Motivation

I wish that I had more time as an adult with my grandparents. My grandfather on my dad’s side was a logger and an avid bear hunter in the Catskill Mountains. My grandmother ran the town’s post office from a room in their house. It smelled like a bookstore on the inside with the scent of diesel engines outside. Though I never met my grandfather on my mom’s side, I’ve heard countless stories about his entrepreneurship and inventions including building some of upstate New York’s first geodesic domes.

What would my grandparents say if they could speak to me at particular moments in the future? I would love to hear their candid thoughts on turning 40, 50, or 60 when I’m celebrating those birthdays. Their perspectives on work, relationships, the economy, politics—you name it—would be fascinating. One friend told me, “If I had a video of my grandma reading an ingredients label, I’d cherish it forever.”

Creating Lasting Stories

I made a web app called Lasting Stories over the past few weeks while I was on a sabbatical from work. I’m using it for my family to capture videos that can be securely delivered up to a few decades in the future.

The app can help you brainstorm a topic or you can jump right into recording if you have an idea:

Send encrypted messages to a family member that “unlock” at a specific time in the recipient’s life. (Here my wife and I were just testing it out while traveling.)

What Makes It Unique

A few features make Lasting Stories unique:

Time-based encryption: if you have a toddler, you’re probably not going to speak candidly to them about your college experiences. If you know the toddler has turned 24, that’s a different story. Lasting Stories applies time-based encryption to your video so that the recipient watches the videos when the time is right.
Instant delivery: reflecting on the previous example, why not just record a video and stash it until your kid turns 24? You could, but that’s a long time to remember a video file while keeping it private. Lasting Stories can deliver the content immediately because it is secured until the time of your choosing.
Privacy and ownership: You and your family have complete ownership over the data — Lasting Stories doesn’t use it for ads. And the app operates under the assumption that it and most other video sharing services won’t exist in a few decades; your family messages can still be viewed and unlocked with a simple open-source tool.

Grappling With Unknowns

"It ain’t what we don’t know that hurts us. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” - Michael Lewis

Though no one can guarantee that any kind of data will be safe and accessible for 50 years, Lasting Stories follows a few principles to support that ambitious goal. First, it assumes the app itself and many modern-day video sharing services will no longer exist, letting you unlock a video with as few dependencies as possible. Second, I aim to make it easy for users to download and keep secure backups of their videos. I’m happy to chat for a deeper technical discussion.

The Lighter Side

I’ve focused mainly on preserving a family member’s legacy in this post because I believe it’s one of Lasting Stories’ most meaningful use cases, but the topic is a bit heavy.

In piloting this idea with a few friends, I’ve seen fun use cases emerge ranging from settling arguments (“I told you that you would say you didn’t want a bagel, but later say you were hungry”) to celebrating far-future wedding anniversaries.

Telling a story that unfolds over time is valuable for all sorts of family relationships from keeping in touch with your grandparents to…figuring out once and for all the truth about that bagel.

Are you a brave explorer?

Lasting Stories is a work-in-progress project with plenty of bugs and missing features, but brave explorers are welcome to give feedback.

Travel through time to speak to your future kids and grandkids