Behind Every Them

Propaganda works by abstraction. It needs a them — a category large enough that no particular person lives inside it. Everything that follows depends on that category staying empty.

Behind Every Them is an attempt to fill it back in, and to do so structurally rather than rhetorically. It does not argue that othering is wrong. It makes the abstraction hard to hold onto by replacing it, step by step, with a specific family whose week you can see.

Two ways through

Explore is a five-level descent: a region, then a country, then a place inside it, then one family, then a single moment in one of their days. Each level down trades reach for detail. By the last one you are not looking at a demographic, you are looking at a morning.

Mirror goes the other way. You answer what you are worried about — a child’s schooling, keeping the house, a parent’s health, money lasting the month — and it matches you with a family from a background unlike yours whose answers are close to yours. The intended moment is recognition rather than sympathy: not how hard for them, but that is my Tuesday.

Why specificity is the mechanism

Universal concerns are what survive translation across cultures — education, economic security, health, housing, the state of one’s family. Those are the shared load-bearing structure. Everything that reads as foreign sits on top of it.

So the content model is built for detail, not for summary. A family is a set of concrete daily moments rather than a profile, and the matching runs on concerns rather than geography, because organising by geography would reproduce exactly the sorting the project exists to undo.

This is the earliest of my projects and the one I am most careful about. It is still in development.