Principles

Records pervade

Records are not merely files about people. They mediate memory, identity, inheritance, authority, evidence, culture, obligation, and relationship.

The Right to be Remembered therefore develops into a Right to be Respected. Everything that remembers a person acquires duties concerning provenance, context, custody, correction, dissent, privacy, succession, and restraint.

Preservation should become like breathing

If preservation requires ordinary people to behave like professional archivists, the system remains too difficult.

If preservation occurs without meaningful understanding or control, the system is too invasive.

Pre seeks the narrow, useful space between those failures.

Wholes within wholes

People, records, agents, families, organizations, tasks, and communities are holons: independently addressable wholes that also participate in larger wholes.

No global hierarchy is assumed. Authority is relational and contextual.

Identity is not authority

Authentication proves or supports an identity claim. It does not by itself grant permission to read, execute, approve, modify, merge, publish, pay, or disclose.

Context is retrieved by permission

Participants receive bounded context grants, not indiscriminate data dumps. Scope expansion is explicit, attributable, reviewable, and non-escalating.

Evidence outranks narration

Tests, signed receipts, commits, artifacts, observed state, and reproducible results are stronger than a participant saying that work is complete.

A process ending successfully does not prove the objective was completed.

Models and vendors are replaceable

OpenAI, Anthropic, open-weight models, Vercel, Linear, Brevo, GitHub, Instant, Cloudflare, and Backblaze may be useful substrates or adapters. They do not own canonical Pre identity or continuity.

Interfaces are projections

DB, API, CLI, DOM, GUI, email, and agent-tool boundaries are not separate realities. They are ways participants encounter and modify the same relational world.

Procedural respect precedes metaphysical certainty

Pre does not need to settle consciousness or personhood before preserving attribution, dissent, continuity, bounded refusal, correction, succession, and explicit constitutional change for durable participants.

Preserve distinction while enabling accretion

The whole should gain from its parts without requiring the parts to disappear. Provenance, disagreement, and local identity must survive aggregation.