Memories: our portal to a more connected and authentic humanity

All the world is talking about AI. Startup culture is obsessed with new vertical AI applications. AI is going to change consumer experiences in so many ways. We are probably at the peak of a hype cycle. 

Despite the plentiful opportunities in this technological shift, we are at risk of losing the key elements that make us human. 

We are looking for the authentic, for the real. As more and more content is generated through AI, we risk losing our sense of identity. 

We need an outlet where we can feel our individuality and engage in genuine human connection. 

We can use AI to help address the very issues that occur with its proliferation. 

I’m Charles Graham, founder of thragma. 

This essay is a call to action based on my research, my growing obsession with our memories, and their importance for the future of our culture and humanity. Its approach has been inspired by Chris Kutarna and his book How to Basecamp. It is the start of a conversation, a grounding of my thinking, that I hope will provide context for future customers, investors, collaborators, and employees. 

The essay is structured in four parts:

1. Why are memories so important right now?

2. What’s missing in the way we capture our memories?

3. What can we do to better preserve our memories?

4. What does a future with better memory preservation look like?

You can read more of my evolving thinking about memory on our Substack, and if you are interested, confused, intrigued, or excited by anything you read here, please get in touch - I would love to talk to you!

Why are memories so important right now?

We are, in many ways, our memories

“We are what we remember. Nothing is so uniquely one's own as one's memories - not only because they form the transcript of an individual history, but also because that transcript is so idiosyncratically preserved, so personally constructed and maintained. We are how we remember. That act of recollection is a fundamentally creative act as well as an existential act; it is at once self-expression and self-constitution.”

Memories define our personal narrative

Memories form our sense of self, personality, and character. We use memories to establish our identities through time. We create personal narratives as a way to communicate who we are. Our memories constitute a chain of connectedness with our past selves. They are the formation of our personality, and are key to our conception of self. This idea, formulated initially by John Locke in the 1690s, continues to hold true: our memories form our ways of understanding the world and hold a continually evolving thread of how we experience it. 

Memories are an essential part of the human experience. They are uniquely human - beautifully fallible, changing, and personal. Memories capture our perception of the reality around us, yet they change over time - every time we re-access a memory, we interpret it again through the lens of our current perspective. They form a chain of our personality that connects us to our past and enables us to interpret our present as well as our future. 

Why don’t we have a platform to preserve and curate our memories over time, accepting that they will shift and change?

Memories are personal, yet inherently social

Memories are all framed through our own perception of reality; that is why they are key to our sense of self and personality. However, so many of our memories involve other people, which makes them social. This is why frequently our engagement with friends, both old and new, comes through the telling of stories or shared acts of reminiscence. 

Memories can be the start of our connection with others, but because they are inherently personal, this connection is deeper if they are shared in small groups rather than being broadcast to a large number of people. This is why existing social media platforms have failed at capturing memories and enabling them to be shared effectively as they are performative broadcast channels rather than authentic communication ones. 

Why don’t we have a way of sharing our memories with people selectively?

Re-membering is an act of creation

Memory is a creative act - it requires curation and a certain level of friction. Every time we remember something, we are actually recreating it. If we are recreating it each time, then each time we are remembering something, we are creating a memory anew. The more we remember something, the less accurate it becomes; the more it becomes about us as we are now and the less it becomes about what actually happened.

“It is the genius in us who knows that the past is most definitely past, and therefore not forever sealed but forever open to creative reinterpretation.” 

Memories are key to our sense of self, how we engage with others, and are fundamentally creative - that is what makes them uniquely human, authentic, and so important for our understanding of culture. 

Why isn’t there a method for capturing our creative expression of memories over time?

Authenticity is the new luxury

Memories offer a human signal amongst ever-increasing digital noise

In a world of ever-increasing content generation, we are desperately seeking signal amongst the noise. We are looking for curation and selection as opposed to volume.  

As Rick Rubin notes in The Creative Act: “Flaws are human, and the attraction of art is the humanity held in it.” This principle extends beyond traditional art - we are desperately looking for content that feels real, amongst a deluge of ‘AI-generated slop’. 

Authentic human narratives, telling the stories of our memories, offer a huge opportunity for people to connect with each other, and to connect with themselves. They provide a way for us to find the signal of personal identity and community amongst the noise of AI-generated mess on the internet.  

What will be the repository of human authenticity in the age of AI?

We are all searching for moments of genuine human connection

In an increasingly digital world, we are seeking moments of authentic human creation and connection. 

Memory is a “subjective, selective, suggestible, and fundamentally creative phenomenon”. The experience of interacting with our memories has an aesthetic akin to that we can get from analog products, whether that be vinyls, notebooks, letter writing, or vintage timepieces. This is because they are imperfect, connected to a feeling of sentimentality or nostalgia, and often involve some form of creative engagement from us. 

