Parallel Conversations Has Exceeded Its Original Mandate
A short fiction about a group chat that achieved more organizational complexity than the event it was created to plan.
The group was created to plan a birthday dinner for Meera.
By Thursday, the group contained:
- A thread about the restaurant, in which three options had been proposed and none selected
- A thread about whether the reservation should be under one name or split
- A reply to the restaurant thread asking about parking, which had been replied to with information about a different restaurant
- A message from Anand asking if everyone had seen his message from Tuesday (nobody had replied to the Tuesday message)
- Several reactions, including two thumbs-up on a message whose original content was now unclear due to edits
- One unrelated voice note from Rahul about something that had happened at his office
Under the governing rule, a group chat decision is not final until silence has been interpreted as consent.
Nobody had consented to anything. Nobody had refused anything. Silence had been interpreted as consent to continue the current conversational structure, which was now a complete replica of the complexity it had been created to replace.
"Just to confirm," typed Divya, "are we doing Saturday?"
Three people replied "yes" to different threads.
Anand replied "which Saturday" to one of them.
The group has more communication than ever while still lacking one clear decision.
Eventually the group maintains a complete communication system for avoiding one direct sentence. The direct sentence would have been: "Saturday at 8, Pali Village, reservation under Meera's name, parking on the street." Fourteen characters fewer than the total messages sent that day.
Saturday arrived. Everyone came. Meera was surprised. The dinner was good.
In the post-dinner debrief, someone suggested making a new group to plan the next one more efficiently.
A new group was created.