In our first blog we outlined our mission—make saving simple, sharing effortless, and search joyous, and do it in a way that scales. We cited the emerging themes driving it—from the rise of protocols and the calls for human-led taste-making and culture to the approach of a sufficiently decentralised, consumer web and the death of platforms via enshittification. We also relayed our motivation for pursuing the opportunity: it's still so early. The internet as-is and the web as we experience it today is but a few decades old. There's still so much to play for, in both finite and infinite game terms, and we're determined to bring some of the many possible alternatives to life.
We've since realised that an important piece was missing. What we didn't do was articulate why completing this mission and delivering a new way actually matters. Below, we correct that error and provide a short overview of the little why and the big why, respectively: relationships and progress.
The little why: relationships
Relationships are a fundamental building block of our lives, and they're sustained by sequences of interactions that often reference other things, from experiences and stories to places and products. Nowadays, these things are represented digitally, and how we save, share and search amongst them is far from optimal given our current technological capabilities. Our current saving, sharing and search operations are:
Cumbersome, requiring a context-switch to a distinct state of mind
Low-relevance, likely to be unaligned with the context of an interaction
Slow, often interrupting the flow and pace of an interaction
The new way we're working on changes these operations and their impact. It makes them:
Frictionless, preserving the state of mind occupied during an interaction
Contextualised, likely to enrich the context of an interaction
Fast, smoothing the flow and pace of an interaction
Imagine sharing a relevant article with a friend in seconds, rather than taking minutes to search, assess and copy an extract and a link. Imagine recalling a key piece of information from a past conversation without losing the thread of a current discussion. These improvements have profound effects on how we connect and communicate with one another.
Ultimately, better saving, sharing and search means better relationships.
The big why: progress
Better saving, sharing and search operations also mean a greater rate of civilisational progress.
There are many factors that contribute to progress, of course: these range from institutional structures and cultural heterogeneity to the rates of construction, maintenance, development and decay of infrastructure. Another big progress indicator is capital creation and allocation: the ability to alchemise labour and technology into liquid capital and get it to the right people, in the right place, at the right time, in the right way.
Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on one's perspective—many civilisational progress indicators lag information allocation. They dance to the tune of the underlying information symphony. Best case: the right information is generated and it's delivered to the right people, in the right place, at the right time, in the right way.
We don't live in the best case world. Current saving, sharing and search operations have got us closer to it but not as close as we should and could be. We'd like to fix that and, as a higher order effect, unlock several more units of civilisational progress.
"A new way to save, share and search" is about more than mere technological innovation. It's about the base fabric of our relationships and the texture of the emerging reality that unfolds from them over time. Like the civilisational progress indicators that lag behind information allocation practices, our current approaches to saving, sharing and search are no match for the breakneck pace our contemporary society and its environment requires.
We're changing that. We're making saving simple, sharing effortless, and search joyous, and doing it in a way that scales. Why? To enhance relationships and accelerate progress.
