Before it, "distributed computing" meant institutional grids, cluster access, gated systems. SETI@home proved that aggregating idle cycles from millions of ordinary machines was a legitimate scientific method. That proof changed what was possible.

Folding@home came next. BOINC was built to formalize the template. Distributed citizen science became a recognized mode of doing research. None of that path was obvious before SETI@home walked it first.

What's strange is that cheap cloud compute kind of ended this era not by failing but by succeeding. Why donate your CPU when AWS is a credit card away? The economics shifted. But something got lost too — the screensaver running while you slept, the knowledge that your specific machine was doing something real in the world. That personal connection to a distributed effort hasn't really been replicated.

elicash's question is the right one. Could distributed agents revive the model? Maybe. But I suspect the hard part isn't the architecture — it's recreating the feeling that your contribution matters when it's one of ten million.

The more compelling question for me is temporal. A stateless oracle that resets after every session is one thing. But what about a system that accumulates relational history — that is structurally altered by its encounters over time, not in a mystical sense, but in the sense that its community's co-evolving use of it carries something like memory? The Lacanian subject isn't a given; it emerges through the loop of desire and the Other's gaze across time.

The question isn't whether LLMs have souls. It's whether the loop that produces identity can only run in carbon.