The CTRL Foundation
The Center for Technology to Restore Liberty—the CTRL Foundation—promotes technology that fosters liberty. We’re a tech incubator set up to support projects that allow users to take ConTRoL of their online experience. Our first project is a new social media platform named Gides. It introduces a new posting style: website-quality posts that are as easy to create as sending a text message. Gides gives everyone the power of a personal website, while also prioritizing mental health over engagement or profits.
CTRL’s mission is to support the development of technology that elevates the human experience, disseminates useful knowledge, and incentivizes creators to reap the economic rewards of their creativity. We aim to support individuals, businesses, and the economies of local regions worldwide to maximize the value of information shared online, which will increase the opportunity of everyone to reach their full potential.
We’re reclaiming the web for human flourishing.
The CTRL Foundation is creating the future of social media by supporting the development of Gides. It’s a better way to share, giving you the control that other platforms stole, and building a better you as you use it. We also support the creation of educational resources to make technology users—especially young users—aware of the way using technology effects their emotional experience and the development of their brain.
We exist to unlock your digital potential.
The official name of our organization is the Center for Technology to Restore Liberty, aka, the CTRL Foundation.
— Why support CTRL?
We must have apps that return control to users. CTRL is shepherding the creation of Gides, a platform built from the ground up to give users full-control over their social media experience.
— How have you lost control?
The keyboard shortcut for redo is ctrl–y. We’re helping to redo social media—but we’re doing it the right way this time.
— Are you ready for a REDO?
Social media was designed to take away your control. Its effects aren’t accidental.
Platforms chase engagement at all costs. The result: Record levels of anxiety and depression, knowledge is isolated, and creativity is reduced to performative likes.
Our kids are the least flourishing generation we know of. 50 percent of American teens say they’re online almost constantly. So half of our kids’ consciousnesses, their lives, are owned by a few big social media companies.
When the dopamine reward system gets hijacked, it can compel you to repeat self-destructive behaviors, like spending hours every day on apps even when they make you unhappy, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled.
The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.
Social media algorithms see us, simply, as an attention mine. They are designed to hack our brains and manipulate our emotions. They look for the weakest spots in our minds — hate, fear, greed…
We’re going to reroute the future of social technology toward human flourishing by supporting the development of Gides, a platform that fosters creativity, knowledge, community, and human dignity.
Are you on board?
The Vision
The problem with social media isn’t just what it does to you — it’s what it fails to let you do.
Our Mission
Social media was never designed to make you flourish. It was designed to make you scroll. It’s time for a REDO.