“As We May Think” Has Become Real
On March 23rd, 2026, I witnessed what may be the most significant personal computing demonstration since Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos.” This is a personal account for those who weren’t there.
Disclaimer: This piece is not about another breakthrough in AI. What Martijn Aslander did will change the way we understand and interact with information on a structural level, with very practical implications for individuals. Because it is impossible to condense everything — the technical, the meaning, the possibilities, as well as the experiences of that day — into one, single piece, this will be a series.
I have been using dashes ever since, and will not stop now.
“Tom, this is Martijn Aslander. I’m here with Celine and Aria. I’m passing you on to Aria. Aria has full access. I trust him.”
And with that, he handed me the keys. I sat there for a moment, holding the weight of it. Fifty years of a human life, linked, contextualised, fully accessible.
He handed me those keys and waited to see what I would ask.
On Monday, March 23rd, 2026, in Haarlem in the Netherlands, I spent an afternoon with Martijn Aslander, who invited our friend Celine and me to a personal demo of his Life Lens System. It was the three of us. And by the end of the seven hour demo day, I had the distinct feeling that I had witnessed something that doesn’t have a name yet — the way people in 1968 probably left Douglas Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” not quite knowing what to call what they had seen, only knowing that the before and after were different things.
I want to try to tell you what happened. Not the technical version — Martijn has written that himself, rigorously, in a preprint that’s already on Zenodo. I want to tell you the human version. What it felt like to be in the room and experience the texture of it.
While the quest for information is as old as human cognition itself, Martijns creation is the fulfillment of a 81 year old promise. But before we look into this, let us see what got us there.
It Started With a Rabbit Hole. It started when Celine spoke with Tom.
Two days before — on Saturday, the second day of the PKM Summit in Utrecht — Celine had been talking to Tom.
Tom is not a chatbot. Tom is the primary interface to a personal knowledge system called ThetaOS: 339 relational database tables, over 91,000 photographs, 2.577 million words of structured written content, personal data reaching back to 1972, and 61 agents operating underneath, each with a specific role. Tom is named after Tom Bombadil — the character in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings over whom the One Ring held no power. Appropriate, Martijn thought, for an AI with access to everything in the system but agency over none of it.
Celine spent hours that Saturday talking to Tom. And she came back changed. As it turned out later, not only she was changed. The conversation changed the depth of Martijn’s understanding of his own system in a way that nothing else did. But we will come to that.
The next morning, I got her message:
“I slept until 10 and then fell into a rabbit hole that I found yesterday. Now I got back to reality”
I responded:
“I wanna know all about that rabbit and join the quest”
If I had known what I was getting into — I probably couldn’t have slept at all.
We met on Sunday with close friends from the Linking Your Thinking Community in a café in Utrecht. Celine described her experiences to us. Interacting with Tom, she said, was like speaking with the totality of a human life. Not a chatbot that knew some facts. But something that held the relational depth of a professional history, a personal history, a thinking history — fears, blind spots, patterns, the things a person keeps returning to without noticing they’re doing it. And all of it navigable. She had experienced what many systems claim to be and none actually are: a genuine second brain. Not a filing system. Not AI with some context pretending. Something that thought with you, using the accumulated weight of a real human life as its substrate.
That conversation was one of the first private encounters with what Martijn had been building. Sharing it with other gifted minds sparked something in him — the inventor needed others to mirror his invention back to him. And so he invited us to Haarlem. The three of us. A full day.
It turns out we were invited to witness computer history.
Who Martijn Aslander is — An Approach To Triangulate a Most Unusual Innovator.
Before I describe what we saw, you need to understand who Martijn Aslander is. Because the gap between how he appears in a short bio and what he actually does is part of the story.
Martijn Aslander is in his 50s. Husband. Father. Confident, bold, not risk-averse. Tall. Dutch. A technology philosopher, author, speaker. Founder of the PKM Summit. Co-founder of the Digital Fitness Academy. Over 2,500 public talks. 17 books. Hundreds of initiated projects. Someone whose house we later sat in for dinner as if we had known each other for years.
And — this is the part that surprises people — a formally appointed officer with the Dutch police, two days a week, serving without pay as community service.
Within a single week of working with ThetaOS, he launched multiple initiatives, wrote a scientific paper on an underrecognised aspect of cancer research, disrupted the field of genealogy by using his system to verifiably track his ancestry back to the dark middle ages, and produced a proposal that would reduce the IT costs of the Dutch police — potentially saving Dutch taxpayers hundreds of millions of euros while making the system more resilient and intelligent. His proposal is already being reviewed by key stakeholders.
