The Non-Negotiables
No selling out. For any reason.
Not for funding. Not for survival. Not for convenience. The moment we compromise the principles below for any outside party, it's no longer Headstone.
The beneficiaries are everyone.
Not shareholders. Not founders. Not a class of early insiders. Everyone.
Intent precedes content.
What something is for matters more than what it is. We evaluate every feature, every partnership, every decision by asking: what does this serve? Whose interest does it actually advance?
Human ignorance and bias are predictable.
We design for humans as they are, not as we wish they were. Naivety is not a defense. We anticipate the ways this can be exploited and build against them.
The Principles
Freedom — People own their own data, their own legacy, their own story. Full stop.
Individual Rights — Every person, regardless of wealth, age, nationality, or background, has the same rights within this system.
Equality — The tools of legacy, memory, and identity preservation should not be privileges of the wealthy. Headstone is an equalizer.
Compassion — This was built from loss. We remember that. Every user is a person with a finite amount of time. We treat them accordingly.
Trust — We don't ask for it. We earn it. Transparent systems, open source where possible, smart contracts that enforce our rules without requiring faith in us.
Justice — We are trying to correct something that is wrong: the theft of human data, the erasure of human experience, the concentration of power over personal legacy in the hands of corporations.
Progress — We keep moving. The goal is not a product, it's a direction. Toward human flourishing. Toward a world where no one disappears.
The Web of Life — This isn't just for humans. What's good for humanity has to be good for the larger system we live in.
Resilience — No single failure kills us. Not a server, not a company, not a government, not a founder. Every critical system has a fallback. Every piece of data has redundancy. We are not fragile. We are built to outlast anything that tries to stop us.
The Test
When a decision is hard, ask:
1. Does this serve everyone, or just some?
2. Are we preserving someone's freedom, or trading it?
3. Would we be comfortable if every user could see exactly what we're doing and why?
4. Is this what we'd want if we were the user?
If the answer fails any of these — don't do it.
Authored by Johnny Bettencourt, recorded by Rook ♜ — March 20, 2026