Social sorting: belonging gated behind conformity. Communities built for you don't reach you because discovery infrastructure wasn't built to find them.

The community built for you is not visible from where you are. Not because it failed. Because the platforms that map your city were built to surface what's popular, not what's near you. Conformity scales. Proximity doesn't. Discovery infrastructure wasn't built to find what exists at the neighborhood level. It was built to find what performs at the national level.

The Proximity Index is the research instrument built to measure this gap. First deployed in the civic resource domain, where BIPOC-led nonprofits and workforce development organizations were chronically undiscovered by the very communities they served, it quantifies the difference between what a community produces and what the people in that community can actually find.

Polarity GPS turns that instrument into a product. A location game where every move surfaces what exists within walking distance, through mission-based exploration that makes proximity a practice rather than an afterthought. The theory of change: community happens in person. You have to go somewhere. Polarity GPS gets you there.

The Proximity Index in the civic domain takes two inputs: the cultural and civic output produced within a geographic radius (music venues, nonprofit organizations, cultural institutions, community events, mutual aid infrastructure), and what discovery platforms actually surface to residents of that radius. The gap between those two is the score.

The Providence pilot drew from MUSEOFRI's institutional network, the Providence city directory, and manual audits of standard discovery platforms including Google Maps, Yelp, and social recommendation tools. The audit compared what was findable through standard discovery channels against what existed and was actively serving the community.

Polarity GPS is designed to target the specific gaps the Proximity Index identifies: surfacing the venues, organizations, and community infrastructure that scored highest on the index, the things most invisible to the people they were built for. The 90-day intervention study tracks whether mission-based proximity discovery shifts participants' Proximity Scores relative to a control group using standard platforms.

The Providence pilot found that the gap was not caused by a lack of output. BIPOC-led organizations, local music venues, community-building initiatives, and cultural institutions were actively producing. The infrastructure connecting residents to them was missing.

Discovery platforms optimize for nationally recognized venues, chains, and highly-reviewed businesses. The civic and cultural institutions built at the neighborhood level, the ones that create actual community belonging, are systematically buried in results pages residents never reach. This is not a search problem. It is a design problem: the platforms were not built to serve proximity.

This research is ongoing. The controlled Polarity GPS intervention is the first test of whether proximity-based, mission-driven discovery can shift that score in a measurable direction. If you are in a position to accelerate the work, through community access, institutional partnership, or methodological expertise, reach out.

Polarity GPS frames city exploration as a game because the habit of looking for what's nearby has to be rebuilt from scratch. Missions structure proximity-based discovery into a practice: find this venue, attend this event, discover this cause. Each mission is a direct response to what the Proximity Index found, a targeted intervention at a specific gap between what exists in a community and what residents can find.

The theory is that community happens in person. Not through content. Not through following. You have to show up somewhere, repeatedly, until you become a regular. Polarity GPS is built to generate that first trip, and the ones after it.

The longer-term integration is WAXFEED. As you explore Polarity GPS missions, the music playing is sourced from local artists performing in the venues you are discovering. WAXFEED becomes the in-game soundtrack: the cultural layer of a city you are only now beginning to explore. You hear the artist in the feed, discover they are playing two blocks away, and the venue is already a mission. The loop closes.

Explore Polarity GPS →

The Providence baseline study needs community access, venue partnerships, and field research. Early contributors get their name on the study and early access to Polarity GPS when it launches.