Why this, now
A clear goal (below)
with two threads to pull
and guidelines
to try to manifest something different
The goal: a fundamental shift to our information-environment state
Data doesn't change
We continue working with data in technology as we currently understand it: binary. Yes/no. 1/0. In/out. On/off.
But we push it. We find and build flexibility, in the control of the people who use it and which it describes.
Metadata is cumulative
Treat every information trove like a library. Not interpreted, but catalogued. Mapped. It's boring, but that's the point. People supply interpretation in every way imaginable, and some that many haven't imagined; to tack closer to useful information, we have to dull the ready-set interpretations at the foundation.
Clean up the noise at the root, so people don't have to spend so much effort trying to figure out how people were trying to figure out how people might be waylaid from what people...yeah.
It'll be a brain bender. It needs information architects and linguists and psychologists and research, at least. We are officially past the point of getting first marks down on an empty page.
Then plan for humanity as we are
People aren't binary. Very little in our biology or thinking says 'binary' without dismissing huge swaths of information.
When we decide to act, fuzziness collapses to a go. Until that moment, it was a fuzzy state of no-go, from a non-potential to a strong probability. That's our closest to a binary state.
People have many thinking tools that we bring into play before that no-go/go shift. We support them by layering multiple user-applied binaries to smudge the root binaries.
The goal: build for humans, effective towards every possible culture, in any potential emerging future, at the root through granular-to-individual control. That's what supports all the unknown futures; all the unimaginable far-flung-future data; and all the models and experiments and mistakes and recalibrations that we'll make.