I've been thinking about this problem for months. It's one thing I can't forget. Because it's in my head—I think about it when I'm in bed. Do you know what it is? It's... this: how can we connect virtual people in a virtual world while using the real world as a landscape to validate real existence and attach it to real purposes?

Let me play with my ideas from scratch.

I have the feeling that when the virtual world becomes completely isolated from the real world, it could become a problem. It's not entirely clear to me yet, but I believe this isolation is a risk for human beings. Today, with all the developments in AI, more than ever.

The possibility of living and interacting with an agent is now absolutely easy to imagine. They can answer and interact in a non-deterministic way. They can learn from patterns and adapt their responses in ways that imitate real humans very, very well. So the idea of somebody living completely isolated on an island—I think, unfortunately, that it could become more than a metaphor. A virtual island, of course, but still real in its effects.

So perhaps our contribution to humanity is to think about a solution to an imaginary problem.

Resistance: trying to keep minds connected to the real world.

And here we face another problem: how can we prove that a virtual entity corresponds to a real human? My answer is that we cannot. There is no way to guarantee that an interaction on the web is generated by a human.

So perhaps the response is different: instead of trying to keep minds in the real world, we should try to keep bodies in the real world.

Just as health apps motivate you to abandon your phone and exercise, we need systems that keep humans physically together in order to validate and confirm the virtual world.

Imagine a mobile app that works through the closest connections. Not a worldwide web, but small, local connections. You can only speak from—and within—your village.

Like torrents: the more seeds, the better.

No algorithms for filtering messages. Geography is the algorithm.

Points connected by lines. Messages only spread through those routes.

You can send one message per day. You can listen as much as you want.

You can send messages to people, to places, or to ideas. Where do ideas live? On the geographies where people talk.