Project: epistēm
epistēm is a personal knowledge management and personal operating system project Steven worked on in early 2022, around the Shadow recruitment process in January 2022. He also described a component called “wikistēm”.
What it was
The name derives from “episteme”, knowledge in the sense of systematized knowledge. Steven describes working on:
- A companion iOS app for epistēm
- A “wikistēm”, a personal wiki and knowledge base
- A “Personal Ledger” / framework for daily tracking
The project appears to have been a system for structured self-knowledge: tracking daily data, logging reflections, and building a personal knowledge graph. It is an early precursor of the daemon and the current personal-wiki project.
Context
The January 2022 journal entries mention working on epistēm during the anxious wait for the Shadow decision: “J’ai ensuite passé une partie de ma journée à avancer de façon vagabonde sur mon compagnon iOS d’epistēm, sans pression particulière et tout en jouissant modérément des douces sensations de ma reine ketamine.”
He also mentions “centraliser toutes les ressources que j’ai pu éparpiller avec le temps, et commencé à vraiment poser des bases solides pour nourrir mon wikistēm”, a recognizable impulse toward organizing scattered information into a unified system.
The Personal Ledger / life tracking
The January 2022 entries include a daily tracking system, coded logs like [W] HM5 HA5 AM0 AA1 EM5 EA4 [H] G0 W- M1 D1 B0 L0 D1 S0 T1 C1, that appear to track mood, health behaviors, and substance use across the day. This quantitative self-tracking is part of the epistēm initiative.
He writes explicitly: “Je réalise également la valeur de mes écrits quotidiens, de par la volatilité de mes pensées qui sont bien plus éphémères que je ne le réalise.”
Legacy
epistēm was not shipped. The iOS app did not complete. Wikistēm is not documented as having been used. The same impulse reappears later in the daemon and the current personal-wiki project, where AI prompts and journal structure are used to centralize scattered information.