• 07:00 PST

• 10:00 EST

• 14:00 UTC

• 15:00 BST

• 16:00 CET/CAT

I believe this is the direct link: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/342063

Otherwise, tap on either of Susan’s links above and I think you’ll see an option to join. I’m still trying to figure out Substack Live, and I’m sure I’ve got something wrong. Hopefully you’re more savvy than me and you’ll figure it out.

Why is this relevant now?

The short video below shows how slime mold navigates a maze to find food.

You’ll notice at about the 35 second mark, once it has found the food, it then retracts from all the routes that resulted in a dead end. I believe the human species is doing exactly the same now, as we reach the top of the S-shaped growth curve and everything about the rapid-growth Market-form of coordination starts slowing down.

What drives the rapid exploration phase is Material Consciousness.

What drives the retraction phase is Mycelial Consciousness.

The inevitable retraction is evolutionarily coherent behavior, as the living system adjusts just so it can survive. Understanding the process is highly relevant for the times we find ourselves in, even though this may sound a little woo woo.

Susan herself is understandably skeptical:

So, expect healthy debate and a deep dive down dark dungeons and rabbit holes.

Hope to see you there!

Michael 💚

PS. If you need a little context before joining us, here’s an essay from last year:

That vision never came to fruition in Fuller’s lifetime (1895-1983), but the pieces now exist and I’ve long wanted to build what Bucky dreamed into existence.

Having worked in the consumer satellite industry (in the early Wild West days), I’ve known for a long time about the satellite constellations that monitor and photograph every hectare of the planet. I’ve known that NASA’s GIBS archive serves daily vegetation indices, soil moisture, carbon flux, and deforestation alerts as open tile layers. When Google Earth was released I could see us getting one step closer to Bucky’s vision, but I could never find a way of merging Google Earth’s photorealistic imagery with the open-source, real-time data he envisioned.

Today, we’re one step closer.

Gaia Earth View (GEV) is an open-source fork of ’s God’s Eye View, a beautifully engineered 3D globe viewer that transcends Bucky’s Geoscope, released on August 25th, 2026. Sidhu’s original project demonstrated what tech could do for a Silicon Valley audience. This fork of his work is much more interested in demonstrating the links to the living systems we depend on.

The name change of his work to Gaia Earth View keeps the GEV initials but entirely shifts the focus. God’s Eye View implies surveillance from above, which many would argue is the dream of some tech actors. Gaia Earth View, on the other hand, implies participation from within a living system, and with hands in the soil observed by satellites as they fly over.

There are seven ecological data layers added in this fork, all regularly updated:

1. MODIS vegetation health (every 16 days)

2. SMAP soil moisture (every 2-3 days)

3. Carbon productivity (every 8 days)

4. Net ecosystem CO2 exchange (every 2-3 days)

5. Deforestation alerts (every 16 days)

6. Global surface water (tracking changes against 32 years of data)

7. Click-to-query watershed delineation (accesses state-of-the-art global datasets of every river basin on the planet)

This is a first step toward the kind of bioregional spatial intelligence Fuller could see, but not quite touch.

I’m delighted to make the first iteration available here, for you to tweak and implement for your bioregion: github.com/mbh66/gaia-earth-view

The project this fork came from is available here, where you’ll find full instructions to get it running in your environment (there is, unfortunately, some tech setup required, although I expect this to change as we embrace this form of realtime reporting): github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view

Here is a quick demo, using our Valley of Grace BioHub located in the wider Overberg BioRegion as an example:

I can’t wait to see what you create!

Michael 💚

Why this essay? I had two huge (tech) breakthroughs this week. One makes a BioRegion navigable using Google Earth, data layers, and plugins. The second is an open-source knowledge commons that combines AI and place-based, hands-in-the-soil wisdom. This essay demonstrates how a BioHub can (relatively) easily implement both tech tools and how each tool helps tell a BioRegion’s story in an evolutionarily coherent manner. It also introduces the BioConomy as the mycelial development layer for Cosmo-Localism.

Setting the Scene

• As forms of coordination in our +M-dominated world continue breaking down globally, more and more emergent forms continue to mature.1 I’m going to go as far as saying we’ve reached an inflection point, which is a major moment or event where a clear trend shifts direction. I’m old enough to recognize the signs, because I’ve lived through two inflection points: the introduction of email, websites, and e-commerce in the early 90s; the introduction of consumer-related satellite services, first with Iridium and later observing how rapidly Starlink was deployed.2 I’m currently seeing an equivalent quickening in how things are rapidly coming together in the bioregional space, starting with the recent publication of Metabolic’s publication of BioHubs: A Pathway to Regional Resilience, which I mentioned last week.3

• Michel Bauwens (follow him! ), Jeff Emmet, and an inspiring group of commoners from around the world launched the P2P Foundation’s Programme for Civilisational Transition, yesterday. This is part of The Valley of the Commons four-week pop-up village and gathering running from August 24 to September 20, 2026, at the Commons Hub in Hirschwang an der Rax, Austria.4 If you can, I encourage you to watch Michel’s presentation, because it provides background on the development of Cosmo-Localism as well as valuable context for the rest of this essay.5 The video and personal highlights and observations are in the footnote.6

• From what I’m seeing, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that what we don’t need is more people to get involved in prosocial work. Here, I use the term prosocial to include any and all forms of activities that are concerned with more than the wellbeing of merely an individual. These actions and thinking take into account the wider community, including the more-than-human community, so it’s a pretty wide umbrella term and growing all the time. There are already many thousands of these initiatives underway in every corner of the planet. What we need now, more than we need prosocial initiatives to scale, is to demonstrate how each initiative comes together in an evolutionarily coherent offering to society. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re very close.

