The internet is an information highway. We are building the indoors.

A highway is an outdoor public transport system, and it does one job well: it gets you from one building to another. Nobody builds a home on the shoulder of a highway, keeps their files there, or lets their children play beside the traffic.

That is more or less what we have done with the internet. It was characterized as an information highway, and it still earns the name — but we have moved our working lives, our records and much of our social lives out onto it. Social media is a public park. In a park, nobody knows who anyone is, and nobody is accountable for what they say there.

The most profitable use of that park has turned out to be anger. Personal information — purchase habits, relationships, beliefs, political affiliations — is collected by hidden trackers and sold to whoever will pay. The buyers are not only interested in what you might purchase. They are interested in what you can be made to feel, because an angry and isolated audience is a reliably profitable one. Meanwhile the world's information infrastructure drifts, piece by piece, into the hands of authoritarian intelligence agencies.

What we need is not a faster highway. We need indoor space: bounded, designated for a purpose, with a name on the door and someone at the desk who asks who you have come to see. That is the space the Alliance exists to build.

The Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure is a design specification: twelve defined components in three groups. The first group is the authenticity infrastructure, and it is about identity. It does not ask a lobby receptionist to identify the bad guys as they come through the door. It asks for accountability — see some ID, issue a visitor badge, ask who they have come to visit.

The standard being applied is the one we already accept for physical space. Any room you are sitting in has an occupancy permit, which means an architect, a contractor and a building inspector have each put their livelihood on the line attesting that it is habitable. That is why buildings work. Nothing less is being proposed here. The specification is set out at length in the book Quiet Enjoyment.

The Authenticity Alliance is the engine that is building Authentiverse™ following the design specifications of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure.

It does this by convening independent enterprises, each of which solves one inauthenticity problem in one market, and connecting them to individuals who want to help implement and promote Authenticity™ principles. The Alliance does not absorb its members. Each enterprise keeps its own market, its own customers and its own judgement; the Alliance is what allows what one enterprise builds to be relied on by the next.

The method is incremental implementation rather than revolution — one enterprise, one market, one solved inauthenticity pain at a time.

You do not replace the world's information infrastructure in a day, and no one seriously proposes to. You boil the ocean one enterprise, one market, one solved inauthenticity pain at a time — until enough of the network is governed by the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure that the rest has somewhere to move to.

Today's internet is infested with hidden trackers — tiny pixel beacons, scripts and device-tracking tools designed to follow you without your knowledge. The operator of this website is a Member Enterprise of The Authenticity Alliance, and this site uses no tracking pixels, no beacons and no covert identity-reporting mechanisms of any kind.

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