Fresh off AI layoffs, Block now wants to whack Slack with agent-human collab tool

After cutting over 4,000 jobs due to AI, fintech biz Block is back with Buzz, a shared workspace where humans and bots can collaborate in ways that are more auditable, sovereign, and secure than what you can do in chat tools such as Slack. Block's human-bot co-op is built upon a turducken of tech jargon: The platform is free and open source. It's based on the decentralized Nostr protocol, so there's cryptographic identity. It's "sovereign," a naively optimistic term readers of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash should recognize, which in this context means self-hostable. And it's intended as a replacement for Slack, GitHub, and various other communication and collaboration tools. If "Buzz" sounds familiar, that's because Google used that name in a social media faceplant more than 15 years ago. For those who missed the first go-around, Google Buzz, a failed social media service, gave rise to Google+, also a failed social media service. Block appears to believe that a decade and a half is sufficient for a brand cleanse. The project's GitHub repo offers a more apologetic assessment: "Yes, it's another AI-adjacent developer tool. We're sorry. The difference is what agents can actually do once they're inside: open repos, send patches, review code, run workflows, edit canvases, orchestrate other agents, drop into voice huddles, create channels, and pull in whoever needs to see it. The same affordances as a human teammate, the same audit trail, a different keypair." You can already sic software agents on collaborative workspaces. Block's main insight is that it would be useful to link AI agents with cryptographic identities. Others have already arrived at that conclusion. Hence OWASP's Agent Name Service, DNS for AI Discovery, Estonia's digital IDs for agents, and so on. But Buzz's badging of humans and bots with cryptographic key pairs is bound to tick governance boxes. "Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together," said Bradley Axen, head of AI capabilities at Block, in a statement. "The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open." Moat-seeking tech incumbents would probably disagree about the need for openness, even though they're fond of using the word without applying it. We note that OpenAI sells closed AI. And Anthropic's decision to disallow third-party tools from using Claude subscriptions highlights the seemingly inevitable path from openness to barriers when revenue is at stake. What's more, it's not obvious that every company will need people and bots in the same space. There's a strong case for keeping humans and agents apart because they work at different speeds. Git at least was built for handling many distributed code edits, pull requests, and merges. It's hard to see how people and bots can share a text-based communication space unless the bots are rate-limited or just talk among themselves. "The bet is that one community can do what teams currently fake with chat, forges, bots, CI dashboards, release tools, search indexes, and a pile of glue code," Block's Buzz developers state. "Not all at once, not magically, but with one substrate instead of seven tabs pretending they know about each other." If tools for these sorts of things didn't already exist, and no large tech companies had designs on this space, Buzz might face less daunting odds. But it's worth a shot. (R)