About This Project
Hidden Systems is a public-good educational website. Its purpose is to make visible the complex systems that shape society — systems whose workings are often deliberately or structurally obscured from the people inside them.
The scope is broad by design: food production, financial markets, legal structures, energy supply chains, labor markets, information ecosystems — any system that significantly affects how people live and that most people move through without understanding. Each topic is presented as an interactive graph of concept pages, built from primary research and cited sources, not from headlines or summaries.
The goal is understanding → caring → improving.
The Author
Hidden Systems is researched, written, and maintained by Sean Cherbone — an independent developer, engineer and researcher. The project is self-funded, built on open tooling, and hosted at near-zero infrastructure cost so it can remain free to all readers.
If you're curious how the author approaches building solutions to the problems this project documents, the engineering side lives at MakerOps Labs — an open-source compute stack built to support small-scale device manufacturing on the path to solving some of those same problems.
Support This Work
Each new topic takes meaningful research time and image generation costs. If this project is useful to you and you'd like it to continue, a small contribution goes directly toward funding the next article.
Support on Ko-fi →Sponsor an Article
Organizations aligned with this project's mission are welcome to sponsor a topic. A sponsorship funds the research, writing, and image generation for a new system article, and earns the sponsoring organization a credited acknowledgment on that topic's pages. Topics are selected editorially — sponsorship does not influence content.
If your organization works on or is affected by any system this project covers — or one you'd like to see covered — and would like to discuss a sponsorship, get in touch.
Community
Have a topic you'd like to see covered? Think something should be expanded or reconsidered? The community feedback space is the place to suggest ideas, vote on what gets covered next, and see what others are asking for.
Suggest & vote on topics →Contact
For factual corrections, sponsorship inquiries, or anything else, visit thecontact page.