The mesh, and what it defends against
Any system that pools citizen decisions has one fatal weakness: whoever can manufacture people wins. Bots are cheap, purchased accounts are cheaper than lobbying, and a manufactured crowd is indistinguishable from a real one unless something distinguishes it.
The mesh is that something. Not the individual number — the mesh is the thing doing the work.
What a mesh is
Standing comes from your position among other verified real citizens, not from a row in a database. That is why a farm of fresh accounts cannot manufacture it: each new account starts connected to nothing, and connections have to be earned from people who are themselves connected.
The practical property: the cost of faking standing scales with the size of the real mesh, while the cost of buying accounts stays flat. Past a certain size, the purchase stops being worth making.
The three things it defends against
- Bots. Volume with nobody behind it. Cheapest to produce, easiest for a mesh to exclude.
- Intelligence services, foreign or domestic, running accounts that present as constituents. See Foreign Intelligence and US Intelligence.
- Paid influencers and propagandists — real people, purchased reach, presented as organic citizen opinion. See Paid influence operations.
None of this is censorship, and that is the point
This site proposes no removal of anybody's speech, and it would be the wrong project to run one: a movement whose whole pitch is check the record yourself cannot also decide what you are allowed to read.
What the mesh does is make the purchased version worthless without silencing anyone. Everybody keeps talking; only real citizens are counted in the decisions. A budget that buys a hundred thousand accounts buys a hundred thousand things that do not count, which is a much more durable defence than a rule about content — rules about content have to be enforced by somebody, and whoever enforces them becomes the next thing worth capturing.
Not for sale
Money buys no standing in the mesh, and that is written down as a rule so it cannot later be presented as an obvious optimisation. The moment trust is purchasable, everything above stops being true in a single step.