The First Bridge
How a promise to my daughter led me to reimagine the Internet
This chapter didn’t make it into the final version of the Metaweb book—but in many ways, it’s where the whole journey began. It’s the personal story behind the Metaweb: how a moment of awe, a sense of responsibility, and two decades of exploration led me to ask a different question about the web, truth, and our collective future.
“The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down…”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
The emergence of the Metaweb was a deeply personal rabbit hole for me. For a long time, I was free-falling—no bearings, just a sense that something profound was missing from the way we navigate truth, knowledge, and each other online.
The seed was planted in 2002 when my daughter was born. I had been worried I wouldn’t know how to connect with an infant. I loved kids once they could talk—but babies? They always seemed to squirm back toward their mother.
Two weeks after she was born, her mother laid her on my chest. She smelled like heaven. I was just lying there, in awe. Slowly, she inched up until she nestled into the side of my neck. It was like the tiniest, most loving puppy had chosen me.
And then something happened I still can’t explain.
A pulse of electricity lit up my entire body. Every cell. It was as if the universe flipped a switch. I knew, with absolute clarity, that this relationship would be the most important in my life.
That week, a single thought rooted itself in my mind:
When she’s a young adult, I need to be able to look her in the eyes and tell her I did everything I could to make this a more beautiful, loving, and peaceful place.
At the time, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Local Systems, Global Stakes
For the rest of the 2000s, I worked on localizing essential systems—energy, food, water, economics. I co-founded the Post Carbon Institute and Bay Localize. Bay Localize had one big win: we helped defeat Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) at the ballot box, opening the door for cities to create greener, cheaper Community Choice Energy programs.
PG&E outspent us 500 to 1. Still, we won by 8 points.
That experience taught me something I’ve never forgotten:
“Never doubt the ability of a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals with a common purpose to change the course of history.”
— Margaret Mead
But even as local victories stacked up, I became increasingly troubled by what I saw in the wider conversation—especially online. Polarization was intensifying. People with seemingly similar values were reaching radically different conclusions. Everyone claimed the “data” was on their side.
And yet…
No matter the subject, one could often easily find someone coming from the polar opposite perspective who also claimed that the information exists to support their position. The lack of context on the web made it difficult without links to understand what evidence backs up the claims on web pages.
What I noticed was subtle but disturbing:
Context was dying on the web.
Commercial sites were removing outbound links to keep users from leaving. And without links, there was no shared understanding of where claims came from. Information was drifting into silos—ungrounded, unchallenged, and disconnected.
The isolation of being on the web, the siloization of information, and the absence of context meant there was little possibility of anyone—including experts—having access to a shared context or even agreeing about what information is available.
That insight was the spark.
The Vision That Took Hold
In 2014, I began imagining a different kind of web—one where:
Anyone could explore a topic deeply
Claims were connected to evidence and alternative perspectives
People could add relevant knowledge and notify others in the thread
Context wasn’t ephemeral—it was cumulative
Humanity needs a place where a layperson could explore any topic, and get a deep sense of the relevant questions related to it. If they come across a relevant piece of knowledge, it should be obvious where to post it—and others should be notified that the conversation has moved forward.
The more I thought about it, the more clear it became: we don’t need better conversation platforms until we fix the knowledge base.
The takeaway from the Trivium is profound: knowledge is the foundation of our intellectual capabilities and the discernment of truth. With a bad knowledge base, there is little chance of understanding—and therefore making wise choices.
And for a hyper-computational civilization?
We perhaps have the worst knowledge base conceivable, which diminishes our capacity for collective sensemaking, meaning-making, and choice-making.
That’s when the question became urgent for me:
How can we reorganize the content on the web so that it brings about an adequate response from humanity—at all relevant levels, from experts to policymakers to the public?
Building Toward the Bridge
I began collaborating with people who saw it too.
Zanette Johnson was one of the first. She immediately saw how this connected to climate adaptation and complex systems. Together, we began falling deeper into the rabbit hole—asking what kind of system could support humanity in learning and sensemaking at scale.
Later, Phahsa Ras joined the journey. His work focused on community sovereignty and safe digital spaces. He understood, intuitively and viscerally, that what we were building wasn’t just technical—it was cultural, political, spiritual. A different relationship to truth, and to each other.
By 2016, we had begun developing what we called bridges—typed relationships between pieces of content. A bridge could say: “this supports that,” “this contradicts that,” “this cites that.”
In 2017, I filed a provisional patent on the idea. Not to lock it down—but to protect it long enough for us to give it to the world, without the tech giants swallowing it first.
That same year, I was introduced to blockchain, and for a brief moment, I saw how these ideas might find each other.
From Synapse to System
I began to think about the web as a brain.
The brain has 200 billion neurons, each with ~1000 connections. It learns by reinforcing meaningful patterns. That’s how intelligence emerges.
The web has trillions of pages—but only a handful of meaningful links per page. It’s more like a damaged brain: noisy, disconnected, hard to navigate.
We imagined a new kind of web—what we called the Synaptic Web—where the connections were the intelligence. Every idea linked to its evidence, its contradictions, its related concepts. Every bridge adding meaning, creating context.
We imagined maps of knowledge, built collectively.
Very few people alive have ever been to a place for which maps do not exist... other than the Internet.
The reality is that there are no reliable maps for today’s web, which is one of the reasons why there is so little context and—as a result—trust.
The bridges became a building block for these maps.
Maps that help us navigate ideas.
Maps that reveal connections.
Maps that let us build shared context—and build on each other’s insights.
Where It’s Going
This personal journey became a collective one.
It became Bridgit.io. The Overweb. The Meta-layer Initiative. A call for input and co-creation. A growing network of people who believe a more coherent, trustworthy, and human web is possible.
What we’re building isn’t just a platform.
It’s a new possibility space.
And it all started the moment I held my daughter, and realized that my life wasn’t just mine anymore. It was hers, too.
I still intend to look her in the eyes one day and tell her:
I did everything I could.
The rabbit hole didn’t end. But somewhere along the way, we stopped falling—and started building.
The Metaweb is what we’re building at the bottom.