- Extraordinary Seasons
- Posts
- Thursday, July 17, 2025
This is the seventy-first installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.
Recently I came upon a messaging app called Bitchat, which purports to let you send messages to other people using Bluetooth rather than standard Wi-fi or cell phone networks. It functioned on the basis of a mesh network, so your phone would send the message to another phone nearby, which would then send it to another, and if any of those are the recipient, it would show the message to the user. This could be useful in situations where infrastructure is down, or to keep your data off of the infrastructure instead.
It was interesting to me for several reasons. First, because it’s exactly how compasses work in Euphony of Seasons. Everyone’s compass is connected in a huge mesh network across the world, and text-based dispatches are sent between them without a central network of towers or something. People can reach each other across oceans because of signal boosters, basically huge transmitter arrays like compasses that don’t move around. They’re a little like lighthouses, being maintained and run by the people who live in or near them, rather than by an organization looking to profit.
His compass acknowledged that the dispatch had been transmitted, cast into the mystifying web of nearby devices, each passing signals along until one hundred and twenty-eight leagues away, the compass belonging to a certain Lehvoki lady would retrieve it for her. He examined the circle of worn metal, fronted with glass, imagining all the dispatches it was currently ferrying. The other rail passengers, homesteaders out in the country, perhaps even the citizens of the town they had just left. His brief time without his compass that day made him appreciate it all the more.
While this sounds neat, I judge it won’t ever really be popular or gain traction in this world. It works on Laviere because that’s the only method of communication they have ever had (at that point in history); the other main alternative is hiring a Messenger to deliver a letter to someone, which is still very popular despite digital datametric communication. Here there are so many messaging apps and opportunities, people will have a hard time adopting one more.
The other big problem is that the application was made with generative AI. Apparently the co-founder of Twitter was responsible for its creation (I don’t want to say that he wrote the code, because he didn’t), and while it seems to work, it has a lot of security flaws because it was cobbled together from the imagination of a computer program. Honestly, though, most programs and apps you use today are just large composites of other established programs, but at least human developers take the time to make sure each piece fits well together, instead of just fitting together at all.
So there you have it. Clearly the concept of a mesh-based communication network is a good idea, but it will take a while for us to see it in reality. In the mean time, fantasy will do just as well.
Reply