The great cyberpunk author William Gibson was once asked to name the most important thing for the future. He responded: “Pointing to the original.” This is where Perma lore begins.

Since the invention of photography in the 1800s, about 12 trillion photos have been taken. By 2034, humans will generate 20 trillion photos in a single year. Cheap storage, smartphone cameras, influencer culture, generative AI, platforms’ data mining incentives…It's an overcooked stew that drowns us in din and muddles any sense of “original.”

"I’m privy to the existence of so much digital noise that lends itself to feeling a little bit crazy,” Perma’s founding designer Alanah Lam (KB7) told Kernel, “it’s a bit like you don't know what's real."

She attributes that sense to "context collapse,” referencing author Jenny Odell's conviction in her book How to Do Nothing that "the Internet is like an apartment building with no walls." We're moving through different rooms with "no introduction or pause between like all the different sceneries,” Alanah observed, “seeing war torn countries and then seeing people on vacation and then being sold e-commerce…I think we have a relationship problem.”

Perma – “modern day correspondence art meets social platform” – is a riposte to that problem. It’s venture studio cum product lab Future Primitive’s first foray into consumer apps: a social camera that “forms friendships – no feeds, no followers, just real photos shared peer-to-peer.”

Amidst the deluge of trillions, Perma touts blockchain amenities like “verifiably human-made” and “permanently stored” to offer a more conscious choice of “represent[ing] ourselves and the way we relate.” It’s one piece of their imagined future of better primitives, and how we ultimately get there – as Alanah might attest – is a question about interfaces.

Alanah, like much of the Future Primitive team, is based in Vancouver. Before design, she studied psychology and business, and started exploring deep questions at their intersection, like: “Can interactive technologies create psychologically supportive digital environments for mental wellbeing?”

She believed they could, referencing psychologist Roger Ulrich's work on "psychologically supportive design" – like how paintings of cities in doctors’ waiting rooms increase cortisol, while nature paintings decrease it.

At some midpoint between psychology and business, she saw an opportunity to explore that terrain. “I felt like UX design was a good place for that.”

Alanah studied abroad in Berlin and fell in love with the city. Her plan became: become a UX designer, move to Berlin. Then Covid happened. “So I was like, okay, I'm just gonna keep learning and watching all these YouTube tutorials and try to really get good." Her first freelance design gig was with a local Vancouver techno club called Dolly. That work led to a connection with the decentralized, music-focused creative community, RefractionDAO. She’d bought Bitcoin in 2017, but this was the first time she was ever paid in crypto (the community’s native $REFRACT token).

Refraction was notable, Alanah said, for "putting on real events" rather than just being a purely digital web3 project. Their website became one of her premier portfolio pieces, earning the attention of Benny Giang (KB7), the CEO of Future Primitive, who tapped her in early 2022 to be the company’s founding designer.

In late 2021, Future Primitive launched as a venture studio. “We created Stapleverse and BBC's venture into Web3,” Alanah said, “and we were working with brands to create their NFT projects.” Perma’s emergence reflects an enduring vision that spans that history.

“The original ethos came from Benny when he was working at Dapper Labs – he had this idea of digital film rolls and minting memories on-chain,” Alanah said. “So when we were building Perma, the initial iteration was digital film rolls. Every film roll had 24 exposures and was a token bound account, immortalizing those memories and creating a proof for where those photos had come from.”

The social app constrains users to photos "taken in the present" with "no uploads and no edits, and no AI," creating what she called "extremely raw photos" of "people going about their day" that foster genuine rather than algorithmic engagement.

Photos can be airdropped to others' digital mailboxes – a nod to the correspondence art movement, which bypassed traditional galleries to create direct, personal connections through the mail.

In May 2024, when Alanah traveled to ETH Berlin to launch the app, she visited Vincent Trasov, one of the original correspondence artists. His work with partner Michael Morris directly inspired Perma's sharing mechanics.

“We got into their work because Benny stumbled upon their book The International Image Directory” – a collection of postcards exchanged between artists across North America and Europe that the team saw as an early decentralized network. “Sort of like a node network,” Alanah said.

The physical complement to Perma is Checkpoint, “portable photo booths that could potentially be portals into the network that we build,” Alanah said. About 10,000 photos are taken weekly in the 30 booths spread across New York, LA, and Vancouver. Participants can scan a QR code to download the high res photo they took.

“And we're building up more features,” Alanah told us, “like what if you could join an exclusive IRL network based on where you went and you know? Similar to Perma, we're seeing that the new type of engagement is actually proof of presence.”

Instead of the "unintentional community policing panopticon" we have now, where people film with an "I can, and so I will mentality," she envisions cameras that prove that you were there – not the Instragram-colored "perversion of your identity into this caricature,” but you. Presence is pushing Checkpoint to the fore of Future Primitive’s attention. "A little bit of an internal shift of focus is starting to happen. We still want to stick to the ethos of Perma – and some of the software that might reappear in this new form – but if we really want to make things better for people in real life and [connect them], then we need to be more in real life [and not] just deployed as an app."

Alanah also supports design at Kernel – a community she first encountered via former Future Primitive colleague Howard Tam (KB5). “He spoke really highly of it,” she said. “And then Benny applied for the whole team to be a part of it because he thought it was really important to immerse in the culture and the lore.”

The team is expanding the Checkpoint network, “so if there are people with businesses – in particular third spaces – we're really interested in who would want to host a checkpoint and be a part of the network.”

Future Primitive is also interested in connecting with mission-aligned investors for an upcoming fundraise. And for others crafting environments, pointing to the original, or building interfaces rooted in building meaningful and diverse relationships, Alanah would love to hear from you.

“If there are people that are liking the ideas that I share – and if they have ideas or they've thought about anything similar,” she said, “yeah, I’m super down to connect."

For rabbit hole dwellers, we ask each featured fellow to share some deeper technical inspiration – e.g. research docs, whitepapers – that adds depth to their work.

These are Alanah's: Byung-Chul Han: “I Practise Philosophy as Art” Protocol Fiction, Desire, and Belief (Interconnected)

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