The Grey Company project serves three purposes:

• Organize and connect people with technical ability and "know how" with doers who seek space to continue making the world a better place, while limiting interference from those would stop that work. Hopefully in doing so, the technically able and the doers begin to resemble one another.
• Catalog resources that enable the first goal. Weather the sources are of projects and technologies that enable, or philosophical/political material to inspire, the Grey Company serves as location to easily reference ideas in this space.
• Start projects and share ideas of our own to synthesize the materials found elsewhere into yet another resource for positive change.

Who are we?

The Grey Company is self selecting. If you say you are trying to find technical solutions to Increase your brand of autonomy, so long as it doesn't violate the autonomy of others, and want to share ideas to make that happen, you can be a member of the Grey Company. We are Technologists, Activists, Students, Teachers, Philosophers, Individualists, Idealists, the disenfranchised, the oppressed, the hopeful, and many others. While there is a staff that works on the Grey Company properly, that specific team is not the gate keepers of those who wish to participate as members of the project. While we don't expressly claim the ideas of anyone purporting to be in league with the Grey Company, and acknowledge everyone has a slightly different view of what individual and collective autonomy looks like, we wish to foster the connections that encourage conversations that move us all toward some ideal of "Better".

Why "The Grey Company"?

It's a joke that became a serious reflection on an obscure reference that the more we thought about it, seemed to embody the general idea of what we aim to do. A number of venture capital backed tech start ups exist that have Lord of the Rings inspired names, and with varying degrees disregard for any specifically benevolent goals. We asked the question "What if you could have a LOTR inspired tech startup, but just for doing good?". We realized we were talking about an action oriented non-profit, but kept the Tolkien inspired name and started running with it.

In "The Return of the King" the chapter entitled "The Passing of the Grey Company" describes a group of rangers (and two elves) who travel from the north, summoned by a message from an unknown source, to find Aragorn and come to his aid. The "Dúnedain" or "Men of the West" were the last remaining descendants of the Númenorians, a civilization with immense technological and arcane capability, which ultimately fell, in part because of the unharnessed technological power. Depending on the degree to which you want to examine the lore and draw parallells, the analogy holds or falls apart. The idea is a collection of talented individuals with backgrounds in technology who, when called, are willing to march to defend the realm from the threat of a great oppressive power.

The "Men of the West" idea holds to the extent that "western liberalism" concerns itself greatly with individualism, autonomy and human rights and freedoms. We of course don't believe this is a limitation to just the "West" (in contrast eastern collectivism) or indeed to just "Men" (in a gendered sense, not in the multi-racial context of Tolkien's Taxonomy of Fantasy Lineageages (Elves and Dwarves and Men and halflings etc)). There is also a discussion one could have about the principles of "Classic Western Liberalism" versus "Modern Western Liberalism" neither of which the Grey Company strictly endorses. In any case, The Grey Company stuck as a cool fantasy label for the group of people with our goals. Welcome.