Ethically Ambiguous Networking

I forget names. Not occasionally, and not in the endearing way that people forgive over a second glass of wine. I forget them in the handshake itself. The name arrives, I nod as if I have caught it, and by the time our hands separate it is already gone. For most of my life I treated this as a small personal failing to be managed with tricks and apologies, the mental equivalent of always losing one glove. A former colleague of mine always asked for a story behind the name, which I found was incredibly clever. Me being a techie, I thought of a different approach.

A while ago I said that working memory is a small budget, and that most of what passes for thinking in a working week is retention rather than synthesis. Names, agreements, who said what three weeks ago and in what tone. A name is the purest form of retention there is. It carries no argument and no nuance; there is nothing in it to reason about. It is simply a fact you either kept or lost. And I lose them, reliably, at exactly the moment a name is worth the most, the first thirty seconds, when remembering it would mean something.

The modern remedy for this is supposed to be the LinkedIn QR code. You meet someone genuinely interesting, and instead of a conversation you perform a small liturgy of phones. Unlock, open the app, find the code, angle the screen against the light, wait for the buzz. Two adults photographing each other’s screens in a corridor. It is efficient in the way a vending machine is efficient, and it produces a connection with no memory of the moment attached to it, a name in a list you will never open again, indistinguishable from four hundred others. It solves the logistics of exchanging identity and quietly deletes the part that mattered. It always struck me as incredibly random. You reduce a person you liked to a notification, and then you both move on, slightly emptier than before.

I find I miss business cards. Not the economics of them, and certainly not the drawer of dead ones every desk eventually grows, but the object itself. A card was something that passed from one hand to another. It had weight, a choice of paper, sometimes a slightly pretentious finish that told you more about the person than the job title did. Handing one over was a small deliberate act, a thing you did on purpose while looking someone in the eye. That world feels almost forgotten now, filed under the same heading as fax machines and calling ahead. I wanted to go back to it, and then, quietly, make it cleverer than it looks.

So I built the thing this post is named after. The honest name, the one I use in my own head, is ethically ambiguous networking. I wanted a card I could touch, that I could prepare before every conference the way you would prepare a campaign, and that would do the remembering I am so bad at. The card is deliberately dumb. It is an NFC tag, the same technology in a contactless payment, and all it holds is a single web address. Someone taps their phone against it and their phone opens my landing page. That is the entire trick, and it is the part I like most, because it puts the tactile moment back. There is an object again. You hand someone a card, they tap it, something happens. The ritual returns, and this time the ritual is load-bearing.

The page it opens is small on purpose. A short line about who I am, a couple of things I have built, and most importantly a way to say who you are. All you have to do is hit send. From that point on I do nothing, and the machine does the unglamorous work. It takes the name and the anchor, quietly enriches it into a fuller picture of the person from what is publicly available, turns that into a small block of text, and files it into a searchable memory. Later, weeks later, when a name has long since evaporated, I can ask it in plain English: who was the fintech founder from the Shoreditch thing. And it tells me. It remembers the meeting so that I did not have to, which frees the part of me that was never good at retention to do the part I actually care about, being present in the conversation while it is happening, instead of silently panicking about a name.

The campaign framing matters more than it sounds. Every card, or every link, can carry a small tag (e.g. some-berlin-conference or some-dinner-in-june, etc.) so the memory does not just know who I met, but where I met them. A conference becomes a campaign with a name, and the people I meet there arrive pre-labelled with the context that makes them findable again. It is the small piece of metadata that turns a pile of contacts into something you can actually reason across. Show me everyone from Berlin. Show me the people building agents I said I would follow up with and never did.

None of the machinery is clever, which is the part I am most pleased about. The landing page is an ordinary page on my own site. The capture form writes a single row into a database and hands the visitor a pre-filled WhatsApp link, and that is the last thing that happens in front of a human. Everything after it runs in the background as a durable workflow. It starts a scraper against whatever anchor you gave me, a LinkedIn URL or just a company name, waits however long that takes, and when a profile comes back it flattens the useful parts, the headline, the role, the place, into a short paragraph of plain text. There is no Zapier, no Make, no box of webhooks held together with hope. It is all native primitives on the same platform that serves this post.

The one idea worth explaining is how the remembering actually works. That paragraph of text gets turned into an embedding, which is a list of a few hundred numbers that places a person somewhere in a space where distance means similarity. Two people who do adjacent things end up near each other, without anyone writing a rule that says they should. It gets stored right next to the row it came from, using a vector extension most people never notice Postgres has. When I later ask a question in plain English, my question is turned into numbers the same way, and the database hands back the nearest people by how closely they sit. The asking goes through a private agent made with vercel eve that only I can reach, and that agent can touch the data through exactly one read-only search tool and nothing else. It cannot post, it cannot message, it cannot enrich anyone new. It can only look. That narrowness is deliberate, and it is doing more of the ethical work than it looks like it should.

Now the uncomfortable part, because I would rather say it myself than have you notice it.

Calling this ethically ambiguous is not false modesty. The moment you take a name someone gave you and turn it into an enriched profile, you have crossed from remembering a person into processing one. The data is public, the people tapped my card willingly, and I am in the ordinary territory of keeping track of contacts I actually made, but I am also, unmistakably, running other people through a pipeline. Most of the people I meet are in Europe, and Europe has strong and correct opinions about doing exactly this. The tools that do the enrichment flag it themselves, in the polite way a knife comes with a warning about the blade. I have drawn my line where it feels defensible: this is a memory of people I genuinely met, not a scraping operation; it stays small and it stays mine; it is emphatically not a machine for cold outreach to strangers I have decided I am owed. The discomfort is not a bug I engineered around. It is the honest cost of the convenience, and I think you should feel a little of it too, the same way I do every time I add someone to it.

There is a version of this story where the lesson is that I automated my way out of a human weakness, and I do not think that is quite right either. I did not remove the human part; I moved it. The machine now holds the retention, which was never the meaningful part of meeting someone. What it hands back is the room to do the synthesis: to remember, when I see a name surface, not just who they are but why I wanted to keep them. I am still terrible at names. I have simply stopped treating that as the thing that decides whether a connection survives.

It is a card I can hold, prepared before a conference, that quietly refuses to let the interesting people dissolve into a list. That is all it is. Whether that is a small act of care or a slightly dystopian confession probably depends on how good your own memory is.

If you're curious about how it is done, check out the GitHub repository.