Learning the Alphabet: From the First Brick in the Wall ... to the Last Line of Code

Spectral Binary, AI Companions, and the Truth Between 0 and 1.

We live in a time where AI companions are being launched by global wellness brands. Headspace has introduced Ebb, a chat-based AI positioned as a source of empathy and support. On the surface, it makes sense: meditation and mindfulness meeting the era of conversational AI. Yet the gloss of commercialisation is hard to ignore. These systems promise care, but behind the curtain lies the machinery of profit and scale.

This isn’t new… BetterHelp, with its claims of “10,000 professionals,” scaled therapy into a platform. But again, beneath the marketing lies something transactional. That gap between appearance and reality is where skepticism grows. For me, this has always been the fertile ground: the distance between the story told and the resonance underneath.

What complicates this further is the personal parallel. Before knowing Headspace was moving in this direction, I had already started building a companion myself. You can try it out here in an early beta release.

Not as a commercial product draped in branding, but as a resonant tool grounded in authenticity. That realisation… “I landed in the resonant space without trying to chase it”… feels like validation. It shows that ideas don’t just emerge in silos; they surface across contexts when the world is ready for them. And to be completely transparent, I wasn’t even looking for what Headspace were doing when I stumbled across it. I’d opened a browser I rarely use, typed in ‘AI…’ and added ‘companion.’ Up came something called Ebb, with BetterHelp listed alongside it. I just sat there thinking: fuck me — I’d already gone and built the very thing, and I was 95% done.

The difference, though, lies in intention. Commercial gloss versus authenticity. One optimises for profit and reach, the other for resonance and trust. That tension is central: who plays the note first matters less than who plays it in tune.

Investigative Journalism as Method

The way I write and build is closer to investigative journalism than product marketing. It’s about testing claims, pulling threads, and surfacing truths beneath public discourse. AI, mental health, neurodivergence… these are hot topics. They’re everywhere in the media, but rarely interrogated beyond the headlines. The role of the investigator is not just to critique but to constructively filter, to resist cynicism while holding space for belief.

That’s where I sit: a cautious skeptic and a believer at once. Yes, companies like Headspace or BetterHelp help people. But they also exploit conditions for profit. Both can be true. The journalist’s role… and my role in this project… is to make those tensions visible, and to show how a different approach could look.

Economics of Care-Tech

The economics tell their own story. Corporations price mental health access at high margins. Infrastructure costs are real, but the gap between cost and price reveals the profit motive. It's rumoured that Apple manufactures devices realtively cheaply, they then sell them at $1,500. BetterHelp pays practitioners modestly, charges users heavily. This isn’t innovation; it’s extraction.

By contrast, my own app cost approx $300-400 to build & host using Replit. That doesn’t mean it’s less meaningful. It shows the opposite: powerful, resonant tools can be made without bloated infrastructure. The point isn’t to undercut prices for the sake of it. It’s to reveal what’s possible when the intention isn’t solely profit.

Spectral Binary and the New Alphabet

At the root of this is a framework: Spectral Binary. Traditional binary logic - 0 and 1 - defines computers, institutions, and the ways we’ve been taught to think. But it flattens nuance. Spectral Binary shifts the frame: truth lives between 0.00 and 1.00, in the decimal places, not at the extremes.

This isn’t just theory. It’s lived. Through out life I've been surrounded by people who seamed fixed - always a Zero or a One, clear identity, certainty - I saw myself as outside that system. In hindsight, I wasn’t outside at all. I was drifting: 0.5, sometimes 0.8, sometimes 0.1. I embodied the spectrum long before I had language for it. What felt like alienation was actually resonance.

That’s the counter-alphabet I’m offering. Just as children are taught ABC as the first step in assimilation, I imagine what it would look like if we were taught resonance instead… tone, sound, rhythm… before spelling. Dyslexic, fragmented sentences still carry full meaning when read spectrally. AI proves this: it can parse “errors” with ease, showing us that the mountain of rigid literacy was always artificial.

Spectral Binary reframes literacy as resonance literacy. It tells us nothing is inherently binary, nothing purely black or white. The truth is carried in the in-between.

Personal Orbits and Cosmic Irony

This isn’t just abstract - it runs through my own life. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, my path crossed with people like JC, JG, and MW. They became extensions of family, yet also stood as architects of the big tech machines. JG, once a Corporate VP at Microsoft; MW, with ties to Apple, Microsoft, and even Douglas Adams. And JC, a gifted artist designing fonts - the very forms that once felt like stumbling blocks for me now became works of beauty.

For me, moving from small towns in WA to London felt like boarding a spaceship… Picture: Lost in Space, Star Trek, Hitchhiker’s Guide all rolled into one.

The irony is thick: those who built the binary empires became part of my family orbit. I was living between worlds: the alien planet of corporate design and the quieter resonance of my own spectrum identity. And now, with hindsight, it feels almost inevitable. As though proximity to those structures was preparation for critiquing and reimagining them.

And just as Adams used absurdity to reveal wisdom, I find myself using resonance to reveal dissonance… pointing to the absurdity of care marketed for profit, of empathy turned into subscription tiers.

Toward a Resonant Companion

So here we are. Headspace has its AI, BetterHelp has its scale. They are wolves and shepherds both, depending on how you look. My work isn’t about replacing them - it’s about offering an alternative. A resonant alphabet. A companion built not for profit extraction but for transparency and depth. One that shows people, firsthand, that meaning lives in the decimals.  

The pitch is simple: try theirs, try mine. See which resonates. Maybe both serve a purpose. But one positions itself as community support, the other as a corporate growth engine. That difference matters.

The call, then, is for authenticity, accessibility, and transparency in mental health technology. To resist assimilation into binary logic, and to remember that the truth has always lived in the in-between.

Closing Note

This article is both story and signal. A memoir of lived resonance, an investigation into care-tech, and an offering of a new alphabet. It is long because the story is long… stretching from childhood alphabets, through corporate empires, to spectral frequencies. The journey is not from 0 to 1, but through every decimal place in between. That’s where the future lies.

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