The Abstraction Problem

An Experiment in Interrupting Abstraction Through Encounter

I’ve been thinking about why dismissiveness scales so easily.

Distance does the work. You can write off a billion people you’ve never met. You can fear an entire continent. You can reduce whole civilizations to a single word: them.

But here’s the thing we all know and somehow forget: the moment someone becomes real to you, you can’t.

This is the abstraction problem.

Propaganda doesn’t work by making you cruel. It works by keeping people abstract. Blurred. Categorical. It zooms out until humans become shapes, and shapes become threats.

Empathy works the opposite way. It zooms in. It names. It specifies. It forces you close enough to see that the family in Lagos worrying about school fees shares something with the family in Ohio worrying about the same thing.

The cure for abstraction isn’t argument. It’s encounter.

But encounter is rare. Most of us will never sit in a kitchen in Lagos or Jaipur or Beirut. We won’t share a meal with the families we’ve been taught to reduce to headlines.

So I kept coming back to a question: could we make encounter more accessible? And could AI play a role?

If AI is trained on centuries of human documentation—journalism, literature, personal accounts, opinions, even our biases and prejudices—could it describe the daily lives of the very people we’ve reduced to “them”?

That’s not really AI’s opinion. It’s a synthesis of how humans have documented each other.

So over the holidays, I built BehindEveryThem.com. Fully AI-generated—the families, their stories, the site itself. A small experiment to see whether that synthesis could make strangers feel real.

Not as facts, but as plausible composites—meant to feel real enough to interrupt abstraction, not replace lived encounter.

The site works in two ways:

• Explore Mode: Start with a region, a country, a city, and drill down until you meet one family. See their home. Understand their daily economics. Learn what keeps them up at night.
• Mirror Mode: Tell us what worries you (education, money, health, safety) and we’ll match you with a family across the world who shares that exact concern. Different context. Same humanity.

The thesis is simple: specificity is the antidote to othering.

Why now?

Because the algorithms that shape our attention have figured out that abstraction drives engagement. “They” is more clickable than a name. Outrage scales; intimacy doesn’t.

But I believe most people aren’t hostile. They’re just underexposed. They’ve been given categories instead of stories. Headlines instead of kitchens.

This project is a small bet that if you show people who’s actually behind the “them,” one family at a time, something shifts. The category cracks. The blur sharpens into a face.

And you can’t dismiss a face.

That’s it. That’s the whole idea.

If it resonates, take a look: BehindEveryThem.com. I’d be curious what you think.