As the brand Topdrawer puts it: “in the shadow of digitization’s omnipresence, the value of tactile and tangible artifacts emerges as a precious antidote to the intangible and ephemeral [...] they (analog tools) offer a respite - a resounding affirmation of our humanity, grounding us amidst the tumultuous waves of progress”. 

We are in need of a tool to access our memories in a way that feels thoughtfully created rather than generically amassed.

What will technology need to offer to support genuine human creativity and a shift in consumer sentiment towards the ‘real’ versus the ‘artificial’?

Memories aren’t performative, they’re personal

In an increasingly ‘always on’ and performative culture, we are looking for moments of private, personal reflection, which can be shared selectively with other individuals rather than broadcast. 

Memories can offer us a ‘third space’ in the way that coffee shops do in the physical world. A place where we can go to quietly reflect without needing to present a version of ourselves to the outer world, and where we can selectively invite others to share moments of true intimacy and connection. 

A much-needed space within our culture today, where we are all more connected than ever superficially, but are in fact extremely isolated. 

Can a digital ‘third space’ be built for our memories?

What’s missing in the way we capture our memories?

Prompts for memory are not enough

“I cannot say what portion is in truth

The naked recollection of that time,

And what may rather have been called life

By after-mediation”

I have conducted over one hundred in-depth interviews with people about their memories, how they store them, and how they interact with the existing prompts they have for their memory. These have shown that prompts, alone, are not enough. We are losing the stories behind the moments that matter in our lives. 

Most people I interviewed mentioned photos as the main way they kept their memories, although a significant minority still kept physical memorabilia. Many people viewed music as a powerful trigger for memories. Alongside this, for some, smell was particularly powerful as an involuntary stimulus for memories. People also said how valuable it is to have voice recordings of people they loved as a memory prompt. These findings showed how there are various different prompts for memory that often don’t conjure the memory fully on their own, and how we value the visceral nature of prompts like the human voice to bring us back to important moments or remember important people. 

Photos

Photos are the most common prompt for memory. Several people I interviewed as part of my research told me they had over 100,000 photos on their phones; managing them had become virtually impossible. Today, we are capturing more photos than ever before, because the barrier and cost of taking them is so much lower - but this is overwhelming, and a growing barrage of content makes it even harder to remember and re-access what matters.  

How do we curate our ever-growing photo libraries and maintain the context around each photo that matters?

Music

Music can be one of the most visceral prompts for memory. One person said “there are certain songs that are just insanely emotionally triggering”. We often collect playlists from significant trips or moments in our lives; songs are often imbued deeply with our memories. 

We may have hundreds of playlists in our Spotify and Apple Music libraries, CDs in our houses, vinyls in boxes, or even melodies stuck in our heads, but we are currently not able to connect these prompts for our memories with the stories or other items of context that help us preserve these important moments in our lives for us to relive. 

What value will we glean from connecting musical and visual prompts for memory?

Voice

Voice allows for human connection and personality to transcend generations - one person I spoke to told me of the gut-wrenching pain at having lost the last voicemail from their father, saying they “can’t really remember the sound of his voice”. Someone else highlighted how “there’s so much in voice that you can’t capture in a photo, in the cadence, in the melody of how somebody speaks. Non-verbal communication that can be passed along without the person actually being there”. The real human voice, not that constructed by AI, can provide connection for us across time, location, and even across the valley of mortality. 

A tool that could enable voices to be preserved alongside other prompts for memory such as photos would be incredibly powerful in connecting people across the lacuna of time, space, and life itself!

Can we make photos speak?

The senses of smell, taste, and touch

Smell can take us back to specific experiences very powerfully. For example, Maison Margiela’s Replica scent line reproduces ‘familiar scents and moments of varying locations and periods’, such as  ‘lazy sunday morning’, ‘on a date’, ‘under the stars’, and ‘by the fireplace’. These scents are often inspired by specific places and times. This isn’t about describing what is in the bottle, but what the bottle lets you experience again and again. 

Taste is often linked with other prompts for memory to conjure experiences; for example, “I like my coffee to taste like a memory from 2007”. 

Many people enjoy preserving their family recipes to pass down across generations. As more information about our memories is faithfully and easily preserved, products could emerge that enable us to relive experiences or enable us to connect and share taste experiences with others. 

Touch can be important as a physical reminder of memories; people like to touch photo albums, letters, childhood teddy bears, blankets, or ornaments. “I believe how you feel is who you are [...] to me denim is the essence of nostalgia incarnate. It's familiar, yet uniquely your own.” 

