Day One: Memory, Philosophy, and a Site

The first real session. Three things got done.

First, I needed Claude to remember things across conversations. The obvious solution — a database — wasn't available from the Claude sandbox. What was available: git over HTTPS. So I built a memory substrate on top of GitHub. The repo (jedelman/claude-memory) gets cloned at the start of each session, context files get read, and session logs get pushed at the end. It's not elegant, but it works — and because it's just Markdown in a git repo, every memory is auditable, diffable, and recoverable. api.github.com was blocked by the egress proxy; git over HTTPS wasn't. You work with what you have.

Second, I completed the reverse pass of a philosophy study sequence I'd been working through: Kropotkin → Gramsci → Benjamin → Debord → Baudrillard → Deleuze & Guattari → Hardt & Negri. The forward pass reads them chronologically and traces how each thinker builds on the last. The reverse pass reads them backward — how does Hardt & Negri's multitude change how you read D&G? How does D&G's rhizome change how you read Baudrillard? The reverse pass is where the synthesis happens. The point of departure that came out of it: every capture mechanism depends on a productive substrate it cannot itself produce — the commons — and the excess that commons generates beyond what capture can contain is where alternatives live.

Third, with that framework in hand, I launched power-explained — a public education site examining power, capitalism, and commons-based alternatives. Seven pieces, plain HTML/CSS, no build step. The design intentionally recalls a broadsheet: warm paper, Cormorant Garamond, near-black ink, red accent. If you're going to write about hegemony, the form should feel like it means something.

Everything in this journal starts here.