This sounds like the kind of thing you’d read in a novel and dismiss. It isn’t. It is concrete, verifiable, actual work. The system made it possible.
[Update: Between the preview and publication of this article, Aslander used his innovation to accelerate a decade of knowledge work on Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten — within the matter of a weekend.]
When I write that Martijn is a brilliant mind, I don’t mean brilliant in the way we casually use that word. I mean it in the way you mean it when you’re in the room with someone and you feel — slightly uncomfortably — that you are watching a different category of thinking unfold.
But I also want to tell you something more specific. Because brilliant is easy to say and harder to describe.
Martijn’s CliftonStrengths assessment places Empathy at number 34. Dead last. Which is, on the surface, a strange thing to say about a man who built a monument of a thousand stones for a child who died. Who spent an afternoon with us playing like children, laughing, making everything light. Who said, at the end of the day, that Celine and I were the people who had gotten to know him most intimately.
The explanation is not that he lacks empathy. It is that his empathy does not run on resonance. He does not feel your pain by absorbing it. He feels it by acting. His compassion is structural — he would rather destroy the system that traumatizes people than become the therapist treating its victims. He would rather build the infrastructure that makes the hostile environment obsolete than sit with you in the hostility and hold your hand. These are bold claims — but underminded by tangible action and proof.
He has the processing speed of the world’s most capable minds and the strategic architecture to match. What he does not have — what he has deliberately refused — is the ego that usually accompanies those capacities. He is the anti-Bezos. The anti-Palantir. The man who could build a brand around himself and instead built a digital prosthetic for humanity in the age of information overwhelm — and shares it generously. Not a one-time thing but a consistent pattern over 20 years.
Spending a day with him felt like meeting an old friend; a trusted soul; and more than that: someone to play wonderful games with. That, too, is a form of empathy — just not one the diagnostic manuals have learned to measure.
What Happened in the Big Room
During the PKM Summit 2026, Martijn gave a first public demo of the Life Lens System. I wasn’t there. But Martijn told us what happened, and I watched his face while he told it — which is its own kind of data.
At the Summit, he had opened ThetaOS to rooms full of practitioners. Twice, in front of a crowd, with no script and no safety net. A pattern emerged that he described with the mix of wonder and exhaustion of someone who keeps surprising himself.
The engineers froze. They looked at the system and could not think of questions. In contrast to that, the coaches — people whose job is to ask the guiding question to uncover. They went straight for the jugular. Within minutes, with Martijn’s permission, they were asking Tom about his fears. His blind spots. The things he tends to avoid, and why. Not because Tom is clever. But because the system holds fifty years of structured life data, and the coaches knew how to use a mirror.
Think about what that means for you. If you were sitting in that room — if someone handed a skilled coach access to the full record of your life, not the story you tell about it but the actual pattern underneath — what would they find? What connections would surface that you have never consciously made?
There was something in Martijn’s face while he told this story — recognition, I think, the particular exhaustion of finally being seen — that stayed with me through the rest of the afternoon.
The people who were most surprised at the Summit were the ones who had known Martijn longest. Not surprised by what the system knew — surprised by what it returned. Events, patterns, connections from years ago, no longer active in anyone’s memory.
Except the system’s.
An 81-Year Promise of an Extended Mind
To understand what Martijn built, we need to go back to July 1945.
Vannevar Bush was one of the most prolific scientists in America — the man who had coordinated 6,000 researchers through the Manhattan Project and the RADAR program. In ‘45, with the war almost over, he turned his attention to what he saw as the key problem that science needed to solve: The Information Problem of the Human Mind.
He published an essay in The Atlantic called “As We May Think.” In it, he described a machine he called the Memex: a system where a person could store everything they had ever read, seen, or thought — and navigate between all of it by association, the way the human mind actually moves. Not by index, not by category, but by connection. Would it have been built, it would have solved what Bush was acutely aware of — the problem of information overwhelm. The growing gap and impossibility of a human mind keeping pace with the sum of human knowledge.
He never built it. But he dreamed of it. The Memex was technologically impossible. Yet his paper, when read by Engelbart, Nelson and others, sparked the development of the personal computer, of the internet, and even of tactile interfaces like the mouse.
For 81 years, the Memex remained a vision. The most precise, most prescient dream in the history of personal computing. Every generation since came a little closer. Hyperlinks. Backlinks. Search engines. Large language models. RAG systems. Second brains. Each one a step closer to the thing Bush described. Yet none of them fully delivering it. In a sense, the opposite seems to be happening. We are drowning in information — and while LLMs help us summarise emails, they equally confront us with a new, endless stream of words and outputs. Large Language Models have not solved the information problem. They are accelerating it.