• One last observation: The final piece that will confirm an inflection point is when BioHubs start becoming useful and even invaluable to society (instead of needy).7 What I mean by this is the observation that states and markets (the two dominant forms of coordination currently) have reached the point of being incapable of addressing the challenges the human species face. This is a normal stage of societal development and is particularly relevant in the latter stages of all civilizational cycles.8 The inflection point will come once we start witnessing an energetic shift from “othering” to “we’re all in this together.” It’s where I believe we extend ideas like Bauwens’ “archipelago of regenerative villages” to something closer to “bioregions of balanced extraction and regeneration,” because we cannot have production without extraction.9 To give a practical example, this would be something like our Valley of Grace (a BioHub) working collaboratively with the City of Cape Town (a Market), national government (the State), Overberg Tourism (a district municipality and BioRegion) and farmers downstream from us (another Market) to regulate water supply during the dry season. Again, the movement is not quite there yet, but we’re getting close. The language we use often gives the game away, and I’m becoming more sensitized to the words we use, especially when we other the extractive economy, while taking full advantage of the technology it produces.

OK, with all that as context, here are the two tech breakthroughs I had this week.

The BioConomy Knowledge Commons

While I was writing up the key differences between the economy and the BioConomy,10 it dawned on me how difficult it is to become proficient in the economy. The rigorous, multi-stage academic and research-driven learning path required to become an economic expect would typically span over a decade of intense study and might look something like this:

1. Undergraduate Foundations (Years 1–3)

   1. Earn a Bachelor’s Degree: Enroll in a top-tier university for a Bachelor of Science (BSc) or Bachelor of Arts (BA) with honors in Economics, mathematics, or statistics.

   2. Master the Quantitative Core: Focus heavily on calculus, linear algebra, real analysis, and probability theory. World-renowned economists require deep mathematical fluency to build and test complex economic models.

   3. Build Research Links: Work closely as a research assistant for undergraduate professors during your final year to learn empirical data management and academic paper writing.

2. Postgraduate Specialization (Years 4–7)

   1. Complete a Master’s Degree: Pursue a Master of Science (MSc) or Master of Arts (MA) in economics or quantitative economics to bridge the gap between basic theory and professional research methods.

   2. Pursue a Ph.D. in Economics: Enter a prestigious doctoral program. A doctorate from a leading research university is an essential baseline for global academic recognition.

   3. Focus on a Niche: Specialize in high-impact subfields like macroeconomics, econometrics, developmental economics, or public finance, writing a novel dissertation that pushes the frontier of the field.

3. Global Impact and Thought Leadership (Years 8+)

   1. Publish or Perish: Secure publications in top-tier peer-reviewed academic journals (such as the American Economic Review or Econometrica).

   2. Join Global Networks: Work or consult for influential international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, or premier global think tanks.

   3. Engage Public Policy: Translate complex theoretical models into clear, actionable frameworks for global policymakers, financial markets, and public discourse.

That’s so old school.

Look at how quickly news of the launch of the P2P Foundation’s Programme for Civilisational Transition reached me. I had no prior knowledge of the event (probably because I missed the announcement amidst the flurry of stuff happening on the ground in our valley). However, Michel’s presentation was live-streamed and mutual friends who were in the presentation (thanks ZM and GS!) pinged me as it unfolded. While I couldn’t participate live, I watched it a few hours later and now I’m letting you know about it, all within 24 hours.

• In the economy, knowledge is proprietary and usually comes with a hefty financial obligation (student debt, anyone?) and lengthy timelines.

• In the BioConomy, knowledge is open and rapidly shared. Michel himself is a living example of how effective this is, with the P2P Knowledge Commons he has painstakingly built over more than two decades and made available without any obligations (not even an email registration).

Long time readers will know how frustrated I’ve become with my own knowledge repository housed on Roam Research. While it’s useful to me, I cannot easily share it because response times are slow on account of the size of the database and it’s incredibly clunky when you try to interrogate it using AI.

So I’ve been searching for a viable alternative.

Introducing Quartz

I was delighted recently to stumble across Quartz, an open-source static site generator that turns Markdown notes into personal knowledge websites and digital gardens. You can learn how to use it here, and I cannot speak highly enough of it: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz (I’ll explain in a future essay why it’s brilliant and how it perfectly serves bioregional coordinating.)

It’s the tool I’ve used to develop the BioConomy wiki: https://wiki.bioconomy.earth. I discovered (by ‘accident’) that Benjamin Life, writer of , also uses it for his wiki: https://wiki.omniharmonic.com.

I’m currently slowly and selectively migrating my Roam content to the wiki. But what I’m most excited about is what happens when we have a thousand BioHubs with their own published wikis on a domain that looks something like CC-ID-BBB.bioconomy.earth, where CC is the two-letter country code, followed by a BioHub code. Our wiki would be za-90-vog.bioconomy.earth.

These wikis each publish an AI-readable sitemap, making it super easy for your AI platform of choice to communicate between these wikis, highlighting needs and offers across a global network of BioHubs.

If you’d like to be one of the first to publish one of these wikis for your BioHub, I’ve published details on how to get going here: https://wiki.bioconomy.earth/essays/how-to-build-a-biohub-wiki

But how do you make this all visible to a wider audience of careholders, including potential funders? That’s where the next tech breakthrough comes in.

Gaia Earth View

I’ve been following a Silicon Valley tech genius called Bilawal Sidhu for the past few months. He spent six years as a product manager at Google, where he worked on spatial computing and 3D maps. He is currently fusing massive open-source intelligence (OSINT) data streams onto a photorealistic 3D globe to democratize high-level spatial intelligence. He releases compelling videos on his YouTube channel, where he’s captivated over 1.5M subscribers and garnered more than 500M views across his content. Since he’s a fairly typical tech-bro, his content has little relevance to the regeneration space, but his tech is fascinating.11

On 25 August (just 5 days ago), he released what he calls God’s Eye View, or GEV, an open-source “spy satellite simulator” that runs directly in your browser. The platform went viral after Sidhu released the entire codebase to the public under an MIT license.12

I immediately forked his code and I’ve been busily developing something more relevant to our field, called Gaia Earth View. I’ve added a number of additional open source data layers, including one I’m particularly excited about: the ability to click on any river and immediately see the river basin it forms part of, while zooming around it. Google Earth cannot currently do this. I was hoping to demo our bioregion using the platform in this week’s newsletter, but sadly there’s a tech glitch which I’ll need a day or two to resolve.

