We’re Aiming Photonics For You, Not At You

New Technology. New Choices.

The People’s Computer · Article One

A man starts his shift in a delivery van with four cameras pointed at him. One watches the road. One watches the cabin. One watches his face. Through the day, a system decides things about him. It decides he checked his mirrors too often and flags him for distraction. It decides he braked too hard avoiding a child in the road and flags him for unsafe driving, because it cannot tell a dangerous stop from a brave one. By the time he learns which flag was thrown, his pay for the week has already been cut and the shift is already over. He never spoke to anyone. The camera decided, and the decision reached him as a consequence.

Two states away, a long-haul trucker runs through the night on a route he has driven for twenty years. He has read that the people building the future mean to take that route from him — that the rig of the next decade will drive itself, and the seat he has held will be a line the industry finally engineers away. One man is watched. The other is being written out of the story. Same industry, same decade, two faces of a single decision about whose life the technology is for.

You are neither of these men, but you are inside the same system they are. Something is deciding things about you too — from your face, your phone, your purchases, the places you go — and most mornings it reaches no verdict loud enough to make you look up. The collection happens anyway. They are only what it looks like when the machine is turned all the way up.

There is another way to aim all of it. The cameras in that van could work for the driver instead of over him — his witness rather than his supervisor, proving what happened on the road and handing him the record instead of holding it against him. The automation closing in on the trucker could double what he earns and lift the worst of the road off him, a machine he owns instead of one that retires him. The same is true of whatever is watching you. The technology does not change between these futures. Only its direction changes, and who chose the direction.

That decision is what this next series is about.

The Oldest Question In Computing

I wrote a book this year about how light solves a problem the transistor cannot. Near the end of it, I set down the question that should sit under this whole industry and rarely does, the one that ought to have been asked first: who benefits from all this? When the question is asked of photonic computing, I wrote, I want the answer to be everyone who helped make it possible.

The question is older than my book. In the autumn of 1972, in a small office in Menlo Park, a handful of people who could see the personal computer coming started a newsletter. Their opening line observed that computers were mostly being turned against people instead of put in their service, used to manage people rather than to free them, and that the time had come to change it. They called what they were building the People’s Computer Company, and they meant every word. The machine that followed — on the desk, then in the bag, then in the pocket — was supposed to be their answer. Power, handed to the person who held it.

The Dream Was Hijacked One Choice At A Time

That promise did not fail on its own. It was redirected, slowly, by a sequence of decisions that each made sense to the people making them. A website learned it could remember a visitor with a small file, and that was convenient. The file became a way to follow the visitor to the next site, and that was profitable. Following the visitor between sites became following the person across every device, and resolving one person’s identity across those devices became an inventory worth selling. The inventory became a market. The market became the engine underneath the facial recognition that arrests the wrong person, the behavioral scoring that cuts the driver’s pay, the watchlist that turns someone away at a door for a reason no one will explain.

No one chose the surveillance economy in a single sitting. It was assembled one reasonable step at a time, and the steps added up to an architecture that aims the most powerful tool we have ever built at the people who use it. The machine that was meant to free us has spent fifteen years quietly deciding things about us and delivering the decisions as consequences. The dream was real. It was hijacked by choices.

Choices can be made again.

The Technology Does Not Choose. People Do.

Here is the part the industry prefers to leave unsaid. The physics is neutral. A photonic switch that fires in under two hundred femtoseconds — six orders of magnitude faster than the transistor underneath the surveillance internet — does not care whether it puts your identity back in your hands or strips it from them. The same speed that could make your face your own could make facial recognition faster and harder to fool. The fork is not in the technology. It is in the hands that hold it and the intent those hands carry.

So the questions that actually decide your future are not technical ones. Who leads the company. What they committed to, and when, and in front of whom. Whether the intent came before the money or got bolted on once there was a brand to protect. In a field where the same breakthrough can free people or fence them in, those are the only questions that matter. And the honest answer to them is not to ask you for trust. It is to put the intent somewhere you can check it, and to invite you to check.

So here is what we committed to, and where it is written down.

