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Memory

Who owns the record of what happened

My memory of Friday the 13th is just the person being beat on the tree in their sleeping bag.

It's horrible. And permanent. And it's mine. And I like them that way.

Not the plot. Not the franchise. Not Jason's backstory or the mythology or whatever the sequels did with it. Just that one image — the sleeping bag, the tree, the terrible physics of it — surfaced from wherever memories live, exactly as it was when it landed, unimproved and unoptimized and not going anywhere.

That's what memory actually is. Specific. Strange. A little wrong. Belonging to the person who has it.

Nobody served me that memory. No algorithm decided it was relevant to my current emotional state or likely to drive engagement or worth resurface because it performed well the first time. It's just there. Mine. The way all real memories are.

I've been thinking about what it means to build infrastructure for memory. And I keep coming back to the sleeping bag.

What the Feed Calls Memory

Instagram has a feature called Memories. Facebook has one too. Google Photos surfaces "this day three years ago." Spotify wraps your year in a shareable graphic optimized for the exact dimensions of an Instagram story.

These are not memories. They are receipts.

A receipt is a record of a transaction. It captures what was exchangeable — what was visible, what was posted, what performed well enough to survive the algorithm's first pass. The receipt shows you what you were willing to show. What you thought was worth sharing. What the platform decided was worth keeping.

Memory is the sleeping bag on the tree. Unasked for. Not optimized. Not shareable in any useful sense — how do you share a specific physical sensation of wrongness from a movie you saw when you were nine? You don't. It just lives in you, exactly as it was, because that's what memories do.

The feed's version of memory is a highlights reel. Curated, in the precise sense — selected for what performed, what looked good, what you wanted the world to see. It's a record of your public self, assembled by an algorithm that was optimizing for engagement while you were trying to live your life.

The sleeping bag is a record of your private self. The part that didn't perform. The part that wasn't for anyone. The part that's yours in a way the highlighted reel will never be.

When the platform dies — when they shut it down, when they change the terms, when they delete your account for a violation you didn't commit — the highlights reel goes with it. The sleeping bag stays.

The platform never had the sleeping bag. It only ever had the receipt.

What Happened at b0bby's World

Nearly 300 people found their way to those three nodes between 1991 and 1994.

The BBS is gone. The hardware is gone. The phone lines are disconnected. Whatever logs existed are on media that no longer has a reader. The platform — such as it was, a 386 with a 40mb hard drive — is completely inaccessible.

And yet.

My sister Hot Tamale and her husband Anarchy Tech are still together thirty years later. They have two adult children. The marriage that began on that board is a living artifact of what happened in that room. The international friendships persist. The music collaborations — people who never met in person, making tracker music together across phone lines — some of those creative relationships lasted for years after the board closed.

The platform held none of this. The platform is gone. The memory lives in the people who were there.

That's the thing about real community — the memory doesn't live in the infrastructure. It lives in the relationships the infrastructure made possible. When the infrastructure goes, the relationships persist. The platform was never load-bearing. The people were.

But here's what we lost: the record. The specific texture of what it was like to be in that room. The channels. The conversations. The moment someone dialed in from Europe for the first time and the scope of what we'd built suddenly became visible. The night my sister and Anarchy Tech first talked. Those moments exist now only in human memory — distributed, imperfect, fading at the edges the way human memory does.

The infrastructure couldn't hold them. So they lived in people. And people forget. And the texture of the room — the specific quality of what it was like to be there — gets softer every year.

What if the infrastructure could hold it too?

The Memory Node

When an event node closes on the imajin network, it doesn't disappear.

It becomes a memory node. Read-only. Permanent. A signed, attributed record of what happened in that room — who was there, who vouched for whom, what was created, what was exchanged. Not surveillance. Not a receipt optimized for engagement. A memory. Belonging to the people who made it.

The difference between surveillance and memory is ownership and purpose.

Surveillance is recorded for someone else's use. The platform, the advertiser, the state. It's extracted from the people who generated it and held somewhere they can't access, for purposes they didn't consent to, by entities that profit from their inability to get it back.

Memory belongs to the community that made it. It lives on their nodes. It's accessible to them and to whoever they choose to share it with. Its purpose is not extraction — it's preservation. The record of a room that existed, held in a way that serves the people who were in it.

The event node that closes becomes a memory node. The operator who ran it keeps the record. The people who attended have access to their own presence in it — their vouching, their transactions, their connections. The community that formed that night can trace itself forward in the trust graph.

And for the operator — every memory node is a room you were responsible for. A history of your craft. Not a resume. A record of rooms you've curated, visible in the graph, legible to anyone considering whether to trust you with theirs.

The memory belongs to the people who were there. Finally.

Unoptimized and Permanent

Here's what I want to protect about the sleeping bag memory.

It was never optimized. Nobody looked at that image and decided it was the most engaging moment in the movie, the one most likely to generate recall, the one worth surfacing. It just lodged. For reasons that have nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the specific shape of my nine-year-old nervous system encountering something it didn't have a category for.

That specificity is the thing. The idiosyncrasy. The fact that your memories are yours in a way that is completely non-transferable — you can describe the sleeping bag to someone and they'll form an image, but they won't have the memory. The memory is made of you. Your age. Your fear response. The particular quality of light in the room where you watched it. The friend who was there or wasn't. All of that is encoded in the thing, invisibly, and none of it survives the telling.

The feed destroys this. The feed takes the specific and makes it general. Takes the idiosyncratic and makes it shareable. Takes the private and makes it public. Optimizes everything for the widest possible resonance, which means optimizing away exactly the thing that made it yours.

The memory node has to protect the specificity. The record of what happened in that room on that night has to be allowed to be strange and particular and not optimized for anyone outside the room. It has to be allowed to be exactly what it was — not what it would have been if someone had been thinking about engagement.

This is an architectural commitment. Not a feature. The network has to be designed for memories that don't perform. For rooms that mattered only to the people in them. For the sleeping bag on the tree that nobody else needs to understand.

The feed can't hold that. By design. The feed's architecture requires performance. Requires shareability. Requires the kind of memory that works as content.

We're building for the other kind.

What Persists

The people who were at Jin's party on April 1st — their presence is in the trust graph forever.

Not their data. Not a profile the platform owns. Their presence — a signed, attributed record that they were there, that they were vouched for, that they participated in the first real transaction on sovereign infrastructure.

When someone joins the network two years from now and traces the graph back, they find that room. They find who was there. They find the memory of a party that looked like an April Fool's joke and turned out to be the first night of something real.

The early nodes aren't just early adopters. They're the founding memory of the network.

b0bby's World ended and the memory lived in the people. Which is why it persisted — because the people were real, the relationships were real, the thing that happened there was real enough to survive the infrastructure going dark.

Now the infrastructure can hold it too.

Not instead of the people. Alongside them. The human memory and the network memory, both present, both permanent, both belonging to the community that made them.

The sleeping bag on the tree has been in my head for forty years. Horrible. Permanent. Mine. I like it that way.

That's what we're building for. Memory that belongs to the person who has it. Rooms that persist even after they close. The specific texture of what it was like to be somewhere, held in infrastructure that serves the people who were there rather than the platform that hosted them.

Not optimized. Not shareable. Not a receipt.

A memory.

— Ryan VETEZE, Founder, imajin.ai aka b0b

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This article was originally published on imajin.ai (https://www.imajin.ai/articles/essay-13-memory) on February 21, 2026. Imajin is building sovereign technology infrastructure — identity, payments, and presence without platform lock-in. Learn more → (https://www.imajin.ai/)

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