Interconsciousness > Internet

Presence Definition Meaning Art Print by Kaigozen – Fy!

The Internet was built to connect computers. Then documents. Eventually, people.  AI is changing what that connection means.

We are entering a world in which digital identity, content and communication can be generated infinitely and almost perfectly.  The scarce signal is increasingly not what someone posts online.  It’s where they actually are, what they are doing, who else chose to be there and what might become possible because they are there together.

I think presence becomes one of the most important trust and relevance signals of the AI era.  That’s the idea behind what we are building at HadtobeHere.  We want to make physical presence programmable.  A concert, college campus, coffee shop, conference, neighborhood bar, stadium, airport, co-working space.  Each of these physical locations becomes an ambient, permission-based, social data exchange hub. 

Today, thousands of people can occupy the same physical environment while remaining almost completely invisible to one another as potential collaborators, friends, customers, mentors, teammates or communities.  There’s an enormous amount of latent social information in a room.

Who is here?   What brought us here?  What do we have in common?  Who is open to meeting?  What is happening around us right now?  What could we do together?  Most technologies treated location as a coordinate, we think it can become a social primitive.

HadtobeHere is being designed as a presence layer that can transform ambient physical context into privacy-conscious, permissioned connective signals: location, proximity, time, event context, affinity, intent and mutual availability.  Those signals can then power a magical and immediate brand of discovery.

Not people you may know, but people you might want to know, because you’re both here.  That distinction really matters.

Our first job is building the primitives ourselves: presence-aware Rooms, events, trails, real-time affinity signals, mutual-intent matching, ephemeral communication, organizer intelligence and a local commercial layer that allows businesses to participate in the communities physically forming around them.  But the larger ambition is infrastructure.

If this works, HadtobeHere should not ultimately determine every experience built on top of presence. Developers should.  Imagine an API that lets a university developer build a campus mentorship network around who’s actually on campus.  A conference can build its own attendee-matching experience.  A music developer can create an ephemeral community around everyone standing inside a venue.  A coworking company can surface complementary skills among members who happen to be working from the same building on the same day.  A neighborhood business can even create experiences for the community physically forming around it right now.

The underlying primitives remain the same:  Presence. Place. Time. Context. Intent. Consent. Affinity.  The applications become infinite.

That requires solving difficult infrastructure problems: privacy-preserving presence verification, spatial indexing, real-time event architecture, identity and reputation, permissioning, developer APIs, abuse prevention, edge processing, interoperability and eventually an ecosystem in which third parties can safely build on the presence graph without HadtobeHere becoming another centralized repository of everyone's movements.

That last part is especially important.  The goal isn't to build a better surveillance network.  It's to build a consent network.  And, the commercial model follows the same architecture.  Every physical community is also a small economy.  Venues, organizers, merchants, institutions, creators and attendees already exchange enormous amounts of value around physical gatherings.  The connective layer should make those relationships more useful without turning every human interaction into an advertisement.

That's what I mean when I use the term, “sociocommercial.”  While the Internet made information addressable, the next great network should make human presence addressable — with permission.

The Internet connected what we know.  A framework for presence-based Interconsciousness can connect where we are, who we're with and what becomes possible when we discover one another, just in time, in real-time. 

That's the platform we're trying to build.