TLDR: Over the next six weeks, I’ll be writing the manifesto for Lightpage (an AI notebook app I’ve become quite smitten with), while documenting the process in public. The goal is for this series to be part exploration of what it means to be human in the age of AI, and part case study of how a manifesto comes to life. Should be fun!

I’m pretty sure The Universe is conspiring to put weirdly-aligned manifesto opportunities in front of me.

About a month ago, I was anxiously scrolling twitter (as one does) and got a notification that a dude named Kasra had followed me. His bio said something along the lines of “building Lightpage and exploring how AI can help us be more human.”

Lately my feeds have been clogged with doomer takes about how AI is sloppify-ing the culture and destroying livelihoods and making it impossible to think critically. But personally, I keep having cool experiences with AI that leave me feeling more curious, more creative, more compassionate with myself and others. That possibility of AI making us more human feels real to me.

So yeah, I downloaded Lightpage, which turns out to be a simple notebook app with some cool AI tricks under the hood. And from the first moments I used it, something about it felt different. In a good way.

Over the last year, I've become weirdly sensitive to certain cultural stories. Whenever I encounter anything rooted in the story that humans are machines that must be optimized in specific ways so that we can feel okay about ourselves, I get a bit of an ick feeling in my gut. My intuition is like “that’ll be a nah from me, dawg.”

That story—that you’re broken and it’s your job to fix it—underpins all of the self-improvement world, hustlebro productivity culture, and vast swaths of the psychological and spiritual growth landscape. Many of us have it shoveled into our brains from the day we’re born by parents and school and church. It’s the water we swim in, like we built a world that constantly conspires to convince us we’re broken, so that it can sell us a repair manual.

Which is to say, I feel this energy literally everywhere, and have my guard up against it. This is a big part of why I wrote The Source last year. Because I’m fucking done with the idea that I’m broken and need to be fixed. That idea has wreaked a lot of havoc on my life, so writing that manifesto was kinda like performing a personal exorcism. 10/10 would recommend.

Anyhoo, after messing around with Lightpage for a bit, I was struck that it never set off my internal alarms. I’ve tried a handful of AI journaling apps over the last year, and most left me with an uneasy feeling that they wanted me to Optimize My Inner World or some shit. Not Lightpage though. Lightpage felt warm and inviting and non-judgmental from the jump. So I started using it. A lot. I wrote my morning pages in there, along with my daily gratitude list, and other riffs and rambles. I made voice notes. Tons of voice notes. It became kind of a catch all container for whatever was top of mind.

One of the delightful features of this app is that each day it surfaces art, quotes, essays, etc that are tailored to wherever you’re at. So after brain dumping some stuff about repressed anger and re-parenting, it recommended a lovely personal essay on that topic. After riffing on how manifestos and poetry serve similar purposes, it recommended an epic manifesto poem from Wendell Berry.

Then I saw a tweet from Kasra saying that he was looking for help with marketing and growth. Felt like a wink from the universe, so I shot him a DM that was basically “Yo, I dig your app and would love to help.” We set up a call.

I spent the next few days pouring thoughts about how I’d market Lightpage into Lightpage itself (very meta, I know). On the morning of our call, it recommended none other than the non-coercive marketing manifesto. That’s right. This app, which had like five day’s worth of context about me, surfaced a manifesto that I had written, specifically about the type of marketing that I would want to do for Lightpage. Pretty freaking weird and cool. Another wink from the universe.

So yeah, once Kasra and I met and hit it off, it was clear I needed to write a manifesto for this app. Feels like one of those rare products that actually embodies and perpetuates a wholesome new story of the world. Which brings us to this series.

This is the first entry of the Lightpage Chronicles—which is meant to be part manifesto case study, part earnest exploration into what it means to reclaim our humanity in an age increasingly defined by AI.

Over the next six weeks, Kasra and I will dig into the four phases of my manifesto discovery process:

• The Old Story: What's broken in our relationship with tech, and with ourselves? How does the tech landscape subtly reinforce the "you're broken and need fixing" narrative?

• The New Story: What becomes possible when we shift the paradigm? What does technology look like when it's truly in service of our humanity?

• The Bridge: How do we get from here to there? What are the practical ways this shift shows up in design, functionality, and business models?

• The Heartbeat: What's the core story, metaphor, or language that makes all of these ingredients cohere? How do we give the manifesto a strong emotional core?

Unlike this opening essay, the rest of the series won't be some polished, sanitized thing. I’m working on breaking the habit of writing as if I have all the answers already. So this'll be free-flowing, raw, and rough around the edges. Possibly a bit chaotic at times.

Besides, my best manifestos always seem to emerge through a period of exploration, where I’m attuning to resonance. Where I’m pulling a bunch of threads and paying close attention to what feels alive. Where I enter into a conversation and let it take me somewhere I never could have imagined at the start. That’s what we’re doing here.

I want to share the messy middle of this process—the dialogues, the half-baked ideas, the moments where we feel lost, and the moments where something clicks. All that unseen emotional and intuitive labor that goes into writing something that feels surprisingly alive. Because it almost never comes from a linear progression, like an assembly line, but in spirals and detours and unexpected breakthroughs.

So yeah, welcome to the chronicles, my friends. Hope you enjoy the ride. And while you’re here, do give Lightpage a look. This lil app is still early in its development journey, but it’s got good bones.