What we believe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.