Field Notes
Our vision and values, essays on our progress and collaborations, social posts, recently shipped releases of our MVP.
Foundational Documents
White paper
A System for the Cultivation, Crossing, and Attribution of Wisdom
Technical description of a system that cultivates contemplative awareness and rewards contribution through conviction, confidence, and network coherence.
Read →Manifesto
This Manifesto is Existential
The case for a counterspell to the allure of extractive attention.
Read →Covenant
What We Stand For
The Existential team strives to build for the Cultivators of wisdom.
Read →Essays
The Substrate of Coordination
A system for coordinating thought inherits a buried answer to what a self is. Individuation is a living model held loosely; the ontological bottom (the self) and the economic top (coordination) fail the same way by freezing flow into a static thing, and the substrate move sees them as one immanent field that stays alive only while its boundaries stay dotted.
Read →Reflexion · June 24, 2026
Coherence Is the Bottleneck
The tools we think with were built to store and retrieve information; the real problem is keeping meaning coherent as it scales across people and time, and a system built on that distinction is a different kind of thing.
Philosophy · June 23, 2026
Distribution Agents and Substrate Design
An autonomous agent's orientation toward giving or taking is fixed by the protocol substrate it runs on, not by its model or its deployer; that substrate is hardening toward extraction now, so building distribution-oriented agents is substrate-design work.
Recent Posts
Product Changelog
v7.10.0
October 19, 2026
- Existential is now a Mac app for Apple silicon. It lives in the menu bar, and Quit leaves your Oracle running.
- Capture takes text or voice from anywhere, with encrypted drafts that survive interruptions.
- Anyone with a GitHub account can sign in. Existential's operators can revoke one Mac, or a member's access to all of them. A guided first install downloads and verifies the engine, and it can move a command-line install aside and bring your notes across.
- This version does not update itself. The next version will come with its own steps for moving to it.
- The app is signed with Existential's own identity and not notarized by Apple, so macOS asks you to approve the first open with Open Anyway in System Settings, Privacy & Security.
- Restore from a snapshot and Remove Existential (Keep my notes or Remove everything) are in the app. An interrupted restore finishes on the next run, and an interrupted removal reopens with Finish, Cancel or Resume.
- The command is now existential. eos keeps working as an alias for this release.
- Venice private inference runs end-to-end encrypted, and Existential checks the hardware attestation first. The receipt records Intel's rating for the machine.
- Withdrawing a note keeps it out of new cloud requests, but replies or Briefs already written from it can still be sent. No signal leaves while master sharing is off.
- Backups refuse linked folders and tell you which notes they hold only as links, and a restore keeps words you save while it runs.
- Known issues: Venice is accepted on one pinned out-of-date Intel rating, shown on the receipt.
v7.9.8
October 9, 2026
- Existential no longer runs out of memory shortly after it starts on a large existing library.
- Updates no longer leave Existential stopped, and eos update reports a failure instead of waiting for ever. eos stop and eos daemon disable now stop a background Oracle.
- Uninstall keeps your notes and drafts, and never removes anything through a mounted volume.
- Voice memos up to about 300 MB (around 2 hours) upload, and long memos transcribe instead of timing out.
- Codex now uses GPT 6.1 Sol and keeps working after a restart. The first start after updating downloads the new Codex runtime once, about 245 MB.
- Cloud token limits count what a call actually used, so analysis no longer stalls early in the day on OpenRouter or Venice.
- A restore puts your notes back first and stops safely if something is wrong. A withdrawn note stays out of the cloud while it is read.
- Known issues: interpretation history from before v7.9.6 is not carried forward. A crash during a long voice memo upload can leave a partial file behind.
v7.9.7
October 8, 2026
- Uninstall offers two choices, Keep my notes and Remove everything, and shows you a plan before it changes anything. Existential never deletes a notes folder that sits outside its own folders; those notes stay where they are and appear in the report.
- A note you locked as never to be shared stays locked when the Oracle re-sorts it into a second category, and category sharing locks follow your notes through re-sorting, merges and the Privacy screen.
- Existential is steadier when the graph database or the model has a bad moment: a note saved during a graph outage finishes by itself when the graph returns, backups give running work time to finish, and the Library tells you plainly when the graph is not running.
- The words in the app are plainer across Library, Console, Home, Reflection, team setup, the Exchange, Settings, Import and Capture, and in the command-line guidance for install, update, doctor and uninstall. Failures say what happened and what to do next.
- Feedback accepts a valid message and screenshot and explains what manual and automatic reports contain before you choose to send them.
- Macs with less than 24 GB run the language model in the cloud, and the installer says so. An update that fails gives one clear reason everywhere it is shown.
- Known issues: some live checks carried over from v7.9.6 remain unrun, the Console cannot yet withdraw a note on the 9B model used on 24 GB Macs (withdraw by hand in the note's frontmatter), and a conversation insight moved or removed before its session completes can be recreated at its old location.