context
August 2021, a year after the explosion in Beirut, many Lebanese are forced to exile, many leave a country spiralling down further deeply ingrained political corruption, an economy in free fall, over a million Syrian refugees begging for food, with food and fuel shortage; a downfall spiral that could dangerously lead to another civil war. For factual context, read Human Rights Watch Country Report.

August 2021 at Kabul’s Amid Karzai Airport, we [digitally] have witnessed a chaotic mass exodus of Afghans and international workers leaving Afghanistan in the mist of The Taliban’s swift accession to national power.

The American deadline to pull their troops out of the country remained unchanged. Via our multiple screens, we globally watched people’s hardship to escape, in real time. August 25, we read of the risks of terrorist attacks, armless, perplex, anxious. And the following day, still seated behind our screens, we counted the casualties.

What if we had been actively engaged on a one-to-one level with a person in Kabul in these 24 hours? What is we had been able to offer temporarily a lifeline to someone in this very moment of political and social turmoil? What if we had been the voice from the outside bringing support with research, shared information, listening and comforting words?

Instead many of us were busy scanning the news, left alone to entangle the political context of Afghanistan in retrospect of twenty years of international presence. To which results? Left with myriads of questions; questions we couldn’t ask Afghans in the country, nor able to ask that simple question: how are you doing? Instead, we watched, listened to and read geo-political experts on our trusted channels and other social media.

Within weeks, we might have collectively grown uncomfortable out of our incapacity to help. Evenings were spent meeting friends to exchange points of view, and somehow brush out the sense of guilt we felt while Afghans had deserted the airport, returned to their house; some beating up by The Taliban, some rightly so, defeated.

Does it matter if we live in Asia, Africa, the Americas or Europe? Haven’t we somehow commonly felt hopeless watching an unbearable situation play out in real time on our screens, us impotent in response?

What if we could have helped?

Until when will we care?


moonlight

is an active mandate for a coalition of creative technologists and UX experts to pair up worldwide and build / customise an app, phone line system or a desktop platform to serve as a lifeline based on a peer-to-peer transactional model.

Its principle is to connect two people in direct [translatable] conversations via Microsoft translate for instance, to bring human-to-human support to people facing distress.

Imagine if each of us individually had a direct access with one person in Lebanon and one person in Afghanistan based on common grounds. Imagine if we could access an individual for support the same way we use peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb, Tinder or Bolt.

We have opened our house to strangers, entered houses of strangers, consented intercourses with strangers, and sat in the car of strangers – via these platforms connecting humans through algorithms.

Can we build, via the same principle, a voice-based lifeline between people facing life threatening events, for an agreed time and agreed expectations?

One may ask: ‘What would be my motivation?’ Another: ‘How can that fit my time economy rational?’ This question is left to everyone to answer individually.

People who have given volunteer time or contributed to humanitarian actions or worked as interns, have agreed to exchange time, skillsets, knowledge, manpower and human support within a framework—without money as a transaction. Should we ask them about their motivations?



moonlight
how will it work?
The app / phone line / or platform will work similarly to transactional peer-to-peer models. Framed via algorithm queries, entered via profile settings, people will be ‘matched’ based on common criteria through search results. People will consent to connect: 1/ after having read and signed a code of conduct, 2/ after having scaled the type of support they are committed to offer, 3/ after being fully aware of the type of support their peer is primarily seeking. Thus the principle is to narrow the type of supports and expectations, to a fairly agreed market exchange.

The platform will ensure the workflow: profile setting / code of conduct / search by criteria / search results / dialogue within text fields / dialogue within simultaneously translatable audio fields / agreed actions through the app / agreed interventions outside of the app / alerts and notifications to keep the conversations rolling / safety measures / and bespoke human-based customer service for special needs.

moonlight is a pair setting for a journey. Instead of guests and hosts, two people [say: a pilot and a navigator] first bond over a common intersections or touchpoints. That can be a common history, a shared experience in distress, a similar profession, a gender right history, a shared language, shared passions, shared concerns, etc.