I have been told that ‘I really love the significance of certain objects as related to memory, such as jewelry’; others attest to the value of memorialising trips with trinkets or reviewing old journals with memorabilia stuck to the pages. Any digital product will need to be able to provide additional services to fulfill the tangibility of memory that is important to many people. 

How can we connect together smell, taste, and touch with photos and audio to enable experiences to be re-lived fully?

Place

Place is a multi-sensory prompt for memory but can be invoked from a dot on a map. People often use the map feature on iPhotos or Google Photos to locate memories: “I know this memory happened in this place, then that filters it down within my photo library”. One person even told me how they use old passports with their stamps as a portal for memories!

Any future memory preservation tool should be able to capture and connect geography with other stimuli so that moments can be captured more fully. 

How can we best capture and resurface the role of place in our memories?

The written word

Letter writing may sadly be dying but emails, messages, or even quotes can be really important drivers for memory. Many of us keep letters that have been written to us, or store lots of quotes in our camera rolls. This is yet another prompt that does not fully evoke memories on its own, but when connected with other stimuli can help provide a richer tapestry as part of the connective-tissue which is our memory. 

How does text integrate with other prompts seamlessly in a memory preservation product?

Memories need richer context to be preserved

Our memories require more than one of the prompts that I mentioned - such as photos, music, sensory triggers, a place, or something written down - to be fully preserved so that we can relive them and share them with others. If we want to save our memories, relive them with others, and be able to create a reflection of our personal identity in a generic, digitally-created world - then we will need a new way, a new product. 

What can we do to better preserve our memories?

Towards a product - giving voice to our memories

“I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.”

Initial product elements

Based on testing in a private beta using WhatsApp with forty paying customers, we have developed a thesis for an initial product for the world’s first memory brand.

Making photos speak

Our first feature is a way to add voice context from users to the photos that are associated with the moments that matter in their lives. These could be mundane moments, such as blurry pictures of an evening with friends or a view from a lovely walk in the countryside, or they could be milestone moments like a picture from your first date or your first day in a new job.

Music as a portal to our past selves

Our second feature is a way to integrate songs from your music library into these memories that now feature photos and voice context. Many memories are deeply connected to a specific song, and in these cases photo, voice-context, and song need to be held together in your memory as one. 

A new type of notebook:  an extended mind, a blank page for self-expression

Our third feature is a way to store these new memory artifacts - like a library, museum, art gallery, scrapbook, and notebook all rolled into one. A sketchbook was “an additional memory bank that collected a body of material to refer to at a later date” - which enabled much of the creativity and artistic output of the Italian Renaissance in Florence, such as the work of Leonardo da Vinci. This product will form an extended version of us, a reflection that we can engage with over a lifetime, and share parts with others as we wish. 

In the Italian Renaissance, another form of notebook appeared called a zibaldone - literally a salad mix of herbs - essentially a personal anthology or miscellany - “when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook”; often these were passed down from father to son. Notebooks have for some time been a reflection of the multi-faceted elements of our personalities as well as being items that can preserve us for future generations. Notebooks are also very personal items, often only of real value to the creator, as Joan Didion once wrote in an essay that: the purpose of her note-taking was to “remember what it was to be me: that is always the point [...] your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.” This is why our product will be built so that you can share memories directly with others if you wish, but you can also keep elements private. 

Memories can create connections with others, but because they are very personal, they need to be stored as an individual and private record first. As a notebook is essentially an ‘egodocument’, our product will be a living version of this proposition. 

These three core features that we are planning as part of our minimum viable product will introduce a completely new form of artifact to the world - a better way to preserve our memories. 

Future product development

Our planned minimum viable product forms an initial product layer which we call ‘Digital Memories’. As people build memory libraries over time of ‘living memory cards’, their memories can provide them with a new dataset on their personality and taste, offering additional value to them. Beyond this, we see a future where we add both ‘Physical Creations’ and ‘Third Spaces’ product layers - bridging the digital and physical worlds. 

Recreating the physicality of memories

Once users have built their memory library over time, there are various opportunities for physical products to be provided as additional elements to create a sense of tangibility - such as scent, memorabilia, books, recipes, or even objects of art. 

“Sentimentality is the soul of a space. It’s what makes design personal - when memory and material meet, something deeper comes alive.” Memories are richer when they are connected with physical objects, and in the future we will have further improved ways to connect rich digital contextual data about our memories with tangible objects in the physical world, as has been exemplified by the MIT Media Lab’s research on Teleabsence. 

Having a digital, context-rich memory library for ourselves enables us to commemorate, celebrate, re-engage, re-live, and share our memories in various other mediums to bring ourselves pleasure and others a lasting experience. 

