On the technology
AI is not the problem. Where it runs is.
We think it will make life better. The only questions that have ever mattered are whose machine does the thinking, and whose disk keeps the record.
You do not need Einstein to write your emails.
Ask a chatbot what to do and you get advice fit for a stranger. Cleverness was never what was missing. Your life was.
Half a life makes half an assistant.
Something given your email but not your messages, your calendar but not your notes, is guessing at the rest. It is everything or nothing. There is no useful half.
On your life
Everyone who holds this calls it data.
Your loves, your worries, the thing you told one person and nobody else. It never was data. It was a life.
Half of your archive was entrusted, not given.
Open your own messages and most of what you find is other people talking: what they told you, in confidence, when it was only you listening. Your words are yours to give away. Theirs are not.
This is not surveillance. It is memory.
Surveillance is an organisation keeping a record of you. Keeping your own record of your own life is the opposite, and it is yours by right. Handing it to a stranger is where the line sits.
You can change your password. You cannot change your past.
Cards get cancelled. Houses get moved. But you can’t unshare your soul.
On the people who want your life
A privacy policy is a promise. Promises break, and so do companies.
Your life on your own Mac is one small pot, and nobody crosses an ocean for one pot. Theirs is millions of them in one room, behind a single door.
Big Tech will never build this.
Their business is knowing you, and renting that knowledge to people who sell it back to you. Handing you that same power over your own life would leave them nothing to sell.
On what you are owed
An assistant that waits to be asked is a search box.
Answering is the easy half. Noticing the thing you have not thought of yet, while it still matters, is the half worth paying for.
Nobody speaks freely on the meter.
Charge by the question and you ask fewer of them. Charge by the token and the assistant learns to stay quiet. Neither of you should be counting.
An assistant should not become another thing to maintain.
No tagging, no filing, no remembering to save. It should read the life you are already living, in the ecosystem you already chose.
Your archive should outlive us, and end when you say.
Yours in plain files, portable whenever and wherever you want them. Deleted means deleted, not hidden.
On what is coming
The device is temporary. The record is not.
Pins, glasses, whatever follows them: devices that transcribe your day are coming, and they are worth having. Every one of them will be obsolete inside three years. What they hear should outlast them, and it should be yours first.
Your life should power anything you choose.
Not only us. Your glasses, your watch, an assistant we did not build, whatever arrives next. We would rather be where your life lives than the only place it goes.
The thinking you rent will get more expensive.
Cloud AI is sold below what it costs today, to get you used to needing it. Every introductory offer ends. A machine you already own does not send invoices.
On us
We take your money, not your life.
Free gets paid for somewhere, and with material like this the currency is you. We would rather charge a fair price and answer to nobody but you.
We are small, and that is the point.
A company with a billion users has to sell something other than software. We only have to sell software.
We would open every line of this the day it paid the people writing it.
It does not yet, so you get the next best thing: an archive you can read without us, and a boundary you can check for yourself.
This asks more of you than free does.
A Mac of your own, a little patience at the start, and a price. We would rather ask you for that than get it somewhere else.
A life should belong to the person who lived it.
Everything above follows from that.