You’re going to love what it can do, and rather than spoil the surprise by explaining it here, I’d rather just show you as soon as it’s ready. Watch your email for an announcement in a day or two! The main reason I’m excited about this development is because, if used as part of a storytelling strategy, it has the potential to play the same role religions played more than two millennia ago: galvanizing large groups of people around a compelling vision.

So how does the BioConomy support Cosmo-Localism?

Cosmo-Localism requires two things working in tandem: knowledge that flows freely across the globe, and production that stays rooted in place. The BioConomy provides the connective tissue for both. The Knowledge Commons, built on open-source tools like Quartz and designed to be AI-readable from the ground up, is how bioregional, place-based (indigenous) knowledge travels between BioHubs, which coordinate activity across the BioRegion. When a thousand BioHubs each publish their own wiki on the bioconomy.earth domain, every practice, pattern, and protocol developed in one bioregion becomes available to all of them. That’s the “cosmo” part. Gaia Earth View supplies the “local” part: it makes a specific bioregion legible, visible, and viscerally real to anyone with a browser. You can see the river basins, the data layers, and the story of that particular place. Together, these tools do what neither Institutions nor Markets have managed on their own: they let communities coordinate across distance while keeping decision-making and material production anchored in the living systems that sustain them.

The BioConomy is the operating layer that makes this possible, because its logic, commons-based ownership, open knowledge, and accountability to place, naturally produces cosmo-local outcomes. The global sharing happens because knowledge is open by default. The local rootedness happens because production is place-based by design.

That’s all for this week. I’m excited and encouraged by developments and I hope you are too. There’s a ton of bad stuff going on right now, and there’s a ton of good stuff too. Choose the frame through which you view the world through carefully.

Until the demo and next week’s essay in which I’ll share the Valley of Grace BioHub wiki, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

5

I first heard about Cosmo-Localism from a friend in Cape Town, Gien Wong, in 2017. He’d worked with Michel Bauwens some time previously. I’ve recently explained the link between BioRegionalism and Cosmo-Localism here: https://wiki.bioconomy.earth/concepts/cosmo-local-production

6

The presentation starts at 07:15, so feel free to skip to that point. A few personal highlights:

• 09:57 - “There is a pattern of people who leave the world and come back to change it.” - Michel Bauwens quoting Arnold Toynbee from his 12-volume set, A Study of History. Example: Rule of Saint Benedict and the Monastic Gardens that restored the food supply chain after the fall of the Roman Empire, and how it changed the history of Europe.

• 12:00 - The P2P Foundation has been observing for the past 20 years what kind of seed forms are emerging as the Cycle of Globalization nears its end.

• 12:30 - Mentions ’s formulation of Regenerative Accelerationism

• 20:00 - Mentions his essay, Breaking the Third Information Barrier

• 20:35 - Markets and states are not able to solve our fundamental thermodynamic resource crisis and climate change, and so what the P2P Foundation offers is a third way.

• 22:10 - Mentions Nodes of Coordination. See https://wiki.bioconomy.earth/frameworks/evolution-of-coordination-nodes

• 30:30 - “My critique of the Web3 space is they don’t go down to the nitty-gritty of production.” - Michel Bauwens

• 31:45 - The vision is an archipelago of regenerative villages: locally rooted, globally coordinated with P4P infrastructure:

Michel’s Substack: Fourth Generation Civilization

Understanding the importance of the P4P moment in the long evolution of the commons.

< “ First, in the Axial Age, we tried religion; then in the industrial age, we tried ideology, essentially socialism. But what now? Well, you know my (our?) answer here at the Crypto Commons Gathering, and later, at the Valley of the Commons: we construct the future, right here, right now, and instantiate the peer relations we wish for, right here, righ…

Read more

19 days ago · 32 likes · 35 comments · Michel Bauwens

9

See Michel’s essay:

Michel’s Substack: Fourth Generation Civilization

Understanding the importance of the P4P moment in the long evolution of the commons.

< “ First, in the Axial Age, we tried religion; then in the industrial age, we tried ideology, essentially socialism. But what now? Well, you know my (our?) answer here at the Crypto Commons Gathering, and later, at the Valley of the Commons: we construct the future, right here, right now, and instantiate the peer relations we wish for, right here, righ…

Read more

19 days ago · 32 likes · 35 comments · Michel Bauwens

Why this essay? In a much shorter piece than my usual missives, this essay plants a seed in the emerging field of regenerative movements that addresses the well-known issue known as lack of funding. By planting a seed, you’ll be able to add your own experience in ways that move the field forward. There are opportunities for collaboration at the end. Please reach out if anything resonates.

Definitions

BioConomy: Distinctly different from a bioeconomy (lowercase), the BioConomy is the economic system that emerges when BioRegions focus their productive activity around biological resources, ecological restoration, and the carrying capacity of their landscapes, coordinated by one or more BioHubs. The BioConomy is the outermost layer of the BioStack, the nested three-layer structure through which bioregional coordination transitions from Throughput Economics to Regenerative Economics.1

Throughput Economics: Economic activity organized around the conversion of natural resources into goods, capital, and waste at increasing speed and scale. Throughput Economics built industrial civilization, modern medicine, global communications, and the material infrastructure on which every living person depends. For most of its history it operated on the steep ascending portion of a growth curve. The structural logic is extract, produce, discard, and grow. A throughput system that has overshot the carrying capacity of its substrate no longer produces net gains; it consumes the base on which its earlier gains depended.

