FAQ
Most frequent questions and answers
Charity? What is charity? It is often people with power, doing something they enjoy that they pretend some less lucky people need. So, no, Rorshok is not like that. BUT…we don’t make a profit. Any money we take in will go back into the effort. We don’t have official non-profit or charity status because we aren’t asking foundations or governments or whatever for money and also we’re busy doing things to be too persnickety with arrangements like that. So the best description would be that we are a social enterprise, or even a zebra as they are sometimes called. We are impact driven. Rorshok wants to do cool, useful, interesting things, and bring in enough money to allow us to keep doing them.
Well, as we said, not profit. And we are not meeting our costs now, but we are trying to, so we very much encourage you giving us money. We try to keep our costs very low, so we can do things like the updates, Ourzines, and other new things. But we are not yet able to cover those costs.
We are open to connecting with anyone that wants to share ideas or thoughts with us. Please, email us at info@rorshok.com and we promise we will write back.
The name “Rorshok” is reminiscent of the Rorschach or inkblot test, named after its creator, a Swiss psychologist, Hermann Rorschach. The connection ends there mostly. But we liked how it sounded. But, not being gifted spellers, we decided to spell it phonetically.
We all project our preconceptions onto everything we see or hear. As an organization that seeks to recategorize, and to some degree shake up, how we learn and connect, we wanted to have a name that didn’t predetermine our path. But was somehow bold rather than tentative. Rorshok seemed to fit the bill and is lots easier to spell than Rorschach.
The name is pronounced like Roar Shock which is the origin of the logo. We don’t roar or shock, in fact just the opposite. But it does grab attention which is what logos and names are in part supposed to do.
Social media platforms can be sources of codependency and anxiety, they keep us scrolling for hours and staring at the screen hoping for likes, or what is called “engagement” but which is not engagement by any real or healthy standard. Our thoughts and lives are constantly interrupted by notifications, but we still hope for more of those micro-validators.
In Rorshok, we want to make sure that the time you spend online is shorter, more directed, useful, and enriching. We are not against technological advances, they are a part of our lives now. In fact, we think they may provide us with very useful tools of communication and connection, but we need to find a way to use them to help ourselves and mitigate their negative aspects. We work on all of our projects with that in mind.
And remember, as you scroll, that you and your attention and preferences are being mined or extracted, packaged, and sold for enormous amounts of cash. It’s kind of gross. We’re looking for a new way.
No. They aren’t. These are questions that some of us made up in the hopes that they may sound sort of like things that people who read the FAQ part of the website might ask. (How’d we do?) But if you have other questions, ask them! And we’ll answer them.