When I started designing All Me in 2023, I believed the primary problem I was trying to solve was privacy.

At the time, my focus was on creating a safer digital environment for people. The concerns were familiar ones: surveillance-based business models, identity exposure, behavioural profiling, algorithmic manipulation and the growing imbalance between platforms and the individuals using them.

The objective seemed relatively straightforward. Build a platform that returned agency to users and allowed people to control their own data.

Three years later, I still believe those problems matter.

What I didn’t expect was to discover another problem hiding underneath them.

Context collapse.

The Discovery

The further All Me developed, the more I realised that identity exposure wasn’t the only thing causing friction in people’s digital lives.

In many cases, the challenge wasn’t privacy.

The challenge was that people were being forced to present themselves as a single thing.

Most social networks assume that one profile is enough.

One profile for work. One profile for business. One profile for family. One profile for hobbies. One profile for interests. One profile for future ambitions.

Everything is expected to fit together.

The problem is that real life rarely works like that.

The Myth of the Single Identity

Modern life is increasingly multi-dimensional.

A person may be:

• An employee
• A consultant
• A founder
• A volunteer
• A creator
• A parent
• A child
• A grandchild
• A musician
• A writer
• A future entrepreneur

None of these are separate people.

They are separate contexts.

Yet most social platforms continue to treat them as if they should all coexist inside a single digital identity.

The more I considered this, the more obvious it became that many of the problems people experience online are not simply privacy problems.

They are context problems.

People are trying to manage multiple worlds through a single profile.

A Small Shift In Thinking

At some point during development, my thinking changed.

Instead of asking:

How do we protect identity?

I started asking:

What if a profile isn’t an identity at all?

That led to a surprisingly simple conclusion:

A profile is not a person.

A profile is a context.

It sounds like a small distinction, but it fundamentally changes how you think about social interaction.

How This Changed All Me

This evolution in thinking has directly influenced the launch profile model.

At launch, All Me will support:

• Anonymous profiles
• Ways of Working profiles

Anonymous profiles address privacy.

Ways of Working profiles address context.

People increasingly operate across multiple forms of work and contribution. Employment, consulting, businesses, startups, creative ventures and future ambitions often exist simultaneously.

Rather than forcing everything into a single profile, the platform will allow separate contexts to exist independently.

Not because people have multiple identities.

But because they have multiple ways of participating in the world.

Looking Beyond Launch

Interestingly, the more we developed this model, the more it became apparent that work is only one category of context.

Other obvious contexts are beginning to emerge.

• Interests
• Family
• Communities
• Friendship groups
• Shared activities

In many ways, the launch model feels less like a finished destination and more like the first practical implementation of a broader idea.

Where My Thinking Sits Today

If you had asked me in 2023 what problem All Me was solving, I would probably have answered:

Privacy

Today, my answer would be different.

Privacy remains important.

Safety remains important.

Agency remains important.

But increasingly I think the deeper challenge is that digital platforms have spent decades trying to represent complex human beings through a single profile.

Perhaps the problem was never identity alone.

Perhaps the problem was assuming that a human being can be accurately represented by one context.

That is certainly where my thinking sits today.

And, as with every aspect of All Me, it will probably continue to evolve.