What this is

The premise: this game was sent back from 2076. The people who kept its archive lived through what came after the late 2020s, and their record of those years has holes exactly where ordinary people stopped showing up. They can't go back and fill them. They can send this to someone who still can.

The Republic Below is a civic-action game with a 1996-style story as its reward. Each week you do five small real things about one real item on a real local agenda: read it, write to the board that owns it, talk to one neighbor, bring five neighbors together, and show up where it gets heard. Each one lights a window. Enough windows and a cutscene plays.

How a week works

The week starts gray on Monday. You pick one item from the agenda where you play. The five widgets live in two places: the kitchen (between the lines, in your own words) and the street (two doors down, the porch light, folding chairs). Each one ends with a plan: when, where, with whom, on your calendar.

The first, third, and fifth things you finish each play a short scene. After all five, the kitchen again, and four doors: join the PTA, run against the board, pack the hearing, or start the thing they won't. The choice goes in the archive. Next Monday the lights go out, the archive keeps the week, and there's a new list.

Where you can live, and why only three places

The game reads real agendas, so each place has to be switched on by hand. Right now that's San Francisco (the Board of Supervisors and the SFUSD board), Beverly Hills (the city council, the BHUSD board, and the LA County supervisors), and Nevada City (the city council, the Nevada County supervisors, the NJUHSD board, the county board of education, and the county's eight elementary school boards). Every Monday morning a crawler reads their posted agendas from Legistar, BoardDocs, Granicus, and the counties' own sites. If a crawl fails, last week's list stays up with its date.

Some boards post agendas behind systems that block automated readers: Beverly Hills Unified, Nevada Joint Union, the Nevada County Board of Education, and the Nevada City, Grass Valley, Penn Valley, Pleasant Ridge, and Union Hill school districts. The game doesn't sneak past that. Until they allow it, their items don't appear, and you can name one yourself.

Towns get opened by the people who live there: a city, a district, a library, a nonprofit, a foundation, a neighbor with a budget. If you want yours, write to josh@thedemocracy.studio.

The five things on your list

An agenda has dozens of items, most of them contracts and minutes. The game keeps an item only if it passes at least two of five plain tests: it names a specific place (a street, a school, a park); something is being closed, cut, sold, or restricted; it touches money you pay (a fee, a rate, rent, a fine, parking, a tax); it's about safety, kids, water, fire, or animals; or it's being heard or voted on in the next two weeks. Items on the regular agenda beat the consent calendar, hearings beat reports, and items that come back beat new ones.

The tests are rules, not a model's judgment, so every pick can be explained. They will be wrong sometimes, and they will be tuned. If nothing on the list is yours, “something else” lets you name it.

The receipts

Every action in the game borrows from research where doing the thing, not reading about it, changed something. Each one has its own page: why it's here, the study behind it, every source with a link, and the honest part, where the evidence runs thin.

• 1between the lines

  Deciding when and where you'll go makes it much more likely you actually go.

  Controlled
• 2in your own words

  A message from someone who actually lives there tells an official a voter is paying attention. In a randomized test, it moved votes.

  Controlled
• 3two doors down

  A short conversation with a neighbor goes better than people expect, and listening first is what moves anyone.

  Controlled
• 4the porch light

  Neighbors who know each other check on each other when things go wrong.

  Practice
• 5folding chairs

  Local meetings are small enough that one more person changes who the room hears.

  Field
• 6the balcony

  Replaying a hard moment from a distance lets you think it through without living it again.

  Controlled
• 7the whole loop

  Small finished steps, and nothing that punishes a missed week.

  Practice

The doctrine

Invent no conspiracy where incentives suffice, no certainty where the record is contested, and no future the real institutions of September 25, 2026 could not plausibly produce.

At every step up, from the PTA to a statewide seat, the game offers four ways to take part. They aren't a list. They're the corners of two questions: where do you stand, inside the system or outside it? And what are you after, reforming how things run or upending it? Inside means holding or running for the seat, or working in the institution itself.

Telling the corners apart: from outside, if you're asking the people in the seat to make the change, that's Pressure; if you're making it without them, that's Build. Inside the system, working it as it's meant to run is Inside; getting in, by winning the seat or taking the job, to change how it runs is Iconoclast, and so is acting from inside when you're already there, like reporting what's wrong or organizing the people you work with. Each way costs something, and the game keeps track of that. None of them is the clean one.

What stays on your phone

Everything you type: notes, letters, plans, your name if you give it. There is no account. Your zip code is sent once, to look up your city and county, and nothing is kept on our side. The game's memory of you lives in this browser; clearing site data resets it.

If your zip code isn't one of the three places, you play as a visitor. What you write is sent from where you live, and says so.

“Count me” is off unless you turn it on in settings. If you do, finishing something adds one to a public tally: the week, your county and state, the place it was about, and which widget. Nothing you wrote. The game runs no analytics and no third-party scripts.

Lines it won't cross

The game never tells you who or what to vote for. It shows you what's on the agenda and who decides it. What you think about it is yours.

Nothing it suggests involves violence, or breaking the law beyond peaceful civil disobedience in the tradition that has always been part of how change happens here.

Real officials appear only as their public record. The game helps you write in your own words and never puts words in anyone else's mouth.

One more thing

This is a small thing, not treatment. If today is heavier than a fifteen-minute thing can reach, say so to a person. In the US, 988 answers calls and texts around the clock.

Credits and contact

Made by The Democracy Studio. Agenda data comes from the public posting systems of each body, linked item by item. Fonts: Press Start 2P, Jersey 15, Jersey 25, and Pixelify Sans, from Google Fonts. Music and art are original.

Towns, corrections, and questions: josh@thedemocracy.studio.