Generative memory palaces

Saved things; memory palaces; spatial computing; generative worlds and agents—smash them together and what do you get? Here's an imaginary ethnography vignette that fleshes it out...

Self, other, system

Quite accidentally, we've stumbled upon three distinct sub-modes that people move between as curators, as part of the longer pace layer undulations between consuming, curating and creating. Curators tend to: 1) Act selfishly 2) Invoke others 3) Construct systems

Maximise surprise

The perceptions and actions of curators are designed to perturb their surrounding environment and elicit surprise, again and again, and across every domain. They introduce sources of novelty and divergence and interact in ways that catalyse new relationships and insight. That is the fundamental char

I saw this and thought of you

Subset is for those bridge builders who see things and think of people. Its essence is the simple explanation given when something saved is shared with someone who'll care: "I saw this and thought of you."

Non-zero friction

For consumers, this means every touchpoint in the user journey should be slick and smooth and never, ever invoke end user thought. For creators, the friction that must be minimised is the friction that is demonstrably non-value-generating, which equates to the majority of creator workflows and proce

My Archivist

This evoked a speculative capability for Subset we've been considering. Something that eliminates the need to: Look up referenced items, mid-communication, during a call. Send a follow-up containing links to discussed items after a session. It has two variants. The first provides a basic post-meetin

People search people

People are searching the web because the web is a proxy for other people. People search people. The correct atomic unit of search is not the website but a person. The traces of engagement certain people leave as they traverse the web. However, our current paradigm of search is a dual class landscape

Machinic curation

Imagine that, at the same moment, your friend sends you a link to a new EP from your favourite band whilst the new EP is surfaced front and centre of your Spotify home page. Which act of curation evokes the strongest response, and why? Do you see your friend's understanding of your taste in music as

ANOM

One of Subset's core capacities is humane routing—the ability to share something with someone via patterns. Rating within the ANOM model sketched above could determine the power dynamics of the sharing activity. For example, a sender that has just a single trusted channel with a recipient is rate-li

Humane routing

Machine agents conducting global information symphonies at incomprehensible scales and tempos is an accepted part of modern reality. Unfortunately, so is the dysfunctional delivery of saved things to specific destinations. Consider this scenario: you're online—somewhere, somehow. You see something a