Icebreaker is a modern networking tool for finding and reaching people and opportunities through mutual trust.
Icebreaker: breaks the ice. Simple.
But do you know what Icebreaker really does?
In early cyberpunk literature, ICE refers to Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, often AIs, that guard large companies' data.
...ICE patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ICE. It was good ICE. Wonderful ICE...
...His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.
The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate's code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived.
— Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
1984 Icebreaker: break through the ice that protects walled data gardens and the nearly unstoppable AIs within them.
2024 Icebreaker: break through the ice that protects walled data gardens and the nearly unstoppable AIs within them.
We believe closed data ecosystems prevent the creation of many apps and use cases that would greatly empower individuals but aren’t otherwise possible because of how hard it is to start new networks from scratch. While technically available, most big companies bury the tools that let you export your data under deep layers of confusing menus, and employ a variety of techniques to ensure this data is hard to use if you get it out.
Meanwhile, they intertwine identity and content so that you can’t leave without abandoning your network and reputation. You are stuck with their recommendation systems (mediocre for you, lucrative for them), dated UX, sponsored content, egregious pricing, and coercive data practices. They rarely interoperate or link out to other platforms because they profit most when you’re engaging with their on-platform content (cue Jonathan Groff).
At Icebreaker, we’re taking the opposite approach: A contentless user-owned identity network.
By not hosting our own content or owning user data, Icebreaker doesn't have an incentive to lock you into Icebreaker. It's in Icebreaker’s interest to help surface data from around the internet and help you extract signal from noise using the power of your identity wherever you are.
Taking inspiration from the best and highly interoperable Web3 wallets and protocols, we believe the best networking app of the future will be the one that builds the best interface for traversing your network and making it useful for you, not the one that best locks you into their platform.
Imagine what it would be like if you could bring your identity and network with you from one app to another. What if you could apply your own content filters based on people you trust professionally when viewing posts on Twitter or reviews on Yelp or Amazon? What if the closed social networks were reduced to pure content platforms so you could pull posts and articles simultaneously from all of them across the internet directly to you, filtered by your trust network?
Or, what if this doesn’t happen? AI-generated content will increasingly take over our feeds with no way of knowing what’s real, while large companies are ambivalent because engagement is all that matters and they would rather extract and hoard our data so they can build more personalized models that subtly and imperceptibly nudge us toward the highest ROI content.
As the world becomes noisier, the answer lies in the people we know and trust.
Our identity and networks are simply too important to be held hostage in closed platforms that we can’t control.
Just as its cyberpunk inspiration, Icebreaker is designed to be your most powerful tool to break the ice and take back control of your data.