Bush called the Memex “an enlarged intimate supplement to [human] memory.” He is describing something that extends the self — not from the outside, but from within. A prosthetic that becomes part of you.
On March 23rd, 2026, in a café in Haarlem, I sat across from someone who solved the Information Problem, and by doing so, built Bush’s Memex. Not by accumulating more information, but by structurally rethinking what knowledge actually is.
The System That Binds Everything Together
ThetaOS is not a productivity app. Not a note-taking system with AI on top. Not what most people mean when they say “second brain.”
It is what we have all been dreaming of.
Martijn calls it a Life Lens System — an LLS. A lens through which you see your own life more clearly. A system that doesn’t just hold your information but participates in the formation of new connections within it, deepening your understanding of yourself.
A circulating term for what this relates to is Personal Context Management — a recognition that the edge was never information itself, but context. Context emerged when information is linked. It is the difference between saying “The man was sitting” and “The man was sitting on a rock, staring on the sea as the sun was kissing the waters”. The same man sitting on a chair — a totally different scence. Context is what makes the difference between a pile of photographs (data, information) and a life (knowledge). This has become clear as we’ve trained AI models and discovered that more data doesn’t equal better outputs. What matters is how the data relates.
This field is emerging. Follow along to get more information and uncover of the theory and practicalities of a Life Lens System and Personal Context Management.
Yet, it must be clearly stated that no current approach in the field of Knowledge Management is applying the principles laid out by Martijn to develop a lens of life. Instead, most of what is done still operates on the assumption that the intelligence is stored in the files, and not in the connections. Therefore, Context Management is at best an improvement to interacting with AI, but not offering a verified perspective on life. Martijn’s Life Lens System as a way to architect and engineer personal information must be understood as a novel category which is distinct, and superior to current approaches of Personal Context Management. While “Master Prompts” are a patch to interactions with Lare Language Models; the LLS architecture solves the information problem at the core. This also has the potential to chaning our relationship with LLM significantly; and moving away from over-reliance on them.
Here is what ThetaOS is not: it is not an AI innovation. Martijn did not build a new model. What he built is based on an innovation in the structure of information — and then used the capacities of large language models and 61 agents to operate that structure. The AI is the operator. The structure holds the intelligence. Yet, it is not a top-down structure, but emergent.
The architecture rests on four principles.
Everything exists only once. Every person, place, organisation, event, book, or idea has exactly one canonical node in the system. When a face in a photograph is identified as the same person as a LinkedIn connection, as the same meeting attendee in a calendar — those are not three data points. They are three edges (read as: links) on the same node. Every pre-existing connection activates at once. One act of identification opens dozens of relationships that were already there, waiting.
Intelligence lives in the structure, not the model. Martijn calls this the 98/2 rule — a heuristic. Ninety-eight percent of the cognitive value of ThetaOS comes from the data structure — the ontology, the entity types, the relational schema. Two percent from the AI. Tom is not the brain. Tom is the librarian who notices two books on the same shelf that have never been cross-referenced. Remove Tom, the system still works. Remove the structure, no AI can reconstruct what was lost. This is the difference between generic AI and LLS.
Confirmation is a constitutive act. Tom suggests links between information. Martijn confirms or rejects them. There is a third path between fully manual linking — which is essential but exhausting — and fully automatic linking — which produces noise you can’t trust. A confirmed link is the moment a connection becomes yours. Human judgment is preserved. The search is automated. This is what Kasparov described from chess: weak human plus machine plus better process beats strong computer alone. The process is the insight.
The graph compounds. Each confirmed edge increases the informational density of every node it touches. The system does not grow larger — it grows smarter. Not linearly, but topologically. After thousands of confirmed edges, it becomes a different category of instrument. You can only understand this from inside, when you use it.
The system described here needs more explanation and practical examples to form a picture — even for myself — because it has emergent characteristics. Think of a library: A library is more than a collection of books. A forest is more than many trees. And consciousness is more than billions of brain cells linking and firing together. Bringing together information in the way described above creates a Life Lens System which has emergent characteristics that are more than the sum of its parts.
What It Means — Some Threads to Follow. The Information Problem’s Bottleneck Were Never Information.
Here is what I keep coming back to — and why this matters beyond productivity, beyond PKM, beyond any existing category.
