Where to place your attention is without question a moral act. This is the understanding I am trying to help inject into the conversation around generative large language models. The more people energize worst-case outcomes the more we guarantee them. If we can help people get enough distance from their knee-jerk fear response to reflect on their own minds and, as the bumper sticker says, not believe everything they think, we can interrupt the fear stream with an executive reallocation mandate that brings us rapidly and coherently closer to worlds we actually want to live in. Silicon Valley is having a bad trip right now. It needs spiritual guidance if we are to live the promise of these tools.

This is the conversation I can't stop having. Convergence to one winner is not how evolution works. Niche propagation is the rule with every new layer of organization: the origin of life led to explosive innovation of new organic molecules, the emergence of multicellular organisms was a boon to the diversity of single-celled organisms, the city created a context that enabled a massive diversification of identities and labor lineages, etc. "Nature abhors a vacuum" and loves closing metabolic loops, so every new waste product is someone else's prospective novel food opportunity or business gambit. It's collective intelligence all the way down and up. Your self is modular and fundamentally social. And because relationships scale faster than population, and every new technology can be remixed with all extant technologies, the possibility space grows faster than actual implementation. People thought we'd get an "everything app" and we ended up with countless context-specific branching lineages. People tried to make "the perfect coding language" and now we have more of them than ever. People thought the Web would bring everyone into a global village and it forked into innumerable Cozy Webs and nationalized internets and local networks and siloed flows. The pattern is free energy minimizing dissipative structures. The singularity is radically plural, even as (and because!) new standards emerge. Glad to see @bratton, @blaiseaguera, and James Manyika exploring the implications of this in their new paper — the far more interesting and fruitful question than "Which winner takes all?" is "What structures are conserved across food webs and what opportunities does this suggest for the new hybrid economy?"

"The fact remains that the public needs storytellers to offer a persuasive vision of why they should be excited about such a powerful technology that they've been warned about for so long." – @jasonhiner at @theDeepView ~ hold my beer ~

💸 Excerpts from "What Capital Never Told You About Rent" from @atlasresear_ch This article took months to write, distills of years of study, and delivers a message @QBFrank and I think people really need to hear: A world approaching total enclosure is a problem for all of us, no matter who you are. Whether you want innovation, profit, cognitive security, or clean air, this is for you. ----- on the history of enclosure ----- 'Starting in England in the twelfth century, the commons – the shared grazing land, forests, and fields on which ordinary people relied for subsistence – were progressively divided, sold, and privatised by legal manipulation, economic pressure, and physical violence. This enclosure extinguished common rights that granted even the poorest access to the means of their own survival. For centuries, the careful management of these rights had prevented overgrazing, overfishing, and other forms of degradation by imposing elastic limits that preserved the sufficiency of natural resources. Livestock were taught to feed in small local areas without the need of fences. Manorial courts thwarted excessive logging and mineral extraction as part of an integrated system of collective soil and wildlife conservation. But when Lords were granted exclusive rights to use the land as they saw fit and peasants and villagers suddenly had to pay for dwindling access to the substrate of life itself, everyone – not just the poor – lost the age-old protections that ensured there would be enough for all in years to come. Ideas of collective stewardship declined in favor and ownership became increasingly a matter of one’s freedom to exploit and even destroy their property for short-term gain. The future was sold for parts. The results were catastrophic for human, societal, and ecological health. The remains of Late Medieval peasants show a steep and sudden drop in average height, loss of bone density, and other evidence of extreme stress and malnutrition throughout life. Destitute masses became forced migrants whose compromised immune systems and overcrowding in urban areas contributed directly to the devastating mortality of The Black Plague. This pattern only intensified over the next several centuries, in step with the contraction of the commons until its peak during The Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, Europe’s mature forests declined over 90% between the 12th and 20th centuries and might have been lost entirely if not for aggressive legislation preserving its last remaining timber. Even with today’s nearly miraculous rebound of forest cover, the continent’s biodiversity never recovered and remains in a state of ongoing systemic crisis. The natural wealth people once “paid” for with honest work has been so thoroughly depleted that present-day Europeans would require several tons of global imports per person per year to maintain the same quality of life. This is the template. Capitalism lives on commons capture, and every subsequent wave repeats it with different resources: identify something everyone will need, build or claim infrastructure around it, and create dependency. Then turn on the pricing and extract forever. Commons become commodities, made artificially scarce and then leased back to those who cannot do without it. Successive enclosures of the broadcast spectrum, the pharmaceutical patent, the social network, and the cloud all follow the same pattern. Lifestyle consumerism enclosed the “authentic self” described by existentialist philosophers and made identity itself a rental contract, under which the real you is only actualized through continuous acquisition and display. Together, these transformations sowed the seeds for the enclosure of our very thoughts. The next chapter in the story of capital is about how the AI infrastructure under construction right now will provide “intelligence on tap” that massively subsidized tech companies plan to sell everyone on a meter. With every enclosure, the stewardship of a complex system by the many becomes the unsustainable administrative burden of the few. In the short term, power benefits, but the long-term result is catastrophic loss of wealth for everyone.' ----- on the miscalculation of risk ----- The temptation is to escape individual scarcity through the very mechanism that causes it for everyone else: every tenant seeks to become the rentier. In business, you find cheaper suppliers, cut costs on labor, negotiate harder, refinance, extract a little more margin to compensate for what’s being extracted from you. This keeps you in the game, but meanwhile the structural rent load on the whole system only grows, and more and more of your ingenuity goes into how to squeeze depleted systems harder than the competition. This is the “original sin” of rent: the positioning of capital to claim on innovation and flourishing itself. And all of us have been paying rent to this story for the last two hundred years, working ever harder to serve unproductive claimants, whilst the idea itself lives in our heads rent-free. We were taught that capital reduces risk through passive income, but in a world approaching Total Rent, systemic risk keeps growing exponentially until it’s existential. Some things can’t be bought: recent estimates put the value of ecosystem services at $150 trillion annually, roughly twice the size of global GDP. According to research from 2014, modern economies deplete that core capital asset to the tune of between $4-20 trillion every year, steadily eroding the very basis of life itself. When even the wealthiest among us have to buy clean air and water, “passive income” is no longer a secure financial position. Decoupling rent from profit gives us the clarity to play another game entirely. The same compounding logic that has degraded the social contract, impeded canonical innovation, and undermined planetary life support systems works in the other direction when we point into the flows that sustain us. The smartest move for capital now is in the regeneration of our most basic commons: trust, nature, and the vast networks of shared infrastructure that make modern life possible. Commons infrastructure reduces the cost base for everyone who draws on it, which means purpose-aligned organisations spend less servicing rent and more pursuing their mission. Stewardship structures deliver value to the people, processes, patterns, and protocols that actually create it. Financial gain becomes one signal among many – including thriving communities, healthy ecosystems, sovereign intelligence, durable relationships, and resilient infrastructure. The good news: being able to trade one thing for a more valuable thing in the future is a developmental marker observed in human four-year-olds. ----- Read the whole article at @atlasresear_ch (image 1: from unequal scenes) (image 2: from bureau of labor statistics)

