I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole LetsBuySpiritAir.com thing and I honestly think the most interesting part of it isn’t even the airline. It’s the coordination.
Kickstarter already exists, obviously, but Kickstarter is basically built around creators asking people for money to build something. The Spirit thing feels different. It feels more like the internet spontaneously trying to organize itself around a collective idea in real time.
And the weird part is the internet is simultaneously amazing and terrible at that.
It’s amazing at generating momentum. Millions of people can suddenly care about something overnight. But the second that attention starts becoming real coordination, everything immediately gets messy. Fake domains appear, random accounts claim to represent the movement, people don’t know which sites are official, nobody trusts the pledge numbers anymore, communication gets fragmented, and the whole thing suddenly feels fragile even if the original idea still has genuine support behind it.
That’s what made me think there should maybe be some kind of public infrastructure for internet-native collective projects. Not a crowdfunding platform exactly, and definitely not some crypto thing. More like a trusted coordination layer.
Basically a place where projects could establish legitimacy before they get buried under scams, impersonation, and chaos.
I don’t think it should control projects at all though. That part feels important. The platform shouldn’t own movements, dictate governance, hold money, or become another centralized authority deciding what’s legitimate. It should stay neutral and infrastructural. Almost boring in its restraint.
The whole point would just be to provide trust systems. Verified project pages, authenticated organizer accounts, audited pledges, official communication channels, maybe local coordination tools so people can actually see whether support exists near them instead of just abstract internet hype.
Because honestly I think the real product wouldn’t even be the pledges themselves. It would be legitimacy.
Right now internet-native movements mostly run on Discord servers, spreadsheets, Twitter threads, random websites, and vibes. Which works surprisingly well until something suddenly gets big, and then everything starts breaking at once.
I also think it’s important that something like this stays non-custodial. The second a platform starts handling money directly, the entire dynamic changes. Suddenly you’re dealing with regulation, liability, power, and incentives that completely alter the spirit of the thing. I think projects should handle their own fundraising and governance. The platform should just help people coordinate and trust what they’re looking at.
The more I think about it, the more it feels like the internet already has infrastructure for almost everything except collective coordination. We built systems for payments, content, streaming, fundraising, and commerce, but we still barely have systems for helping large groups of people organize around shared public ideas without instantly collapsing into fragmentation and confusion.
And I genuinely think the Spirit thing accidentally exposed that gap.