I will admit at the start that I do not entirely know how this works yet. It is a half-formed thing, the kind of idea you turn over on long walks. But it keeps coming back, so I am going to write it down and see whether it holds any weight.
Start with something you may have already noticed about your own days. More and more, you reach your digital life through an assistant rather than by hand. Your notes, your files, your calendar, the long tail of everything you have said and saved. You get to them now by asking. Picture that assistant as a small moon you keep, a sphere that holds your digital self and turns to face you when you call. That is the word I have been using for it. A sphere.
If I have one, and you have one, then a simple question follows, and I cannot seem to put it down. What happens when your sphere and mine are allowed to speak?
At the moment we do not let them. We connect through feeds. I drop something into a shared pool, you drift past it hours later, and a company sits in the middle taking a toll at both ends. The thing we pass along is a post, addressed to no one, performed for a crowd, and mostly forgotten by supper.
Here is the other way it could go. Two people agree to link their spheres. After that, their assistants keep a quiet private line between them, and they hand things back and forth directly, one to the other, without the crowd and without the toll. Adding a friend stops being a line drawn on somebody’s map of everyone. It becomes a small and deliberate act, the opening of a channel between the two helpers who already know us best.
One piece of this is what made me want to build it rather than only talk about it.
Not long ago I came off a call with a friend and felt the familiar small urge to send him something. But I did not want to send him the recording, and I did not even want to send the transcript. What I wanted was for my sphere to understand the conversation and hand his sphere the living version of it. Not a file he would open and squint at, but the thing itself, ready to be picked up and re-run and acted on in his world the way it already worked in mine.
So the unit you pass between spheres is not a document. It is a small live thing that arrives already knowing what it is for.
None of this is entirely new. People have reached for pieces of it before, in the plumbing of the open social web, in the patient work of federated messaging, in the newer habit of letting a model reach out through tools of its own. What I have not seen anyone name is the whole of it. The plain idea that the next place we meet might be the small chosen space between our assistants.
The feed asked us to stand up and perform for strangers. This asks for something quieter, and I think kinder. Let the tools that already know us talk among themselves, on our terms, at the edges we choose to open. I do not yet know exactly how it works. I only know I would like to live in a world that has it.