Meet Tlon's Team

"At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally." – Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Tlon (rhymes with flan, the dessert) is named after a short story Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges wrote in 1940. The story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", presents as a first person account of a lost encyclopedia, which itself contains the lost descriptions of a mythical world called Tlön.

We named the company after this story because the myth of Tlön—its strange metaphysics and mysterious disappearance from history—represented our own longing for a different digital world, a place built on an idealized vision of trust and control.

Tlon is a small team with an ambitious mission. Our company has been around since 2014. Some of us have been here since the beginning, many of us for several years. As we worked, our research spread, inspiring a close-knit and dedicated community that grew alongside us.

Together we share the common goal of restoring ownership in our digital daily lives. To trust the tool that connects you, you first have to own the tool, giving you the power to use and extend it however you see fit.

Like the forgotten world of Tlön, we actually used to own our software, and our computers networked more directly, without corporations in the middle, holding our precious memories, and combing through them for revenue.

The internet's architecture developed as an accident. While we can't totally reconstruct how networking evolved, we can change how it will continue to evolve, taking the familiar and reimagining how it can better serve us, the people who depend on it to go about our daily lives.

Who is Tlon? At first it was believed we were deliberately vague, a research quest with impossible aims, but now it is known that we're a catalyst for a new era of computing, and one true ownership and trust will shape

You can learn more about how we work here, and why we believe ownership is the key to controlling our digital destiny here.