Abstract
The web is dividing into two layers. The agentic web — machine-mediated,
self-improving, with language models as its input/output surface — will absorb
retrieval, synthesis, and transaction. What remains, and what becomes more valuable
as it does, is the experiential web: the layer humans actually inhabit.
This site is the technical workshop for building that layer deliberately —
where technical
spans not only technology but semantics, epistemology,
and every place where detailed inspection uncovers insights, patterns, and
affordances. It is written for scientists of all shapes.
1Premise
When information ceases to be scarce — when anything fetchable is fetched and phrased instantly, for everyone — the marginal value of having the answer tends to zero. What does not tend to zero is the irreducibly human act of being somewhere, with someone, feeling something, at a time that will not come again.
We take this as a working hypothesis, not a slogan, and treat it the way one treats any hypothesis: by attempting to make it precise enough to fail.
2Four quantities under investigation
- Spatiality
- A sense of place: depth, scale, orientation, the body's intuition that here differs from there. The web has been flat for thirty years; humans never were. What are the minimal conditions under which a mediated space is inhabited rather than viewed?
- Temporality
- A sense of time: duration, rhythm, anticipation, irreversibility. Content on demand erased the event; we ask what is recovered when moments are allowed to be unrepeatable.
- Expression
- A sense of voice: the capacity to make something unmistakably one's own, with the idiosyncrasy that statistical machinery flattens into the average. Where exactly does the flattening occur, and what resists it?
- Emotion
- A sense of stakes: the web mediated by feeling rather than feeling mediated by the web. The hardest of the four to operationalise — which is precisely why it is on the list.
3Method
The inquiry runs on three tracks, pursued in the open:
- Instruments. Software — immersive, browser-native, open where possible — built to make the four quantities observable and manipulable. An instrument that cannot surprise its maker is a demo, not an instrument.
-
Semantics. The vocabulary of
experience
is currently too soft to build with. We work toward terms precise enough to disagree about productively: what is presence, what is an affordance, what is the unit of an experience. - Epistemology. How does one know that an experience occurred, that it differed from another, that a design caused the difference? The measurement problem here is genuine and we intend to take it seriously rather than gesture at it.
Findings, instruments, and dead ends will appear here as numbered notes. Some of the supporting repositories are open; some are not yet; some will not be. The reasoning for each is stated where it applies.
4Participation
This work uses GitHub as its commons. Engagement is read the old-fashioned way — by who turns up and what they say:
- Discussions — for argument, in the constructive sense.
- Issues — for errors found and questions worth tracking.
- Stars — a one-bit signal that you want this to continue.
- Sponsorship — for those who would rather the work went faster.
The agentic web is the nervous system. The experiential web is everything the nervous system is for — distinctly human qualities, intermediated and connected by fibres and silicon, human at the surface where it counts.