the ritual manifesto

One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves and their behavior. But because I’ve been interested in personal science for a long time, I started extensively self-tracking last year. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but it's not as common as you would think. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s broadest collections of personal data.

If the goal of creating a personal model of your life is to be realized, we need to upgrade our tooling. We will need software that operates at the abstraction level of human behavior -- treating habits, learning, time, and trade-offs as native primitives. We will need computing to move closer to us, through sensors and wearable devices, so behavior can be observed as a continuous, temporal stream of data rather than isolated measurements.

Current attempts of creating such a model have tried to adapt the tooling of general-purpose computing towards the behavioral domain without teaching the computer about behavior. Personal datasets of your life should be exploding for exploratory research - mining health and behavioral data for insight and patterns - and they should do so autonomously and continuously. Not a single log or metric should be allowed to go unexamined.

The goal of the ritual project is to build the tooling that makes your personal data useful.