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Podcast: Interview with Austin, founder of Write In Stone

This post was drafted by Claude Code with AI-assisted research. A human editor partially reviewed it for general accuracy. Verify specific claims against the linked sources.

This interview was recorded on 31 July 2021, the day after Austin attended a DOD session with Hubertus Hofkirchner (co-presenter at the 2017 Citizens' Democracy event). Write In Stone sits at the intersection of journalism and democratic accountability — the premise being that you can't have informed public participation without trustworthy information.

Austin's background: philosophy at Macquarie University → freelance journalism → Beirut during the 2006 war (blog picked up by the Canberra Times) → Cairo during and after the Arab Spring → a decade building the tool.

The problem

Austin's account of his inflection point in Cairo is specific. It's 2012, after Mubarak has fallen. The Muslim Brotherhood has won several elections. The English-language press is treating them as the bad guys. But Austin finds himself at a bar agreeing completely with a journalist from a very right-wing financial publication — a "Ron Paul kind of guy" — because the guy had been paying attention to what was actually happening on the ground.

"It's like, well, what actually matters now is who knows their shit. And that's about it. Because it's actually all about who's been paying attention and who's been doing the work." — Austin

The shared conclusion: if the Brotherhood doesn't finish its term, the military takes over and Egyptian democracy is over. The person across the table held opposite political views. The facts made the ideology irrelevant. When the coup happened anyway, Austin decided that being a single voice shouting counter-narrative into a stadium of other voices shouting wasn't working. He needed a different tool.

What Write In Stone does

The core idea is making the research process visible, not just the conclusion. While researching a story, the journalist records their screen and switches on a webcam at key moments — adding a verbal "highlight" explaining why a particular source or finding matters. The finished article then has a linked research portal: time spent, number of sessions, all the highlights, and playback of the full research process.

Austin's "iceberg" framing: most people see only the tweet (the tip); fewer read the article; the smallest number will look at the underlying research — but those who do get the highest-quality engagement because they see exactly where the information came from.

"Research is valuable, make it visible." — Austin

The underlying principle he calls strength through vulnerability: falsifiability in science, bibliographies in the humanities, police body cameras — the vulnerability of having your process visible is what gives your conclusions credibility when they survive scrutiny. Write In Stone applies this to day-to-day journalism and knowledge production.

"If your evidence trail and your good-faith efforts are visible, then that protects you from attacks on your character. And if your process of creating original work is visible, that protects you from people disputing your ownership of the finished product." — Austin

The fake news problem — and why walls don't work

Austin is explicit that Write In Stone is not a fact-checking overlay, not an algorithm, and not an expert panel deciding what's true. He describes those approaches as "building walls" — getting between the story and the public and acting as a filter. His metaphor: the article is a canoe carrying cargo, social media is the sail that moves it faster but also makes it prone to capsize, Write In Stone is the keel — a small amount of friction that creates stability.

The older media system (Chomsky's goalposts model — agreed left and right boundaries of reasonable discourse producing an established consensus) had serious problems. The current system has no goalposts and no consensus, which is, Austin argues, actively useful to bad actors. The answer isn't to restore institutional gatekeeping. It's to open the process — "build windows, not walls."

The first significant external user at the time of recording was Scott Stedman of Forensic News, whose principle ("evidence is key, articles are always free") aligned closely with Write In Stone's ethos.

Austin's own crystallisation of the positioning:

"We're the anti-Twitter, and we're not against Twitter. When you want to be fast and flippant and fun, you go to Twitter. When you want to take your time and get it right, you use Stone." — Austin

Relevance to DOD

The link to democracy is direct. Informed participation requires trustworthy information. Austin's argument is that trust is rebuilt not by asserting credibility but by demonstrating process — the same "show your working" principle that DOD has applied to deliberative democracy design.

The parallel to the Trust: A Concept Analysis episode — where Alexar Pendashteh explored how trust emerges in open-source governance — is worth noting: both arrive at the conclusion that transparency about process, not just outcome, is what enables trust at scale.

See also