See Chapter 5 of Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere by Richard M. Doyle (2011) for a detailed, gorgeously-wrought unpacking. Cannot recommend enough now that we are well into The Era of High-Dimensional Mapping and definitely on a Non-Euclidean curve

We compress ideas, or they are formed incompletely, for ease of communication. Power and richness come from taking the time to distinguish individual components. The uncollapsing of previously unseen elements give power where there was none. Take for instance the recent article by @michaelgarfield & @QBFrank about Rent vs Profit. When the two are distinguished as distinct from each other something new becomes possible. Simply by virtue of seeing it.

"Alignment" is not collective intelligence. Be an ecosystem, not iron filings.

Such a deep, interesting conversation about how AI will change credentialing. Context-to-context communication is vastly superior to standard HR, grant application, or pitch process. Work on personhood credentials and provenance for digital objects is producing a ton of good work in this area... And these systems will afford new kinds of collaboration, too — giving people the right place to start in the right group without having to invest as heavily upfront in getting one's bearings in, for instance, a DAO or movement. This stuff (high-dimensional mapping for coordination, and new institutions) is my obsession at @atlasresear_ch. Also, plenty of smart people in the space to recommend.

Grateful to have been involved in @cosmos_inst's first cohort and very glad to see they're putting real money toward people building well from this vital thesis we have in common: "Institutions encode theories of how we should live together. A new school is a claim about how children should be formed and what is worth teaching them. A personal agent is a theory of which decisions we can delegate and which we must make ourselves. A new assurance regime is a theory of what to trust and how to demonstrate trustworthiness. Enduring institutions won’t be built by simply following user feedback and iterating. Their founders must answer normative questions about what kind of society they’re building toward." No world model is a pure description. Every map encodes goals. And if @cosmos_vc turns out to be able to bootstrap a bunch of successful bids at restoring collective intelligence to the commons, it could be one of the most generative investments of all time.

My latest half-a-talk from @GETDWeb 2026 on how living systems avoid model collapse and why weirdos will inherit the Earth, with some notes on what's worth investing in right now.

What happens when intelligence itself becomes infrastructure? New for Analogue Press: analogue.press/p/the-price-o…