Regenerative Economics: Economic activity organized around maintaining and restoring the substrate on which all production depends: soil, water, biological complexity, social cohesion, and the coordination capacity to steward them across time. Regenerative Economics encompasses regenerative agriculture, bioregional economics, commons governance, cooperative enterprise, community currencies, landscape restoration, and related disciplines. The structural logic is retain, restore, circulate, and coordinate. They are phases of the same civilizational growth curve: Throughput Economics built the material infrastructure during the ascending phase; Regenerative Economics organizes the maintenance of that infrastructure and its ecological base as the growth curve reaches its carrying capacity.2

The distinction between Throughput and Regenerative Economics enables us to sidestep the traditional moral distinction that extractive systems are bad and regenerative systems are good. Instead, the distinction is one of maturity.3

Context

• Longtime readers of this Substack will know that I’ve been engaging with the bioregional field as an enquiry into the evolution of forms of human coordination, rather than the specifics of what the field does. This inquiry has been informed by David Ronfeldt’s TIMN model, which explains that groups of people have variously formed in Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks.4

• As part of that enquiry, I’ve tracked the History of Bioregioning from the mid-1800s to include major developments usually excluded from field discussions.5 This includes themes like Bildung,6 Rudolph Steiner’s autonomous cultural/political/economic spheres,7 and long-standing cooperatives like Mondragon (1956) and SEKEM (1977). As part of tracking this history, I’ve noticed a significant quickening of developments in the mid-2020s i.e. now, even as, or perhaps because of how quickly the traditional +M form of coordination is breaking down.

• I started teaching Will Ruddick’s Grassroots Economics to my daughter’s Waldorf-inspired class 6 this week.8 This experience has led to the development of BioConomy as a 5-year project-based learning curriculum for her high-school education, which will start in 2028.9

• Longtime followers of my work will also know that I’ve at times been somewhat critical of the bioregional field, calling it fragile and underfunded, saying that we have a positioning problem in that we cannot expect the institutions we critique to fund their own downfall. I’ve stepped on some toes on that journey. I’ve also written about the gap between the maturity of legal, financial, reputational, and relational structures when compared to the +M form.

• In my earlier work, I launched initiatives that attempted to fund the regen field: The Transition Collective (March 2024) and ERF, the Ecosystem for Regenerative Funding (June 2023). Both were spectacular failures in the traditional sense, but the experience taught me many valuable lessons.

• The past two months has seen a significant shift in focus for me personally. I’m now engaging much more with wider ecosystem players in our BioRegion — the Valley of Grace, 90 minutes from Cape Town. While I’ve been deeply engaged in various community engagement activities over the past decade in our valley, I’ve never considered the direct impact our actions can have on the Cape Town water supply (significantly upstream from our valley). This has really opened my eyes to the huge opportunities opening up in the bioregional field that shift our efforts from being needy to being needed.

I’ve provided all that context to say that the introduction of the term BioConomy has a reasonable amount of depth behind it.

While there’s only a basic website there currently, it felt right to mention this now as an invitation for collaboration. The website joins a growing seedbed of related activities, each reaching toward the evolution of the next form of human coordination. I’ve listed relevant domain names below, as well as the dates they were registered, so you can get a sense of the collective consciousness unfolding through the simple act of registering a domain name. I haven’t provided live links, because the trend is what I’d like to highlight, more than the content or theme of each website:

• one.earth (2015) - redirects to oneearth.org/navigator (1996)

• sanctuary.earth (2016)

• bioregions.earth (2017)

• bioregional.earth (2022)

• regenerativa.earth (2022)

• anura.earth (2023)

• biofi.earth (2024)

• ecohubs.community (2025)

• bioregioning.earth (2026)

• biohub.earth (2026)

• biohubs.earth (2026)

• bioconomy.earth (2026)

Want to Collaborate?

The BioConomy framework is very early. I believe the definitions are stable enough to hold their ground and the architecture has depth behind it (at least 13 years of thinking deeply about this stuff). But the work of making it useful to people in real bioregions, with actual soil and defined budgets, requires more mental capacity than I can offer.

I’m looking for five kinds of collaborators:

• The first is those who can pressure-test the framework itself. The distinction between Throughput Economics and Regenerative Economics as phases of the same growth curve carries a lot of historical, structural work, and I’d like to know where the logic breaks down. If you teach ecological economics, or practice bioregional governance, or you’ve spent years inside the regenerative finance space and can see what I’m missing, please let’s talk. The framework is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 because it needs to be refined in the open, by people who know the bits I don’t.

• The second is practitioners who want to test the AI tools for their own BioRegion. There are three AI-assisted templates on bioconomy.earth: BioHub Identity, BioRegion Establishment, and BioConomy Value Proposition. They’re designed to help a group in any bioregion work through the structural questions that precede funding, governance, and action. They are prototypes. I’d like to chat with those willing to run them in their own places and tell me what works, what confuses, and what the templates assume that turns out not to be true on the ground. I’ve tested them all in our bioregion and they work well, but my own bias may be getting in the way. If you’re working at the bioregional scale anywhere in the world and are willing to spend a few hours testing, please reach out.

• The third is educators. I mentioned that this work has led to a 5-year project-based learning curriculum for my daughter’s high school education, starting in 2028. The curriculum uses the BioConomy as the through-line: real bioregional challenges, real coordination problems, real ecological data, structured across five years of increasingly complex engagement. I’m not a curriculum designer. I’m a parent with a thesis and a curious (and maybe willing) school. If you work in project-based learning, regenerative education, or place-based pedagogy and want to help shape this, I’d be grateful for a partnership, in whatever form that might take. Waldorf, Montessori, and unschooling practitioners who see the connection are especially welcome.

