Bring trade back to the community.
I spent a long time working in consulting and directly or indirectly involved in international organisations. Organisations that coordinate across jurisdictions, optimise deliveries, and act as connection points between countries and companies that would otherwise never meet. They do real work. I'm not here to caricature them.
What I noticed, slowly, was the spillover. The globalist mode has a gravity. It pulls everything into its orbit, until the plumber on your street has to work for Pimlico to be found, because that's where the search traffic goes.
And even that isn't the whole story. The bigger problem is attention. The person most likely to recommend something to you today isn't your neighbour. It's an influencer, sometimes not even in this country, whose opinion about where to eat or who to hire somehow weighs more than the woman two doors down who has lived on your street for thirty years. That's the shift. We're more exposed to strangers than to our friends, and we've stopped noticing.
Regulators prefer to deal with big companies. Not because the companies are better, but because they're legible. A single chain with a compliance team is easier to oversee than a thousand small operators with no brand and no paperwork. Imagine a London where every café was a Pret. No cash, no quirks, identical everywhere. Much less work for the regulator. Much less of a city, too.
That has it the wrong way round. The small operator, the one who lives on your street, does have a reputation at stake. It's the one that matters most to them. It's the one their kids inherit. It just isn't legible to anyone outside the street.
And the reputation the big platforms sell you instead is mostly theatre. I watched how easily reviews get bought, how routinely businesses nudge happy customers and quietly discourage unhappy ones, how an average of 4.6 stars means almost nothing here, because anything less than five is treated as a complaint. Oddly enough, 4.6 is a reliable signal in Japan, where reviewers actually use the full range and a three is a genuine middle. So stars aren't the problem. A culture that doesn't know how to use them is. Opinions are the way. An actual person on your street telling you the plumber was fine, the electrician wasn't, that's the real signal. We used to have it.
What I grew up with
I grew up in a small town in Norway. One of the things you absorb there, without anyone naming it, is the idea that you can just do your business locally. The last time I rented a car at home, I was given the keys before I'd said my name. My parents are selling their flat at the moment, and when they needed listing photos they called the photographer. Not a photographer. The photographer.
That is the posture I'm describing. It isn't only about picking litter or joining committees, though those things happen too. It's about shrinking your world view on purpose. Back down to the street, the corner, the few hundred people you actually share a place with. You don't need to compete with the world. Everyone contributes what they have. And that's enough.
You don't have to compete with a ranking algorithm. You don't have to be the best in the world at anything. You just have to be somebody on your street who can do a thing, or knows a person, or has a ladder to lend.
What Nearhood is
Nearhood is a noticeboard. That's the honest description. Your area, and the things happening in it. Someone's got a piano teacher. Someone's a bike mechanic. Someone runs personal training sessions in Clissold Park in the summer. Someone will feed your cat while you're away.
The technology underneath is called Nostr. It means your reputation belongs to you, not to us. We use passkeys, so there are no usernames or passwords. These are quiet choices. You probably won't notice them. That's the point.
What you will notice is that there is no feed. There are no trending posts. There is no aggregated opinion telling you what to think. There is only your area, and the people in it, and what they have to share.
Maybe it's just this
Maybe the whole thing is just: being connected to the right person in your community. The person who knows a guy. The neighbour who lends the ladder. The corner shop that remembers your order. When that infrastructure exists, everything else gets easier. When it doesn't, you order everything on an app from a warehouse fifty miles away, and the money leaves.
We're trying to make the first kind of infrastructure legible again. Not replace it. Not disrupt it. Just make it visible to anyone who moved in last month and hasn't found it yet.
— Stian