Alike most social platforms, it starts by setting up an in-depth profile. For instance

profile 1
Location: Afghanistan
Language: Farsi, English, notions of French
Gender: female
Age: 31
Place[s] of origin(s): Afghanistan
Cultural interests: ….
Studies: medicine
Occupation: ….
Skillsets: ….
Hobbies: …

Matches with
[Based on algorithm queries and gatekeeping rules]


profile 2
Location: Canada
Language: Arabic, English, French
Gender: female
Age: 33
Place[s] of origin(s): Morocco
Cultural interests: ….
Studies: psychosociology in France
Occupation: ….
Skillsets: ….
Hobbies: …

Two humans connect with different contexts:

One is liquid. The other solid.

One is in movement facing distress, the other is stable with time to help.

One is a cloud pushed by the wind facing great uncertainty about his landing.

The other is a tree with roots and height, serving as a lighthouse in the tempest.

Importantly, the pairing exchange will be based on an equal ground. This must exclude the hierarchy money too often induces and exclude any form of condescendence or humanitarian bias. Ruled in the code of conduct, manners, ethics and consents will be at the roots of this project.

moonlight can apply the human dynamics and complementary duos already functioning in such interlaced agreements: the driver & navigator in the context of race. The complex relationship between artist & collector. In movie production, the essential partnership between director & producer. And to translate blueprints into physical habitats, the interlaced pairing of the architect & developer… You might ask once again, about each partner’s motivations? If this project aims to avoid unrealistic expectations on either side, it doesn’t set an end goal.

On the contrary of money that releases instant gratification when distributed, this transactional model delays gratification, blurs one’s motivations at the start, and provocatively does not promise direct rewards.

After all, that type of relationship is not different in real life. When supporting a friend, meeting a new friend, going out with a ‘potential date’ or entering a business partnership, nothing preludes the outcome. Being parent is kneaded in a lifelong commitment, with no pre-sets either as to guarantee kids will be all right.


moonlight

… is not about an end goal.
It’s about a shared journey that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

The technology offers a type of connectivity and support that can be scaled and safely set within pre-requisites such as: a shared quality for listening, a preference for questions vs. assumptions, an elegance in manners, an honest while organic exchange… The role of the technology is to lower the thresholds of expectations to what is clearly possible, and brush out the irrational fears we might have to meet a stranger, afar, mostly portraited by media and the political context of one’s country.

“Maybe that’s how we know when a relationship is real. When someone else previously unconnected to us knows us in a way we never thought or believed possible.”
– Iain Reid, Canadian writer (born 1981)

Example of set parameters.

“I can help with”:

Lifeline [using audio & writing] yes
A daily conversation [at a set time] yes
Direct phone calls in case of emergency yes
Money no
Logistic support along the journey yes
Food and a room offered when landing [for a time period] yes
Paid work no
Volunteering work [with a set period to cover cost room] yes
Local connections for paid work yes
etc…

Please note that the support can also remain completely virtual.
The engagement to welcome someone is highly appreciable but might only concern a few people who have the facilities do so. On the reverse, other forms of help can be deviced.

The following functionalities will be enclosed:

– personal profile settings [with different levels of privacy in case of political threats]
– a space to connect with one another [with mutual consent, agreed rules and mix media options]
– a space to exchange dialogues, information and links [with an archiving system to retrieve this information easily]
– a space to support one another within a fair equal transactional model [criteria to be set and agreed prior the supporting exchange takes place, will be signed]
– a legal space where the platform operates as a 3rd party: matching profiles, providing legal support, alerting and following up, mediating, moderating, etc.
– when the technology reaches its limits in mediation, human-based moderation is offered each time needed as in Airbnb for instance.


the platform as the third party
Powered by intuitive user experience, the platform mediates a new market exchange based on human-based currencies where money is no longer king. Replaced by the act of sharing, the partnership translates into sharing knowledge, skillsets, space, time, networks, kindness, experience and so on… This implies to be sharing values and some common denominators.

A doctor might support another doctor; a young woman might support a woman her age speaking her language. Someone who has suffered gender or sexual discrimination in her/his/their own country, might want to support someone facing a similar experience. Someone who has lost housing and belongings in an earthquake, a fire or landslides might overcome the traumas in supporting someone facing similar distresses elsewhere. Or will it be somehow who comprehends deeply what this means for an individual or a family?

