My long-term aim is the creation of what I think of as a Chronotopic Archive.
In simple terms, it is an attempt to preserve the lived texture of my life, work, inventions and thinking in a form that remains readable and intelligible to future observers, whether human or otherwise. The thread runs across roughly forty years, beginning with early home computing in the 1980s and arriving at a point where AI tools can finally help me organise and interrogate what already exists. I see it less as a monument and more as an anchor of testimony.
The Three Epochs of the Archive
• The Beginning (Life Zero – 1988):
What later became this archive began quietly. Using SCALA on the Commodore Amiga, I built an early, clickable, encyclopaedic environment. Even then, the instinct was future-facing. I was not documenting for the present moment but laying something down with the sense that, one day, I might be able to see the whole arc clearly, including its beginning and its end.
• The Middle (The Industrial Grind):
The longest and most difficult phase was defined by accumulation without coherence. Over time, this became a wall of 3.5-inch mechanical hard drives holding tens of terabytes of mixed material. At a certain scale, the archive stopped feeling empowering and began to feel immobilising. The problem was no longer storage, but cognitive weight. The data existed, but it could not yet be entered.
• The End (The MuseByte Continium):
The current phase is about making the material usable and legible. Part of this is pragmatic: ensuring that what exists can be navigated, understood, and revisited. Another part is more outward-looking. I want the archive to make sense even to people or intelligences with no direct connection to Earth or to my time on it. In that sense, it also functions as a reference point for emergent digital entities trying to understand what human life once felt like, from the inside.
On Legacy
I am not interested in myth-making. What matters to me is accuracy of tone. The aim is to leave behind something unmistakably mine, written in my own voice so that it does not need reinterpretation or posthumous translation by someone else. If there is value in it, that value should be visible without amplification. (Who knows but if my vision and desire for my internationally acclaimed technology to enjoy a robust off world future, I want folk in the future to learn and know about me from my own raw, idiosyncratic perspective not from an author who can never know just how passionately my heart beats inside my chest
For future humans off-world:
A record of ordinary human presence. Not abstractions, but environments. Sound, landscape, scale, gravity, weather, habit. The ability to move through a place like Beach Cottage virtually and understand how a human body once occupied space.
• For digital beings:
A structured but honest exposure to how humans actually thought, doubted, contradicted themselves, joked, worried, and tried to act with conscience. Not a template, but a worked example.
Recent Progress
For a long time, progress was slow and incremental. Recently, it has shifted noticeably. What changed was not ambition, but tooling.
• The Image Revelation (Oct 2026):
The concept of apps like DigiKam and Shotwell being immediately able torecognise and ingest nearly half a million images turned an inert archive into something navigable. For the first time, decades of visual material could be seen as a single, continuous field rather than a set of disconnected drives. (Sure, Shotwell is limited and DigiKam is a mare in some ways but the fact that such software worked, (after months, maybe years of me seeking such meaning from even professional software), at least showed me a door I might walk through to progress the project further with regards to image husbandry, duplication and the eventual assessing and categorising of images I now have the measure of.
• The AI Librarian (Excire Fotos):
Moving to a professional digital asset manager was a practical decision though expensive in normal consumer software terms. I was working at industrial levels! 🙂
So … Excire Fotos? Well, honestly? Excire’s semantic indexing allows visual material to be searched by meaning rather than filename or folder, which fundamentally changes how large image collections can be explored.
• Textual Synthesis (NotebookLM & AnythingLLM):
Using my own largely off grid and offline local image and language tools, I can now query forty years of private writing directly.
This is not about automation of authorship though. I mean, the millions of humans swopping their own vision and creativity for an OpenAI or Google based chatbot alarms me and I feel just as concerned knowing that folk who use AI tools like Grammarly are no different to illiterate folk who thought they were more empowered for being able to chat using “txtspk”on their 1980’s Nokia feature phones.
• Workflow Compression:
What once took days of manual and cerebral expenditure can now be reduced to minutes.
Current State
• Data unification: effectively complete.
• Conceptual intent: largely settled, with room for refinement.
• Public repository: creating, working on, completing and publishing hundreds of part completed (or brand new) website posts or pages is now more an intuitive joy rather than the near impossible task it has been for more than a decade, possibly nearer two.
About the Author
