What is Clique Space?

Clique Space™ is what you might use to assert ownership of things in this world. These things are devices that you can connect together, and together, they make the same set of assertions: collectively, they virtually manifest you and communicate your presence to others. Clique Space endeavours to extend the individual’s visceral presence over their devices and maximises this potential through a basic communication protocol which can be extended to transport the real-time state and control information of any device.

While you can say to other people that a car is yours, and you can produce registration to prove this, the idea of ownership in Clique Space carries visceral meaning: the things (the devices) you are asserting are yours each help identify you to others as the individual who possesses them. In Clique Space, your car is not only your possession, it also becomes your identity - part of your cybernetic corpus; your devices are an integrated extension of your presence.

Your stomach functions to digest food and absorb nutrients. You would naturally contend that your stomach is part of you, and when your stomach operates as intended, you are seldomly conscious of it. In a future, however distant that may be, you may have a similar awareness of your Clique Space connected vehicle. Clique Space might provide an infrastructure so intimate that you might feel a pang similar to that of hunger when fuel, or charge, is low. Furthermore, you might will your vehicle drive to a station to refuel, or to a charge point to recharge. So yes indeed, Clique Space might even empower a world where our individual thought is directly connected to the action of our machines. Additionally, I would contend that whether utopian or dystopian (and I’m not smart enough to know which it is), Clique Space - or something uncannily like it - is going to make this future inevitable.

What type of mechanism would facilitate this type of communication? A practical necessity appears to be that devices need to communicate with each other in a real-time peer-to-peer agglomeration like one would find in a neural network. In this network, every device is a peer (there are no dedicated clients or servers) and every device in this network has the ability to inform every other device of what it is doing. Among the device specific state information any device in its own device specific way may be capable of communicating over Clique Space, every Clique Space aware device will be able to communicate identical information about the individual that owns it as a collection of one or more Identities nominated by the individual.

Networks where every node is directly connected to every other node are known in graph theory as Cliques, and this phenomenon is the inspiration for the name of this concept. Although it might not be practical to physically connect every device to every other, devices perceive each other as nodes in Clique Space. Any one device may be connected to a subset of an entire network, while the remainder of the network may be minimally distant from any given device by one or more intermediary devices. A collection of nodes may be distant in the physical sense, but, participating in some organised activity, they may all share direct virtual connections as two or more Participants in a Clique, using intermediary nodes to relay distant signals.

The individual (not an organisation) is at the centre of Clique Space. Every device that manifests you knows a secret called “that which is sacred”. This secret allows co-Sovereign devices to identify each other but it is never communicated between them. The secret would have to be known to the individual these devices collectively represent. Your devices are known to you as co-Sovereign devices because they all share the same secret just as those that may manifest others are known to you as contra-Sovereign devices because they don’t.

So why would people want to use Clique Space? The earlier cited vehicle use-case might have caused you to think about Clique Space’s utility in other situations. Consider, if you haven’t already, a possible future where Clique Space may be integrated into quadrillions of devices or more. Clique Space could provide individuals with the opportunity to become wholly manifest as someone other than just a flesh and blood hominid.

Enough for flights of imagination; I’ll step back to reality and finish by telling you where Clique Space is today. Currently it is a proof of concept written in Java SE. I have been working on it since July 2008. The code consists of 900 or so Java source files: about 80% code for exceptions (aside: exceptions are subtyped in Clique Space as problems and every problem must be converted to another subtype of an exception known as an injury - a mechanism that actually makes good use of Java’s checked exception feature!) in seven Ant projects. Apart from the Java API, I don’t use any third party libraries because I haven’t found it to be necessary. I haven’t needed to move far beyond SE 8, and anonymous inner classes appear anecessary alternative to lambdas in the bulk of situations in which I use them.

All source code is the property of me, Owen Thomas, and hence no source code is available on GitHub. This might indeed change in the future, but I prefer to hold my cards to my chest for now. If there is any value in these cards that I am holding, then perhaps you, the reader, can share in this value by helping me present this technology to the world in a way that preserves my proprietary stake.

Contact Information

Email: owen dot paul dot thomas at gmail dot com
Phone: +61 401 493 433
Address: Wollongong, Australia