The platform will simultaneously and progressively offer understanding on people’s motivations to support one another. Left blind by corporate choices to retain social media’s generated human behavioural data, we must integrate a transparent system of sharable data sources retrieving what weaves and bond and sustains humans supporting humans.


who are we talking to?
The first circles of influence might rotate and cross-reference these non-exhaustive categories:

– people who have faced similar threatening events and have the heart, experience and knowledge to relate and share support

– people who have had to invent alternative pathways to queer social narratives failing them, and courageously created their own believe systems and interactions

– people with grassroot experience in humanitarian endeavours and willing to share their learnings with one individual

– people who have invested in the Silicon Valley’s golden rush, enriching themselves, and who might wish to direct a part of their investments towards ethical experimental projects as such

– people who are in a time and space in their life, where they are comfortable and stable enough with time at their hand, to support someone they somehow relate to or are moved by…

Feel free to add more profile hypothesis…


what is the business model?
We must accept that this concept is not designed for capitalistic exponential growth nor conceived per se, for a global mainstream outreach. It is not ‘niche’ either. It speaks to many people; some at the intersection of social enterprises, others actively involved in community-caring economies, others operating in the field of innovative technologies where they wish ethics could be pre-set…

Similarly, moonlight calls for a category of angel investors to shoulder the project financially, logistically or both, with a flair for changing narratives and… a leap of faith.

If the foundations of Silicon Valley have centrifugally being built locally around sciences [with universities such as Stanford], the US Defence investments and massive venture capitals,

moonlight is made of different components and uprooted:

– it is leaning on a decentralised form of knowledge-economy powered by humans

– it is built on trust, giving people agency and the courage to help one another with a framework alleviating unnecessary risks to fail or deceive, without the back up of governments or institutions

– it builds on the spine of social media with the maturity to avoid falling into the traps the tech giants land mined around our first experiments. We were docile monkeys clicking endlessly to reach 500+ on LinkedIn, for what? Most of what we produced [for free] has benefited and empowered corporations rather than individuals. That can change…

– it brings what governments and global organisations cannot provide: a decentralised form of aid that isn’t about money nor mass logistics but about personal listening, one-to-one moral support and bespoke agility in response of one’s distressful circumstances

– it timely sets itself in motion around the recent changes in narratives and the changes in values following a palpable climate crisis and two-year old global health crisis. The value of human life might have changed in perception. It has also challenged established tech companies when cynical and greedy.

– simultaneously this project needs Twitter, Bundle, Instagram, Tik Tok, and others to share concern and network for this vision to thrive. If just one of them comes on board, sharing network and knowledge in functionalities, this project is design to succeed.
It won’t work as an empty shell. It needs a mothership to be propelled in the cybersphere.


the act of sharing as currency
The primarily currency in this human exchange doesn’t count on the traditional form of trade, money. Its core asset relies on the act of sharing time, intelligence, research, shared decision making; and acting with common sense, knowledge, access and compassion.

Without money as a hierarchal tool of measure, these partnerships-in-crime are leaning on each other’s skillsets to understand and address together solutions in unpredictable events.




This project ignites the complex grid on which human beings place the cursor and the limits of their ability to share. The act of sharing in a Sharing Economy Model of co-living, co-working, co-creating and more, is after all the most delicate, singular, emotional and unscalable practice until it is truly put to test.


the act of sharing with consent
What makes this challenge unique:

– the act of sharing support within mutual consent transforming a total stranger into the compassionate partner of an unpredictable journey

– the act of mutually engaging in an active connection on a journey without end goal. This mindset sets moonlight apart from most apps with pre-set goals, promises or commodities [a ride, a house, sex, a job, etc.].

– It leaves the growing relationship between the pair, to be entirely defined by them.

–agency is offered within high challenges. A poor decision could derail someone’s destiny. A rough exchange could hurt someone’s feelings. Thus, the importance to rely on direct conversations imbued by research, shared information, regular assessments, precious listening and elegant manners, are key.

To sum up, the unicity of this project includes to accept the exchange as an open story form. Will it build a lifelong friendship? Will it induce a change in vision on either side? Will it lead to a business partnership? Will it change someone’s course of history? Will it deceive?
The outcomes are thrilling in mystery.


re-thinking humanitarian actions
Humanitarian support needs rethinking its emergency responses for years. The tools used for logistical support, the Donate button as a call for funding, the question of long-term viability in people’s assistance often left assisted–to name a few, are at stake in an increasingly more complex world hit by simultaneously a global climate crisis, a global health crisis and in its most creepy backgrounds, political radicalisations leaving more countries in the claws of sanguinary dynasties, authoritarian regimes, egomaniac idiots, openly corrupted regimes and hyper-local fanatism sustained by proxies.

