Chapter 1

Raika swiped right. Over and over again. Before each swipe she halted a moment, contemplating the picture that appeared in front of her. Sometimes she tapped a little hourglass on the top right, making the picture disassembled into a series of drawings appeared, sorting themselves chronically. She zoomed in on some, reading quotes from them, only to close them all by pinching the artificial drawings and swiping right.

With a sudden big exhale she punched the holographic screen floating in front of her, causing it to splinter into countless pieces and the TogetherChain app to vanish. "Still alone", she exclaimed loudly, swiveling around in her chair to face three screens: A small 15-inch screen in the middle, and two bigger ones left and right, the size of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, a newspaper that stopped existing many years ago. Hardware companies adopted this newspaper-inspired design for their screens, as it gave them an air of authority and legacy.

The top half of one of the big screens was filled with numerous little squares, each showing a person. Some were live, others recordings. One of those squares had a green frame that blinked violently. Raika sighed one more time and tossed a little ball on that square. Bonzai!

"Hey Raika, how are you doing? I've been ringing you for the past 5 minutes. How's life? How's the job? Still always busy? You know you should take care of yourself. Do you sleep enough? Are you doing exercise? I've sent you a couple of videos and games you can do. The coach is also hot, I mean, wow. You should just do them to look at his body. So you know what happened yesterday..." Sonja kept on talking, her voice streaming out like a cheerful river, constantly flowing.

Raika pressed a couple of keys on her keyboard, and below Sara's picture a text box appeared. It filled automatically with key points and sentences from whatever Sara’s monologue was. She straightened her eyes onto the smallest, middle screen, and continued with her work, while Sara's voice filled the room with background soundtrack. The program detected pauses, alerted Raika, and displayed a bold sentence in the text box for Raika to read out loud. For Sara, the need for human connection was fulfilled: Someone who appeared to pay attention and listen to her life.

Sara and Raika met in a community for young, ambitious women. She spent hours laboring over the application. It was her ticket to something greater. But soon after Raika got accepted, she grew unenchanted by her fellow peers. No one sought adventure; everyone fixated on their career, achieving the next milestone, as an arrow heading directly towards the goal. She was paired up with a peer. To encourage participation, there were incentives to participate in those meetings, i.e., points for initiating the call, talking time, asking thoughtful questions, and eliciting laughter. You also got points deducted: Swearing, making off-hand comments, or not answering directly. Raika normally started with a negative balance.

The more you talked, the more points you earned. Bored of listening, Raika created a program that would do the laborious task of listening to meaningless chatter and asking the right questions at the right time to simulate an engaging conversation. It took some fine-tuning, but by now, she got the program so well-trained, that she's earning points as a deep thinker. She experimented to incorporate humor but Pete, that's how she named her program, was tremendously bad at making jokes, prompting her to abandon the idea. Right now, Pete needed to learn to be random. But programming true randomness or chaos turned out to be really complicated.

"Well, anyway, thanks for listening. You're the best. Gonna go back to work. You know, my promotion is on the line." And with this Sara blew her a fake kiss. The green frame turned ice-cold blue, but the video of Sara kept on rolling. Sara loves to have her camera on when she's working. "You gotta show up" she would say in her high-pitched voice with a fake smile on her face.

Raika, on the other hand, doesn't believe in the notion of showing up. Contemplating whether to revisit her TogetherChain account, she found  some communities interesting and their score, visualized by the OLTA drawing, wasn't too bad. But the disappointment from past experiences made her reluctant to open up again. She had the sensation that the scores weren't true anymore. Someone was messing with the algorithm,or perhaps too many people are gaming the system, being paid to show up and behave in a specific way. Once you are in those communities, you realize that it's all just fake. Fake. fake. Fake.

If fake communities are topping the list, she thought, who's at the bottom? An idea started to crystalize in her head. "Show me the white paper for TogetherChain, and open the page about the algorithm. Highlight all changes to it chronically." she asked her computer. On the big left screen, a paper appeared in the middle, and spilled math formulas and annotations, spiraling around the original paper. It took some time for it all to be sorted. Each change to the algorithm was annotated with an accompanying announcement.

Initially, TogetherChain was centered around fostering community, uniting people, and helping people create online environments where members feel heard, seen and capable of making an impact. But over time, as clearly visible thanks to the annotation, it morphed into something to please the masses. All complexity of human-to-human interaction is down-weighted in the algorithm. Simultaneously, a surge of bots and incentives for engagement motivated more and more members to adopt that fake nicety. To not ruffle any feathers. All roadblocks and challenges removed.

Hidden behind a bunch of meaningless partnership and funding announcements, Raika noticed that someone had forked the original algorithm of TogetherChain. The repository was public. It wasn't maintained, and the owner's name showed as “account deleted”. Nevertheless, the repo had an updated list of all communities on TogetherChain and their original Together score, before all the alterations took place. Raika noticed that her heart was beating faster. Her palms became sweaty from excitement. Could she, at long last, find her tribe?

Collect the entry, if you want me to focus more on this story. Not sure yet where it is heading.

Inspired by The Diamond Age, my search for my Tribe, and my work on community analytics.