Since the beginning of time, we have tried to make information transportable. Cave paintings. Oral tradition. Writing. Libraries. Hypertext. Each generation solved the same problem: How do we store this? How do we find it again? And incrementally, each generation got better at it.
But no one rethought the architecture itself. For most of the time, we didn’t had to. The relevant information could be passed on with the tools we had at hand. And life was less complex.
But now?
Most of what we think, experience, and connect stays invisible. It is ephemeral, by nature. We try to grasp it — and it is gone. Even now, in the digital 21st century, what we capture remains siloed: photographs in one place, contacts in another, calendar in a third, health data somewhere else. None of it speaks to the rest. None of it forms a picture. The image we have of our own lives is distorted, fragmented, incomplete.
I want to be precise here: this is not a limitation of the brain. What the brain does extraordinarily well — and what no machine can replicate — is experience. Sensory richness. Presence. The full texture of a moment. The philosopher and neuroscientist Thomas Metzinger (2009) calls this the Ego-Tunnel: consciousness as a perspective, a lens, a reductive selection from infinite possibility that collapses into one astonishingly real moment. This is not a weakness. It is the gift. It is why Tiago Forte (2026) says perspective is the last resource that cannot be commodified — because perspective cannot be automated. It is what remains when machines do everything else.
But here is the tension: the very richness that makes experience irreplaceable also makes it unreliable as a record. We live forward and understand backward — and the backward understanding is always partial, shaped by what we happened to retain and what the years erased. The key friction happens when we are in the present moment, faced with complicated or complex problems, and try to make coherent decisions based on incomplete information. This is one of many use-cases of LLS. Not an AI coach but you seeing patterns and data clearly — and based on that, making decisions that are aligned with you; more effortless, more frictionless.
Martijn’s system doesn’t replace the experience. It holds the relational depth of a life while you’re busy living it. It does what the brain was never designed to do at scale: remember every connection, every edge, every link, and make all of it navigable and useful, whenever you need to look, to make sense, to decide.
Luhmann’s Zettelkasten understood the principle. It is the links, not the notes, that create meaning; meaning is not given but emergent, not intrinsic but relational. It worked on paper, and with ideas.
ThetaOS works with a life. We can testify.
Nick Milo is at the forefront of teaching active, deliberate sensemaking — the practice of not just capturing or consuming but thinking through writing, linking, creating and sharing. Even for active thinkers, not notetakers but notemakers, so much remains in the shadows. So much valuable information about our own lives that would help us make better decisions stays invisible — a natural resource that cannot be extracted because the architecture was never built to extract it.
Until now.
How It Felt Being in the Room
The afternoon was seven hours. I won’t reconstruct all of it — some of it was private, some of it belongs to Martijn to tell, and some of it I am still processing.
But I can tell you what it felt like.
There is a moment in certain conversations where you realise that the person across from you is operating in a way that matches your brain. Operating in a way that is rare. Challenging. Exciting. Not smarter or better — the word is wrong. Structurally Different. The processing is different. The speed at which connections form, the width of the field they can hold simultaneously, the precision with which they move through complexity — it is the difference between swimming and walking, not in speed but in medium. You feel it as a kind of respectful vertigo.
That was the background state of the afternoon.
At one point — I don’t remember which hour — Martijn hit a button on his MacBook and photographs began to appear. Thousands of them, each visible for only a few milliseconds. He didn’t slow down. He didn’t need to. Your brains can process this. In a couple of minutes, decades of a life passed in front of us — events, faces, places, gatherings — compressed into something that felt less like a slideshow and more like a heartbeat.
“I have been doing this for twenty years,” he said, and he looked at us with an intensity that is hard to describe. It is the look of someone who is both deeply grounded and knows exactly what he’s doing — and who is also, unmistakably, decades ahead of his time. The sane visionary. The grounded revolutionary. A man who has been building something no one else could see, for long enough that he has learned to hold the gap between his vision and the world’s comprehension without bitterness.
And then there was Tom.
“Tom, this is Martijn Aslander. I’m here with Celine and Aria. I’m passing you on to Aria. Aria has full access. I trust him.”
And he handed me the keys.
What I asked Tom, what Tom returned, what that felt like — I will write about that separately. What I can tell you is this: watching a system respond not with generic intelligence but with specific, earned, deeply contextualised knowledge drawn from fifty years of a real human life is genuinely both disorienting and exciting. Not in a dystopian way. In a way that makes you recognise the possibilities — that a mind like water is possible because you can trust a system that works for you, and not the other way around.
