The prototype was for a class on leveraging AI to empower software development, a novel concept in 2024 transformed more mainstreadm in 2026. My inspiration for the project was a general frustration that both myself and society as a whole felt at the time.
In the run-up to the 2024 election, and amid the lingering post-COVID craziness, keeping up with the news felt incredibly overwhelming. There were constant challenges in navigating misinformation, media bias, and an endless news cycle that was difficult to follow, and perhaps intentionally so. The same event could produce dramatically different interpretations, and open, honest conversations increasingly felt divided into two opposing camps.
Most importantly, I felt like I had little agency over how the news reached me. Whether it came through social media, an aggregation app, cable television, or an individual publisher, more and more of what I encountered was being selected by systems I could neither see nor control.
Truthfully though, I originally found it hard to conceptualize the source of this frustration. It wasn’t until I came across two essays written thirty years apart that I was able to verbalize what it was.
Two Cities
In his 1996 essay “The Transparent Society,”David Brin David Brin reflects on the accelerating pace of technological progress and how its growing ubiquity challenges how we as a society maintain privacy, accountability, and the distribution of informational power. In Brin's eyes, the question was not whether we could stop or regulate the spread of ever more capable surveillance technology, as he considered that spread inevitable, but rather who gets to wield it.
Brin illustrates the choice by describing two cities. Both are equally dystopian where cameras watch every street and mass surveillance is commonplace. In City One, those cameras feed only the authorities: governments, companies, and elites can see everything while remaining largely unseen themselves. In City Two, the same cameras exist and institutions still maintain the same power to observe, but at the same time, every citizen can also wield that same power, including at the institutions that govern their lives. Although people’s privacy still comes at a cost, in City Two, the power to observe is held by the public as well.
City One
The surveillance network provides services and information to institutions without collecting their activity. Citizens provide personal data but cannot receive the network's services and information.
City Two
Institutions and citizens both receive services and information from the surveillance network, while institutional activity and personal data both flow into it, making observation reciprocal.
Although neither is perfect, Brin assumes most would choose the second city, and beneath his argument lies a broader concern about information asymmetry: institutions become dangerous when they can know and exercise power over ordinary people while remaining largely mysterious to those who are impacted.
Looking thirty years past when this essay was first published, I believe we still face these challenges today to an even greater extent than Brin had anticipated. Although Brin was primarily concerned with the power to observe, companies today have not only consolidated direct control over these observational technologies, but have also weilded it to capture our attention.
The Attention Economy
This is no better described than in Rai Hasen Masoud’s 2025 essay “The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy.”Rai Hasen Masoud Masoud describes the contemporary digital landscape as an “attention economy” where “human attention has emerged as the principal object of economic capture and commodification.” Dominant institutions compete for that attention by leveraging even more evolved forms of surveillance technology that Brin had imagined to algorithmically extract and personalize content that maximizes engagement. As Masoud explains, human attention is a highly valuable resource in this economy and the core mechanism involved requires free technology services to profit using targeted digital advertising. “Algorithms learn what content maximizes engagement and feed users more of it,” and as Masoud points out, these goals are often achieved and optimized for outrage, anxiety, and/or sensationalism.
Nowhere is this more consequential than how we get our news. It is clear that these technology platforms are “not neutral conduits of information” and their structure “creates direct incentives to amplify emotionally charged, polarizing, or misleading content” which continues to widen the political divide and increase political violence. According to Pew Research, “64% of Americans say social media has a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the U.S. today.”Pew Research We seem to be trapped in Brin’s City One, where, as Masoud put it, “the result is an asymmetrical information ecosystem where a handful of corporate actors wield disproportionate influence over collective consciousness.”
The Guiding Light
So would our ideal digital landscape be a reflection of City Two, a city where Brin describes this power to observe as being reciprocal while still exchanging our privacy as a consequence? Of course not ideally, and I think we could extend this further by imagining a City Three. A city where informational asymmetry still exists except that it is now completely in the hands of ordinary people. This would involve transparency to observe how institutions operate along with avenues for open critique and accountability for their methods of operation. Yes, it is idealistic, but I believe for certain areas of our digital landscape, the consequences of this are important, especially for how we get our news and stay informed as a society. For this, I believe that these institutions must abide by three tenets to achieve this reality: (1) Providing people with the transparency to see how institutions operate, (2) surrendering control so that people have agency over how the system operates, and (3) not requiring forfeiture of privacy in return. Many institutions today claim to champion different bits and pieces of these tenets but very few claim all three, let alone implement them completely. Especially considering our digital news landscape, there is no news institution that achieves all three completely.
City Three
Services, information, and visibility into institution activity flow from institutions to citizens, while citizens' personal data cannot flow back. Citizens retain transparency, agency, and privacy.
That is the guiding light for the Mosaic News project, to create the most transparent, customizable, and private news aggregation platform.
Chapter Summary
Mosaic News started its life out as the “Media Bias Analyzer”, a prototype I built while pursuing my Master of Technology Management at UCSB. My inspiration for the project was a general frustration with navigating the news in our digital landscape where there were constant challenges in navigating misinformation, media bias, and an endless news cycle that was difficult to follow, and perhaps intentionally so. I felt like I had little agency over how the news reached me. To help conceptualize this frustration, I called upon two essays, both written 30 years apart.
In his 1996 essay “The Transparent Society,” David Brin reflects on the accelerating pace of technological progress and how its growing ubiquity challenges how we as a society maintain privacy, accountability, and the distribution of informational power. In Brin's eyes, the question was not whether we could stop or regulate the spread of ever more capable surveillance technology, as he considered that spread inevitable, but rather who gets to wield it. Brin illustrates the choice by describing two cities. In City One, those cameras feed only the authorities: governments, companies, and elites can see everything while remaining largely unseen themselves. In City Two, institutions still maintain the same power to observe, but every citizen can wield that power too, including at the institutions that govern their lives. Although people’s privacy still comes at a cost, the power to observe is reciprocal. Beneath this argument lies Brin's broader concern about information asymmetry: institutions become dangerous when they can know and exercise power over ordinary people while remaining largely unknowable to those people. Looking thirty years past when this essay was first published, I believe we still face these challenges today to an even greater extent than Brin had anticipated.
Although Brin was primarily concerned with the power to observe, companies today possess both the power to observe and to capture attention. This is no better described than in Rai Hasen Masoud’s 2025 essay “The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy.” Masoud describes the contemporary digital landscape as an “attention economy” where “human attention has emerged as the principal object of economic capture and commodification.” “Algorithms learn what content maximizes engagement and feed users more of it,” and as Masoud points out, these goals are often achieved and optimized for outrage, anxiety, and/or sensationalism. Nowhere is this more consequential than how we get our news. It is clear that these technology platforms are “not neutral conduits of information” and their structure “creates direct incentives to amplify emotionally charged, polarizing, or misleading content” which continues to widen the political divide and increase political violence. As it seems, we are trapped in Brin’s City One.
City Two is not the ideal digital landscape because reciprocal observation still comes at the cost of people’s privacy. I believe we can extend Brin’s idea by imagining a City Three, where informational asymmetry is completely in the hands of ordinary people: they can observe, critique, and hold institutions accountable with no reciprocal expectation that institutions can do the reverse. For this, institutions must abide by three tenets: (1) Providing people with the transparency to see how institutions operate, (2) surrendering control so that people have agency over how the system operates, and (3) not requiring forfeiture of privacy in return. That is the guiding light for the Mosaic News project, to create the most transparent, customizable, and private news aggregation platform.