Vinyl records were often said to sound better than CDs.
Limited by Side A and Side B, an album rarely exceeded seventy-five minutes.
Track order mattered.
Even the act of standing up to flip the record was part of the experience.
Today, music has almost lost its form.
Packages have been dismantled.
We expose ourselves to endless streams—someone else’s playlist,
a recommendation whispered by Alexa.
It is convenient.
It is efficient.
There is little reason to reject it.
And yet, something lingers.
A sense that we are only standing in the wind, rather than walking through the landscape.What vinyl offered was not merely sound quality.
It was the weight of the jacket in your hands. The act of going to a store and digging through shelves.
The quiet time spent following small printed lyrics while listening.
What existed there was not a difference in frequency.
It was an intentionally constructed density of narrative.
In that sense, it was a luxurious experience.
What Is Lost in an Age of Generative AI
In the age of generative AI,
we are entering a world where searching is no longer necessary.
Recommendations are optimized.
Choices are accelerated.
Hesitation is engineered out of the system.
“Leave the digital world behind and go into the forest.”
That interpretation makes perfect sense, and I agree with it.
But personally, another journey keeps drawing my attention.
Is it possible to reweave, within the digital realm itself, those small particles of narrative that once existed naturally in everyday life
Structures born from constraint.
Experiences remembered because chance slipped in.
Moments that gained meaning precisely because they took time.
Rather than treating these elements as enemies of efficiency or optimization,
what if we designed for them deliberately?
That question feels far more exciting to me.
A Thought Experiment
There was a shared texture to the user experience of the analog era.
It is often described as inconvenience or limitation,
but that was never the essence.
– Room for coincidence
– Being alone without being fully isolated
– The imagination that someone, somewhere else,
might be sharing the same moment in a different place
Consider traveling alone.
Unfolding a paper map.
Missing a transfer.
Stepping into a café by accident,
and later realizing that a fragment of conversation from the next table stayed with you.
In that moment,
you sense that somewhere in the same town,
someone else is seeing a similar scene.
You are not connected to anyone.
And yet, you are not cut off from the world.
That sensation, I believe,
was the core of analog UX.
The Concept of Parallel
Here, as a hypothesis,
I want to imagine a service called Parallel.
Parallel is an attempt to redefine generative AI
not as something that delivers answers,
but as something that quietly runs alongside human time.
It is not a tool designed to help you achieve something.
It is not a social network meant to bind people together.
It is a thin layer—
one that prevents time spent alone
from becoming excessively disconnected from the world.
Solitude as a Premise
Parallel does not attempt to rescue users from loneliness.
Instead, it respects being alone as a premise.
It does not force sharing.
It avoids structures that invite comparison.
It does not demand reaction.
Here,
thoughts that are not shaped for evaluation by others are treated as the most valuable form of presence.
And Yet, Not Disconnected
What Parallel values is ambiguous contemporaneity.
– Someone else is pausing at the same question right now
– Someone is lingering on this very paragraph
– Someone, somewhere, has chosen silence at the same hour
No names.
No histories.
No achievements.
Only a faint sense that
you are not the only one here.
This is not connection.
It is parallel presence.
A Different Bandwidth
Parallel does not exist on the same extension
as conventional streaming.
High-speed, optimized, endlessly consumable information flows
cannot carry certain things.
Emotional tremors.
Silence before language forms.
Indescribable discomfort and lingering aftertaste.
These require a different kind of token
and a different kind of bandwidth—
one meant not for processing,
but for perception.
Parallel is not a new format of distribution.
It is a new channel altogether.
Redefining the Token
Here, a token is not a unit of computation.
The tokens Parallel handles
are not meant to be consumed.
They are meant to remain.
They resist immediate interpretation.
They do not rush toward conclusion.
They change shape inside a person over time.
A single token may stay as negative space in thought,
only to return hours or days later
bearing a different meaning.
This is a unit
that streaming systems cannot handle.
AI Does Not Lead. It Accompanies.
In Parallel, generative AI is neither teacher nor navigator.
Its role is simple:
Do not disrupt the user’s pace.
It does not hurry answers.
It does not impose conclusions.
It allows sessions to end unfinished.
At times, the AI may return a question—
not to move the user forward,
but to give them a reason to pause.
Reimplementing Analog Premium
Analog premium was never about higher fidelity
or rarity.
It was about this simple fact:
The speed and bandwidth required to feel were protected.
Parallel is an attempt
to reopen that bandwidth
in the age of generative AI.
A place that resists optimization.
Time that does not rush.
A sense of being alone,
yet gently aligned with the world.
This may not be a luxury.
It may be a requirement
for the era we are entering.