We Put The Promise In Writing

Dr. Gary Poovey invented the switch this company is built on. He trusted us with his breakthrough because we promised to do good with it — a promise made before there was a single dollar in it to protect. In the book, I was plain about the kind of person making it. I will quote it directly, because the whole point is that it is already in print and I cannot take it back:

I am not a particularly virtuous person. I am a businessman who has spent forty years chasing opportunities wherever they appeared. But a promise is a promise. And beyond the obligation, I have built enough businesses to understand that extraction is not sustainable. Eventually, the community pushes back. Eventually, the political winds shift.

What follows from that is specific. If photonic computing succeeds, it will create enormous value, and that value should flow to the communities that host our facilities, to the workers who build and operate them, to the early believers who took risk when success was uncertain, to the researchers who gave their careers to problems that might never have resolved. To the founders and shareholders as well — their returns are legitimate. But they should not be the only returns. The value is too large, and the people who make it possible too important, for the old extractive model to hold. We are building infrastructure that shares: not through charity, not through foundations that bear our name, but through structures that give communities real power over real assets.

A promise you cannot check is only advertising. This one is printed, with my name beneath it, which makes it yours to hold and yours to enforce.

The Physics Already Keeps Its Half

None of this would matter if the technology did not work, and the plainest place to see that it works is the least glamorous one. A data center built on photonic logic can do the work of a two-gigawatt transistor-based facility for a small fraction of the cost, on roughly a tenth of the power, with no cooling water, and it can run on sunlight. The largest transistor-based campuses now under construction are measured in tens of billions of dollars. The photonic equivalent is measured in tens of millions. That is what the physics does when light carries the logic instead of electrons — the switch behind it independently measured many time, as science requires.

The point is the order of things. The technology already works. In a short time it will make computing cheaper, cooler, and cleaner for everyone who depends on it. What is left to decide is not whether it delivers, but who it delivers for — and that is a choice, made out loud.

What We Are Building, In Order

This is the first piece in a new series, and the series is one argument built in sequence. Each piece is a single application of the same decision, and each one earns the next.

We begin with your identity — an internet where your face, your location, and the patterns of your life belong to you, where anyone who wants something has to come to the door and ask, and gets only what you choose to hand over. We take up your work next, and what it means for a family to own the machine instead of competing against it. We get to your money, to devices that stop watching you, and to the question of how you will tell what is real online once anything at all can be generated. Sovereign-scale deployment — whole countries operating on the new foundation — comes early, because the choice is easiest to see at full size.

The thread through all of it is the one this piece is about. The physics lets us build nearly anything. We are choosing, in public and in writing, to build the internet where you pay a small price and stand as its customer, instead of the one where you pay nothing and are sold as its product — and to build the machines that do the work so that you own them and earn from them, instead of ones that earn for someone else and retire you.

New Technology. New Choices.

The surveillance economy was never the verdict of the machine. It was the sum of a thousand decisions made by people who held the power to decide and chose the extractive answer every time. The people in that Menlo Park office wanted the opposite, and for a while the personal computer delivered it. What they could not have built then — a foundation where your identity is yours by physics rather than by permission — we can build now.

So the old question finally has somewhere to land. Who benefits? The driver who owns the record of his own day. The family that owns the machine that earns for it. The person who owns the identity that was always theirs. You, if you decide that is the internet you want to live on and the way you want to see machines work — because The People’s Computer is only the people’s if the people claim it.

We’re aiming photonics for you, not at you. That is our choice. We are putting it in writing so you can hold us to it. The rest of this series is the invitation.

Derek out.

Derek W. Bailey is the Founder of True Photonic, Inc. and author of **Keep Computing: How Light Solves Computing’s Impossible Problem** (2026). TPI is developing the Logic-in-Light™ architecture centered on the Poovey Switch, validated at 150–200 femtoseconds at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.

Contact: **dbailey@truephotonic.com**

Disclosure: The author has a financial interest in the success of photonic computing technology. Performance projections are based on preliminary research, early-stage testing, and technical simulations. Actual results may vary.

Forward-Looking Statements: This article contains forward-looking statements regarding future technological capabilities and market developments. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the publication date.