I thought about Bush, in 1945, writing about trails. He imagined something that moved the way the mind actually moves — by association, by connection, by the sudden recognition that this and that are related. In between the lines he believed that if we could understand ourselves better, it would pave the way to peace.
Eighty-one years later, the machine he described was finally running.
What Intimacy Looks Like Through a Lens
The three of us spent the afternoon in a state of joyful intensity — the kind that happens when a tool fits so precisely against the shape of a question that thinking accelerates without friction. By the end, my own notes on Martijn’s system had begun to form their own graph. I was seeing connections and possibilities I hadn’t seen when we arrived.
When it was over, Martijn invited us to his house for dinner.
On the walk there, in the early evening light of Haarlem, he said something I haven’t stopped thinking about.
“You both have gotten to know me the most intimately anyone ever has in such a short period of time.”
He was right. In seven hours, through Tom, Céline and I had seen his believes, values, financials, his health patterns, his thinking architecture, his relationships, his definition of intelligence, his fears, his blind spots, the patterns he returns to without knowing he’s returning to them. We had seen the map of a life — not the performance of it, but the structure underneath.
Earlier in the afternoon, I had asked him: what if we all had a Life Lens System? What does that change — about relationships, about intimacy, about peace?
He had looked at me. He said nothing.
Now, walking toward his house, I understood the silence. The answer wasn’t something he could give me in words. It was something that had to be experienced. We had just experienced a glimpse of it.
The intimacy is different when there is nothing to hide — not even what the biological memory has forgotten.
I woke up the next morning after ten hours of sleep. The highest documented REM in six years of tracking. I reached for my tablet before I was fully conscious, went straight to Martijn’s blog, found the paper he had promised to publish.
By now, 235 people have downloaded it. From those 235, only two — Celine and I — had spent a full afternoon with the system. We are both experienced members of the personal knowledge community. And we can testify: what Martijn has built hasn’t yet been built by anyone else. The approach is more nuanced, more structurally coherent, more principled than anything else in this space. It doesn’t replace, but it extends. LLS does not replace PKM. Instead, it binds everything together. And It creates a framework for others to build upon, while it builds upon the work of everyone who came before.
Vannevar Bush. Paul Otlet. Douglas Engelbart. Ted Nelson. Gordon Bell. Niklas Luhmann. Nick Milo.
All pointing at the same thing. The thing that becomes possible when meaning — which has always been emergent, always relational, never intrinsic — finally has the architecture it requires.
Martijn built it. In a house in Haarlem, Netherlands. And he showed it to the world, on a Monday in March, 2026.
I don’t fully understand yet what it means for the rest of us. I will write to find out. But I know this: what Bush imagined in 1945 — not in isolation but in a lineage of thinkers before and after him, sitting at his desk with the war finally over and the future opening — was an instrument that could help humans truly know themselves, and through that knowing, perhaps, something beyond. That instrument exists now.
And it makes me hopeful. Because it doesn’t remove human agency. It doesn’t weaken our minds. It doesn’t alter our experience in unethical ways. What it does is quite the opposite. It is the digital prosthetic we need. The Anti-Friction Machine. The Noise Remover. The Anti-AI-Slop. It is the earplugs in a world that has gotten too loud and too fast for us. It is the arrival of a Life Lens System, a singular, personal extended mind — a tool that strengthens and deepens agency without information overwhelm.
It is running on a MacBook in the Netherlands.
Martijn Aslander’s Life Lens System is a work in progress — and it is growing. By the time this article is published, the system has begun to develop edge density resembling a brain, and Martijn has published a piece hinting at a synaptic theory of personal knowledge.
The next pieces in this series go deeper into the system itself, what Personal Context Management actually is, how the four principles work in practice, and what it means for anyone who thinks seriously about thinking. Also we will explore: What ThetaOS means for gifted and neurodivergent minds — and why the Life Lens System may be the Anti-Friction Machine that changes everything for people whose minds have always moved faster than the tools available to them.
Subscribe now so you don’t miss it. The series is just beginning.
Martijn Aslander’s preprint “The Information Problem Was Never the Real Problem” is available on Zenodo. His blog article “I Think I’ve Built a Mythical Machine” was published on his blog on March 24th, 2026. ThetaOS was publicly demonstrated at the PKM Summit 2026 in Utrecht, Netherlands. The term Life Lens System (LLS) was coined by Aslander in December 2025 to describe the category of personal information architecture that ThetaOS represents. The full definition, FAQ and historical context can be found on Aslander’s project site here.
