitoring & influencing, input & output, read & write). It's essentially a marketing company + a sociology research lab. We understand that every marketing campaign changes the global information landscape that we all share - we try to make every change we do, good. We pave & maintain the roads for long term stability & access. We want to raise the epistemic waterline, basically.

When we do take on clients & projects it's always with this long term purpose in mind. Finding an existing solution to an open problem in society is an example of a "blocked information pipe". Unblocking that specific solution manually (via marketing) may be lucrative - but unblocking that pathway in general is the goal. This is what we mean by "clean information highways" - how do we make it easier for solutions to propagate where they need to go. We regularly do "mic checks" between different networks to check the health & expected connectivity.

Successes / Portfolio

• Anatomy of an Internet Argument
is one of our most popular products. It's a protocol for doing live experiments on any subculture on the internet, with proper guardrails.
• Good & Evil Words is a research prototype & piece of science communication that shows what empirical methods to study the evolution of culture & precisely track the origin of changes might look like
• There is No Source is a meme essay that raises awareness to the danger of consuming information designed to alter your behavior without knowing its source

Friends / Collaborators / Competitors

• Remilia - most famous for leading the "milady" subculture. Most notable member is Vitalik Buterin
• Seithar Group - very similar to our focus on cognitive security/defense & transparent post mortems of their ops. Contact is Mirai
• Klew Studio - by Marianne specializes in ARGs (internet wide scavenger hunts) for recruiting talent
• Vector Culture - by Somewheresy. Notable high signal voice in the industry
• Tyler Alterman - NYC based, regularly does open culture experiments & documents them. Most notable is his "forcing party" which started on twitter and resulted in going mainstream + a lot of journalists contacting him (see example Vice.com article)
• David Goldstein - see his NPR interview on "How to meddle in an election" where he performs an A/B test for a political campaign and publishes the results openly
• Epistemic Garden - by Xiq, building open source tools/infrastructure
• Calcifer Computing - by Brandon, building infrastructure & theory. See their Johns Hopkins "Computational Semiotics" class.
• RonenV - the longest running memetic engineer we have found (over a decade). Rivaled only by Tim Tyler and Tianmu
• Deepfates - famous for popularizing "AI slop" and propagating the concept of "IRL office hours"
• Andy Ayrey - famous for "Truth Terminal", one of the first autonomous AI bots
• Ben Ristow - professor of writing & rhetoric
• Michael Smith (morphenius) - pioneer theorist. See his "Subject Science" piece for an entry point
• EtymologyNerd - science communicator, independent researcher, runs live experiments on his audience

Services we offer

We can perform these services in any of the "territories" that we operate in (see "minds we monitor" below).

• Marketing - you have a product or service that needs customers, we help you find the right way to communicate it, and which information networks to put it in
• Background checks - you want to invest in or work with an entity, but want to know its track record. Please note that background checks happen in public, and the target is notified with the result. No underground gossip networks.
• Propaganda / hit piece - you want to change the whole world's mind on a specific topic, start or grow a movement, or repair / defend your public reputation.
• 1 on 1 connection
- you have a specific target in mind you want to be connected to. This is typically for headhunting C suite roles, an investment pitch, or a political thing. Please note, same as background checks, the subject will know you are using this service
• Establish an "information highway" base station in a new territory - we help you setup a trusted node in your information networks, or help you find one if one already exists. This can be your corner of the internet, your IRL community, or your company/industry/academic field. You then become our "cultural ambassador" for that network

We prioritize projects that have highest impact towards our purpose, and will offer our services for free, or fund your work if it is aligned. If you like our work and would like to donate to pay it forward, you can do so here: https://opencollective.com/prosocial-engineering

Minds we monitor

TODO - I want to maintain a list here with "fresh shibolleths", that's the standard way to precisely demonstrate exactly how "deep" our penetration is/fluency is on each of these languages.

TODO - rough list so far: Ogi Ogas. Qualia Research Institute. LessWrong/Rationalists. Tpot. Ithaca NY (townies & Cornell). Arab (Arab American, and Middle Eastern Arab. Practicing muslims & ex muslims). Israeli (in Israel, and abroad/diaspora). Newgrounds / indie game dev. Computer graphics / big tech (Casey Muratori / Jonathan Blow). Academics (mainly PhDs, postdocs, young professors, a few retired professors. A range of supporters of status quo & those pushing for reform). Science communicators like Sabine Hossenfelder, Vsauce, Hank Green, Etymologynerd. Plus a wide selection of normies (TODO: define the "general standard normie" for comparison/reference point)

NOTE: we try to make everyone that we are "monitoring" aware that we are monitoring them, but it is not always possible if they are "above" us hierarchy wise and thus cannot "hear" us (broken pipe)

Credit

• The core of this work is built on original research by Ronen V & his work on a memetics institution, and funding from OhhShiny and Vitalik
• The open-source methodology is taken from Blaise Aguera's Who Are We Now book
• Working at Snapchat and using their A/B testing dashboards, while talking to my friends who do sociology at Cornell, was one of the things that gave me the spark to try & bridge these two worlds.