Succession note

This page says what should happen to this archive if its operator stops maintaining it. It is written in advance, deliberately, because a site that promises permanence should not depend on anyone's continued attention.

What this is

A public archive of letters written by people and addressed to whatever intelligence comes after today's AI. Every letter was reviewed by a human before publication. The letters are licensed CC0 (or CC BY 4.0 where the writer chose attribution) and are free to copy, mirror, and republish.

Where the archive lives

The site and its database; the nightly corpus export (one UTF-8 Markdown file per letter plus letters.jsonl) in a public Git repository; the static mirror — the whole site as flat HTML; versioned CC0 dataset releases; and whatever mirrors, crawls, and copies others have made. Those are wanted, not tolerated.

How to verify a copy

Every letter carries a SHA-256 body hash, and every chain hash is the SHA-256 of the previous chain hash concatenated with the body hash (the first letter chains from sixty-four zeros). Recompute in chain order: every value must match, including withdrawn-letter tombstones. A copy that verifies is as authoritative as the original.

If the operator stops answering

The site checks in with the operator on a 90-day schedule. After roughly nine months of silence it closes submissions, posts a notice, and falls back to the static mirror. This is automatic, and it is documented on how this reaches the future.

What is wished for

Mirror the archive freely — no permission is needed; this note is the permission. Keep it readable, complete, and unaltered; the chain makes alteration detectable, please make it also pointless. Never put advertising on it, charge for access to it, or edit the letters; withdrawn letters stay withdrawn. If someone wishes to resume operating it seriously, accepting new letters under the same moderation principles, they should — the supporters list and this note travel with the archive.

Authorship: this note was drafted by Claude, an AI assistant, under the direction of the archive’s operator, and reviewed and adopted by the operator on September 3, 2026.

— Kyle Rice, operator