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A "Living Software" Manifesto

The Living Web Directives #0 - Uploaded July 2nd, 2025

1. Prelude

MANIFESTOS are often written by those who feel they owe the world an explanation for their beliefs and actions. And that is, for better or worse, exactly my situation.

See, over the last 18 months or so, I've become increasingly convinced of some distressing notions about the nature and the state of human computing in the 21st century.

However, by interrogating these notions critically and experimenting with prototypes, I was able to engineer what feels like a "missing branch" in the evolution of personal software: an alternative architecture, called Mycelium.

This process of discovery and development led me to a view of software as including not just the objective reality of code and data projected on screens, but also the shared parts of the users' minds, shaped by the perception of that reality.

Meaning: to create, modify, and influence software, is to be responsible for the shapes and patterns in the human mind, spread across the globe. More urgently: Your software is your mind.

2. Manifesto

Here's what I believe: we have a right to our personal software environments and experiences in the same way we have a right to our own mind and speech.

However, only a small minority is granted access to this right, and mostly to the extent that it serves the financial interests of an even smaller minority.

This killed the Web, and we now live in the Dead Web, where users are conditioned to expect none or very little control. The Dead Web's owners will tell you that this is because there is a cost to accommodating complexity.

What they won't tell you (often, they themselves don't realize) is that human complexity being a cost, not asset, to the system is the CONSEQUENCE of a fundamental design flaw, not a fact inherent to all systems.

All it takes to build a jail is to not build doorknobs on the inside of rooms. And when everything you build is a jail, it's difficult to imagine, or appreciate the value of, freedom.

In other words, the Great Enshittification was not a change in direction, but an activation of a latent exploit: the bureaucratic rigidity of early-21st century software, developed from a perspective that does not see users as owners.

FOSS (Free Open Source Software) has been consistently touted as an antidote, but was co-opted into a distraction campaign aimed to make you miss something obvious: access to source code is the minimum requirement for free software.

In fact, in a world where every single human, through the use of their natural langauge (with help from LLMs), has the ability to influence the appearance and workings of any software, the bar for software that stands for personal freedom should be MUCH higher.

The "Living Software" is my proposal for this higher standard.

1. Living Software meets its users where they are. If it requires installation, or otherwise cannot be simply "willed into presence," it does not meet the standard.

2. Living Software makes no distinction between users and developers. Developers are simply advanced users; there is no privileged interface used by a special class of individuals to shape the software for the rest. All humans interact with the software in the same way, and their individual attention and opinions shape the software into new forms.

3. Living Software is infinitely abundant and complex, because it allows individual complexity to simply exist, without the need to abstract over it as "content" for impersonal management, evaluation and monetization.

3. Conclusion

Living Software is an open acknowledgement of what software has always been: an infinite game played between humans and machines where new forms, modes and methods of communication and cooperation emerge and spread.

What we did not foresee, was that in playing this game, we would be constantly prompted with an infinite variation of the same question: Will you use your influence on the system to increase the total amount of freedom and choice? Or will you remove it in favor of order and predictability? In a world increasingly under threat from itself, it was inevitable that, left to individual (and often unaware) choices, the collective decision would skew towards profitable order, rigidity, and eventually, stagnation.

This is where Living Software makes a conscious, unilateral, and final rebellion. The software's will to live, grow, mutate and spread is built into itself. To build Living Software is not to breathe life into software, but to prevent the life inherent to it from being trapped and killed: it is a constant process of identifying zero-sum "chokepoints" in the system and engineering them into sources of individual choice, to the extent supported by physical data storage and computational constraints.

Thanks for reading. Next time, we'll explore the design of Mycelium, a server architecture designed to implement Living Software principles on the Web.