About

In the 80s, I had a CB radio. I talked to friends, but I also talked to complete strangers. You didn’t know who was out there. You just happened to be in range of each other, at the same time.

Then came the internet. Chatrooms took that same spontaneity and made it global. ICQ followed, and suddenly we knew when our friends were online.

Around the same time, Bluetooth appeared, and I remember thinking we had almost come full circle. After years of making communication global, our devices could suddenly notice that something else was nearby.

Then came Friends Reunited, Facebook and the social networks, and the internet became incredibly good at connecting us with people we already knew.

But I have always been interested in something slightly different.

The people we don’t know yet.

Somewhere in all of that, we lost the local.

Community used to be everyone in the village helping the farmer get the harvest in, because without it they would all have a hard winter. It was never only about the work. There was cider and food, things got mended, somebody watched the children. The togetherness happened because it had to.

Very little of that is left, and a good deal of what replaced it is fear. We are told constantly that the world is a dangerous place. The news carries the attack and the thing that went wrong. It never carries Mr Jackson getting a barn owl out of the pond, or the hundred other small kindnesses that happened that day.

DELULU is not going to fix that, and it would be a strange thing to claim.

What it can do is make use of what is still there.

So it is the harvest again. The thing has to be happening first. DELULU is only any use in the middle of something that was already going on. It needs somebody to have bothered.

DELULU is about meeting people in the real world, so safety can’t be something added afterwards. Nobody gets your location, a Wave goes nowhere unless it is returned, and Findable switches itself off when the time runs out. That’s not a list of promises. It’s how DELULU works.

Technology has changed rather a lot since the CB radio.

It was finally time to do something with it.

And there is one other part of that old idea that matters.

DELULU doesn’t quietly watch where people are gathering and call it clever. It cannot see that something is happening unless somebody has chosen to say so. If nobody chooses to be discovered, there is nothing to discover.

That is deliberate.

A crowd of people who have published nothing has not asked to be discovered.