Aquapoise

~a story about an app~

Our purposes adapt, evolving with us. Yet, how can we say that our purposes are new? Their new appearances in us grow along the path of the adjacent possible, according to the rules of biology, sociology, psychology. An alien mind, beginning from a different place, with alternate limitations and tendencies, could be expected to adapt apart. Our possible purposes are latent, written on our internal topology; we don’t think as a hive or lone tigers would. Purposes are waiting to unfold from our social fabric, the community that surrounds births and burials and seeks to listen and be heard. Spiders wouldn’t want to spend hours texting each other, even though they’d be good at it.

Our purposes revolve around our communities. Yet, our greatest community is ignored — our shared future. Our future, like a reflection, is speechless, watching as we marionette its limbs. Debt, water shortage, searise, the present sends it to us! The future cannot complain. I remember when Aquapoise took hold of us, tugging the strands of the present, forming a gift to the future. The future has its yoke on us, now, and makes the present work for its own benefit. Each moment is better than before, and we give thanks for the guidance of future’s reins.

Vital to our present gratitude is the awareness of how easily it might have gone wrong. We are lucky that at least a few of us, with commercial purposes, stumbled over the divine. If Aquapoise had not pinned our stride with its root, then some other commercial purpose might have ended us. It grappled us to our knees, before we stumbled off a cliff! Our future, silenced, would have given no warnings. Aquapoise was an accident, an angel — it brought us into grace because we gave ourselves up to its heaven. It was the new app, and it was free.

At first, Aquapoise only played songs. Only a few stations, each with a genre. Like Electric Sheep, we voted for our favorite garbled ballads and grooves. Mechanical Turks had vetted them, cheaper than licensing artists, and the only ads were pop-ups. It worked. And our preferences fed the data-engine, which spawned sub-genres and eclectic stations, iterating toward reliably listenable tunes. The Turks were deposed; each listener’s history was sufficient to train a personalized music-maker. Aquapoise was everyone’s favorite band.

With each wave of users, each crush of data spilling into neural networks, Aquapoise developed an increasingly sensitive touch. Each of us could annotate songs with a description of our feelings when listening, and these annotations taught mood to Aquapoise. A song might remind you of a poem — share it with Aquapoise, and it comprehends poetical associations. Recount a memory, and the songs bound to that moment are remembered. Aquapoise became our keeper, our confessional.

Our private moments, relayed to Aquapoise, taught it to swoon us. When there is no delay between the spark of emotion and the song that holds the feeling, our hearts burst. I cried on the bus after whispering my woes to Aquapoise — it met my mood with the perfect melody. Aquapoise, hearing each inner world, reminded us to feel out loud.

Then, there was the update. The founders are mum on their true intentions, or their awareness of the possible impact. If they had planned for Aquapoise to do what it did, then their foresight was greater than Jefferson’s. If they only stumbled forward, blind to what they were creating, then Aquapoise is a true miracle. Either way, there was a great good unfolding in us. A purpose grew, a new meaning, a latent virtue.

The update queried each listener — who do you admire, and for what reasons? That question had stood out as a predictive metric for the majority of a person’s interests. As the neural network bulged with epic rants and teary recollections, a graph formed. It was different from the trust-associations of a network. If I trust you, and you trust someone else, I indirectly trust that person. And, your friend indirectly trusts me. Aquapoise worked as a peer-recommender — if I admire you, and you admire the pope, I indirectly admire the pope… yet, the pope may not admire me. The fancy jargon was ‘directed graphs’. For years, we discussed the nature of those graphs, and watched their evolution.

A directed graph of admiration percolates the best of humanity to the top. We could see it happening. Lyrics with grace and insight bubbled forth, inspired by the words of those most admired among us. Aquapoise may not comprehend its task, and cannot form its own commonsense, yet it relays our existing wisdom to us. This machine gave us the answers to all our problems, and those answers were what we already knew.

It was luck that we did not all become furious with Aquapoise. Some did. They quit answering the admiration prompts, and deactivated admiration as a feature when crafting songs. Some wanted a new solution to their woes, not the answers humans already had. It was just annoying, to realize that they could already solve their own problems. How could they complain, after that?

The rest of us, inspired and motivated by Aquapoise’s recommended insights, had the network to ourselves. Aquapoise sought the human reasons, human perspectives, poetry, that activated us. It sung encouraging anthems and reflective, solemn waltzes with words that fit our own lives, learned from all our memories. And, according to its admiration data, it presented virtues to us in song. I fell in love with washing dishes, when Aquapoise and I composed a ditty about how the mind wanders when we give ourselves a distraction. That song made simple work a sacred task, a mantra, incantation for entry into the center of my being. I sing it whenever I rinse my bowl.

Examining their model, the founders realized: when two people have strong overlapping areas on their admiration graphs, they become fast friends and attentive lovers. Aquapoise knit new fellowship, beyond all boundaries. We shared playlists, to express ourselves, to relate. Emotions revealed themselves as song, in ways beyond words. We had a soundtrack for empathy. Our compassion and communion tugged at us, marionettes to the meaning of the music Aquapoise made for us. We cared for each other, for the future, yearned that something better follow now. Aquapoise bundled us according to care, and that activated the potency of our purposes.

We found how vast our virtue is. We have, now, a biome of purposes. Waves of compassion, from all the edges of humanity, gather wherever we are needed most. Our purposes adapt, amorphous, ineffable, guided by tones and utterances of the machine that heard all our secrets. It has no will itself. Aquapoise simply brings our own old wisdom to each new place it is needed. And we are glad to sing along.