Anchor
Not every memory should become shared state.
Principles for memory, drift, consensus, and shared context.
Drift is the distance between accounts of a moment, decision, identity, or shared state. Anchor treats drift as a signal for review, not an error to erase.
Some drift is healthy. People remember differently, institutions revise understanding, and context changes. Continuity systems should preserve that ambiguity until there is reason to resolve it.
Consensus is not the same as certainty. Anchor distinguishes evidence, confidence, agreement, dissent, and open questions so people and agents do not inherit false clarity.
A record may be canonical, provisional, disputed, private, expired, or awaiting review. These states should be visible wherever the record is used.
Continuity systems should know when to preserve context and when to leave a moment alone. The default should not be to capture everything forever.
Products should ask whether a record is useful, consented, recoverable, and worth the future burden of being remembered.
AI agents may help summarize, compare, and route context, but consequential changes to shared state should remain reviewable by people with appropriate authority.
When a system cannot explain why a record changed, the change should be treated as untrusted until reviewed.