Community tools that help us see each other again
What if we background AI in order to help us actually see each other again?
When you create a Gaia Circle for your friend group or community, you embrace aspects of technology that serve your needs, and discard the rest.
Not another app that pretends to connect you while harvesting your attention. Not more algorithmic manipulation.
Instead, technology that works like the best parts of small towns — where people notice when you're struggling, remember what you're good at, and connect you with what you need.
Your community owns and edits the AI rules — there's nothing behind a curtain.
Here's what we're building together right now:
A listening companion for conversations. Augments natural flow without interrupting.
Coordinate care within your community. From feeding horses to supporting friends.
AI that connects needs with resources in your circle. Creates beneficial serendipity.
Gaia Circle is both a philosophy and a practice. The philosophy: human flourishing (eudaimonia) is inseparable from the health of our communities and environment.
The practice: systematically supporting wellbeing wherever it's weakest, at every level of human organization.
When guided by community values and good human judgment, AI becomes an anti-fragile technology for wellbeing— systematically strengthening our capabilities where they're weakest.
Humans excel at deep, contextual intelligence in areas we've mastered. AI offers broad, limited intelligence across many domains.
Gaia Circle brings these complementary strengths together for collective benefit.
In health, small problems create chain reactions. Physical, mental, social—a crack anywhere can bring down the whole system.
One panic attack can matter more than ten strengths.
Scaffolding for Humanity
Supporting our architecture where it's weakest rather than replacing it.
You deserve software that you can adapt to you, not the other way around.
Read the essay →The future is not self-hosted—it's community-hosted, where we share the burden and benefits together.
Read the story →Gaia Circle builds on these foundational ideas: software should bend to human needs, and communities should own their digital infrastructure. We're not reinventing the wheel— we're rolling it forward together.
Gaia Circle is inspired by the wisdom of living systems.
Named after James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis—the scientific observation that Earth operates as a self-regulating system maintaining conditions for life—Gaia Circle attempts to apply this same principle to human communities. Just as Earth's biosphere uses feedback loops to sustain life, healthy communities can develop similar mechanisms to detect and respond to human needs.
The biosphere maintains temperature, atmosphere, and ocean chemistry through interconnected feedback loops.
Healthy communities can develop similar mechanisms to detect needs and coordinate care through collective intelligence.
Both systems maintain optimal conditions for flourishing through distributed sensing and responsive action.
This is community barn-raising for the digital age, where the barn we're building is collective resilience. Want to help build this?