Note
Notes from Superhuge
20.07.26Published
The physical internet
People find each other online. A room, some tools and a recurring Tuesday let the group do something together in the physical world.
- groups
- places
- social software
- local life
The internet is good at helping people with the same specific interest find one another. They may start in a WhatsApp group, Discord server or forum, sharing advice before they have anywhere to meet.
That works until they want to do something that needs tools and a table. A repair group can diagnose a lamp online, but a screen cannot hold a screwdriver or store parts for next time.
This note is about the smallest step from online conversation to physical action. Not buying land or building an institution. Just one message: “I can get the room on Tuesday.”
By physical internet, I mean these ordinary places: a borrowed room, a recurring evening and somebody with the key. The internet carries the knowledge and memory. The room lets the group do the work.
Physical Internet already has a logistics meaning: networks for moving and storing objects. I am borrowing the phrase for something smaller and social.
01 / Place
An address and an evening
On Tuesday, somebody brings screwdrivers. Somebody else brings a soldering iron. People arrive with a lamp, a radio and a stubborn bicycle light.
The group still lives online: where people find the directions, check which tools are missing and say they will be late. The room handles the parts a screen cannot: weight, noise, demonstration and the useful silence of two people looking at the same broken thing.
Nobody owns the room. It has an address, a Tuesday evening and a way in.
02 / Things
The physical world answers back
A chat can stay vague for months. A cupboard cannot. The soldering iron needs a safe place. The box of spare parts gets heavier. A table is scratched. Someone must open the door before the first visitor arrives.
Then there is the end of the evening. Mugs are washed, tools are counted and the person with the key waits while everyone remembers one last thing. The group feels different once somebody has to put it away at ten o’clock.
Questions that drift through a chat become ordinary. Can everyone get upstairs? What do the neighbours hear? Who opens when the usual organiser is away?
The group has made something real enough to care for.
03 / Node
Start smaller than territory
One ambitious idea is that an online community might eventually own a distributed archipelago of property. I like that imagination. I am more interested in the first believable step.
A physical node can begin long before the group owns a place.
It might be borrowed every second Tuesday. It might disappear during school holidays. The smallest interesting node may be a cupboard with a key and an agreement that the room will be left as it was found.
What makes it a node is the repetition around it: the same people can return, the same things can be kept, and responsibility does not vanish when everybody goes home. Real estate is optional. A relationship with a place is not.
One group, three states
The threshold turns online coordination into a physical occasion.
Before
Online group
- Invitation
- Repair guide
- Rota
- Memory
Threshold
A way in
- One address
- Tuesday, 19:00
- Key holder
- Open door
During and after
In the room
- Workbench
- Shared tools
- Repaired object
- Cleanup
- Next date
04 / Knowledge
Knowledge travels. The work happens here.
Repair Cafés already show this shape in the world. They are local meeting places where people bring broken things, use shared tools and learn alongside volunteers. Each one is local. The wider network helps the idea travel.
Fab City asks a related question at a larger scale: how can places become more capable of making and reusing things locally while staying connected to knowledge elsewhere?
A repair guide can come from another country. A safe format for the evening can be copied from another group. The answer still has to fit this room, these tools and the people who can make it on Tuesday.
The network moves the lesson. The room is where somebody tries it, gets it slightly wrong, and learns the bit that was missing.
05 / Memory
Back out through the screen
After the evening, the useful parts return online. A photograph of the repaired radio. A note about the tool nobody brought. The next date. A short rota so the key does not become one person’s permanent hobby.
This is also what I want from Selfso, the group software I am building. It should not replace the room. I want it to help the group remember why the room opens, what happened there and what comes next.
Being in the room is not automatically better. Distance, stairs, money, health, caregiving and simple social comfort decide who can be there. Someone joining from home may write the best repair guide or keep the calendar accurate. Some groups should remain online.
A physical place adds a capacity. It does not make the group fair, safe or legitimate by itself. There is still work to do. There is just a table to do some of it on now.
06 / Tuesday
Turn the key
Tuesday arrives again. The key turns, the light goes on and the kettle makes the noise kettles make while pretending to be useful. People come upstairs carrying broken things.
Later, the table is wiped. The tools go back into the cupboard. Somebody posts the next date before they forget.
One lamp works again. The room goes dark until next Tuesday.
Tim