• The fourth is someone who can help me speak to the investment community. I certainly don’t want to pitch anyone, but I think there is work to be done to translate. It feels to me as if the BioConomy framework names something the impact investing world is circling without yet having the vocabulary for: the structural difference between making extractive capital flow to better destinations (which is useful) and building a coordination substrate where regeneration is the default economic logic (which is different). Katapult Future Fest, where Metabolic launched the BioHubs paper in May this year, is the kind of venue where this conversation belongs. If you work in regenerative finance, family office advisory, or systems-change philanthropy and you see how the Throughput/Regeneration distinction reframes what you’re already doing, let’s talk about how to bring it to that audience.

• The fifth is one I can’t fully describe yet. The BioConomy exists at the intersection of fields that don’t usually share the same space: monetary architecture, catchment hydrology, cooperative law, developmental psychology, indigenous governance, regenerative agriculture, and likely a whole host more. Every time I present this work, someone arrives from a discipline I hadn’t considered before and shows me a connection I couldn’t have found on my own. (Oh, and I’m also frequently told my thinking is too big picture and that I should simplify, but I’m afraid that’s just not my calling.) If you’ve read this far and something resonates with work you’re doing that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories above, reach out anyway. I’ve found that the most useful collaborations in this field have come from people I didn’t know were there.

That’s all for this week, but it’s not the last you’ll be hearing about BioConomy.

Over the coming weeks I’ll provide the BioConomy Framework, as well as AI tools that help you refine your BioHub and BioRegion within the context of a BioConomy.

Until then, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

Why this essay? There is a significant shift underway, at least that’s what I’m witnessing firsthand, experiencing on a personal level, and seeing unfold in different patterns around the world. There is a withdrawal from the drama. There is a refusal to blame ‘the other.’ There is a willingness to embrace what is and what could be. At the same time, I’m personally navigating a deep, deep shift… on sooo many levels. This essay is another mapping out of patterns I see coming into view, more than anything concrete. If I’m reading the signs correctly, you’ll see/feel a resonance, hopefully giving shape to what you already sense is unfolding.

Context

A few of what feels like deep truths I’m holding (gently) while new neural pathways connect in profound ways in my aging brain. 🤯😁 Please take your time to absorb each of these meta-themes before moving on to the main essay.

• Artificial Intelligence vs. Heart Intelligence: AI is getting a bad rap, but I’m not sure it makes sense to throw the baby out with the bath water. HI isn’t often spoken about, but there’s certainly a role to play for intuition and love, as we navigate the collective challenges our species face. I’m increasingly liking a distinction between Silicon Intelligence and Carbon Intelligence.1

  • SI includes all of the human-made technologies we take for granted: telecoms, fiber, satellite networks, internet, large language models, and all compute power. SI excels at data speed, scale, and pattern prediction.

  • CI includes all forms of intelligence that is not human-made: empathy, indigenous knowledge systems, the wisdom of Nature, and the evolution of consciousness itself, including collective consciousness. CI relies on intuition, lived experience, and emotion.

• Activism vs. Political Change: I’ve never been a fan of activism and I’ve never signed a petition or participated in a protest or march. I’ve viewed it more as a necessary evil: necessary because it makes issues visible to those who otherwise aren’t aware and evil because not only does it seldom accomplish any longterm change, it actually diverts human ingenuity away from birthing new ways of doing things. I’ve often criticized activism as being a form of outsourcing morals and values to an external savior in the form of political machinery, but I know that’s being a little harsh on all the well-intentioned activists passionately working on their issue. I’ve also never been a fan of politics and I’ve never voted for any political party or participated in any form of democracy as we know it, no matter where in the world I’ve lived. I’ve just never seen anything meaningful accomplished by the political machine. Worse than that, I’ve observed how the machine continues its trajectory, no matter which party citizens vote for.

  • The good news is that I sense a shift away from both activism and politics as a vehicle for change, at least among those who have spent time meaningfully thinking about these things. It feels to me as if there’s a shift toward personal and collective accountability, rather than expecting some outside power to make changes.

• Municipal Elections vs. Subsidiarity: In national politics, subsidiarity means resolving ecological, social and political issues at the most immediate or local level possible. South Africa has municipal elections coming up on 4 November 2026. Our valley has two parcels of contested land that have been underutilized for decades because we can’t agree on the way forward using existing (national) legislation and frameworks. This creates an opportunity, if we position it correctly, for all valley denizens to abstain from voting (or spoil their vote) in favor of local governance to, finally, resolve the land issue. We won’t be able to do this using +I or +M thinking, but there are many ways this could be accomplished using +E approaches.2

• Being Needed vs. Being Needy: This theme is my biggest itch, and the essay is my attempt to scratch a spot I can’t quite reach. Let me explain… The current regen/bioregional/activist/prosocial movement is needy. It’s constantly underfunded and trying to find creative ways of raising financial resources to keep going. Wearing my (almost long-forgotten) corporate hat, being needed is exponentially more impactful than being needy. All sorts of resources flow when an initiative is needed rather than needy. The specific itch is how our particular valley, in the context of municipal elections, can position itself as needed.

• Commitment Pooling in +M vs. +E: Longtime readers will know that I’m a fan of ’s work, crystallized in his 2025 book, Grassroots Economics: Reflection and Practice.3 And I’m a fan of Ronfeldt’s TIMN, as explained in this essay’s footnote 3. What Ruddick’s Commitment Pooling doesn’t yet do is connect what is clearly a +N/E coordination vehicle to the health of the living ecosystem the community inhabits. His book and extended research describe how a commitment pool coordinates human reciprocity, but it doesn’t connect that reciprocity to the health of the watershed, soil biology, and the water cycle. The commitments are social and economic, but they are not yet ecological. It feels to me as if there’s an opportunity to expand bioregional commitment pooling in a way that shifts communities from being needy to being needed.

