mapping how ideas spread online... We're building tools to help communities understand their information landscape and protect against harmful coordinated narratives. https://www.epistemic.garden/

Epistemic Garden - Strategy

Epistemic Garden  runs the Community Archive  and its discord server which serves as a Schelling point for open memetics research . Aug 2025

Executive Summary

Online communities  are often rich sensemaking spots where people compare notes to figure out the truth, and decide on what to do together.

*However, people lack awareness of the narrative patterns  shaping the online information landscape, and are vulnerable to coordinated intentional spread of harmful narratives

Epistemic Garden  is a non-profit research and development lab that builds tools to map how ideas spread. We follow a living lab philosophy, iterating with online communities to improve their knowledge production and robustness

We are building

A continuous stream of social media data via a crowd-sourced browser extension (the Community Archive

The Nooscope. A tool we can point at the realm of ideas and track their origins

Why we’re different

Open by default

Traction to date

Ask: $2.5 would extend our runway

Situation

What’s the problem?

The internet is like a jungle

People lack “jungle eyes” , or an informed awareness of the hidden patterns, adversarial actors, and narrative forces shaping the online information landscape.

Ads and psyops   compete with legitimate information  for your attention

Social media data is closed

That makes it difficult to analyse.

Why are current methods not good enough

Why is it novel?

AI uncovers lots of low-hanging fruit in the space of tools for interpreting the information environment.

What happens if unaddressed?

An example of a strictly memetic risk: Stories about rogue AGI making it to the training set of LLMs and directly causing those behaviors

It is hard for people to coordinate and defend their own interests from the whims of platforms and third actors, protect themselves, pursue their own flourishing

Mission

Map how ideas spread to improve online knowledge production

Shovel-ready prototype ideas

Memetics