Essays
Urging New Institutions
Institutions don't protect democracy—social contracts do. COVID revealed that constitutions were mere suspension of disbelief. This article introduces a new series on rebuilding civil societies with decentralized tools, grounded in aligned values and functioning social contracts.
The Future of Work is Play
We tell our children to find work that matters, to be creative, to follow their passion. Then we spend our days in meetings about meetings. The future of work is play—not because work should be easy, but because it should be voluntary, creative, and aligned with who you actually are.
Reclaiming The Future
Zuboff's surveillance capitalism weaponizes data to control behavior, making connection without alignment dangerous. This article concludes the series by advocating ecosystem architecture as the practice to design multiple inhabitable futures against predetermined dystopias.
The Practice Of Ecosystem Architecture
Ecosystem architecture designs intentional communities through bottom-up emergence rather than top-down control. This article introduces the four-phase practice—Align, Validate, Scale, Spin Out—drawing from de Certeau's sieve-order and cellular automata's emergent complexity.
The Good Foot
Healthy ecosystems enable voting with your feet—the freedom to leave. This article examines Srinivasan's Network State as digital communities transcend territorial boundaries, building startup societies around shared values rather than contingent geography.
Learning From Nature
Regenerative design meets decentralization through permaculture and biomimicry, learning from nature's collaborative ecosystems. This article explores how Wahl's regenerative culture principles challenge Darwinian competition with natural systems optimizing for collective health through alignment.
Economy Of Garbage
Bataille's economy of excess challenges scarcity-driven capitalism by embracing waste as abundance. This article examines how Borawake's Garb-Age practice reframes garbage as intrinsic to nature and culture, offering a paradigm shift from extraction to regeneration.
Shenzhen Goes Ham
Shenzhen's shanzhai ecosystem exemplifies advanced decentralization through gongkai—open sharing of hardware designs. This article explores how this peer-to-peer manufacturing model surpasses both traditional innovation and Western open source, while confronting its environmental costs.
Foam Party
Sloterdijk's foam metaphor reframes internet fragmentation as a positive phenomenon of multiplicity. This article explores how filter bubbles can be understood as potential ecosystems rather than problems to burst, embracing complexity without universal norms.
Global Village People
McLuhan predicted the global village, but also its tribalism. This article examines how the internet's collapse of space and time simultaneously connects and divides us through digital echo chambers and control over communication channels.