Values

We default to collecting nothing. If a feature doesn't strictly need a piece of data to function, we don't gather it. The people we build for are often the ones most endangered by data exposure — surveillance of organizers and artists is real and material. We act accordingly.

We do not build the machinery of the thing our clients are often fighting. No third-party analytics, ad pixels, fingerprinting, session replay, or behavioral tracking — unless a client has explicitly weighed it and chosen it with full understanding. We reach for privacy-preserving, cookieless, aggregate-only, or self-hosted alternatives first, every time.

We build as if the code will be read, because it should be. Work is open-source by default. Closed-source happens only at a client's documented request — never as our quiet preference. Open work is accountable work, and it lets movements share, fork, and outlast any single project.

We refuse the assumption that underdog causes get underdog work. High craft is how we signal that the people we build for, and the people they serve, matter. Cutting corners on a movement's website is cutting corners on the movement.

We are tech and design experts. We are not movement organizers, and we don't pretend to be. Organizers and the people active in their movements carry the strategy, the relationships, and the lived experience — and that expertise outranks ours on everything that matters about the movement. We listen before we prescribe, we defer to their judgment on their own work, and we never mistake our craft for their wisdom. Solidarity means knowing what we don't know.

We are not neutral and we don't pretend to be. We work in service of social justice and the artists pushing culture forward. That stance is the studio.

Picking a side means refusing the other one. We do not work for:

• Police, military, and the carceral state — law enforcement, prisons, ICE and border enforcement, defense and weapons, and the surveillance contractors who serve them. We don't build for the apparatus our clients resist.
• Extractive corporate power — fossil fuels, predatory landlords and real-estate speculation, union-busters, and predatory finance.
• Surveillance and data brokers — ad-tech, data brokers, and tracking or biometric firms whose entire business is the thing we refuse to build.
• Hate, oppression, and disinformation — anti-LGBTQ+, white supremacist, anti-abortion, or propaganda and disinformation operations. Anyone working against liberation.

No fee moves this line. If we have to ask whether a prospective client belongs on this list, that hesitation is usually its own answer.

We use AI as a craft tool, and we draw a hard line at exploitation.

• We use AI as a tool. It speeds up code, research, drafts, and scaffolding, and helps us deliver high craft to clients who can't pay high-craft prices.
• We respect artists. We don't train models on anyone's work without consent, and we don't ship generative art that displaces the very artists we exist to serve. Human hands make the creative work.
• Always disclosed. Clients know where and how we use AI. No quiet substitution.
• Privacy is religion. AI tooling follows the same privacy rules as everything else here: no client or community data fed into systems that would leak, retain, or surveil it.