The sovereign memory stack
Design notes on durable personal records: cryptographically anchored markdown, selective privacy, and recovery that outlives any single platform.
marbles.network · research in progress
Don't lose your marbles.
A study of memory, ownership, and the shape of thought in the age of AI.
fig. 0 · interact → influence
The question
What happens to an idea after you give it away?
Every day we hand our thinking to systems that summarize, merge, and paraphrase it until the original is gone. Marbles is a study of what it would take to keep it: each idea whole, permanent, and yours.
The work surfaces below as it firms up.
The open problems
Fifteen questions. Ten with no owner.
From the working paper. The marked ones have no dedicated research program anywhere we could find. Each is a domain this project intends to learn from. Four of the ten, numbers 11 through 14, have a drafted design response in the protocol paper below.
01Joint measurement of convergence and divergence∅
02Longitudinal cognitive trajectories∅
03Model-tier stratification∅
04Instruments for mutual intelligibility∅
05Interface design as the operative variable
06The composite as the unit of evaluation
07Relational reallocation
08Cultural tail-loss measurement∅
09Human-side ecosystem monitoring∅
10Practice versus exposure
11Persistence of user contribution∅
12Portability and exit as a cognitive variable∅
13Many-to-one-to-many mediation∅
14Encodings that preserve particularity∅
15Simulation as design-space search
∅ no dedicated research program · august 2026
The archive
What's on the table.
Versions are kept. Earlier drafts are marbles too.
Informinformare · to give form
Interfaceinter + facies · the shared boundary
The four-tier operational stack
A working paper on why interface design, not mere exposure, is the causal mechanism behind cognitive change in human-AI systems.
Interactinter + agere · to act between
Physical marbles as digital anchors
Prototyping NFC-enabled objects as tangible keys to a personal record. Memory you can hold.
Marbles: a protocol for attributable collision
A working paper answering four of the open problems by construction: additive turns, structural attribution, portable payloads. Eight primitives and one untested bet.
Social AI, second draft
Can AI ambassadors introduce people on the depth of their thinking instead of the surface of their profiles? Dinner tables, pen-pals, teams.
Influenceinfluere · to flow into
Metacognitive laziness
What happens to thinking when the thinking is offloaded: how AI assistance erodes self-monitoring, and what preserved, sovereign records do to counter it.