Data Ownership on Thede Technologies

One question a week

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The database behind the iPhone app I just put on the App Store has answers in it from 2014.

Not a copy of them. Not an export I re-imported into something new. The same rows, in the same Rails application, sitting there the whole time.

In 2014 I went to Nashville Software School to learn to build the thing I had spent the previous two years trying to get somebody else to build. I turned 35 during the program. The capstone project I handed in was called Answers to Answers, and it did one thing. Monday morning, an automated mailer sent a single question to a small group. Everybody answered on their own, either by replying to that email or on the web. Friday morning at ten, everyone’s answer was revealed to everyone else at once.

Be Your Own Historian

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have been saying a version of the same sentence for fourteen years, and the sentence has gotten shorter every year. It started as a product pitch. It is now four words: be your own historian.

Here is the long version, which I will spend the rest of this essay defending.

In a world where intelligence is cheap and getting cheaper, the only thing that stays scarce is the record of a particular life. It cannot be generated. It cannot be bought. It can only be kept. And the person who should own it is the person who lived it.

The Memex Has Been Waiting 80 Years for This Moment

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In July 1945, an engineer named Vannevar Bush published an essay in The Atlantic called “As We May Think.” It is one of the strangest, most hopeful documents I know.

Bush had spent the war as the director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. He oversaw the entire American scientific war effort: radar, the proximity fuse, penicillin manufacturing, and, indirectly, the work that would end the war the same month his essay was published. The atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Bush’s essay came out a few weeks earlier. He could feel what was coming. He wrote the essay anyway, and what he wrote was not a triumphal account of what science had done. It was an almost embarrassed argument that the same instruments scientists had built for destruction could be turned, just as easily, toward the preservation of human knowledge.