InterEthos is a transdisciplinary research collective examining the interplay between power, culture, and technology on the internet.
InterEthos is fascinated by what gives the internet its culture, the economics that shape it, the governance structures that constrain it, the identity formations it makes available, the rights questions it keeps generating and deferring.
Where most groups study the internet as a policy problem or technical system, we study it as a cultural force with a character that determines what systems incentivize, produce and normalize.
On the nature of the collective
InterEthos is a transdisciplinary research collective. Transdisciplinary means something specific to us — instead of academics from adjacent departments we are an open collective of people with genuinely diverse backgrounds and thinking. Researchers and engineers. Lawyers and designers. Writers and technologists. The qualification for contributing is the quality of the questions you bring, not the institution that trained you to ask them.
On the subject of inquiry
The internet is not a neutral medium. It produces culture, and with that the formation of identity, desire and power. The systems people use daily are actively shaping what they consider possible, normal and acceptable. Most research examines what those systems extract or whom they harm. We are interested in the mechanism underneath — how digital systems produce the very orientations through which people understand, accept and defend them.
We call this mechanism Loop Legitimation.
Loop Legitimation operates through three interlocking processes. (1) The normalization of system outputs as authentic preferences. (2) The production of inevitability as a felt quality of infrastructure. (3) And the digitized diffusion of responsibility across networks of builders, platforms, users and institutions (where no individual actor experiences themselves as causally responsible for the whole).
The most consequential things the internet is doing are the things that have stopped feeling like things the internet is doing.
On methodology
Most of us have been intimately involved in designing, building, shipping, and shaping technologies, experiences, infrastructure, events, public goods, research, and ecosystems on the web. And some of what we built (however successful) is part of what we're studying.
We practice first-person infrastructure research and endogenous inquiry — ways of working that treat knowledge produced by construction and direct participation as primary material. When language fails we build something instead. The prototype is not a product. For us, it's how we think and a demonstration that things could be otherwise.
On outputs or forms
Our primary output at this stage are research essays — argumentative, citational, transdisciplinary pieces that develop mental models, language and frameworks for the conditions of digital life, and what more honest, more accountable versions of those conditions might look like.
The development of our research essays can lead to prototypes, program development experimentation and new orders of inquiry. And all of these outputs can serve as primitives for further exploration.
On direction
InterEthos is early. We intend to develop the collective into a decentralized research institute — eventually structured as a DAO, governed by its contributors, accountable to the work rather than to institutional convention. InterEthos makes it everybody's problem to examine. Still Our Internet moves it toward the life we want to live. [StillOurInternet.org]
We are particularly interested in people with direct experience inside the systems we study — those who have built platforms, designed infrastructure, written governance frameworks, shipped products, run communities, or made decisions about how digital systems work and for whom.
We are also interested in people who study these systems from the outside — anthropologists, legal scholars, historians, philosophers, policy researchers — whose frameworks illuminate what first-person experience alone cannot see. And we are interested in people who don't fit either category but have something serious to contribute to the questions we're asking.