The Human Stand

Sondage’s Human Standard Interests, 2026

Sondage is animated by four questions. Each has been with us longer than the technology now reshaping it. Each will only grow in importance as artificial systems become more widespread in human life.

We name these questions here, alongside a partial list of those whose work — across disciplines, sectors, and borders — answers them with courage and conviction. We do not claim alliance. We signal lineage, and we invite conversation.

What follows is not a field guide. It is a record of where Sondage’s attention is currently directed and a recognition that we work in the company of others.

What makes an artifact real?

The question of provenance — of how a record proves its origin in a witnessed moment — has moved from the archivist’s workshop to the center of public life. The work below is shaping how authenticity will be defined in the coming decade.

Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA)

An open technical standards body developing cryptographic provenance for digital media.

Sondage observes C2PA’s work closely as the technical counterpart to its own doctrine of Embodied Provenance — and as a reminder that no metadata standard, however rigorous, can substitute for the unbroken human chain that places a record on the archive shelf.

Starling Lab for Data Integrity

A Stanford–USC Shoah Foundation research center building methods for capturing, storing, and verifying sensitive digital records.

Sondage takes instruction from Starling Lab’s insistence that authentication and ethics must be designed together, not bolted on after the fact.

WITNESS

An international human rights organization helping people use video and technology to defend and protect human rights.

Sondage shares WITNESS’s conviction that the witnessed record is a moral artifact before it is a technical one — and that the people who hold cameras and microphones bear the first burden of its authenticity.

What kind of labor requires embodiment?

Some work cannot be performed at a distance, by a proxy, or by a machine. The traditions below have spent generations refining the disciplines of presence — of the body in the room, the voice in the air, the human across the table.

Oral History Association

The principal professional body for oral historians in the United States, custodian of the field’s ethical and methodological standards.

Sondage’s Seminar on the Self descends from the methodological lineage the OHA has stewarded for more than half a century, and a key source for standards in the field.

Oral History Center, UC Berkeley

Our neighbor and one of the oldest oral history programs in the United States, producing scholarly life history interviews since 1954.

Sondage looks to OHC as a working demonstration that the scholarly life history remains a living craft, not a historical artifact.

Soul Biographies — Nic Askew

An independent practice of intimate filmed inquiry, conducted one human being at a time.

Sondage finds in Askew’s work a contemporary insistence that the conditions of attention — silence, slowness, the disciplined presence of one person to another — are themselves the instrument.

What kind of work — or non-work — is good for humans?

The question of vocation — and of the rest, contemplation, and craft that vocation requires — is older than industrial labor and will outlast it. The voices below are reopening it for a generation surrounded by automated convenience.

The Convivial Society — L. M. Sacasas

An ongoing essay practice on technology, the moral life, and the conditions of human attention.

Sondage finds in Sacasas’s work a careful, non-reactive register for thinking about what technologies do to the people who use them — a register Sondage tries to keep in its own writing.

The Long Now Foundation

An institution dedicated to fostering long-term thinking, including durable formats for transmitting knowledge across centuries.

Sondage shares Long Now’s conviction that the time horizon of an artifact is itself a moral choice, and that the work of building for the long term is good work in its own right.

Modern Elder Academy

An institution dedicated to midlife transition, the cultivation of wisdom, and the redefinition of work and contribution in the second half of life. Sondage shares the Modern Elder Academy’s conviction that the second half of life is a vocation in its own right, and that what is asked of an elder is not a slower version of earlier work but a different kind of work entirely.

What does it mean to age honorably, die with dignity, and be remembered accurately?

The arc of a life ends in two passages — the body’s and the record’s. Both are increasingly contested, and both depend on the same human commitments: honesty, attention, and the willingness to bear witness without erasure or embellishment.

International Federation on Ageing

A global non-governmental organization advancing the dignity, autonomy, and contribution of older adults across more than seventy countries.

Sondage takes instruction from the IFA’s insistence that honorable aging is a global question and that the answers will look different in different cultures.

USC Shoah Foundation

The institute housing the Visual History Archive — more than 56,000 testimonies from witnesses to genocide and mass atrocity.

Sondage looks to the Shoah Foundation as the standing demonstration that accurate memory at scale is possible, and that the obligation to be remembered accurately is among the most serious obligations one generation can owe another.

Hospice Foundation of America

A national organization advancing the practice of end-of-life care and the public conversation about dying. Sondage shares the Foundation’s conviction that dying is not only a medical event but a human passage that asks for company, presence, and the careful keeping of what the dying person wishes to leave behind.

An invitation

Sondage welcomes correspondence with practitioners, scholars, and institutions working on these questions in any tradition. We are based in Berkeley, California, and we read what is sent to us.

If your work belongs in a future revision of these notes, write to us.