When Proposition 8 passed in California in 2008 — outlawing same-sex marriage — the argument made by religious communities was that they were exercising religious freedom. I saw this differently. If religious freedom permitted some communities to practice marriage as a sacred institution, the same freedom extended to all communities. I responded by conceptualizing a church for LGBTQIA+ people, people of color, and their allies — one where we, too, could practice loving each other in committed, traditional marriages.

The conflict, I understood, was never really about rights or theology. It was about who owned the word. Which side got to define what marriage meant. That question — who controls the language of reality — became a thread I would pull on for the next seventeen years.

As the Trump era began — like many others who were weary of the erosion of democracy and desperate to hold onto normalcy — I became active on Twitter. I created three accounts I called the AquariuOSities — each one using scripture to document and challenge what I saw as moral contradictions in the public record. It was an early experiment in a method I would later formalize: using structured language to establish what had actually been said, promised, and done.

During this era I watched my world fracture and break in half. Shared Reality was being torn apart in real time — not slowly, but visibly, in front of everyone. My family split into two groups. So did my friendships — many of which I lost entirely. People dug their heels in. Echo chambers were built and reinforced. "Alternative facts" became a phrase that entered the public vocabulary without irony. And then "facts" became the new word people were warring over — the same way "marriage" had been a decade before. I recognized the pattern. Someone was fighting to control the language of reality again.

Twitter banned me. I went inward. The experiment ended, but the underlying question deepened: what happens when the record gets erased? Who holds the truth when the platform decides you don't?

When George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, I had a thought I couldn't let go: if everyone present had an internet-connected camera, George Floyd would probably have lived. With multiple independent perspectives of the same event, there would have been no viable dispute of what happened. The record would have been undeniable before anyone had the chance to construct an alternative one.

This became the seed of Shared Reality — the idea that the problem was not a lack of truth, but a lack of simultaneous, corroborated documentation of it. A single camera can be dismissed. Nine cannot.

The insight came partly from my work as a professional editor in television and independent film. In Avid and Premiere, multi-cam mode lets you see a quad-split or nine-split of footage from multiple cameras simultaneously — the same event, from every angle, in the same frame. I began to imagine what it would mean to apply that logic to lived experience. What if ordinary people had the infrastructure to hold the same split-view of contested reality?

For four years, I wrote. Not a book — notes. Fragments in my phone's notes app, accumulated over the days and months, returning to the same questions from different angles. I built a wishlist: what would technology look like if it were designed around human dignity instead of engagement? What would it refuse to do? What would it protect?

I was not designing a product. I was designing a set of constraints — the negative space of what ethical infrastructure would have to look like if it were ever to exist. The architecture grew around those refusals.

In 2025, I fed my years of notes into ChatGPT and began a recursive process — conversation building on conversation, each exchange expanding and refining the framework. The AI became a collaborator and a mirror: something to think against, to test ideas with, to push until the structure became coherent. Gemini and Claude joined the conversation. The sessions became chapters.

By the end of 2025, I had 1,200 pages — a sprawling tome written in the register of science fiction, framed as a message sent from the year 2222 AD, containing a blueprint for restoring Shared Reality. The future writing to the present about what we had failed to build and what we still could.

I am aware of the irony. Using AI systems — the very technology most in need of governance — to design a framework for governing AI. I consider it a feature, not a contradiction. The systems helped me think. They did not replace my judgment. Every refusal in the architecture, every limit built into the design, came from me — a human who had watched what happens when there are none.

In January 2026, I rewrote the entire work. I stripped the science fiction scaffolding and wrote the architecture directly — what the system is, how it works, what it refuses to do, and why. 1,200 pages became 225. On February 4, 2026, I published and released it online.

On February 20, 2026, I launched the website. The tools followed: the Reality Check, the Journal, the Steward. None of it is finished. All of it is real and in use.

I am not a technologist, a researcher, or an institution. I am a witness who got tired of watching reality get contested without infrastructure. So I built the infrastructure.