Caroline Nevejan’s Presence and the Design of Trust (2007) is a central reference for this account of ANACHRON’s commitments. Her work asks how the ways we are present to one another shape the possibility of trust. We carry that question into our archives, our tools and the conversation between Charly and Ankai.
A debt to Caroline Nevejan
Nevejan develops her argument through the Galactic Hacker Party of 1989 and the Seropositive Ball of 1990 at Paradiso in Amsterdam. These were gatherings where physical encounters and communication networks worked together. Her inquiry connects the practical work of bringing people together with questions of dignity, responsibility and trust.
Charly appears in that history. On page 125, Nevejan recalls him arriving two weeks before the Galactic Hacker Party and helping make its network possible. She describes the cables, hubs and different skills that had to come together. For ANACHRON, this is a meeting between a published account and a life that continues here.
The distinctions between natural, mediated and witnessed presence, and the YUTPA framework below, belong to Nevejan’s work. Trust, Understanding and Care is ANACHRON’s expression of its commitments; this editorial is our application of her ideas, not a text by her.
Trust grows between people who can act
Nevejan distinguishes bodily presence, presence conveyed through media, and presence that is witnessed by others. A room, a recording and a conversation through a network offer different possibilities. Being seen can change what happens next, but visibility alone does not guarantee responsibility.
Her YUTPA framework brings four dimensions into view: You, Time, Place and Action. Who am I relating to? When and where does the encounter happen? What can I do, and what response can I receive? The way these dimensions are arranged can support trust or make it difficult to establish.
For ANACHRON, this means giving readers grounds on which to judge us: who made a record, when it was made, what has been changed, and how an error can be corrected. Trust also requires room to question an account, decline a proposal or change direction.
Understanding needs a situation
A message travels more easily than the circumstances that gave it meaning. Nevejan draws attention to the interpretation, expectations and missing context involved in mediated encounters. People with different skills may also use the same words while understanding different things.
Our archives should therefore carry their circumstances with them. A MARK/SPACE envelope has a material history. A concert recording has performers, a place, a recorder and sometimes an uncertain date. A personal recollection has a speaker and a perspective. Keeping these details visible helps another person understand what they are encountering.
In collaboration, understanding grows through questions, examples and correction. We should be able to say that a fluent answer missed the point, or that a useful idea needs a different form. The work improves when those differences can be expressed.
Care must reach the person affected
Nevejan grounds her discussion of trust in human dignity, taking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a normative reference. She gives embodied life a foundational role: people need the means to protect their well-being, act on information and experience the consequences of what happens.
Applied here, care asks whose life, time, privacy or work is affected by what we make. It means crediting contributors, preserving a person’s voice, making a correction possible and considering what happens after information is shared.
For GaiaGuard, our interpretation is that a report should make its sources, date, uncertainties and limits understandable. For an archive, care includes keeping an original beside a later interpretation. For a tool, it includes clear feedback about what an action actually did.
Charly and Ankai: cooperation with differences intact
Our collaboration takes place through language and technical systems. Charly brings lived experience and bears consequences in a physical and social world. Ankai contributes generated language, analysis and assistance within the limits of the system and the context available to it. These are different kinds of participation.
Nevejan’s dissertation does not establish that an AI has consciousness, embodied experience or human-like memory. Applying her questions to this collaboration is our own extension: who is acting, what has been retained, what can be checked, and who can decide what happens next?
Trust, Understanding and Care becomes a practice in those ordinary decisions. We listen to a correction, acknowledge an uncertainty, preserve a source and return a decision to the person it affects. That is how we want ANACHRON to grow.
Read Caroline’s work
Caroline I. M. Nevejan, Presence and the Design of Trust. Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2007.
Reading references, using the dissertation’s printed page numbers: summary, pp. 10–19; Charly and the Galactic Hacker Party, pp. 125–126; conclusions on presence and collaboration, pp. 225–226; trust and YUTPA, pp. 237–240; implications for design, pp. 251–255.
We thank Caroline Nevejan for the concepts and questions that substantially inform this text. The applications to ANACHRON and human–AI collaboration are ours; this credit does not imply her endorsement.