Earned Connectivity: On the Coming Market for Certified Remoteness

1. The observation

This month marks the tenth anniversary of a mobile game that began, in 2014, as an April Fools video: a fictitious challenge inviting the public to find imaginary creatures in real terrain, with employment promised to the winner. The joke was taken seriously. Two years later it was a product; within two months of launch, five hundred million downloads; within a decade, more than eight hundred million players, estimated gross player spending above nine billion dollars through the two dominant app stores, and upwards of sixty billion miles walked — a figure the operator prefers to report in kilometers, where it crosses one hundred billion, and which is in either unit roughly six hundred times the distance from the Earth to the sun, a destination that was not the object of the search.

The sequence — a joke, taken seriously, escalated stepwise into revenue, a trade press, and an anniversary — follows a methodology the Institute has documented elsewhere and does not claim to have invented.

Case reports describe chronic conditions brought under management as a side effect of the search; the walking, unlike the creatures, is real. And this month, in an interview marking the anniversary, the operator's president of games identified the next frontier. Praising the national parks — "I think it's fantastic that a lot of them don't have cell service" — he proposed satellite connectivity, so that the game might be opened "just for a minute when you reach some kind of peak."¹

The remainder of this paper concerns that minute.

2. Prior art

As is the Institute's practice, the projections below begin from documented ground.²

• In 2017, a federal court preliminarily enjoined a county from enforcing an ordinance that required publishers of location-based augmented-reality games to obtain permits before their games could operate in county parks, finding that the games contained sufficient expressive content to implicate the First Amendment and that the permit regime's unfettered discretion was constitutionally defective (Candy Lab AR v. Milwaukee County, E.D. Wis. 2017). The parks were thus provisionally recognized to contain expression invisible to the unequipped eye, which is also true of most parks.
• At least one major life insurer ties premium savings — and, in some products, later premium adjustments — to voluntarily submitted activity telemetry. Walking, under this arrangement, is not exercise but disclosure.
• Retreats already sell phone-free stays in which lockboxes or locked pouches are included as part of the experience. The brochures describe the guests in the vocabulary of their surrendered devices: they disconnect, unplug, and recharge.
• Commercial direct-to-cell satellite service is operational for messaging, location sharing, emergency contact, and selected satellite-ready applications. The remaining blanks on the coverage map are no longer an absence of infrastructure. They are a roadmap.

3. The doctrine of earned connectivity

Continuous connection cannot be a reward, because it is ambient. The design insight of the summit minute is rationing: connection, withheld along the trail and granted at the peak, converts coverage from a utility into a sacrament of arrival. The industry term, which the Institute projects will exist within eighteen months, is earned connectivity.

Under the doctrine, the wilderness — which had spent a century losing market share to its own photographs — is repositioned as an achievement tier. Trailheads become lobbies. Elevation becomes progression. The backcountry becomes content, and the one resource it uniquely holds, the absence of signal, becomes the scarce input of a reward economy.

4. The verification of absence

A reward for remoteness requires proof of remoteness, and proof of absence is the one document absence cannot sign. Attestation follows, in the customary order.

The Institute projects: a Registry of Verified Absence, certifying locations where connectivity reliably fails; site ratings expressed in bars of absent signal, with facilities certified at 0.0 bars commanding premiums (the grammar of this market — certification of a negative, priced by fidelity — was documented in the certification of simulation, IAN-2026-043); annual re-certification, since coverage creeps; and, for practitioners unable to reach authentic absence, constructed dead zones near metropolitan areas — shielded grounds where signal is engineered out at considerable expense, admission charged, authenticity disclosed in the fine print.

The audit problem is already visible: an assessor's instrument, once switched on, voids the condition it measures. Assessors will accordingly attest from the trailhead, on their honor, which will be accepted.

5. The ritual layer

The itinerary — a long walk, an ordeal of elevation, a summit, and a single minute of grace at the top — has a shape that sociologists of religion the Institute consulted declined to name first. The Institute takes no position on whether the practice constitutes religion. It notes only, for the record, that the community already possesses relics (accounts registered in the founding summer of 2016), feast days (annual festivals with attendance in the millions), a tithing structure (the seasonal pass), and now, over the question of whether the peak should acknowledge the pilgrim, the beginnings of a schism.

The Silentist position holds that the summit's value lies in being unwitnessed. The Connectionist position holds that an unrecorded ascent, whatever its private merits, did not happen. Membership drift favors the Connectionists, whose position can be measured. In administrative completeness, the practice now stands ahead of several faiths of comparable age, a comparison the Institute makes actuarially and withdraws immediately.

6. Trajectory

Expected, in the customary order: an international working group on the measurement of absence; park services staffing summit checkpoints as the unpaid infrastructure of a private reward economy; insurers extending telemetry pricing from steps taken to elevation earned; a university concentration in Experience Scarcity Design; and polarization along the only axis available. As the coverage map completes, verified absence becomes a positional good: the poor are continuously connected; the wealthy purchase intervals of not being anywhere in particular. Both parties describe their arrangement as recharging (see Section 2). Neither is wrong, which is what will make the argument durable.

It will then be ordinary to drive four hours into a designated wilderness in order to be seen there, briefly, from orbit. Visitors will describe this as getting away from it all. The all, for its part, has nearly completed its coverage map.

1. Roettgers, J., "10 years later, 'Pokémon Go' is as popular as ever," Fast Company, 9 July 2026, fastcompany.com. The second consecutive locatable reference in the Institute's registry. The trend has been noted.
2. The Section 2 record: the preliminary injunction order; insurer program materials; satellite service terms; representative phone-free stays in Cornwall and Texas. The Institute notes that the Section 2 record is, in its entirety, locatable.