Mass responses to wars, conflicts, and natural disasters essentially centralised by governments, global organisations and grassroot organisations, have generated delays in interventions with bottleneck effects, unaligned strategies, bureaucracy and poor communication between actors.


something has always been missing.
What each individual, each family experience in conflicts and disasters cannot be captured when people are treated as a mass or as novelist Chimamanda Adichie states it: a ‘single story’.

Summer 2016 proved it.

Mostly Syrian ‘refugees’ stood at the doors of Europe. A diversity of political voices for the better and the very worst defined each nation’s response and their accepted breakdown. The absence of European coalition will surely be judged by history. At worst, the events saw the hastened erection of unvoted walls, the referendum of Brexit in the UK, the emergence of extreme-right radical movements, and other inward-looking political actions led by fear and populism.

New terminologies such as ‘migrants’ emerged. In facts and in essence, these terms have only accentuated the notion of an unwanted population on the move. How different would it have been if people could one-to-one engage and communicate with Syrians fleeing?
And as such truthfully, each could have captured what Syrians went through within their country and now in exile in the name of their freedom?

Today’s access to information and knowledge can no longer let us ignore that people facing the arbitrary in unchosen cluster of events, might result in them being repressed, stateless, homeless, segregated, forced to exile, refugees, migrants—and soon pariahs. And the sum of sufferings and traumas people will be subjected to, say nothing of their human value.

Only individual support with personalised and actionable solutions through direct conversations can change one’s journey in perception and in warmth. And that is what could preserve people suffering traumatic experiences populated by haunting memories and hopeless and loneliness with the risk of life-long mental disorders.

Imagine a boat sliding to shore without a lighthouse. How many deaths are we willing to witness in real time and how many casualties are we willing to count? How many more bodies lost in the sea? How many more people left dead in trucks? How many more people pushed back at the borders? Or parked at the borders? Or beaten on their ways to an airport? How many people will need to suffer until we fearlessly stretch a hand, speak to one another, embrace who we are even when / if facing hardships?

Remember:
We have opened our house to strangers, entered in strangers’ house, sat next to strangers, slept with strangers. We can light up the journey of a stranger from our stable settings, without promising unrealistic commitments, and still run our daytime duties.

If not, the question we might ask ourselves each time is:

where were we?
Devoured and deeply absorbed by the elaborations of the self in its digital construction, numbed by the endless flux of images and the influx of our self-doubts, or crippled by the fears of digital rejection, are we becoming the trunk men hiding in the golden prisons of the corporate worlds, tethered, vaguely rebel–we think, tragically docile to the next technology imperatives?

We have clicked 500 times to gather 500+Friends on LinkedIn, pushed impulsively the Like button on Facebook endless times, and still scrolling nervously on Instagram, feeling slightly behind, less creative, less active, less acute, while carefully adding our contributions. That’s a lot of time offered to giant corporations.

are we missing the point?
Our access to information and knowledge will only increase the feeling of distress and defeat when witnessing people facing hardships and sorrows. Each time we will be left powerless to help, we will discover that increasingly the posture of neutrality, of denial and/or of rejection, is ethically, emotionally and intellectually, humanly unsustainable.


values & principles
moonlight is a human-to-human partnership made of a new geography: digital, global, borderless, accountable, intergenerational, interdependent, interactive; active with agency.

moonlight defies obsolete controls of power and segregations oppressing people based on their unchosen place of birth, unchosen race, unchosen gender, unchosen religion, family history, ethnicity and unchosen borders.

moonlight entices human connection otherwise out of reach through an open ended relationship model similar to friendship, where the pair decides the intensity of the intellectual, epidermic and sensual interchange.

moonlight is a life changing exchange built upon the act of sharing with clarity, on equal grounds, pondered and powdered by intelligence, listening and empathy—without direct compensation, nor instant gratification other than to be standing solo in a lighthouse guiding a boat to shore.

moonlight is a complex relationship model. Alike in humanitarian support, one’s mind might never be left still. It can be confusing, challenging and mostly humbling to support someone through hardships, when one’s life changes by the second without clear outcomes.

moonlight is about human engagement made of the most sophisticated [brain, mind, heart engaged] response. It isn’t A.I. induced, nor a VR safe experience. It trusts human in judgement with trials and errors, sleepless nights, and self-doubts on right / wrongdoing.

moonlight is an interchange made of invisible bridges weaved by people’s courage and trust. This project marks the advent of ethical technologies where a rare form of friendship replaces the quantitative values serving capitalistic exponential growth.


