Clarion & Linkbooks
A paper-first product (Linkbooks) stacked on a deeper system layer (Clarion).
Clarion & Linkbooks — One-page Vision
A system of record for unfinished human thinking
Short version: Linkbooks is the working product. Clarion is the underlying system it proves. Together, they point to a new layer of the internet — one that finally treats human thinking as something worth preserving before it is polished, published, or flattened.
This is not a note-taking app. It’s not a productivity trick. And it’s not vaporware.
It already works.
The problem we’re actually solving
People do their most important thinking before it’s clear.
They sketch ideas, copy quotes, make mistakes, revise, contradict themselves, and slowly figure out what they believe. Today, that kind of thinking is either:
- trapped on paper and lost to time, or
- forced into rigid digital tools that assume clarity too early, or
- flattened into documents that erase how ideas actually evolved.
There is no system of record for human thinking in its unfinished state — with attribution, context, and history intact.
That’s the gap.
What Linkbooks does today (this already exists)
Linkbooks is a paper-first, web-based application that lets people:
- write naturally in physical notebooks
- capture pages with a phone or scanner
- upload single pages or hundreds at once
- process everything in the background
- search their handwriting seconds later
Behind the scenes:
- raw page images are stored permanently and never altered
- extracted text is derived, versioned, and re-derivable as algorithms improve
- nothing is overwritten
- latency is near-real-time
This already works. Real people are using it now.
Linkbooks keeps the data as a living archive, not a disposable upload.
The deeper idea: Clarion
Clarion is the name for what Linkbooks has been building toward all along.
Clarion is a system of record for human thinking before it is finished.
In Clarion:
- every captured thought becomes a knowledge element
- elements are immutable
- meaning evolves through new elements and links, never edits
- corrections don’t erase mistakes — they reference them
- attribution is expressed through links, not claims
- time is first-class
If you copy a quote from a book:
- the quote is your transcription
- the book is the original source
- the relationship between them is explicit
- errors are allowed, visible, and correctable through linkage
This is how real thinking works — and how trust is preserved.
Why links matter more than notes
In Clarion, links are the core primitive.
Links don’t just connect things — they mean things:
- “this comes from that”
- “this corrects that”
- “this elaborates on that”
- “this contradicts that”
Users are never forced to classify or organize upfront.
Structure emerges over time from how ideas relate, evolve, and resolve.
Sharing, reimagined
Sharing in this system is not publishing a document.
It’s exposing a constellation:
- a connected subgraph of ideas
- with history intact
- sources preserved
- context visible
You don’t copy knowledge. You reference it.
That’s real hypertext — closer to Ted Nelson’s original Xanadu vision than the modern web ever got.
Why this matters now
AI, search engines, and the web itself are collapsing under:
- loss of attribution
- remix without origin
- hallucinated certainty
- erased context
Clarion doesn’t compete with AI.
It gives AI — and humans — a trustworthy substrate of human-origin knowledge built from elements and links.
Not content. Not documents. Provenance.
The ambition
- Linkbooks is the behavioral wedge: paper → capture → memory
- Clarion is the layer beneath: elements, links, provenance, time
- On top of Clarion can live:
- better personal knowledge systems
- institutional memory
- trustworthy AI ingestion
- a healthier web of ideas
This is not a solo project. It’s a long-term effort to fix something fundamental.
But it’s already real. And it’s already underway.
If this resonates, the question isn’t “does this work?”
The question is: Who wants to help build the missing layer of human knowledge?
Market Overview — High-Frequency Knowledge Producers
The market in one sentence
Clarion serves high-frequency knowledge producers: people who externalize thinking every day and need that thinking to remain retrievable, attributable, and usable over time.
This is a behavior-defined market, not a tool-defined one.
Who these people are
High-frequency knowledge producers are people whose work or learning depends on thinking out loud on paper — sketching, writing, annotating, copying, revising, and linking ideas before they are finished.
They don’t write to publish. They write to think.
