Your life is being recorded. Right now. In all likelihood, you’re doing most of the recording. Through something on your wrist, through your smartphone, your camera, status updates, check-ins, likes, tweets, tags, hashtags, pins, uploads, downloads, comments and blog posts. And then there’s all the recording being done by others: online trackers, cookies, banks, hospitals, ad agencies, big box stores, security cameras, turnstiles, tollbooths, ISPs, the NSA, Nielsen, and private detectives.

That is a lot of data. Your data (or, rather, data about you).

What do you do with a lifetime of data?

BLACK BOX is a personal unit of hardware created to house all the tiny pieces that comprise the “big data” picture of your life—an all encompassing vessel holding a lifetime of transactions, conversations, likes, secrets, and habits. BLACK BOX is not in the cloud. The cloud is everywhere else. BLACK BOX is the tangible, incorruptible storehouse of every cloud that holds some small part of you. Accessible only by you. BLACK BOX is a way to quantify, contextualize, analyze, and philosophize. It has all the answers. You provide the questions.

To whom (or what) are we accountable? What happens when our apps become our parole officers? What makes something meaningful? Is a moment only meaningful after the fact? Can an app parse out truth? Is the nature of truth simply an algorithm? When does truth go from philosophical treatise to validated code? Can truth be debugged? What is the difference between Enlightenment and Entertainment? How does data create empathy?

BlackBoxVerified™

You are a liar. It’s not entirely your fault, lying is a result of socialization, a means of self-preservation, and a handy tool. Oftentimes, you don’t even realize you’re lying, because your brain is an even better liar than you are.

Fortunately, with a continuous supply of hard data accounting for nearly every moment of your life, lying, misremembering, and obfuscation are becoming harder and harder to pull off, even accidentally.

BlackBoxVerified is here to keep you honest. This BlackBox app forces you to account for your data transgressions. It looks at the records you provide—tweets, checkins, updates, etc.—and tries to corroborate them with additional evidence: bank transactions, phone records, and the like. If it can’t find time-stamped matches it asks for further proof of your claims.

Verified moments can protect you against accusations, faulty line-ups, and dubious claims. No more second guessing, appropriated memories, or trips down the memory hole. BlackBoxVerified provides rock-solid accountability, true, court-worthy alibis, and a hard look in the mirror. It is quantified truth for a duplicitous world.

BlackBoxHeirloom™

Most families, at different points in their histories, have had self-selected archivists—someone to keep track of who was who, where someone was born and how they died, what exchanged hands under what circumstances, all while cataloguing the gossip, dirty deeds, and secret shames common to every family throughout time.

Unfortunately, with the onslaught of data, “productivity” tools, longer working hours, the dispersal of family members, and the passing of the old guard, it’s becoming harder and harder to rely on a single person within a clan to document and protect a family’s legacy.

BlackBoxHeirloom is designed to be the family tie that binds. The app connects and quantifies the BlackBoxes of multiple family members, pulling out repeated words and tags to identify common interests and shared memories. It can show how close or disconnected a family is, draw parallels between generations, and create a hypothetical window into the future based on the past.

BlackBoxHeirloom goes far beyond a means of keeping up your family tree. It becomes a way to create family myths, legends, alliances, and words of wisdom for generations to come.

BlackBoxEnlightenment™

Data is no longer delivered through isolated funnels, individually fed to us in discreet, digestible doses. Data consumption is now more akin to standing at the convergence of a few dozen waterfalls with your mouth open.

Information comes at us so fast, and in such high volume that it can be extremely hard to enjoy it in the moment. To even have a moment. To recognize that moments still exist.

BlackBox is not only for passive data collection and perusal/analysis after the fact. The app BlackBoxEnlightenment now allows you to tap into the insightful power of BlackBox to enjoy fleeting moments in the moment through metadata.

Using the massive data analysis capabilities of BlackBox and building on petabytes of past experiences, BlackBoxEnlightenment takes in the scene presented to it through your smart device and extracts digital poetry from the colors, textures, sounds, objects, and people living in the frame. These artificial interpretations can then be shared and saved, and added to a lifetime of inspired moments.