Human capacity first
Creative tools can respond to cognitive diversity without requiring surveillance, diagnosis, or a person to repeatedly explain their needs.
The future should adapt to people.
Not the other way around.
Made Sick explores what happens when technology is designed around human capacity instead of demanding that humans continuously adapt themselves to technology.
The moonshot
Make participation accessible by default.
The goal is not to build a prettier platform. It is to test whether creative and civic technology can reduce avoidable cognitive friction while preserving identity, ownership, consent, and agency.
Identity follows the creator
A creator's identity and relationships should not become disposable whenever a platform changes.
Consent travels with the work
Publication, discovery, contact, collaboration, and reuse should have clear permission boundaries instead of relying on ambiguity.
Access is infrastructure
Accessibility should be an acceptance criterion for systems, not a late-stage feature request.
Information becomes usable
Public information—including civic resources—should be easier to understand and reach without requiring institutional expertise.
AI serves agency
Automation can assist people without silently taking authorship, identity, consent, or decision-making away from them.
Why this exists
It started at a crossroads in Minneapolis.
Made Sick did not begin as a conventional product plan. It began with a deeply personal vision: trying to help a sick boi find meaning and purpose, while finding meaning and purpose in my own life again.
Every step since then has required confronting a fear—uncertainty, failure, visibility, responsibility, technology, and the possibility that something that mattered deeply to me might not matter to anyone else.
I kept going anyway.
Why stop now?
The title and mood of the movie Why Stop Now? fit this chapter of the experience: a crossroads, a difficult road, and the decision to keep moving rather than abandon a vision because it became frightening.
What began as one personal act of trying to restore meaning became an experiment in building something useful for many people: a place where creativity, accessibility, identity, consent, civic participation, and technology can meet without asking people to surrender themselves to the system.
This is an account of the creator's experience and motivation. It does not claim that any person named in the project's public references endorsed, joined, funded, advised, or partnered with Made Sick.
Prototype → proof
Small today. Testable tomorrow.
Made Sick should not ask anyone to believe that the whole thesis is already proven. The current work is a set of concrete experiments that can be challenged, tested, and improved.
PIXIE Device Stewardship
A consent-first research hypothesis about avoidable cognitive labor in operating systems and creative tools, with an interaction prototype rather than a diagnostic or health service.
Creator-owned identity
Experiments with AT Protocol identity and public writing aim to keep the creator at the center of identity and publication decisions.
Story Finder
A device-local research interface for public Bluesky feeds. It does not use passwords, private messages, or private records.
Civic access
The voting-resource flow is a concrete accessibility experiment: reduce friction between a person and authoritative voting information without turning the project into a political organization.
The path
A roadmap from prototype to evidence.
Build the foundation
Static prototype, consent architecture, PIXIE research, creator identity experiments, Story Finder, and concrete accessibility flows.
Test with creators
Participatory stories, accessibility review, stronger AT Protocol integration, and documented user research with real workflows.
Measure friction
Test whether the proposed interaction patterns actually reduce cognitive effort, improve clarity, or preserve agency compared with ordinary workflows.
Open the method
Publish methodology, findings, failures, and interoperable patterns so others can reproduce or challenge the work.
Change the default
Explore whether human-centered participation infrastructure can work across creative disciplines and civic contexts without centralizing ownership of the people using it.
Research ledger
Claims should have receipts.
This ledger deliberately distinguishes demonstrated work from hypotheses and future research. “Unproven” is a valid status.
| Claim / question | Current evidence | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Cognitive friction can be a meaningful accessibility problem. | PIXIE research hypothesis, methodology, and case-ledger work. | Researching |
| A low-friction habit cue can be designed without streaks, scores, guilt, or surveillance. | PIXIE interaction prototype using voluntary browser-local state. | Prototype |
| Creator-controlled identity can support portable participation. | AT Protocol identity and public-writing experiments. | Demonstrated / testing |
| Public story research can be separated from private account access. | Story Finder uses public Bluesky feeds and keeps research local to the device. | Prototype |
| Voting-resource discovery can be made easier without partisan framing. | Browser-session location flow with official-resource fallbacks. | Prototype |
| These patterns scale across creative disciplines and civic contexts. | Future creator research and comparative testing. | Unproven |
| The larger thesis improves participation at measurable scale. | No scale evidence yet; this is the moonshot to test. | Unproven |
What we need from the future
Don't just believe it. Stress-test it.
Creators
Use the system. Tell us where it adds friction instead of removing it.
Researchers
Challenge the assumptions and help design measurements that could falsify the thesis.
Accessibility experts
Find the places where “accessible” language still produces inaccessible behavior.
Technologists
Help make identity, permissions, portability, and privacy interoperable rather than proprietary.
Filmmakers & storytellers
Show what a humane technology future could feel like before it exists.
People with lived experience
Identify the quiet failures that technical teams routinely miss.
The case for Made Sick
One screen. One argument.
Problem: Technology increasingly asks humans to adapt themselves to systems that were not designed around cognitive diversity.
Why now: AI, automation, decentralized identity, and increasingly digital civic and creative participation are changing how people work, publish, and make decisions.
What's different: Made Sick treats consent, identity, accessibility, and creator ownership as infrastructure rather than decoration.
What exists: PIXIE research, creator-identity experiments, Story Finder, voting-resource accessibility work, and a public prototype.
If it works: participation becomes easier without requiring people to surrender agency.
Future-facing context: The page is designed for conversations with people working on ambitious, technology-enabled visions of the future, including the ecosystem around XPRIZE's Future Vision and Moonshots Live. Made Sick is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or representing XPRIZE or any related event.