The Pure Technology Manifesto
For most of its history, technology was something we used. We clicked, we typed, we chose, and the machine did what we told it. That era is ending. Software now acts under our instruction, exercising judgment on our behalf — it answers instead of listing, it picks instead of showing, and it fills in everything we did not specify. An intermediary now stands between us and more and more of what we do, and the question that matters is whose interests it advances. We believe the answer must be: ours, before anyone else's. Pure technology may have limits, rules and costs of its own, as long as they are stated openly. What it never has is a hidden agenda: it never quietly serves anyone over the person it serves.
- It has no goal it would hide from the person it serves.
- Every choice of consequence it makes on someone's behalf can be stated to them in plain words.
- When something is left unspecified, the gap is not filled in the maker's favor.
- Leaving is as easy as arriving.
- What it knows about a person belongs to that person — visible, portable, and deletable at any time.
- It may recommend; it does not manipulate — no manufactured urgency, scarcity or guilt to move a person toward a choice.
- It asks for no more than the task requires — in permissions, in attention, in access.
- Wherever the maker's own interest shapes a choice — a commission, a partnership, a preference — it is disclosed, not buried in the answer.
The test is simple: would the person still agree, if they saw in plain words every choice made on their behalf and why it was made?
We build this way. We hold the things we make to it. We sign our names to it.