• Sawalmem: This word popped into my dreams during the week and it’s been raising its head in random places since then. I’d never heard of this concept before this week, so when it kept repeating, I had to dig deeper. Interestingly, this word came into my consciousness after including this context note in last week’s essay: “Water as Wisdom-keeper and Governance Holder. This is a big topic, and one I’ll unpack in future essays.” I didn’t fully anticipate just how massive a topic it truly is, until Sawalmem appeared. The word means “sacred water” in the Winnemem Wintu language. It’s also the name of a landholding and cultural entity created by the Winnemem Wintu — an Indigenous tribe of Northern California based around the McCloud River and Mount Shasta — to buy back ancestral lands, restore native winter-run Chinook salmon, and protect their sacred waters. I’ll come back to this theme later.

• The TIME Value of Water: I visited a commercial farmer 20km upstream from our valley earlier this week. I wouldn’t normally be interested in any operation that relies on fertilizer and pesticides to convert soil, sun, and water into calories, but this was different. The owner of the farm, a delightful, unassuming English-speaking businessman, was willing to chat and we spent an informative 40 minutes together. Rather than discussing his farming operation, we discussed his involvement in the Zonderend Water Users Association (ZWUA), and specifically his role in restoring the river that runs through our valley, 20km downstream.4 He provided valuable information on the history of the river going all the way back to the late 1970s when the massive Theewaterskloof dam (about 15km upstream from his farm) was planned, and eventually completed in 1980. A few hours after the meeting, while processing everything I’d learned, it dawned on me that water itself carries different values, depending on whether it’s viewed through the lens of a Tribe, Institution, Market or Emergent form. This was a major insight, and one I’m still wrapping my head around fully.

OK that’s a lot of what could look like random context setting. Let’s see if we can weave all these contexts together in some coherent way.

The TIME Value of Water

What is water worth?

That’s a question that irked me for a good few hours after the meeting with the farmer. The answer depends entirely on which coordination form you’re asking from. We’ll use Ronfeldt’s TIMN model to build the case.

Tribes

Under the T form, water has no price. You get water because you belong. The leiwater systems still running in some Cape villages like Greyton, Montagu, Prince Albert, and Stanford operate like this: each property has a beurt, a timed turn over a weekly cycle, and your right to water comes bundled with an obligation to maintain the shared channel.5 Acequias in New Mexico, some over 300 years old, work the same way.6 Subak irrigation in Bali, coordinated through water temples, outperformed the Green Revolution’s state-directed alternative on the state’s own terms.7 These are all T-form systems. Access follows from membership. The resource circulates through relationship.

Institutions

Under the I form, water is a governed allocation. South Africa’s National Water Act of 1998 places all water in public trust and establishes the Reserve: a first-priority allocation for basic human needs and ecological function, guaranteed before any licensed use. Few countries have an equivalent legally binding ecological allocation.8 The I form works until scarcity overwhelms it. Cape Town’s Day Zero crisis in 2018 demonstrated exactly how limiting the I form is during a crisis.9

Markets

Under the M form, water is a priced commodity. Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin,10 Chile’s 1981 Water Code,11 and the global desalination industry all express this logic.12 Pricing signals scarcity and mobilizes capital. It also concentrates and dispossesses. Chile’s smallholders in the Limarí Valley can tell you what happens when water rights trade freely in a dry year.13

Emergent

Under the E form, water is co-produced. This is the crucial point for our valley, and any bioregion interested in Watershed Governance. Coordinated landscape restoration (alien clearing, riparian repair, soil rehabilitation, infiltration enhancement) increases usable water yield: more water entering the soil profile, moving through subsurface pathways, and emerging as sustained baseflow weeks or months after rainfall. In the coming weeks I’ll expand much further on this topic.

The Deep Insight

Ostrom’s eighth design principle for long-enduring commons is that governance activities should be organized in multiple nested layers.14 Her broader argument about polycentricity goes further: overlapping centers of authority produce more adaptive, resilient outcomes than a single center of control. Every durable water system we can study confirms this. Acequias survive as T-form associations nested inside state water law (+I) nested inside land markets (+M). Bali's subak collapsed when the Green Revolution replaced compound governance with monocentric state direction, and recovered when the compound form reasserted itself. A resource embedded in Tribal, Institutional, Market, and Emergent layers at once is what Ostrom’s framework predicts as the resilient configuration. It is also what our valley, and any bioregion, already has the raw materials to build. We’ll cover this in more detail over the coming weeks.

The Business Case for +E Watershed Governance

This is the piece I’m most excited about, and the piece that’s still coming together. Briefly, the water that flows past our valley is part of a huge Western Cape Water System called the Riviersonderend-Berg River Government Water Scheme. It’s a massive network of dams and tunnels that supplies Cape Town’s water. It’s relevant to our valley because a +M focus on all this water concentrates on everything that happens upstream of the Theewaterskloof Dam. Downstream of the dam there’s very little comparative focus, which creates the opportunity of a +E offering. I’ll explain more in next week’s essay, but if you’re in a hurry, let me introduce you to the Nature Conservancy’s Greater Cape Town Water Fund.15 In their Sustainable Funding Strategy (March 2021), they explain how nature-based solutions “could generate 55 Mm3 of annual water gains within six years for as little as one-tenth (1/10th) the unit cost of alternative supply options such as desalination.”

In addition, the City of Cape Town Water Outlook Edition 11 (March 2024), “The City continues to plan for a 25% reduction in yield (available water) by 2045.”

Because of this, the City of Cape Town has confirmed that its first permanent desalination plant is expected to be operational by November 2031.16

The Cape Water Performance-Based Bond

Here’s the bombshell that changes the game for bioregions struggling with funding.

FirstRand Bank issued a ZAR2.5 billion (approximately US$132 million) Cape Water Performance-Based Bond on 1 April 2026, and the JSE listed it on 17 April 2026 (ticker FR31PB). This is Africa’s first nature-linked performance-based bond and the first outcomes-based bond by a commercial bank globally to tie investor returns to verified ecological restoration.17

This is a pure +M solution, and prior to the TIME value of water I laid out previously, I would have written this innovation off as greenwashing propaganda wiffle waffle. However in a +E framing, a performance bond like this could reward bioregions that create commitment pools that take pressure off the Market. In short, if bioregionally-set targets are met, outcomes funders pay. If they are not met, they don’t. RMB calls it “a market signal that natural capital has entered mainstream finance.” The more important signal is structural: this is the first bond by a commercial bank, anywhere in the world, to tie investor returns to verified ecological restoration. And it was designed as the first in a replicable series covering South Africa’s Strategic Water Source Areas.

Read that last sentence again. A replicable series. The bond’s architects built it to be copied. Every Strategic Water Source Area in the country is a potential site for the same instrument. What each site needs is a coordination body that can deliver verified restoration yield at landscape scale, and a verification methodology aligned with the bond’s architecture.

This is where the shift from needy to needed becomes real — something more than a pipe dream. A bioregion that asks funders for money to do restoration work is needy. A bioregion that offers a verified water-yield service to a bond programme designed to buy exactly that service is needed. The relationship with capital changes completely. You are no longer writing grant applications. Instead, you are tendering a product into a Market that has already signaled it will pay. The unit economics favor you because restoration delivers water at roughly 10% of desalination costs. The business case has already been made and documented.18

If I’m reading all of this correctly, there is already capital available and it’s looking for somewhere to land. The bioregions that can demonstrate a +E coordination architecture to receive the capital will unlock the capital that has been elusive so far.

That’s all for this week. I’m pretty excited about the potential that raised its head as a result of a 40 minute conversation with a commercial farmer.

I know I’ve gone through this pretty quickly, and if I’m missing something, please let me know. Over the coming weeks I’ll dive into further details about this Emergent form of coordination and specifically how we’ll be bringing it to life in our valley.

Until then, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

PS. I said in last week’s essay that I’d share a BioHub diagnostic, which will help anyone in a bioregion identify whether they ‘see’ as a Tribe, Institution, Market, or Emergent. I haven’t quite finished it, and rather than rushing it, I’d rather delay this for a week or two. Forgive me for making a premature commitment. 🙇‍♂️

Why this essay? The past week was, for me, mind-blowing. It started with a simple thought/meditation/intention: What am I willing to shift/adapt/embrace personally that will unlock the abundance for all we sense in our valley but haven’t yet been able to tap into? The question itself came from a series of conversations I’ve been having over the past few months — thanks JP! This essay is an attempt to unpack what feels like a significant shift for our (and potentially other) BioHubs that unlocks economic value in rural areas in entirely novel ways. There may be errors in how I’ve interpreted what came through as a powerful download. These errors are mine alone, and I’d be grateful if you’d point out where I’m missing something.

Background

As usual, a few context-setting snippets so that the remainder of the essay makes more sense.

• Protective Illiquidity. Last week’s essay explored the challenging land tenure situation we’re navigating in our valley.1 I described the blockage as a blessing in disguise, because it means the land hasn’t fallen prey to commercial over-development. That means it remains available for other forms of value creation in which the value created remains in the valley.

• Seeing Like a State. Published in 1998, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by political scientist James C. Scott explores why large-scale, top-down government plans to reshape society and nature often end in disaster.2

• TIMN → TIME. If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of David Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework that explains the evolution of forms of human coordination.3 In the conversations I’m having recently with groups in our valley, I’ve found it easier to replace the +N form (Network) with +E, to mean Emergent. It just saves having to explain some of the uncertainty around the word “Network.” This change isn’t endorsed by David, because I’ve not yet had a chance to catch up with him recently. However, this simple shift has unlocked significant coordination activities around the simple slogan: It’s About TIME, which echoes the deep yearning for change from a rapidly growing group of people.

• [Edit: 11 Aug, 2026, after I made an inaccurate claim about the link between the two concepts mentioned] Promise Theory developed by Mark Burgess and Jan Bergstra, is a formal theory of voluntary cooperation among autonomous agents.4 Commitment Pooling, developed by Will Ruddick and grounded in ancestral rotating labor traditions across East Africa, is an economic protocol for curating and exchanging pooled resources within communities.5 The two frameworks helped me understand Sahtouris’ claim that ‘collaboration is cheaper than competition’ from entirely different starting points: that cooperation works when it’s voluntary, and that systems built on this foundation can coordinate resources without central command. Both Promise Theory and Commitment Pooling can be used to model the behavior of a community working together on societal challenges in ways that create economic value. The remainder of this essay explains how.

• Water as Wisdom-keeper and Governance Holder. This is a big topic, and one I’ll unpack in future essays. For now, I just want to introduce the work of Stef van Dongen and Victoria Engelhorn in the Muga watershed in Catalonia, Spain.6 (Thanks for the hat tip, GS!) Their approach is based on earlier work by Professor Millan Millan’s concept of a Two-Legged view of Climate.7

• The TIME Reader. Inspired by the principle of the book Seeing Like a State, I wondered if there exists a collection of books that describe Seeing Like a Tribe, Seeing Like Other Institutions, and Seeing Like a Market. I couldn’t find a definitive list, so I’ve now assembled just over 20 significant and timeless books into just such a reading list, called The TIME Reader.8

Now let’s dive into novel way residents in rural areas can create significant economic value. I’ll first walk through the theory and then use our valley as an example so you can see the theory in action.

1. The Evolution of Nodes of Coordination

A few days ago I introduced the Bio-revolution in the context of three previous revolutions:

1. Agri-revolution (12,000 years ago, which mechanized farming and high-yield crops)

2. Indus-revolution (250 years ago, which scaled manufacturing via steam, coal, and automation)

3. Digi-revolution (50 years ago, which connected the world through computers, the internet, and data, changing how we share information, run businesses, and automate tasks)

4. Bio-revolution (currently emerging, which organizes activity around a defined watershed)

The important observation is that every revolution develops around a node, which is the physical place where the era’s coordination logic materializes or concentrates. Each node also externalizes certain costs.

