Conversation

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A great deal of communication medium design effort goes into coupling objects like documents to communications. Attachments, links to google docs, etc. They all seem janky. There are no good solutions. Why? Consider the most stream-native document possible: a Twitter thread
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A thread messes with chronological serialization of a stream by forking off a logical serialization. “Reserializing” the global stream is a trade off between following events in logical order locally on the thread vs following events in chronological order in the stream.
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A document can have an internal clock too. The history of “track changes” or the commit log of a git repo represent internal clocks driven by local state changes. But this time is object-relations time. I-it time. Confined to process rates inside a frame boundary.
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In general, this closed process is too impoverished to be a “headspace” a human can inhabit for long. You can get your head “wrapped around” a complex bit of code or a challenging essay, but it’s stressful, like being underwater. You’ll have to come up for air (richer headspace).
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Social streams, and open natural environments are not I-it time, contained within the closed internal state dynamics of a finite and bounded object. They contain potential for unpredictable stimuli and novel inputs. They create an I-you headspace you can fully inhabit.
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Note that even non-human cpunterparties like a cat or a natural space can create I-you type time (test, if you can anthropomorpize it, it can create I-you time and an indefinitely inhabitable headspace for you). Very rarely, “document” like objects rise to this level.
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So what does this have to do with social media design? Well, it explains why document protocols will always have a minimum necessary jankiness to them. The switching shock from “headspace” and “I-you time” to “head-wrapped around” and “I-it time” is fundamental.
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Second, it offers the VR vs AR question in a very interesting perspective. VR is default document-like while AR is default stream-like. VR time is I-it time by default, AR time is I-you time by default? Can this be changed? Somewhat.
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Even when a VR is multi-player, you’re interacting through a finite avatar that’s in most ways impoverished relative to your full persona. That’s why you need text/audio side channels to complete the experience. Even the richest single-player VR so far can not generate I-you time
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Can AI characters get sophisticated enough to sustain single-player I-you time in VR worlds? That’s basically the same Turing test you’d apply to a simple text chat bot. The sensory richness of VR is a red herring for that question. We’ve not gone too far beyond ELIZA.
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There’s something profound here. The “attaching docs to emails” problem is ultimately about creating Turing-test-passing objects that can create sufficiently strong I-you time to merge into social streams. An attachment is a primitive AI trying to slide into your DMs
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