InterEthos is assembling its first cohort of contributors.
We are looking for people whose thinking doesn't fit neatly into a single discipline — researchers who build, builders who theorize, lawyers who design, designers who govern, writers who code, technologists who ask philosophical questions about what they've made.
The qualification is not a credential. It is the quality of the questions you bring and your willingness to follow them wherever they lead.
The nature of participation
Contributing to InterEthos is not membership. There are no profiles, no retention metrics, no engagement scores. What holds the collective together is shared orientation toward questions that don't have institutional homes yet.
At this stage contributing might mean co-authoring a research essay. Developing a prototype as a form of argument. Bringing a theoretical instrument from your discipline to a problem another contributor has identified. Reviewing work in progress. Or simply being a part of the discourse. We can schedule meetings (virtual and in-person) but most of our comms will be async.
The work is collective. The credit is distributed. The findings are designed to travel.
On who belongs here
We are particularly interested in people with direct experience inside the systems we study — people who have built platforms, designed infrastructure, written governance frameworks, shipped products, run communities, or made decisions about how digital systems work and for whom.
We are also interested in people who study these systems from the outside — anthropologists, legal scholars, historians, philosophers, policy researchers — whose frameworks illuminate what first-person experience alone cannot see.
And we are interested in people who don't fit either category but have something serious to contribute to the questions we're asking.
On current inquiry
Our current research includes Razorblade — a study of one hundred randomized platform abuse reports examined through the lens of Hanlon's razor, mapping the language of harm reporting, the perception of intent, and the gap between what platforms claim their processes are and what users experience them to be.
We are also developing the theoretical framework of Loop Legitimation — the mechanism by which digital systems produce the conditions of their own acceptance — and the research program that will test, extend and complicate it.
On finding us
We are not building a community. We are building a body of work. The network forms around that, among people who find it useful.
If the questions we're asking are questions you've been asking — and you want to think about them with people who have been inside what they're studying — we'd like to hear from you.