Isolation is the obvious answer to the Beatles' question about where all the lonely people come from.  While globalization has made it possible to connect previously isolated economies, it has simultaneously led many individuals, in the US in particular, to use their personal wealth achieve greater degrees of isolation.   It's not just the private homes, private transportation, and private online worlds, it's also the way we shop now, increasingly interacting with businesses, brands, and products with which we have little or no personal relationship.

Consider how much our relationship to food has changed in the last century.  Our great grandparents would, in their youths, have been shocked to learn we 21st centuryites of don't even know which fruits and vegetables are in season, much less where they come from.

An apple, like any product, has a story.  So does any company.  But today we are rarely offered these stories, and when we get them, they're canned -- often literally.  When we miss these stories, we miss a great sense of connectedness.  Not only do we interact with the world in shallower ways, but we also lose our feeling of community and our sense of interdependence.

Hooze will help address this problem in two ways:

1. by providing a place for gathering companies' and products' stories, and
2. by organizing stories in ways that help us find connections

A major part of finding connections is nourishing local economies.  Our world economy has gone from predominantly local to predominantly global; it needs to be more balanced.  Global economies open up possibilities that would never otherwise emerge, but local economies foster connection, empowerment, and personal development.  Those are qualities of life that few of us want to trade away, though we often need stronger signals to remind us that we may be making those trades unconsciously.

Hooze aims to help provide those signals.