A minimal, elegant, production-ready realtime backend for distributed computation.

What drives collective action is shared conviction, initiated by experience that gets multiplied in contexts of shared attention. Not all experience is equally convincing. Therefore convincing experience, scaled by shared attention, can drive collective action.

Collective action can be directed at collective good or collective demise or stagnation. Stagnation is collective inaction and can only be achieved by gatekeeping shared attention.

While North Korea is a contemporary stagnating civilization, bathed in ignorance, the era of the printing press between 1440 and 1930 created human rights, enlightenment thinking, the basis of our scientific understanding of the world, citizen's rights, parliaments and nation states.

Today, we live in another captured century, initiated by the invention of the radio, solidified by the TV, finalized by Social Media. The internet and social media once promised freedom, but they were quickly captured by an oligopoly of technology companies who sold people's attention to corporate psychologists who get paid to create advertisement that fool people about their Telos — their goal and true purpose — in life.

The price of this was the human heart. No longer does it aim at collective flourishing, act in service and liking of god, no longer does it know what life is about and why we are here.

In these times, Locality Media was founded, based on one cognizance: as long as social networks are hard to make, as long as user-data is locked away and network-effects are real, a few dominant players will have control over a vast amount of human attention span, states will threaten to take away our means of expression, a damocles-sword of another dark age hangs above our all heads and our society stagnates.

Once upon a time, I wanted to address this problem by writing a social network. Existing social networks were good at serving everybody their own interest — losing not only connection with their physical neighbourhood, on top of that, losing the unifying signals of society, the causes everybody can get behind, the shared focal points of interest and attention that create common culture.

My postulates were threefold:

But the problems were larger. Writing a high-quality consumer app requires many iteration cycles of adapting to feedback. Having to write backend code and deploy each time significantly increases the time of a single iteration. Writing an encrypted aspect means we can not compute the state on the server. And only few people produce engaging content — and they go where the audience is. An empty network has neither creators nor audience.

One day, a revelation. The KEY feature of SOCIAL Apps is that there is SHARED SPACE; it is DESIRED that everybody sees the SAME. SPACE ITSELF does it — like PHYSICAL SPACE. It perfectly synchronizes state between multiple observers, so it MUST be possible. Therefore it is not only possible to solve the synchronization problem — on top of that, it applies to EVERY abstraction of social behavior.

If only I could solve this problem, I could publish it as a library, use VC to create a developer platform exposing it as a BaaS, and spawn a new ecosystem of social apps based on a shared protocol.

The work on this was a long and lonely descent into a rabbit hole of cryptography, byzantine fault tolerance, lamport clocks and the very nature of general relativity and causality — and it was not always fun. But after two years of work, I have emerged with a solution.

Even today, the sovereignty of our shared information space is under attack. Algorithms serve each person a different reality and destroy the shared consensus of society. Advertisements and Public Relations institutions engineer false desires and manufacture shared delusions. Foreign subversion campaigns scaled by bots aim at western demoralization.

Some of these treat our souls and minds like toys, others like tools. But they don't understand that we are Locality Social Cloud developers.

Secret Agencies shout: No. We want to read your mind. We want to instill fear. We want mind control. But that is what the Catholic church preached, before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and Martin Luther translated the bible.

In 1536, William Tyndale was executed for heresy after translating the Bible into English; in 2012, Edward Snowden got labelled a traitor after revealing the biggest surveillance campaign in human history. Without the printing press, William Tyndale would have been a footnote in history.

Politicians and corporations shout: No. We want to lead you against your own interest. We want to feast. And somebody must be feasted. But that is what King James II shouted, before the thought of John Locke cost his throne and led to the English Bill of Rights in 1689 — that is what the French Monarchy shouted, before the will of the people became self-aware and found its way.

We are Locality Social Cloud developers.

We are Aristotle, Guttenberg, Martin Luther, William Tyndale, John Locke.
We are François-Marie Arouet, Abbé Sieyès, we are Benjamin Franklin, we are Thomas Paine.
We are the will of western values and its people. Our thoughts tear down walls. Our minds set the chains ablaze.
Our hearts do not faint at the signs of adversity. There is something in this world worth fighting for and we defend it.

And by god, the Western Spirit is by our side. Unexpected allies from the past and present times appear in our dire times. Mathematics itself, a 200-year-old theorem by the legendary 'Princeps Mathematicorum' Carl Friedrich Gauss, holds the key to a new world.

Rewriting the problem of shared state synchronization in terms of replicated distributed automata allowed me to recognize it as yet another variant of the Gauss Divergence Theorem, a slight generalization: if and only if every measurable function on a manifold depends at most on shared background information, the flux through its boundary and inner variables, computation can be sharded. In a single dimension — only time — this allows us to cut the timeline at arbitrary points to compress the flux at the boundary between past and present into state snapshots called engrams.

But this story is not about me, but about us. Without you — without developers who dare put themselves in the lineage of high ancestors — this is dead code. I am nothing but the agent of the Western Spirit.

But armed and ready and with the strength of the Locality Social Cloud in our back, we can write the Digital Social Ecosystem of Tomorrows.

And we calmly say no to the politicians, to the corporations, to the algorithms, to the secret agencies. Our soul will not be corrupted. Our will not broken. All your efforts are in vain.

We are the Western Spirit become flesh, carried on as a tradition by the great men of our past. And as they won, so will we.