I want my daughters to grow up in a world where they can speak freely—without filters, fear, or silent scoring systems. To know truth doesn’t need permission. Honesty doesn’t need a profile. A voice can matter even when it’s spewed across social media.
You left the house at 9am on a bike and didn’t come back until dinner. You built ramps out of plywood and cinder blocks—there was no bell, no mom calling you home like they say. The suburbs of the South were safe, fun, and raw. I remember snakes, bikes, and the kind of wild stuff that, now that I’m almost 40, makes me think: what the hell were we doing? You smoked half-burnt cigarette butts behind the gas station. You found a 2,000 times folded up ripped out hustler page that had been passed from older kid to younger kid and down the line; never a whole mag. It was raw. It was real. It was unfiltered. And no one was watching.
If you’re over 35, you probably exhale with relief that there’s no permanent record of half the dumb, creative, experimental stuff we did. Being 20 before social media meant you were simply you—and that felt normal.
We didn’t have feeds. We had moments. We didn’t have followers. We had BEST friends. We didn’t document—we lived.
Right now it’s late, the house is quiet, and I’m writing code for something that might nudge the internet back toward being human.
I’ve thought hard about releasing this. Some will try to pin a label on it—left, right, faction, trend. It isn’t about sides. It’s not about politics, parties, ideology, race, gender, geography, religion, or identity labels—it’s simply space to voice a thought and let it burn.
I was in high school when texting wasn’t a thing. I was in college when texting, Facebook, and the internet became part of people's lives. Yeah, we all found out about porn and Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, but it wasn’t like it is now. Yeah, I bricked a few PCs with Limewire and Napster trying to download Dre Dre and The Sims—but wasn’t that the point?
My father handed me an old Windows 98 SE laptop and said, basically, “see how it works.” Taking it apart and rebuilding it was the hook. I started as a help desk tech, moved to admin, then engineer, then senior architect at a company edging toward the Fortune 500. Years in a managed services grind taught me patterns; going internal later taught me focus. The point isn’t that I was better—it’s that curiosity plus knowledge built a lens for what the web has become and what’s missing.
We’ve built a world where every word is a liability. Every post is a performance. Every thought is a risk. Kids don’t grow up—they optimize. They brand themselves before they even know who they are. And if they slip, if they say something real, the internet never forgets.
We traded free speech for filtered and archived speech. Let that sit. Whatever you say is inspected and, if it passes (You got an A!), it stays online — essentially forever. Are we serious as a species? Sure, we have the storage space. I know storage, compute, replication. But the post about your son's baseball game, your nephew's whatever, your daughter's ballet recital, your long-lost relative you didn’t know died — it all takes digital storage. To the population at large, your post writes TEXT to a database row; your heartfelt memoir is a row in a table, load balanced and replicated across CDNs, regions, and databases. It’s… fascinating, and also quietly suffocating.
Every click is tracked. Every scroll is logged. Every message is stored. Their digital footprint starts before they can walk. They’re taught to self-censor before they learn to self-express. And when they finally speak up, they’re judged, punished, and archived.
We’ve gotten used to being watched all the time. We’ve called it “safety.” But it’s just control.
It’s a small, simple codebase that says: no data mining, no manufactured feeds, no performance profiles.
This isn’t a social network. It isn’t a dump. It’s a place to say something and let it burn. No likes. No followers. No history. Just a thought—for 60 minutes—and then it’s gone.
It’s not nostalgia. It’s rebellion. It’s not a feature. It’s a philosophy.
Humans have always misspoken, overreacted, exploded, healed. The difference now is the permanent record and the replay button.
We’re flawed—and today we’re punished for that flaw indefinitely. That’s not growth; that’s freezing people in their worst sentence.
I keep thinking about the teenager who can’t safely say what they feel anywhere else. If this gives them one lighter hour, it matters.
People will still do kind and unkind things here. That’s real life. Tools don’t erase human nature; they channel it.
Mediums evolved: cave walls, clay tablets, Dead Sea Scrolls, printing press, telegraph, radio, billboards, film, social media. Each let expression breathe differently. Ephemeral speech is just the next format.
Instead of writing poetry in a 1920s café, we’re tapping thoughts at red lights. Same impulse, new container.
Add one more line to that timeline: FilterNone.
We’ve built a world where people hold everything in because they’re afraid of being misunderstood, canceled, or exposed. That fear is killing authenticity.
We don’t speak—we perform. We don’t share—we brand. We don’t connect—we calculate.
And in that silence, we lose ourselves.
They type it out. Then they think:
And then they delete it. And they hold it in. And they become someone they’re not.
That hesitation is the wound. FilterNone is the outlet.
We’ve built platforms that reward conformity and punish honesty. We’ve created systems that monetize identity and criminalize emotion.
We don’t need more filters. We need more freedom.
We need permission to be human.
Walk away.
The truth doesn’t need polish. It needs space.
And sometimes, it needs to disappear.
The ones who want to scream, confess, vent, joke, cry, rage, whisper, and disappear.
It’s for the people who don’t want to be tracked, judged, or remembered.
It’s for the ones who’ve been silenced, shadowbanned, doxxed, and deleted.
It’s for the ones who still believe that speech should be free—and fleeting.
Because I believe in a future where people can speak without fear.
Where truth isn’t punished. Where identity isn’t monetized.
Where the internet doesn’t own your voice—it just holds it, briefly.
"There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and the risk you cannot afford not to take." This is the second one for me.
One hour of honest air. Then it burns. That’s the promise.