# What we believe — Eden The Pingback builds instruments to augment human intellect. Instruments, not products; augmentation, not productivity; actors, not agents; one partner, not a crowd; beautiful personal software; your life is not raw material; a home should send you back out. Canonical: https://eden.actor/beliefs/ Human page: https://eden.actor/beliefs/ [Skip to content](https://eden.actor/beliefs/#content) [Eden](https://eden.actor/) ### The Read menu What it is: The nav’s menu of what there is to read. How it works: Tap Read and a menu of links opens under it; Esc or a tap outside closes it. On a narrow screen the nav folds into a Menu button that holds the same links, Community and Contact. Opens to: The menu - [What we believe](https://eden.actor/beliefs/) [Community](https://eden.actor/beliefs/#community) ### Request an invite, in the nav What it is: The site’s one ask, in the nav: a button that opens a small form under it. How it works: Tap it and the form opens under the button (on a phone, as a panel under the nav) with the email field ready; Esc or a tap outside closes it. Sending thanks you in place. It goes to Eden’s own request list, which Joel reads; you hear back when you’re let in. Opens to: The form ```text-view:invite Email you@example.com (required) Where's your mail? Choose one (required) Gmail · Outlook · iCloud · Other What would you use it for? Optional [ Request an invite ] Joel reads every request. ``` *What ASCII can't carry: Colour and the field's focus ring aren't shown here.* # What we believe. [The Pingback](https://pingback.ai/) builds instruments to augment human intellect. Eden is one of them. 01 / 07 ## Instruments, not products. A product tells you how a thing is to be used. It decides the pattern for you. An instrument gives you affordances: what a thing could be used for, and room to find out. That is what The Pingback builds. It is the same line as augmentation and productivity. A product is built to get a set amount done. An instrument leaves the person holding it more capable, and the rest is theirs. Machines are becoming first-class actors in the world. The infrastructure by which people know, the interfaces, the philosophies, the intuitions, has to be augmented to meet that, and to leave people more capable, not less. [The Pingback](https://pingback.ai/) Lineage [Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973](https://www.panarchy.org/illich/conviviality.html) 02 / 07 ## Augmentation, not productivity. Useful technology presents like a superpower. It grants you a capacity without binding you to use it in some particular manner. Many people speak of technology as though its ultimate end is productivity. More will be done. Less time will be needed. That framing is misplaced: productivity is an outcome of a more fundamental reason for technology. Some people use a superpower to be more productive. Others use it to do less of one thing and turn their attention to another. Email didn’t only make mail-by-post faster; it gave people new ways to reach each other. Augmentation inevitably leads to a semblance of productivity. Productivity, for its own sake, never leads to augmentation. [Augmentation](https://adejola.com/writing/augmentation) Lineage [Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect, 1962](https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html) 03 / 07 ## Actors, not agents. An agent is an entity that acts on behalf of another, while an actor does so on its own behalf. When we prompt a model today, we are really conveying our values and orientation to it, and converting it from an actor to an agent. What it can do is governed by the prompt it was given. What it knows of the world is imputed by that prompt. The premise of an actor is that it can take initiative about when to participate or idle. Eden’s actors each hold a standing purpose of their own, keep it from one day to the next, and choose when to step in. The most useful technological implementation of the actor-model will let humans spend more time in reality. [Why the agent-model of artificial intelligence will not scale](https://adejola.com/writing/why-the-agent-model-of-artificial-intelligence-will-not-scale) 04 / 07 ## One partner, not a crowd. It is already difficult to earnestly text ten different people every day. A separate profile for every bot only adds to the list. A roster that can grow without end becomes an attention funnel. None of us can hold more than a certain number of active relationships at a time. So you talk to one Eden, and it knows who to ask. Running and directing four or five agents at once, and switching between them, is Eden’s to hold, not yours. 05 / 07 ## Everyone deserves beautiful personal software. Software that grows with you: a garden for your dreams, capable of holding and diffusing complexity. We are, in many respects, in the stone age for these interfaces. Every application we’ve relied on to learn, read, write and use the web will be rebuilt. What would each look and feel like if it were built today? The models are already broadly good enough. What we haven’t yet felt is held back by the interface and the harness around them, and that is where the care has to go. Lineage [Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, Personal Dynamic Media, 1977](https://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf) 06 / 07 ## Your life is not raw material. What you keep in Eden is held for you, not mined from you. Eden never trains models on anyone’s home. Wherever your home lives, four things hold. Only you, and whoever you grant, can see it. Nothing happens in it without your grant. You can take all of it and leave. You choose where it lives. Eden is made by The Pingback, a public benefit corporation with custody of your data and your actors in its charter. In answer to [Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism) 07 / 07 ## A home should send you back out. Most of what we try to do isn’t work. It’s how we want to become a better self: to learn, to make, to be a better friend and family member, someone who cares. With everything a life sprawls into, it is hard to hold all of that together and live it. A home holds that complexity so you can spend more time in reality. Write the book. Read the books. Remember the birthdays. Sleep, and wake to find the day already rearranged, with one thing to approve. It holds all of it toward something: the option to stay and be the best you can be, or to say, thanks, I’m not doing this again, and go. A space that is soothing to return to, and still turns you back to reality. Lineage [Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, The Coming Age of Calm Technology, 1996](https://calmtech.com/papers/coming-age-calm-technology) A home for your digital life, so you can return to reality. [Discord](https://discord.gg/c8fPV4X26J) [X · @PingbackAI](https://x.com/PingbackAI) [Instagram · @thepingback](https://www.instagram.com/thepingback) [Substack](https://letter.pingback.ai/) [GitHub](https://github.com/thepingback) [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/thepingback) Eden - [Request an invite](https://eden.actor/#invite) Instruments - [Eden](https://eden.actor/) Read - [What we believe](https://eden.actor/beliefs/) - [The Pingback’s writing](https://eden.actor/beliefs/#) The Pingback - [About](https://pingback.ai/) - [Contact](https://eden.actor/contact/) [The **Pingback**](https://pingback.ai/) An institution for knowing. Eden is made by [The Pingback](https://pingback.ai/). Designed and built by [Joel](https://adejola.com/). [Privacy](https://eden.actor/privacy/) [Terms](https://eden.actor/terms/) © 2026 The Pingback ### Human · Machine What it is: A switch in the footer: Human is the page as built, Machine is the same page as text, made for agents. How it works: Choose Machine and the page gives way to its own markdown twin in one mono column: every word, each link as [label](address), each picture described, each product view drawn. Copy copies all of it; choose Human to go back. The choice is remembered on this device, and ?view=machine opens it from a link. Opens to: Machine ```text-view:machine Human · Machine [ Copy ] # ```