Vision
Vie is a software company built around an argument that software has become the main way things happen in the world, and that most of it is designed to take from the people using it: their attention, their data, or their money, in exchange for as little as the market will tolerate.
We do not think that is a property of the medium. Software is the most important driving force in the world, and what we have now is what happens when you measure a product by engagement and then optimise against that measurement for long enough. Hollow content, attention-seeking algorithms and centralised control are all downstream of the same decision about what to count.
We work on three fronts.
The first is digital connection: social software that helps people form real, lasting relationships instead of holding their attention. Building purpose and meaning into the software people interact with everyday. The second is distributed cloud computing: a mesh network that turns every device into a node, as an alternative to the centralised cloud. The third is digital intelligence: intelligent-first architectures, and AI models that grow and prune the way a living system does.
Getting this wrong is expensive in three ways. Socially, it produces loneliness, polarisation, and a shared sense that nothing means very much. Economically, it lets profit collect around services that ought to be commodities rather than around anything new. Existentially, it keeps a great deal of human potential occupied with things that do not matter.
The essays below are the full argument: what we think is wrong, and what we propose to do about each part of it. They are what we currently think, and we will change them when we change our minds.
Contents
The Connection Crisis
The tools we built to connect us reward performance over depth. They exploit real wiring: short-term gratification, social comparison, cognitive ease. That same wiring can be designed for instead. What slow, meritocratic social software looks like.
The Compute Monopoly
Global workloads need resilient, low-latency, energy-aware infrastructure. Instead we have a handful of providers, a handful of regions, and billions of idle devices doing nothing. The case for a mesh where every device is a node, and the hard problems in the way.
The Knowledge Gap
We have more information available than at any point in history and no matching gain in understanding. The gap is curation and application, not access. Why the answer is open knowledge plus a living AI architecture that learns from quality rather than scale.
Bringing Life to Software
Software is how most things happen now, and most of it is built to extract. Vie is a company built around an argument. What the argument commits us to, what it costs us, and what we are asking of the people who share it.
We are looking for people who believe software can be more than an instrument of extraction.