Origin Stories

Every person has a unique side of the story to share —
now there is a way to tell it your way for generations to come.

In 2016, creative sparks flew at an unlikely meeting between a tech-savvy Millennial and an “ahead of the times” Baby Boomer. Independently, they had each been wondering how to build a dynamic digital platform that could capture, save, and share experiences of their loved ones for generations to come. The existing tools were too past-facing, and the widely used social media tools are too fast-paced. They wanted to build a beautiful, easy-to-use, tool to capture all of life’s moments and carry them, safely, into the future. Here are the stories that brought them together.

Cemetery in Malaysia

In a Cemetery in Malaysia

By David Morse

In 1997, I was standing in a cemetery in Penang, Malaysia paying my final respects to a dear friend, Dato Kim Yeo Tan. Surrounded by hundreds of headstones, some centuries old, I started thinking about the lifetimes of stories buried with each and every person and had an idea…

What if there were an easy way to preserve and share memories dynamically into the future so we had more than a epitaph on a stone as our final story? What would I use to capture the fading memories of my father? What would I want my children to know about my life? What would they use to save their memories?

Infinite Humanity is an online product designed to answer these questions.

It is a passion project to capture the smiles and sorrows, the loves and losses, the wonder and wisdom of life, and the unique experiences that have shaped us… because they also have the power to guide others.

In 1997 you had to carry a camera, a camcorder, and a journal to capture and share a moment. In 2017, we have all of these tools, and many more, in the palms of our hands. We can create, edit, and share multimedia instantaneously.

If you’re like me, you have hundreds, if not thousands, of photos and videos of family and friends on your smartphone. It’s difficult to pull them up, create a story from them, or figure out where to keep them safely.

Infinite Humanity is the place for you to upload your content, add notes and dates, curate your story, so it’s told the way you want it to be remembered, for generations to come.

I’ve watched the boom in popularity of genealogy services and sites. There’s a basic human drive to know our roots. But Infinite Humanity isn’t about making a family tree. It’s about putting the leaves on it, one story at a time.

Life Celebration Ceremonies

By Sandra Kwak

In my family we don’t do funerals. We have Life Celebration Ceremonies. Grandma Ida’s ashes sailed out to sea in a present wrapped with colorful paper while we sipped martinis – her favorite cocktail, and Uncle Dennis’s Life Celebration was full of jokes, poems, songs and stories shared by his friends and fellow symphony members. At these ceremonies I saw old photos for the first time and learned things about my family members I never knew before. But those precious memories, assembled by the people my loved one’s lives touched, left the building when they did.

I started dreaming of a way for my future grandchildren to experience this celebration of life, to know my Grandma Ida and Uncle Dennis through stories. I imagined a place where people could love and admire them the same way that I have and always will, a place where family, friends and community could contribute memories, photos, videos, audio recordings, and newspaper clippings like the ones Grandma used to mail me.

Society as a whole is rapidly digitizing everything and sometimes it’s hard to keep up. From remembering where you hid that backup external hard drive, to trying to get footage off of a VHS tape, to deciding which travel photos to post (let alone print!), uniting disparate sources of data in a format that will be accessible in the future is a challenge. Will .jpg even be a file extension 100 years from now? Probably not.

Simultaneously, technology is enabling us to live a more asset-light lifestyle. Our need for material possessions is diminishing and we value experiences over physical things. Infinite Humanity is a way to document and relate the experiences that make up our lives, to carry them forward.

Building Infinite Humanity for me has been about celebrating the meaningful moments and all the lessons they have to offer, creating a space for the sacred and mundane, enabling people to better understand one another, remembering into the future, and using technology to make an offering to our predecessors and successors.