NB: When writing a history, the hours spent in research tend to outweigh those spent shaping the narrative itself. Along the way, you collect all kinds of material — primary sources, theoretical reflections, marginalia — that never make it into the final cut. These “Chapter Notes” are for readers who want to know more about the people and events behind the story, and who don’t mind wandering down a few adjacent corridors.
(Free subscribers get a glimpse; paid subscribers ($5/year) get full access.)
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A few of the people whose stories I tell in these upcoming chapters are people I knew personally. Here are messages between myself and two of them who yo will meet in later chapters:
A message I sent to Ravi Narayan (Chapter 5):
WhatsApp message, Ben Loomis to Ravi Narayan, Feb 7, 2029:
Hey! Check out this video I made of my walk through Xpuhil — Mayan ruins in Mexico. This Maya-Chak app layered a reconstruction over the main plaza — full ritual render, dancers, smoke, sounds. Pretty cool, I’d love to see something like this at Mahabalipuram. You could narrate them!
From an email sent by Tyler Grant (Chapter 2) to me:
Subject: Re: DC Visit
From: Tyler Grant (tygrant@[redacted])
To: Ben Loomis (bal@[redacted])
Date: November 19, 2029 — 9:12 PM
Yeah, I’ll be in town those dates. You can stay with us if you want.
By the way, I’ve got to get you into this pilot network I’m in. It’s not just an assistant, it’s like your brain finally gets to be social. The network’s tuned to entrepreneurial workflows, so everything just… flows. Meetings feel frictionless. I’m getting pre-sync’d with clients before we even talk. It’s like they already trust me.
Also: sleeping better, focusing better, even crushed Matt at racquetball last week.
I swear, I’m not shilling. It’s just making me better.
Let me know if you want an invite. The dev team said they’re still expanding.
Seriously, it’s next-level.
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The next set of excerpts get deep into the weeds but are useful to at least skim if you want to understand why certain cog-nets evolve as they do over the course of Part II.
Excerpts from Table 4 in “Network Parameters and Effects on Group and Individual Cognition” White Paper, 2030 — authored by the Human Dynamics Group at MIT CSAIL.
Table 4: Effects of Changing Network Variables
Variable: Network Size
Parameters:
Min: 8 participants
Mean (across all configurations): 133
Max: 5,000+ (asymptotic groupings via pooled subnet overlays)
Results:
Networks with <25 members exhibited high emotional salience and rapid consensus, but also elevated rates of cognitive echo and affective contagion.
Mid-sized networks (50–250 users) showed the greatest variance in cohesion depending on shared context and task domain.
Networks >1,000 members displayed self-stabilizing group memory effects, though individual agency perception dropped by ~17%.
Reported user satisfaction followed a U-shaped curve, peaking in very small (<15) and very large (>1,500) networks, with a trough in the 150–300 range.
Emergent symbolic logic was significantly more likely in large-scale configurations (p<0.01), regardless of initial narrative framing.
Recommendations:
For high-performance professional contexts, cap networks at ~120 users to maximize mutual relevance and reduce fragmentation.
For symbolic or ritualized applications, larger populations (>800) are more conducive to memetic drift and shared metaphor emergence.
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Variable: Geographic Distribution
Parameters:
Min: Single-location networks (<1 km radius)
Mean distribution index: 3.2 (on 0–10 scale, where 0 = fully co-located, 10 = fully global)
Max: Globally distributed across 14+ time zones, no common language majority
Results: