In 2023, company founder Joseph Pelle participated in a “Cripping Technology” worldbuilding course at ASU. In this course, he imagined a world where everyone became disabled at some point in their life from a virus spreading. In this possible future,  there would need to be devices to accommodate for disabilities and his solution was ToneTag™.

 

In one of his activities Joseph outlined his plan for his career future, speculatively writing back to himself “from the future.” It’s a little unbelievable now, but reading this letter now in 2045, we know that even though this was a fictional letter ‘from the future,’ it was a motivation and a clear plan for how Joseph wanted to work on creating a real future. Over the years since our founding, he has worked tirelessly to make his creative vision here a reality, and from 2045 we are happy to reach back out to young Joseph and say - “We’ve made it Joseph, it’s all real now.” We are grateful Joseph used this as a blueprint and motivation to begin ToneTag™ in 2035. 

 

Joseph’s Fictional Letter to Himself, written September 6, 2023

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Dear Joseph,

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Writing in from the year 2033. I wanted to let you know how the future is going and give you hope it isn’t all for waste. Thankfully, more and more people have realized a lot of the systems back then were just based on constant conflict. Needing to fight each other just to have a chance at living a serviceable life and end up dooming others to a terrible fate. We decided that empathy would be a better use of our time. By getting to understand those who haven’t been listened to before, we better shape the future to accommodate letting people express themselves in their emotions being better recognized. Through communicating more, we found systems that ended up just leading to suffering and working on retooling them to actually help. Keep on your work knowing that it does have a purpose.

 

Sincerely,

Future Joseph