Lately I've been feeling despair and dread at the scene of hundreds of people glued to their phones .. after a particularly hard week at work I stood at the station and watched the train roll by, full of commuters glued to their little machines. It was an entirely dystopian scene, and as much as I've been a promoter of the technological revolution that is the Internet and all its devices, I'm feeling more and more disaffected with the results of what we've done.<p>It could be different, but its not. These phones are brick walls, carefully channeling the minds of the enslaved back to the master.<p>So I started thinking about what I would do to make it different, and really, I think one small tweak to our technology would make a huge difference. Of course, its not in the interests of the manufacturers or network providers: make it possible for phones to auto-discover each other locally, without requiring a server somewhere upstream.<p>If only we had some way to get people connected to each other - in a local context - i.e. anyone on the train can search for and find others on the same train without requiring a client-server relationship with an upstream connection. Host-AP mode: too restrictive.<p>We need local peer search and discovery.<p>About the only way I can think of to get this right now is to man up and put a device in AP mode with some sort of SSID named "LocalUsersNetwork" or something .. some sort of recognizable brand that people can use to connect with their local peers.<p>It would make the forward march towards further electronic enslavement so much more palatable if it were possible to have at least a local context in which to freely operate.<p>EDIT: events like this make me think there <i>is</i> a market for "local stranger discovery services", its just nobody has worked out a branding process for it:<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1480766915558797/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/events/1480766915558797/</a>