An invitation, not a product

Prosperity without exploitation.

An economy where doing what's right is good business.

I'm Richard Whitney. I build software, and I'm looking for a few people who want to prove that a business can do very well without capturing, tracking or squeezing the people it serves.

Write to me

What is real prosperity?

Is it a trillion-dollar valuation? A company pulling the most revenue it can from customers who can't leave? An ad network that knows everything about everyone?

I don't think so. I think real prosperity is an economy where businesses prosper because their customers do.

This isn't against wealth, and it isn't against ambition. Build something great and get rich doing it. And it isn't a fixed pie -- someone else's success doesn't have to come out of yours. An honest business can do well by its owners, its people, its customers and its neighbors all at once. The work is lining up the incentives so those reinforce each other instead of trading off.

I'm not interested in confiscating what people produce and handing it to someone else. I want prosperity common enough that the gap between people flattens into a shallow wave -- small swings, with the whole line riding high. You get there by building things that leave people better off and letting them keep what they earn.

Technology is where I work, so it's where I'm starting. The same questions apply to healthcare, banking, housing and education.

The problem, plainly

Making money isn't the problem. Making dependency the product is.

The pattern is familiar by now. Something genuinely valuable shows up. People come to rely on it. Leaving gets harder than joining was -- and then the price climbs while the value doesn't. We've watched it play out in social media, cloud hosting, advertising and software subscriptions.

I can't change anyone else's business model. What I can do, with a few others, is build the alternative and run it in the open, so the comparison is there for anyone to see.

Five principles -- each one a test

A pledge costs nothing to sign. So every principle here comes with a check anyone can run on a company, without asking it for permission.

  1. Leaving is easy.

    Test A customer can export everything they put in, in a format another tool can read, without asking anyone.

  2. Pricing is legible.

    Test The price page says what one unit costs and what a unit is.

  3. Privacy is the default.

    Test There's a public list of every piece of data the product collects, and why.

  4. Accountability is independent.

    Test The party being judged doesn't hold sole control of the evidence it's judged by.

  5. The principles live in the structure.

    Test A future owner can't quietly remove them. The charter holds them, not the founder's good intentions.

Before any new way of making money, one question: does this make our customers more free, or more dependent on us?

The rule above the principles

No person, organization, or financial interest -- including the founder -- shall be exempt from the principles of Real Prosperity.

That includes me. This has to become greater than the person who started it, and the principles have to stay stronger than anyone who leads it. Today that's a statement of intent. As the coalition forms, it needs to become governance that can actually be enforced -- on me first.

Who I'm looking for

You don't need to agree with me on everything. You need to want this to work -- for your own reasons, whether that's principle, profit, or both.

Builders and founders

You run something small and you'd rather earn loyalty than manufacture it.

Developers

You're tired of the dependency that comes bundled with the tools, and you'd help write the open pieces.

Publishers and creators

You want to be paid for your work without turning your readers into the thing being sold.

Patient operators and capital

You'd back or run a company built to last, not one built to flip.

What I'm building

These are my attempts to live by the five tests. They're in progress -- demonstrations, not proof yet.

They're founding examples, not the point of this site. They answer to the same five tests as anyone else's work -- the rule covers me too -- and if one of mine fails a test, this site should say so.

MIR -- Memory Infrastructure Registry
Records what entities, including AI agents, have actually done over time and surfaces that record at the point of decision. It's evidence, not authority. It never decides who to trust -- the system using it does.
Pricing -- it fell short, now fixed. MIR's price used to mean asking. It's now published per unit: one entity is one unit, $3 a month each plus a $40,000 yearly platform fee, and free up to five entities.
VoltJS
A small, no-build web library growing into an alternative to WordPress, so a site doesn't come with a stack of dependencies its owner can't see into.
Pixboard
Advertising without surveillance. Advertisers pay for visibility, publishers get paid, readers keep their privacy.

Why I care about this

I welcome prosperity. I will not worship it.

I seek success, but I will not purchase it at the expense of my soul.

-- Richard Whitney

I'm a Christian. Paul wrote that the love of money is the root of all evil -- not money itself, the love of it. I'd like to build things that do well and don't need that love to keep running.

You don't have to share my faith to be part of this. You do have to share the principles.

Can a few people actually move this? I honestly don't know. But I know it's worth finding out, and I'd rather find out with others than alone.

Write to me

Tell me who you are and what you're working on. I read every one and I'll write back personally.