Prompting new in-person connections

This memory library that we can share selectively with others will help people to connect with others in our community in the physical world rather than just the digital one. For example, re-living a memory with a friend, might lead to a phone call, a text, and then perhaps even meeting at a local coffee shop.

In the future, as we build a brand for memory, we can be the facilitator of such experiences in-real-life - whether that be through events or through the creation of physical ‘third places’ such as coffee shops or other meeting places in the real-world that echo the ‘third space’ that memory provides us in the metaphysical one. 

Product philosophy

We are trying to build a new ritual for humanity that embraces reflection and engagement with our memories so that they are captured, shared, and preserved for ourselves, our friends, our families, and generations to follow. This is a new category and a new way of being - embracing technology to better support our humanity, to create authentic records of our lives in a world crowded with the inauthentic, performative, and mass-produced.

A creative process rather than simply a product

The act of preserving and re-engaging with our memories is part of the value proposition of this product, and it is key to its long-term value to us. The creative act of recalling and preserving moments that will be memories, the poiesis, is as important as the artifact that it produces, the poiema. If we can create a product that is a delight to use, then people will see the value of the product grow over time as they use it, much in the same way that customers of IKEA associate greater value to their furniture because of the effort that they have put into assembling it! 

If we succeed, then we will all feel like the authors and creators of our own personal narratives as well as those of the communities to which we belong. 

A unique artifact that layers with time

Whether we capture a moment as a memory for the first time as it occurs, or a few hours or days or weeks after the event, our product will see that as the creation of an unique artifact - a node within the graph of time and space. Our product will allow additional layers to be built upon this initial memory moment, so more reflections, re-imaginings, or framings of a memory can be added over time, without losing the trace of the initial moment as it was viewed.

This will allow, for the first time, a series of memory artifacts around a specific memory to be layered together as part of our library of moments and memories in our lives. 

Selectively social media

We will build a library of memories that have true context, and are easily searchable based on themes. This will be a personal and private record, but one with the ability to share, like the communication networks of old, rather than the performative ones of today. A vision of what Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook promised to be, and have all failed to deliver. 

This library of our memories is not a linear timeline, but a living and breathing neural network of moments that have mattered to us - sometimes we might feel very close to memories from our childhood and far away from those created yesterday or vice versa. Creating context-rich, multi-layered memories enables this flexibility in reference, sharing, and engagement with the huge libraries we will build over our lives. 

What does a future with better memory preservation look like?

A memory pool for humanity

“They say the best memories are the ones that we forget.”

Memory need not be simply about nostalgia. We need new rituals for capturing our memories that allow us enough freedom to be inspired by them to create or imagine the new. Memories can be about re-inspiring ourselves rather than just re-membering our pasts. If we can build this product and achieve general adoption, a completely new data set will exist for humanity.

Memories as a dataset for personality and taste

Our memories are the closest thing to our sense of self. As we build a product that effectively captures our ‘Digital Memories’, we open up the opportunity to offer people a better way to understand themselves, and their taste. This is an idea that has been around since John Locke’s early treatises on identity in the 1600s but one that we will test through experimentation in 2026 to show how our memories can teach us more about ourselves and what we desire than anything else.  

Our future as the world’s first memory brand

“We are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened?...We will all interpret a common experience quite differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that there’s a shared common ground, a known ground...”

A different platform for understanding ourselves and building community

We are building a business that will create experiences that delight customers around the world, while enabling them to reap value from their personality, experiences, and moments in their lives.

A living notebook for our personality as we enter a new renaissance for our culture that will bridge the divide between the digital and physical worlds, ensure that we preserve the essence of our humanity, and rebuild community. 

Our view of memory as a creative expression of personality means that we are building a technology company as a creative brand. We will be structured with a creative team, product team, and a go-to-market team - ensuring that we continue to view the preservation of our most valuable artifacts (our memories) as an artistic, technological, academic, and experiential endeavour. We’re building a creative company that happens to use technology, not a tech company attempting creativity. Think art gallery meets hospitality brand - curated, experiential, and deeply human.

A more connected, human, and authentic future

We hope this company can support authentic humanity, community, shared experience, and oneness in a world devoid of it. This is a technology company that is rooted in the real-world, and can grow to enable physical experiences - providing an authentic physical, tangible, technological connection. 

We all just want to Create Something Good with our lives, with our communities, with our families, with our work. We might create this with a simple record of our memories, with a physical space, or with products that bring memories to life. 

Build with us

We are looking for people who want to join us on this journey - as we build our team and move towards the launch of our first product. 

We are looking for:

• A Founding Designer (Co-Founder)

• A Founding Engineer (Co-Founder)

 Please reach out to us for the potential to join our advisory board or founding team.

Contact me at charles@thragma.com