…/…



why should we care?
– we have agency to help. We are the ones in the cockpit. It is our partition. And we collectively and individually give time to governments and organisations to prepare and eventually rephrase their actions at best.

– Technologies have given us the capacity to reach out to people on a global scale, to connect with one another, to manufacture friendship into influential networks, to date through filtered conversations… We controll our road trips with Google’s GPS, we boss around Alexa in our kitchen, we evangelise ‘followers’ and set ourselves as ‘influencers’, but we haven’t shared the unpredictable. The unpredictable encounter found in travels, books and unexpected friendships… And even the unpredictable that forces us to shift value after situations of vulnerabilities [the loss of a loved-one, a sudden illness, a physical impairment, and so on].

If we trust one-to-one direct connections and conversations, to truthfully capture someone’s state of mind, intentions, context, history, journey, dreams and struggles while set in motion and forced to change, we thus agree that this knowledge and deep understanding are missing in the realm of possibilities of human interactions. Someone’s emotional distress grasped by someone else with nuance, consideration and empathy, might become the highest form of ‘trade’.



social bond with universal responsibility
If we stand by the precept of sharing universal social responsibility toward one another, individually and collectively, moonlight is the beginning of a personal engagement involving time, research, information, innate generosity, intelligence, curiosity and listening.

People fluent in researching and colliding data, people agile in briefing creative, people multi-tasking with multiple cold-blood decisions a day, might all be compelled to help and best suited to help. Not only. These qualities can develop instinctively when humans are suddenly responsible of someone else’s course of life.


universal responsibility with social consciousness
In a world increasingly unstable, polarised and inequal, our individual and collective responses to events and people caught in events, is the only thing that truly matters at that point.

We have built the technologies to support such vision. We have trained as multi-tasking producers. We have shared and produced knowledge. We have learnt to build networks. By doing so, we have enriched a happy few, letting a majority down.

Lately—way too late, we have gazed at the planet through the prism of our social accountability. In this painful awakening of an unsustainable post-capitalist era, we have also started to re-write some of the social narratives, we had accepted as unifiers.

The ‘winner and loser’ rhetoric of the American Dream is tired. The God Money is obsolete as fair trade when concentrated massively in the hands of 2,755 billionaires–660 more than last year according to Forbes. The IQ as a unit of measure of one’s intelligence paired with an exclusive access to ivy league establishments, is suffocating in the [essentially white] privileges this narrative shells for so long.

Most of these concepts have either limited or predictable shelve life even if forcefully hold alive and high by mostly privileged casts worldwide. Access to peace, security and education, we have seen, is poorly and unequally distributed. These setbacks can and will fail people at decisive moments of their life.


epilogue
We cannot afford millions of people eroded by decades of war, face the traumatic journey that another mass exodus is implying. We cannot ignore the repercussions discrimination will impact mentally and financially. We witness human losses in real time, measure what unchecked information, isolation, propaganda, defeat, depression and dark memories can do to people and consequentially to the societies these patterns inhabit.

We must fight back the increase of social stigmas and stereotypes virally seeded by questionable governments, questionable media and individuals. We must face and seed ways to understand the most radical acts, such as the act of one individual taking randomly the life of innocent people and his own, out of despair.

We must change era and let this one close:


[Exhausted the twilight laments of the end of the century, the general environment in the Western world at least was an end of celebration—a global orgy of violence, vanity, narcissism, paranoia, and self-destruction.] [translated by Microsoft Translator]

—Manuel João Neto, Portuguese writer


Finally we must remember that supporting each other is a lot of fun along new learnings, bursts of laughs, shared memories and tenderness spreading across borders.

The way we dance is the way we gather, the way we love and the way we revolt; solo, in duo, in riots. When the earth trembles, when politicians divide us in furrows and instrumentalise one’s irrational fear of ‘others’, it is for us to gather freely on the dancefloor.




Written by:
Claudine ‘CB’ Boeglin


v1 initiated the 24th of August 2021 at the heart of Kabul’s airport evacuation
v6 distributed the 9th of September 2021 to 20 hand-picked people for feedback and critics

@dandyvagabond
cb@floatinglab.org
+447500444529