Agora Pluribus Technologies

My Mission

To Empower Ordinary People

The overarching goal of Agora Pluribus Technologies is to explore and create new ways to use technology, art, and music to empower ordinary people to live the lives they want and deserve to live. People should be able to acquire and use their talents to give back to the communities that raised them, rather than be forced to participate in a system that exploits people for profit.

Primarily, the approach will be to develop free and open source software that is designed to undercut the explotative middlemen that keep powerful and useful software tools behind subscription fees and data harvesting.

Software and Technology

As a software engineer with over six years in the industry, I'm using my skills to develop free and open-source software tools that empower ordinary people. Advancements in AI shouldn't only benefit shareholders and bosses in the C-suite. Technology should help everyone.

Democratize the Internet

My current priority is creating a free and open source website builder and publishing tool so that anyone can publish a website as easily as making a Microsoft Word document or drafting an email. If self-publishing were simple and universal, anyone could easily build a personal or professional site to showcase podcasts, blogs, essays, work, music, art, educational content, and more without being forced to go through middlemen who farm user data and content and use algorithms that more often divide people than bring people together.

The Dot Network

Introducing the Dot Network: a free software toolkit you can run on your own computer. No logins. No surveillance or data collection. No performative outrage. Just you, your computer, and tools to empower you.

The software is still in development, but you can check out my GitHub profile to see my work so far:

Here is a list of plugins I plan to develop:

Education

Knowledge is Power, not Propaganda

I believe that education should be democratized. It should be easy to acquire the information people need to succeed. Once I have a website builder and publisher set up, it will allow anyone to publish educational content on the internet for free.

I will focus on two core areas:

Advocacy & Activism

Empower Main Street, not Wall Street

The third plank of my work is advocacy and activism. It's about allowing ordinary people to organize and publish their ideas and collaborate with others in the community without needing to go through exploitative middlemen like PACs and political parties. With the proper tools, people can stand up for themselves, know their rights, and work together to break free from systems that exploit them.

Once I have a website builder and publisher set up, it will allow anyone to host and participate in open online forums that encourage a long form deliberative speech and in-person meetups as opposed to the short-form content that is designed to keep people online and subjected to the whims of the social media algorithms.

About Me

Hi, my name is Michael Yee, and I'm the founder of Agora Pluribus Technologies — a mission-driven civic tech startup dedicated to empowering ordinary people. I've lived in the Greater Philadelphia area my whole life and am currently based out of South Philly.

I graduated from Cornell University College of Engineering in 2019, and I've spent the last six years working full-time as a software engineer. But with everything going on in the world right now, I started to ask myself: What if I could use my skills for something more meaningful than helping my employer exploit working people for profit?

That's why I quit my job at JPMorgan Chase to launch Agora Pluribus Technologies, to use my full range of skills to try to lift up and empower ordinary people.

Support My Work

I won't charge for my software itself. But supporters can contribute in the following ways: