Recently I saw a social media post that claimed: “chat” might be legitimately be the first dedicated 4th person pronoun. This has triggered a series of realisations, one of which highlights a design flaw in modern business productivity software.

https://twitter.com/angeisighting/status/1729843603587960989

To understand the flaw, we need to compare two groups of software: business communications — such as email, slack, teams — and broadcast social media, which includes Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and the like. Each has their own method of creating alignment between participants. Business communication relies on direct and group messaging; Someone messages someone else. Whether one-to-one or one-to-many, there is a source and a recipient. However, in our latter category of broadcast social media, participants join a chat*.* This is a completely different dynamic: business communications relies on connecting identities and social media relies on merging identities*.*

The design of each emerges from different fundamental axioms. Business operations assume a message is something you create, send, and receive. Social media assumes the message is something you collectively create; there is no send and receive, there is only post. Corresponding to this, the concept of productivity has mutated. While productivity in a business is about exchange, productivity in social media has transcended into something reminiscent to play: world building.

Over the last few months, I’ve started a new venture with a partner. Intuitively, being the very online version of myself that I am, I created a channel simply called “feed.” There, I began to ‘post’ simple messages that included thoughts, task updates, content clips, and ideas. My partner asked initially: “Why is this not a task list? Seems repetitive.” And yet, within a day, they started posting naturally. The feed is a space to co-create a vibe, to attune to the happenings to each other. It’s the opposite of every recommendation; it is pure noise. And through the noise, an emergent pattern.

Today I wonder: What will business and collaboration software look like tomorrow? What will happen when we work together through attunement and world-building instead of bargaining and exchange?