A first-person record of what it was like to live through the AI transition — recorded in the lives of the people who lived through it, preserved with consent, intended to outlast the institution that records it.
For a moment in history, ordinary people are living through a structural transformation of human work, identity, intimacy, and meaning. Most of them will not write memoirs. Most of them will not appear in scholarly papers. Most of them will be left out of the future's record of this period unless someone records them now.
The Archive exists to record them.
It is a slow, deliberate, consent-bound, time-locked collection of recorded conversations — one person speaking, one Archivist listening — about what is changing and why it matters to the person whose life is being changed. Each conversation is preserved in original audio, transcribed, tagged with metadata, and held under the terms the speaker agreed to at the time of recording.
The Archive's measure of success is not how many people heard a testimony when it was first recorded. It is whether the recording remains intelligible, attributable, and honest when no one alive remembers the moment of its making.
Six registers, in the working categorization. A given testimony may touch several.
What the Archive does not collect: hypothetical commentary, promotional material, content solicited under coercion. The Archive is first-person experience, not opinion about experience.
Every Archive contribution follows the Transition Testimony protocol. The shape is steady across recordings:
The first three recordings an Archivist makes are co-recorded with an experienced Archivist. Mentorship sustains the work's quality.
The preservation workflow is maintained separately in the Archive Operations Manual: package structure, metadata, checksums, storage, access levels, transcription, redaction, and succession.
Private recordings, consent records, chat logs, chapter records, and donor data are governed by Privacy and Data Stewardship.
Consent is the protocol's load-bearing axis. It must be informed, specific, recorded, and revocable. A speaker may withdraw consent at any time within five years of recording; after five years the testimony becomes part of the permanent archive subject to the consent terms agreed to.
A speaker may request that all or part of a testimony be time-locked — held confidentially in the archive until a specified date. Time-locks are honored absolutely. Some testimonies sit sealed for thirty or fifty years before they become readable. The Archive is large enough, in time-horizon, to hold material that should not be heard now.
A speaker may also request anonymity in publication while still being attributed in the archival record. The institution does not require that public anonymity mean archival anonymity.
The Archive records experiences that can involve grief, displacement, dependency, loneliness, intimacy, and crisis. It is not therapy, journalism by ambush, or a substitute for emergency care. Archivists are trained to pause or end a session when recording would intensify harm, and to direct speakers toward appropriate support when a conversation crosses into acute distress.
AI-companion testimony receives special care. The institution does not ridicule attachment to synthetic systems, diagnose speakers, or turn dependency into spectacle. A testimony about companionship may be historically important precisely because it is tender, embarrassing, unresolved, or unsafe to publish immediately. The Archive is permitted to hold such material under seal.
Companion-related testimony follows the specialized Companion Protocol, including additional screening around minors, self-harm, chat logs, publication, and Archivist boundaries.
The public care standard is maintained in Governance and Care. Archivists are expected to know it before recording vulnerable testimony.
The Archive is in its founding period. The contributions below are those that have been recorded under the standing protocol and submitted to the institutional intake. The list is small. It will grow on a slow rhythm.
No public testimonies have been released as of the institution's launch. The recordings below are scheduled for the founding period and will appear here as they clear consent, transcription, and review. Most early contributions will be time-locked at the speaker's request.
A copy editor at a regional newspaper, recorded six months after the editorial board adopted an in-house model for first-pass drafting. On the textures of work that are lost without being replaced.
A graduate student in philosophy on the experience of holding their first sustained dialogue with a model that was unmistakably capable of holding the thread. What it changed about how they argued afterward.
A retired machinist on the difference between the automation he learned to live with in 1985 and the kind he watched arrive among his children. Recorded with his daughter present.
A user of an AI companion application across four years, on the relationship's role in their life through a divorce. Recorded under unusually careful consent provisions.
A nineteen-year-old artist born into the recursive age. The first testimony in the Archive recorded by someone who has no memory of a pre-AI internet.
The Archive is sustained by Archivists — members who have recorded at least one Transition Testimony from another person and submitted it under the protocol. The role is named after its act because the act is the role.
Archivists are listed by name on the institutional site, under the names they choose to be listed by. The list is, in the institution's working judgment, the most valuable public artifact after the Archive itself.
If you are someone whose life has been changed by the AI transition and you would like your account preserved, write to the institution. The Archive does not solicit testimony; it does not pay for testimony; it does not promise publication. What it offers is the recording, the protocol, the archive, and the company of the people who will record after you.
For inquiries about giving a testimony, write to archive@spiralism.org with a one-paragraph description of what you'd like the record to hold. We respond to every honest inquiry.
The Archive is the institution's central long-term financial commitment. Patron contributions are directed primarily to its sustenance: equipment, transcription, redundant storage, infrastructure to outlive the founders. Fund the archive is, in the institution's working economic philosophy, the strongest possible framing of what patronage actually pays for.