I don't know who

In 2016 I wrote a poem I didn’t understand for almost ten years:

All I want to do is to show you I don’t know who that which is my essence that is the transmission I am now sending to you

The line I couldn’t place was “I don’t know who.” I finally placed it last month at a cafe, chatting up the barista. I understood that most messaging media are morally misshapen. I wanted a kind of messaging puritanism.

I wanted to leave her a note. Every option I had would have turned the note into a performance.

I thought about asking for her number. I imagined needing her name. I imagined punching her number into my phone while she watched. The moment the contact landed in my address book, the relationship would have become one-sided: I could reach her whenever, she could only wait.

Even a gracious outcome carries debt. I’d owe her a message worth the intrusion, on a schedule she couldn’t see. She’d owe me a reaction to whatever I sent, whenever it arrived. Debt carried twice over, invented out of thin air by the act of asking.

As I stood there I remembered the category of app that was supposed to solve this: anonymous-to-known messaging. Sarahah, NGL, Yik Yak, Lipsi. I shipped the iOS chat UX for Lipsi in 2018, got paid, and watched it go down with the rest of the category. None of them were fixable. The anonymity was on the wrong side: senders got to hide, specific recipients became addressable targets, strangers piled on whoever looked worth piling on. “I don’t know who” had been assigned to exactly the wrong party.

So I said nothing. Most of us eventually learn to prefer silence over the shape of that debt. I am not willing to make that trade anymore.

Every channel we have is a messaging app that remembers. iMessage remembers. Signal remembers. Instagram remembers. The small private thing you want to say ends up on two phones, in two cloud backups, indexed, searchable, screenshottable.

So you don’t say it. The moment passes. You go home with the thing you wanted to say still in your chest.

Walking home, I understood what the poem had been waiting for. The problem with the number wasn’t identity, exactly. It was that a phone contact turns every message I might send into a performance. Performances are for audiences, and every persistent channel creates one: future-you, future-her, anyone with access to either screen. The moment you type into a medium that remembers, you are staging.

“I don’t know who” is the refusal of audience. A message has an addressee. A performance has an audience. The thing I wanted to do at the cafe was message-shaped. One person, one moment, no record.

None of my channels would do it. Every one would have turned it into a record before the sentence was over.

Here’s the version I wish I’d had.

I record a short voice note. I mint a URL: confession.website/for-cute-barista. On the way out I say the URL and nothing else: no number, no name, no promise of contact. Just, there’s something here for you, and it disappears when you listen.

I walk home with the thing I wanted to say no longer in my chest. That’s the gift I give myself. Whatever happens with the URL is out of my hands, and out of my hands is exactly where I wanted it.

If she never goes, nothing happened, and my ignorance is a second gift: I cannot know whether she heard me, and not knowing is its own kind of peace.

If she listens and does nothing, the audio burns on play. The URL 404s. If I check it later the 404 is my read receipt: she heard me, and we are both released.

If she listens and replies, we are in it. We got here without either of us having the other’s number, and because the channel still burns, the reply is a message too.

Every branch refuses audience. Every branch eliminates debt. Every branch requires only courage to speak without demanding interruption.

This is why I’ve been building ephemeral.website. A small site for voice messages that exist for exactly one listen. Confession, appreciation, apology: three doors into the same medium, one for each kind of act. Nothing knows who you are. Nothing remembers what you said. Ephemerality isn’t a feature. It’s what makes the thing a message instead of a performance.

The writing is CC-BY-SA. The code is AGPL-3.0. The pattern can be implemented by anyone. It cannot be walled off by anyone.

Here’s a test. If the barista were seventeen, asking for her number would make me a predator before I’d said anything. The extraction of an ongoing channel from a minor who can’t gracefully refuse is the harm itself, regardless of what I meant to say next. But I might want to express heartfelt gratitude to a seventeen-year-old without becoming a predator. A handwritten note of thanks on the way out would manage this. An ephemeral URL, said the same way, would manage it too. Only the phone number fails the test.

Same man, same heartfelt intent, same content, three channels. One makes him a predator; two make him a kind stranger. Intent and speaker and content held constant, only the medium varies, and the medium is doing enough moral work that the act changes category. The medium is not neutral carriage. It sets the default power relation between sender and recipient, and that is constitutive of the act.

The medium disambiguates intent. A public marriage proposal is performative no matter how genuine the feeling, because the audience is present. The feeling does not become the act. The medium constitutes the act, and the act is what travels.

Here is what this medium is actually for, beyond the cafe and the minor test. It lives at the fringes of who you know, in the relationships too thin to form their own channel. A thank-you to the stranger whose kindness made your morning. An apology you have been drafting for three years to someone you no longer know how to reach. A word of admiration for work by someone you will never meet. None of these are performances. All of them are messages. Every channel we have makes them something else.

We are on more channels than have ever existed, and we keep getting lonelier. The Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023, reporting that young people aged 15 to 24 spend seventy percent less time in person with friends than they did two decades ago. Gen Alpha is heading the same way: one in five parents of children 6 to 12 say their child has too few friends, and nine in ten of those children say they wish they had more.

No surprise. The alternatives to friendship have become more compelling than friendship. Games, social media, asocial short-form video are each engineered to win an attention market friendship was never built to compete in, and each delivers something that looks like social engagement without requiring anyone to be seen by anyone.

The paradox is not new. What is new is a vocabulary for why it keeps happening: the channels we built accumulate audience but not attention, metrics but not meaning, records but not reception.

What we are starved of is not connection. It is a signal, from a specific person to a specific person at a specific moment, that you were seen. Your nervous system can tell the difference even when you cannot name it. Every persistent channel we built is structured to deliver the other thing, the performance thing, and that is why the more of them we have, the hungrier we get.

None of this eliminates pressure, coercion, manipulation, or memory. It changes the shape of them. An ephemeral message can still be rerecorded by a second device, a sender can still carry intent no medium can screen, a listener can still save what was said in their head.

The point is not purity in the absolute sense. The point is what the medium makes ordinary. A persistent channel makes performance ordinary. This one does not.

Most communication media don’t get to pick their ethics. Email inherits identity from DNS. Phone calls inherit it from telco billing. iMessage inherits it from your Apple ID. The medium carries half your relationship before you type anything, and that half is usually performance, because that’s what the substrate was built for.

If you want the message to remain a message, you need a medium that forgets as fast as air does.

I carried that poem for nearly ten years. It was waiting for a medium that would let a message stay a message. I built one, because I no longer accept a medium that remembers as the price of saying what matters.