Without a single User's Agent who can see all of a user's data, data is sharded across hundreds of pocket universes.
- Without a single User's Agent who can see all of a user's data, data is sharded across hundreds of pocket universes.
- Each pocket universe (domain) would love to get more data and use cases, but every other universe is unwilling to share it with others (because the use case will move to the other pocket and never come back).
- So power imbalances between universes rarely lead to collaborations except when the much smaller player has no choice at all.
- But even among peers, there's a combinatorial explosion of possible collaborations.
- Each collaboration requires tons of bespoke partnership, engineering, and marketing work.
- If no individual partnership clears the threshold as obviously worth it, none of them get done.
- The result is our data is sitting impotently[wj], either inside of one mega-aggregator with little incentive to build software just for us, or stuck in hundreds of fractured universes.