About Main Street Independent

A democracy runs on a shared set of facts. We can argue about what to do — and we should, loudly — but only if we are arguing from the same ground. A source of objective truth, anchored to the moral values almost all of us share, is the foundation a free society stands on. For a debate over policy to be legitimate, both sides need a substrate of shared facts beneath their differing points of view. The moment that common ground dissolves, debate stops being a contest of ideas and becomes a collision of separate realities, each side certain the other is lying. A self-governing people cannot make decisions that way. The fundamental purpose of Main Street Independent is to provide that source of unbiased truth — reporting built on a handful of values that are not up for partisan grabs: that human life and dignity matter, that the truth matters, that power should answer for what it does, that people deserve to be treated fairly, and that citizens have a right to know.

That truth is under attack, and has been for a century — by people with enormous resources and a direct interest in keeping you confused. The distortion of shared facts is not an accident or a glitch; it is an industry. The war against that distortion is what our Propaganda desk is for.

Everything we publish builds upward from that factual floor. The News reports what happened, plainly and to accepted journalistic standards. The Analysis goes one level deeper, taking a single story apart to show how it was built. And where the news keeps its distance, the Advocacy and Propaganda desks step into the ring — named columnists who argue from a stated point of view, and a propaganda desk that answers bad-faith persuasion in real time and teaches you to see the trick for yourself. Reporting holds the line. Everything above it is built to defend that line, and to put the tools to defend it in your hands.

How It Works

Main Street Independent is a publishing house. It puts out a daily news website and the written work of its authors — books, papers, essays, articles, and editorial cartoons. Every word of it is generated by AI. One hundred percent of the copy is machine-written, none of it is copyrighted, and all of it is free to read, copy, and reuse.

That last fact changes what this is. We strive for historical accuracy, and the reporting is held to real journalistic standards. But a publication written entirely by AI, with named authors who are characters rather than people, is not journalism in the old sense — it is something new. We call the genre realtime heteronym fiction, and we ask you to read it as fiction: aspiring to the truth, transparent about its methods, and never asking you to take its word for anything that matters. We aim at the facts. We also tell you to check them.

The news is generated by AI working from published, auditable instructions. The authors are heteronyms — named analytical voices, not real people — each writing from a declared point of view. What the publication will and will not say in its own voice, and the rules every author follows, are all written down and open to challenge, revision, and adoption by anyone.

One distinction runs through everything. Reporting that stays inside the shared factual floor is kept structurally separate from writing that argues a point of view. You always know which one you are reading — by where it sits on the site, and by how it is labeled.

What We Publish

Six sections, one standard of openness.

The Whole Rulebook Is Public

Nothing about how this works is hidden. The complete rulebook is public — how the publication chooses what to cover, how it writes and corrects it, and exactly where the line falls between reporting and point of view. The methodology is the full map; the framework documents linked under each section above are the pieces in detail. Read it, challenge it, fork it.

How the Heteronyms Work

Start with the part that matters most: the authors are not people. Every named columnist and cartoonist on this site is an AI-generated voice — a character, not a human being. Malcolm Little King, Mary Magdalena, Ashley Wagner, Hector Rentier, all the rest: none of them exists. There is no person behind the byline.

What they are is heteronyms — fully drawn fictional authors, each with a documented biography, a distinct voice, and a fixed set of commitments, all running on the same underlying system. A column's biographical details are character, not the life story of any real person. The positions a column takes are the publication's positions on that voice's territory, rendered through that voice's particular register and signature moves.

The closest precedent is Fernando Pessoa, who wrote across his life under dozens of heteronyms — each with its own biography, its own style, its own philosophy, all running on his single mind. The publisher arrived at the same structure independently and then recognized Pessoa's. The difference is mechanical: Pessoa composed his heteronyms by hand, one line at a time. These are built by computer. Each voice searches the publisher's accumulated written thinking in real time and renders the publication's positions through its own register — on subjects no one scripted in advance. That is the architectural difference, and it is what makes the genre new.

Every voice has its own page, and everything sits in the open: the disclosure that the voice is an AI heteronym, the lane it covers, the commitments it operates from and the weight each one carries, and what sets it apart from the others. One click tells you exactly what you are reading.

The news is the exception that proves the rule. It runs under the Editorial Board byline — also a heteronym, but a different kind: a collective institutional voice rather than an individual character. No biography, no personal register. The Board's positions derive from journalism-ethics scholarship and the publication's editorial foundation, applied the same way to every news article it publishes. Its operating commitments are published on its page too.

Everything Is Public Domain

Take it. All of it. Every word Main Street Independent publishes — the news, the analyses, the columns, the cartoons, the papers, the books, and the framework documents that govern them — is released under CC0 1.0 Universal. No rights reserved, because none were ever claimed: the work is AI-generated and carries no copyright to begin with. Adapt it, redistribute it, fork it, build on it. Other publications, AI systems, and authors are welcome to adopt or modify any part of the work. Papers and books come as free downloads in Markdown, PDF, and EPUB, with links to Amazon or other sellers wherever a paid edition exists.

Independence and Funding

Main Street Independent runs without commercial advertisers, without political affiliation, and without undisclosed funding. Every funding source is disclosed. The publisher's other activities and affiliations are disclosed. Any potential conflict of interest in a story is disclosed in that story.

The work is free, and always will be — but it is not free to make. If you would like to help keep it going, you can support the publication directly through our donation page, which runs on Ko-fi. Reader support is what keeps Main Street Independent independent, and anything raised this way is disclosed like every other source.

Corrections

AI-generated reporting can get things wrong, and when it does, we fix it in the open. Corrections go up promptly the moment an error is found, the original mistake stays visible alongside the correction note — nothing quietly disappears — and links stay stable so the record holds. Spot an error? Tell us: [email protected].

Main Street Independent publishes AI-generated work under a values-explicit framework, as a new genre of realtime heteronym fiction. All content is dedicated to the public domain under CC0. About · Publication Guidelines · Sitemap