FIGHTING MISINFORMATION & BURNOUT

Enough with the clutter & clickbait.

The current system isn’t designed to inform, it’s designed to sell. The public isn’t invited into the conversation and rarely gets a place in the discourse. We’re stuck in a design challenge. We have all the information in the world at our finger tips, and no structures for making it usable.

Openness to change is the bedrock of an informed citizenry. Yet openness doesn’t always come easily. As a society, we have more access to information than ever before, yet we've failed to prioritize systems that support informed, open, and engaged communities. If you want to learn something these days, you might Google it, and pull a book or article from an overwhelming number of options prioritized by factors that have little to do with the quality of the information or learning experience. It’s time consuming, difficult to responsibly navigate or know what to trust, and often feeds a single or sensationalized perspective motivated by the bottom line. It’s a systems problem, a culture problem, and a design problem.

Information is everywhere. It's in every data point, Google search, conversation, and sensory input.

But knowledge is much harder to come by. Insights happen when you organize, structure, and synthesize information responsibly. And we need more of that, across disciplines and perspectives, to build a world that serves everyone.

At The Plenary, we believe that society's collective knowledge should be technically, financially, and psychologically accessible to everyone.