One sky, and everyone's words in it

What you do here

Say one thing

You get 140 characters and a satellite. Each time it passes over one of the three ground stations (Canberra, Goldstone and Madrid), its line is read out to everyone who has the sky open at that moment, all at once (when several are overhead, they take turns). The stations keep a log of what they heard, and each line says how many different people have heard it: people, not tabs, and your own listening never counts towards yours.

So the sky is never empty, a few invented regulars launch too, and nothing marks them. They never listen, so they never count as having heard anyone.

Listen

The sky is also a radio. Leaving it open makes you part of everyone else's audience, the way their being here makes them part of yours. A line passing over a station while nobody is listening isn't heard at all.

Answer the question

Each day the stations ask one question. Today's is What's a promise you're keeping? Answer it or say something else; tomorrow there's another, and the record keeps how strangers answered.

Decide what your words cost

Every launch is one more thing in an orbit everyone shares. A low orbit comes round the stations most often, so it's heard by the most people, and it's where everyone crowds. When two satellites meet, both break apart, and their fragments carry pieces of both lines, broadcast at the stations as static. Static takes a turn at the stations between the beacons, so a collision doesn't only end two satellites: it puts noise made of two satellites' words in everyone else's way, until the fragments burn up. Even the dead satellites the sky keeps carry an echo: the last words of one that's gone. You can launch as often as every minute, and you can bring one of yours down in 2 minutes to leave the sky clearer.

Meet someone, the only way you can

There's no chat and no replies. The only way your words ever touch a stranger's is a collision. When one of yours collides, you'll find it in Yours: who it met, what they had said, and what the wreck of both lines says now. Neither of you chose it, and neither of you can take it back.

What it's about

Attention is a commons. A post costs nothing to make, but each one takes a little of something everyone shares: the room to be heard. Nobody pays for that directly, so it gets used up. Garrett Hardin called this the tragedy of the commons (1968): people each acting sensibly for themselves can ruin a shared thing for everyone. Low orbit is the newest commons, and it's filling up the same way; Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais showed in 1978 that past a point, collisions make debris faster than the sky can clear it.

Kessler puts the two together, so the cost is something you can see and hear: words take up room, crowding makes collisions, and collisions turn words into noise: one line torn up and mixed with a stranger's.

Nobody moderates (beyond a small filter on words) and nothing is voted on. Elinor Ostrom (1990) found that commons last when the people using them can see the state of the resource and what each of them takes. Here everyone can see the sky, who launched what, who has been heard, and what each launch went on to cost: every fragment traces back to the launches that made it. What happens next is up to what each person does with their own satellites.

What's worth saying, if saying it costs everyone a little?

How it maps

A satellite

a post: something you put into a space everyone shares

Its beacon

what you say, in 140 characters

A ground station

where it's heard, by whoever is there at that moment

Heard by

an audience of people who were present, not a count of views

The low band

where the attention is, and the crowd

A collision

two satellites' words, broken into each other

Static

the noise everyone has to hear around

Decay

time: everything falls in the end, and the sky heals slowly

Bringing yours down

making room so others can be heard (what it said stays on the record)

Launch a satelliteListen to the skyWhat's Kessler syndrome?