Lately I've been feeling despair and dread at the scene of hundreds of people glued to their phones .. after a particularly hard week at work I stood at the station and watched the train roll by, full of commuters glued to their little machines. It was an entirely dystopian scene, and as much as I've been a promoter of the technological revolution that is the Internet and all its devices, I'm feeling more and more disaffected with the results of what we've done.

It could be different, but its not. These phones are brick walls, carefully channeling the minds of the enslaved back to the master.

So I started thinking about what I would do to make it different, and really, I think one small tweak to our technology would make a huge difference. Of course, its not in the interests of the manufacturers or network providers: make it possible for phones to auto-discover each other locally, without requiring a server somewhere upstream.

If only we had some way to get people connected to each other - in a local context - i.e. anyone on the train can search for and find others on the same train without requiring a client-server relationship with an upstream connection. Host-AP mode: too restrictive.

We need local peer search and discovery.

About the only way I can think of to get this right now is to man up and put a device in AP mode with some sort of SSID named "LocalUsersNetwork" or something .. some sort of recognizable brand that people can use to connect with their local peers.

It would make the forward march towards further electronic enslavement so much more palatable if it were possible to have at least a local context in which to freely operate.

EDIT: events like this make me think there is a market for "local stranger discovery services", its just nobody has worked out a branding process for it:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1480766915558797/