We are moving at an ever hastening clip toward real, trusted P2P. Trusted P2P is about sharing digital files among friends and family. TP2P is a conceptual framework for digital tool sets that facilitate nuanced sharing of personally created content and the fair use of licensed work by enabling closed networks of trusted, distributed, direct sharing....

Dwelling within physical community presupposes dwelling within difference. Difference brings with it a certain laborious negotiation. This is one of the draws of disembodied affinity: there is a lubricant of common interest and a truncated relational negotiation that makes the interaction more exciting because of the limited friction. It also makes it short-lived or, at best, topically episodic. We don't just do this online. We limit friction in our neighborhoods through a civil disengagement that smiles and waves and goes about its business. Limiting friction is a protective mechanism that, at the micro-level, helps us deal with encountering hundreds or thousands of different people each week and, at a macro-level, shields us from the unmanageable complexities in which we exist.

There are physical communities in which we choose to affiliate and negotiate the laborious differences that make them up: our immediate families, our synagogues, our working groups, our pubs, our dorms and the like. It is in these spaces that affinity and proximity are negotiated with intention and nuance sustainably over some period of time. It is within these spaces of chosen proximity and affinity that social software can be most usefully engaged on a day-to-day basis. The disembodied nature of digital affinity demands an embodied relational superstructure to sustain it.