Project 1518
"I actually had a huge crush on you back then. If only we'd known."
The Catastrophe
Despite being more connected than ever, we are experience a public health crisis of loneliness and isolation.
Project 1518
Cultivate poetic infrastructure by drawing on the arts, sciences, and humanities with an emphasis on human-scale design.
Goals
Relationships are complicated, nuanced, and often silly. We need systems that make sense so we don't have to.
"No, I didn't send that. Must have been noise in the wires. Yes, I'm sure."
In the timescale of human life, the internet and social media are pretty new. Many of our old norms don't fit our current reality. Etiquette, expectations, even meaning are in flux.
These interpersonal technologies have also broadened our horizons, let us explore new identities, and given us the chance to participate in vast communities. The good and the bad come together, and our role is to embrace this new reality and evolve into a thriving dynamic new normal.
"Rumor has it that Alice and Eve have been hanging out a lot lately."
There are nearly 8 Billion people alive on this Earth; most of them are strangers. That's great news from a databasing perspective, because keeping track of unique asymmetric relationships between every pair of elements in a set that size would require 6.4x10^19 data points.
For context, it is estimated that the Big Bang happened 4.3x10^17 seconds ago. That's a lot of relationships.
"'We don't talk anymore. I'd be there if he really needed something, but it just, well, we just don't. Door's always open though."
Thank you for your interest in the project, and before you consider volunteering to work on the team, we ask that you familiarize yourself with the following topics.
Watching the videos is plenty, this isn't a test.
Human-Scale Design
Differential Privacy
Prosocial Evolution