A hundred years from now, an ordinary life should still be readable.
We're building an archive so that any ordinary person can record their life story — and have it survive beyond three generations. Together, those stories become a portrait of our era.
Why most lives disappear
Today a human life is carried forward by only two things: religious ritual, and roughly three generations of oral memory. After that, almost every ordinary life vanishes — not because it didn’t matter, but because families have no mechanism to keep it. Nations have archives. Religions have canon and ritual. Families have a shoebox.
What we’re building
We want it to be normal — and possible — for anyone to speak their life into a book, and for that book to still be here in a hundred years. Recording turned out to be the easy half. Making it last is the hard half. So we are building the second half in the open.
Our 100-year promise — precisely
We claim no magic. We commit to the three things that actually make a memory last:
Open & portable
Open, exportable formats. No lock-in — a family can always take everything with them.
Redundant by design
Many copies, many media — print, voice, film — in many places. Antifragile to any single loss.
A guardian that outlives us
The archive is held by a nonprofit foundation, with the mandate and funding to keep preserving it — long after any company.
What we hold to
The author is the person
AI only organizes what they said. We never invent, and never synthesize a likeness of the dead.
Consent and control
Nothing is kept without clear consent. Anyone may withdraw and delete, at any time.
Portable forever
Open formats, exportable anytime. You are never trapped.
Redundant by default
Many copies, many media, many places — so no single loss can erase a life.
Continuity beyond us
A foundation, not a company, guarantees the promise; open standards guarantee it beyond the foundation.
Never for sale
Personal stories are never sold, and never used to train models.
How a story survives a century
No single technology solves this. We stack them — and we hold every medium to one test, borrowed from the archivists: benign neglect. A medium earns its place only if a story stays readable when no one is tending it — no power, no upkeep, no subscription. That is why our masters are physical: print, voice, film — not a hard drive or a cloud that dies the moment it is forgotten.
Analog, technology-free
A printed book on archival paper, and the voice pressed to vinyl — readable with nothing but light and a needle.
Digital, open, migrated
Open-format files kept in several places at once, checked for integrity and carried forward as formats change.
Institutional
Deposited with partners built to outlast companies — libraries, genealogical archives, and long-term vaults.
Add your story to the record
A hundred years from now, this should be the truest portrait of who we were. Every ordinary life belongs in it — including yours.
— The team at EverMemory