Project summary

Before Day Zero (BDZ) will be an online platform that will be like a living museum dedicated to preserving the experience of how the world was before the pervasive, ambient AI. With cryptographic verification, it will provide a platform for pre-AI media provably generated before Day Zero. The platform will also include "Cognitive Sandboxes" to simulate unassisted human tasks, raw errors and unoptimized frictions to mimic a portion of digital life before AI. The platform will serve as an anthropological anchor for future generations, cultural researchers and anyone who seeks to preserve human cognitive experiences.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The goals are:
To establish a dedicated, open, immutable archive of human-made pre-2022 digital analogue-scanned items, including raw webcam footage, early web forums, and VHS conversions, that can serve as a reference for ground truth and a baseline for synthetic media for future generations. We plan to build a lightweight, accessible web application that follows HTTPS standards and offers offline-first capabilities.

To develop web-browser-based "friction simulations" with features like autocomplete-free writing environments, manual navigation tools and uncurated static web browsing that will allow the human of the future to experience digital life before AI and the cognitive effort without algorithmic guidance. For this, we will partner with community archiving projects, digital libraries, and university humanities labs to source verified pre-2022 data signifying the world before Day Zero. We will also work and implement decentralised timestamping (such as RFC 3161 timestamps and existing web archive cross-checks) for verification.

To build a platform for cognitive scientists and AI governance researchers that provides a structured benchmark of natural human deliberation, error rates, and communication before generative models take over everything. To do that, we will build and release open-source modules and SDKs that let educators embed friction sandboxes directly into classrooms.

How will this funding be used?

Core web development and Architecture will consume around 45% of the funding we are seeking.
Archival and Storage Infrastructure will consume around 25% of the budget.
Curation and Legal Verification Pipeline will consume around 20% of the budget.
User testing, outreach, and documentation activities are expected to consume 10% of the budget.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

I will kick it off myself and hire team members to get it done over time. I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus (METU-NCC) and completed a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at Kyungpook National University, South Korea. I have worked in networked communication systems, edge architectures, IoT, and applied machine learning have more than 35 peer-reviewed publications in IEEE transactions and high-impact journals, co-authored patents, and a textbook on network programming.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The project could fail due to low ongoing retention. Users might visit the platform out of nostalgia and not integrate it into ongoing educational or personal routines. To avoid this, we can focus more on pedagogical tooling for schools, research citations, and API/embed tools rather than relying purely on novelty traffic.

Since AI is evolving as well and submission volume can explode, that can lead to archive contamination and verification bottlenecks. To address this, we can introduce strict algorithmic cutoffs linked to existing public web archives (Internet Archive Wayback Machine pre-2022 snapshots, EXIF/hash verification).

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

We recently won multiple competitive international research funding awards, including grants from the International Science Partnerships Fund (£80,000), the National Research Foundation of Korea ($450,000), the Québec Merit Scholarship program ($35,000), and AdımODTÜ research programs.