Core segments
1) Professional knowledge workers
People who write in order to decide.
Examples: executives and founders, consultants and strategists, product managers, engineers and architects, researchers and analysts.
What they care about: recall over long time horizons, traceability of decisions, synthesis across projects, not losing insight when roles or companies change.
2) Academic and learning power users
People who write in order to understand and retain.
Examples: university students (especially STEM, law, medicine), graduate students and PhD candidates, professors and researchers, serious lifelong learners.
What they care about: memory reinforcement, accurate attribution of sources, linking ideas across courses/books/years, preserving how understanding evolved.
3) Creative and ideation-driven professionals
People who write in order to discover ideas.
Examples: writers and journalists, designers and UX researchers, filmmakers and screenwriters, artists and independent creators.
What they care about: capturing fragments without breaking flow, revisiting half-formed ideas later, seeing connections across notebooks and time, preserving the process, not just the output.
4) Operational and compliance-driven writers
People who write because accuracy and record-keeping matter.
Examples: legal professionals, healthcare professionals, policy and government workers, technical documentation authors.
What they care about: correctness, auditability, provenance, being able to explain why something was done—not just what was done.
How big is this market?
A conservative, order-of-magnitude view:
- ~1.2–1.5 billion global knowledge workers
- ~300–400 million people who write or sketch as part of their daily cognitive work
- ~75–100 million high-frequency knowledge producers who write almost every day, keep notebooks or personal archives, and actively revisit past material
This is not a stationery market. It is a cognitive infrastructure market.
Why existing tools fall short
Most tools are built for finished information: documents assume clarity upfront; note apps assume organization is known early; wikis assume consensus; AI assumes meaning can be inferred later.
“I don’t know what this is yet, but I don’t want to lose it.”
That gap is where Clarion and Linkbooks operate.
Why this market matters now
- AI systems increasingly need high-quality human-origin knowledge
- Attribution and trust on the web are collapsing
- People are drowning in notes but starving for memory
- Organizations lose institutional knowledge as people move faster
High-frequency knowledge producers feel this pain first — and most acutely.
Why this is a category-sized opportunity
This market spans professions, ages, and industries; grows as knowledge work grows; feeds downstream systems (AI, search, education, institutions); and has no true system of record today.
Clarion doesn’t just serve these users. It becomes infrastructure built from their thinking.
Clarion — Principles
A system lives or dies by the principles it refuses to violate.
These are the non-negotiables.
1) Thinking is valuable before it is finished
Clarion exists to make unfinished thinking safe to keep.
“I don’t know what this is yet, but I don’t want to lose it.”
2) Externalization precedes understanding
We write, sketch, and annotate not to record conclusions, but to discover them.
Capture first. Meaning later.
3) Elements are records, not drafts
A captured element is a fact about what someone thought at a moment in time. It is never edited. It is never erased. Mistakes are corrected by linking, not rewriting.
Memory is additive, not revisionist.
4) Links carry meaning
Links express provenance, development, correction, and contradiction. Meaning lives in relationships, not containers.
Elements are nouns. Links are verbs.
5) Time is first-class
Thinking unfolds. Clarion preserves sequence, context, and evolution instead of flattening them.
Clarity is temporal.
6) Space matters as much as text
Humans organize ideas spatially — through proximity, layout, and emphasis — not just lines of text.
Thinking has shape.
7) Attribution is expressed, not asserted
Authorship, sources, and influence are made explicit through links. Trust comes from lineage, not claims.
Provenance beats authority.
8) Sharing is exposing a constellation
Sharing reveals a connected subgraph — not a flattened document.
Share structure, not scraps.
9) Humans first, AI downstream
Clarion optimizes for faithful human memory. AI is a reader and assistant — never the author of record.
AI depends on Clarion. Clarion does not depend on AI.
10) The goal is continuity
Across days, careers, institutions, and generations.
What matters should remain intelligible.
Clarion does not try to finish human knowledge.
It makes unfinished thinking safe, attributable, and usable over time.