The Advancement is a repo with a mission to help a movement to improve the world.
This repo is a work in progress
The Advancement is the free consumer-facing application of the Planet Nine stack, built on top of Sessionless, MAGIC, and teleportation. It is a set of browser extensions paired with companion apps that allow users to navigate cyberspace without a shared credential like email, and without the need for passwords. Since it allows for a lot of behaviors, there's a bit of a smorgasbord (I suspect this word won't translate well, but many of its synonyms in English are idiomatic. Maybe conglomeration?) to choose from.
Perhaps a bit of lore might help.
Benevolent aliens have been watching us from afar at their home on Planet Nine. Unable to make physical contact, they waited patiently for humanity to create an online ecosystem where they could interact in small quantities with us via the pseudonymity of the internet. These aliens belong to a galactic federation called The Advancement.
There are four criteria to join the Advancement, and humanity is close, but not quite there so interaction is limited.
Holding humanity back is our collective need to divide ourselves into groups and subgroups, and to subjugate and undermine the opportunities available to different groups. There are many causes of this, but rather than look into those, I'd like to focus on one of the consequences.
There is an enormous economic incentive for reinforcing group segmentation amongst humans, and that incentive is what is fueling digital advertising. This giant industry has built an intricate system of software to track you, and everyone else, around everywhere you go in cyberspace.
It is not easy to not be tracked, and often you're at the mercy of what companies are forced to do. Those little popups asking for your permission about cookies and things are only there because governments said they had to be. And you know what, I do this stuff for a living, and I don't even know what those rules are, and what you should do about them.
What I do have is a sense that forcing convoluted decisions on people to protect their privacy can not be in the best interest of humanity. And since I enjoy thinking about what that means in the context of joining a Roddenberry-esque galactic federation, I've decided to build Planet Nine.
Of course, you don't have to care about privacy or anything like that to benefit here. You just need to not like advertising. And who likes advertising?
I've always had this thing where I don't believe it should ever be my responsibility to tell you who I am. 99% of the time you shouldn't have to know who I am at all. For the 1% of the time that you do, like a bank or court I guess, we can leave that to governments.
To this end, the first feature of The Advancement is to provide users with a set of emails that, for all intents and purposes, do not exist. Users can optionally use these emails automagically to sign up for things around the internet. The Advancement will remember which email is used where, just like a password manager, so that users don't have to. Similarly if you need to put in an email to get past some gatekeeping, just wave your wand (cursor), and the Advancement will use your email, and then we'll handle the cans of spam that'll be lobbed at you.
If you haven't given up on email entirely, and want to clean up yours, I suggest checking out this project which provides a python script for unsubscribing from all the garbage The Advertisement has signed you up for.
The second order of business in defending against the Advertisement is identifying them in the first place. The Advancement provides browser extensions for doing just that or at least it will once I finish it). Most browsers are supported, if your browser of choice isn't on the list below, let us know.
Safari and Chrome are under construction.
The extensions are geared towards a gaming experience, and a non-gaming experience, which users can opt into in the app. Not everyone has fun the same way, so we wanted to keep it flexible.
These extensions are ad blockers cover-uppers.
With Google's adoption of manifest v3, ad blockers are losing their ability to rely on huge filter sets for blocking ad domains.
In that link you can read about one ad blocker's attempt to continue without the filter rules, but we wanted to go an alternative route.
You see there's nothing stopping us in manifest v3 from just covering up ads with this harmless ficus.
That might not seem like much, but it makes it so that if you tap anywhere on the ad, it just goes away. Unless you're playing the game version, in which case you have to kill the ad.
Oh, and unlike ad blockers, doing it this way makes sure the content creator still gets paid.
Well first of all, in addition to battling ads, the browser extension gives you the ability to use any MAGICal interaction built anywhere on the web. That can be one click shopping, or just liking a blog post.
The second thing the Advancement provides is an entry point to a (the?) teleportal network. The Advancement apps aren't meant to be true shopping experiences, though teleportation can enable that, but rather an aggregater for finding teleportals that might interest a user. Check out the teleportation repo for more on this.
For more on how this all works and how to get started, check out these companion docs.
| Dev | UX | Product | The Non-Technical |
|---|---|---|---|
| README-DEV | README-UX | coming soon | README-NT |