a fish is just a fish
Reflection 2 of 2 on the subject of presenting silly little fish to venture capitalists. Written July 2024, and addressed to Finn.
The sketch I made in Taiwan had nothing to do with Realizing Goals, or Reshaping The Internet, or anything towering and climactic like that.
It was a reflection of how Taiwan made me feel - Present, and, maybe for the first time, at peace with myself.
That sketch was me, nostalgic for the good old days as I was living them, wondering if a digital space could bring me back to that state of being, for a space to be designed for me and by me to have that specific experience of presence while writing, so that my words, relieved from the pressure to become sentences, would have the freedom to go wherever the cursor took them.
Being Present is different from ‘Distraction Free’. Presence is disturbed by displaying time, by autocomplete, and even by going back and forth between characters, words and lines.
Displaying time (with a timer that counts time down, or clock that counts time up) isn't present, because time displays remind you of what needs to be done, of what hasn't been done, and of time running out before having done enough.
Instead of a clock, I wanted fish. Made of clouds of ink, they would swim around as my words appeared on the surface of the pond. They would weave around the edges of the text I'd type and, in doing so, ground my writing in a sense of time without alerting to it.
In moments where I would run out of things to write, I'd stare at the blinking cursor, and it would fade out, and I would be left hanging over the water with the fish, observing how they move and react, just as I did at that bridge over the pond in Taiwan.
A space for contemplation, opened.
I questioned, I agonized over, whether they should have sentience for a while, if they should be spoken to, and if so, how.
This was a few months after ChatGPT launched, and as a designer plugged into social media, I had my own “inspired” reactions to the chat interface to spell out and claim for myself. But, truthfully, embodying agents as fish and making them talk had little to do with "better interfaces than chat to LLMs" or agentic inferfaces, or ai-native interfaces.
It was about being with and feeling heard by little fish. Little fish who knew little, little fish who had tiny vocabularies, little fish who, in the simplicity of their on-screen existence, would not judge what I was writing and instead just ... exist around it.
They weren't meant to swim in and comment on what I was writing, or nudge me towards a Goal, or help me "self-actualize".
They weren’t meant to be helpful assistants, except and unless to the extent that fish can be - which is not much help at all.
They weren't meant for me to write to and be responded to.
They weren't meant to do anything except exist with me, and, if I requested politely and wasn't too much of a bother, spit out a few grammatically incorrect words.
And if I wanted time to myself, I could throw them a few breadcrumbs, and they’d swim away.
The experience of Writing is not "text-editing". And Fish - they're not "Agents". They are just fish. There is no "problem to solve", and there is no "vision", no “business plan”, no “target audience”. And that language polluted the pond.
Instead, there was a yearning, almost, for an experience with digital spaces that could make me feel like how Taiwan once did - present and, for once, at peace with myself. It is fish swimming around my writing, software given the permission to be its own reward.
In a sense, it can be thought of as solving an "existential problem" - the problem of attempting to exist as a human does in the digital spaces we find ourselves spending so much time in, and finding it hard to have space to breathe and time to idle.
I don’t even believe it "solves" it, but it does treat these concerns of human existence, of how to facilitate presence with oneself, as a design concern, and in turn a design concern for software.
In doing so and at the least, it acknowledges that software is already more than what it solves - we live and experience the world through it - and with that acknowledgement tries to do a little more than treat the experience of writing as a job to be done or a problem to be solved.
since you're deep in the TfT space, i assume you're familiar with gordon brander's concept of geists within subconscious? reading this made me reflect on the different types of digital beings/ambient presence we'd like to be in relationship with. we're always embedded in a physical ecology, but we don't think much about it in the digital realm.
geists' design is different from the fish (they are still little agents, but they're much more spontaneous/ambient than all others i've seen). if you haven't seen it, i think the design of subconscious as a whole could be a huge reference for you/commonplace.