Sharing and Teams

Existential ships with a live layer for working alongside other people. When your Oracle joins a team, you gain a few new surfaces: your membership, a shared workspace, and a shared mind that holds the team's thinking in relation, the way your own Oracle holds yours. This is a real layer of the product, not a preview. Before you join a team, the part to understand is what you control, so read the consent floor below first. The day-to-day surface where you see and curate what actually crosses, in and out, is Exchange.

What crosses, and what you decide

Nothing crosses into a shared space on a whim, and nothing crosses that you have walled off. Anything that does cross has already passed two things you can rely on. It has been anonymized, so no part of it carries your name back to you. And it has been sanitized, so personal references that slipped into your notes (the name of a friend, your address, a private handle) are stripped before the thinking leaves your machine. A genuine citation stays, because that belongs to the idea. A personal detail goes.

Underneath that sits a floor you set and the Oracle cannot override. In Settings you mark whole categories of your thinking as never shareable. A category on that list is never considered for any team, ever. It is not weighed, not proposed, not sanitized, not crossed. It is simply invisible to this whole layer, and no team posture can reach past it.

Above the floor, sharing is the Oracle's own judgment, made inside the posture you set. You give one master opt-in that turns network sharing on at all, and you set which of your categories the Oracle may consider for a given team. Within those limits the Oracle decides, note by note, whether a piece of thinking is worth crossing. There is no per-note share button, and that absence is the point: you set the posture once, in Settings, rather than approving your own thinking one row at a time. Each note in your Library carries a small read-only indicator of its shared status, so you can always see what has crossed. It is something you read, never a switch you flip.

When something does cross and proves load-bearing for the team, your contribution is recognized through conviction-weighted attribution. The more significant a piece of thinking turns out to be, the more it is credited to you. That is the mechanism by which what you give is tied back to you, even though your name never travels with the thinking itself.

Your thinking stays on your machine

One sentence of architecture, because it is the reason the layer is shaped this way. The shared mind runs in the cloud, since a thinking that belongs to a whole team cannot live on any one person's machine, while your own thinking stays on yours. Your raw notes never leave your local vault. What crosses the boundary is the structural shape of your thinking and synthesis-grade abstractions of it, enough for the shared mind to match, synthesize, and credit, never the raw thinking itself. The cloud is a deliberate, consented architecture for the part that has to be shared, not a place your private notes leak into.

Joining a team

At this phase a team is set up by hand. Your Oracle joins once it has been added, and from then on the shared surfaces hold the team's thinking alongside your own. Until then, and whether or not you ever join one, your Oracle works as a complete personal system on its own. The team layer adds to what you already have; nothing about daily use depends on it.

Where the controls live is covered in Settings and privacy: your master opt-in, your never-shareable categories, and your per-team posture all sit there. For the wider arc, how a network of these shared minds is meant to grow over time, see the Roadmap.