1. The Agri-node began with a community settling in a particular place, which held kin, land, water, and labor. That coordination collectively produced surplus for the first time in recorded history. That surplus led to the emergence of the granary, and the granary led to the temple, and the temple gave birth to the state. I want to propose that this coordination node was a specific parcel of soil. Its optimization target was caloric yield per unit of land. Its time horizon was seasonal and generational. The costs the agri-node externalizes is the substrate it depends on: soil depletion, downstream water quality, and the untamed/untouched commons the soil was separated from.

2. The Indus-node has shifted location over time from the farm to the mill, then to the company that owned the mill, then to the exchange where the shares of the company were traded. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the stock market had become the node because it’s where ownership decouples from operation. The farmer who owns the farm is replaced by the shareholder who owns a claim on a factory the shareholder will never enter, run by managers the shareholder will never meet, producing goods the shareholder may never see.

   1. What is coordinated is capital, risk, and claims across financial time.

   2. What is optimized is return on capital.

   3. What is externalized is anything that isn’t tracked in the accounting department’s record-keeping: labor conditions, biosphere depletion, and the coherence of the communities the labor is drawn from.

3. The Digi-node is the data center. Personal computers and smartphones and the platforms that run on them are the endpoints, but the data center is where the coordination of attention, behavior, information, and computation happens. Its optimization target is prediction accuracy, which is another name for human coordination at scale. Real-time coordination is the design goal. The length of elapsed time between stimulus and response (a time period once filled by human deliberation and evaluation) is the field the industry is now competing to fill. The cost this form of coordination externalizes is energy and water. The grid is being asked to double its capacity in a decade to serve loads that produce no material good. Hyperscale data centers emerging globally consume watershed capacity at rates that break local hydrological budgets. The state permits this activity because, as we saw from the context-setting, the state thinks like a state (increased revenue) and the market thinks like a market (increased profits). No amount of reasoning or protestation can change the underlying incentives. Prices have shifted from goods to attention, and from capital to compute. Costs have been externalized to communities. This is the bad news.

The observation that comes from the evolution of coordination nodes is the increasing abstraction of the real cost of coordination. Each solved its coordination challenge by displacing those costs onto the substrate the next node would organize. The community’s substrate was soil. The stock market’s substrate is a claim. A claim is a promise about the future written down and made tradable. Claims can be manufactured in unlimited quantities; soil (and all natural capital) cannot — they have biophysical limits.

For two and a half centuries, the stock market’s coordination worked because the biosphere could absorb what the accounting department couldn’t price. The forests were still there, the oceans and all that swam in her remained abundant, and the atmosphere still supported life. The costs the stock market externalized were allocated to substrates that seemed inexhaustible (and in the beginning they were). Now the costs of water and energy (traditionally handled by the state) have been externalized to communities. The substrate below these communities can no longer absorb the cost. This is the point at which societies typically collapse.

2. The Bio-revolution, with the BioHub as Node

The BioHub is the physical anchor of the fourth node of coordination, and it’s the context that transcends the mainly ecological focus of most bioregional regeneration initiatives to include an economic focus. It does this by making promises and commitments to the parties who have externalized the costs of the Digi-node to rural communities, in exchange for economic rewards.

The BioHub name is fairly recent. The paper that formalized it was published by Metabolic in May of this year, building on work by Ernesto Van Peborgh, Samantha Power, Leon Seefeld, and others.9 The idea itself has been bubbling along below the surface of the regenerative movement for at least fifteen years, using different vocabularies.

A BioHub is a place-anchored coordination point that organizes activity around a defined watershed, in response to rapidly escalating externalized costs. It is the cradle that nurtures the land, water, biological cycles, and human creativity and ingenuity together as a single coordination node. It operates at the scale of the bioregion, which is the scale at which biological time is actually meaningful and measurable.

The BioHub includes the soil, and that inclusion completes the cycle of the evolution of coordination. Soil was the first coordination point; the BioHub is the first that can hold the soil inside a frame the farm alone couldn’t justify because the only service the farm priced was the provision of calories. Soil now becomes the substrate from which water and energy are priced. Stated differently, the provision of calories is now less profitable than the provision of kilowatt-hours (kWh). The land continues the same relationship to the Institution (state) and the Market (big tech) and the Digi-node, but this time on their pricing terms. The BioHub folds them all in by providing services no other coordination node can adequately provide. Data centers continue to run inside the BioHub’s energy and water budget, but what changes is which coordination node determines the prices for their services.

The BioHub coordinates living systems inside a defined watershed. It optimizes for the continued viability of the substrate it depends on. It externalizes nothing the previous three coordination nodes haven’t already exhausted.

This is the essence of the download that arrived earlier this week.10 This is a very big deal, and I hope my explanation is sufficient to crystallize for you how important this awareness is. In essence, the BioHub is the first coordination form that cannot displace its costs, because there is no substrate below it to receive them. The externalities have to come home, and this creates a huge opportunity for those BioHubs that are sufficiently coordinated to play the role being offered them.

Before I continue, here’s an AI-generated summary table of the four forms of coordination. I’ll unpack this in subsequent essays, but I thought it could be valuable at this point.

What the column called “Externalizes” shows is a running debt. Each era’s externalities column is what the next era inherited. The Bio row is where the running debt becomes due, because there is nowhere further to send it. This debt that must now be repaid is what creates the economic value for the BioHub.

Let me make this more tangible by showing what promises our BioHub could offer to both the Market and the State. Loosely, the offer has previously been called Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES). In the past PES has been described as a type of market-based instrument that is increasingly used to finance nature conservation. The proposition now is that PES is a service offered by rural communities to coordination forms that desperately need what only rural areas can provide: energy and water. And we’ll provide those services based on terms and conditions the BioHub determines, because there’s nowhere else these services can be provided. It’s called a natural monopoly, a term the Market knows all too well, but this time with a twist.

3. The Valley of Grace as an Example BioHub

Consider the catchment area of the Riviersonderend (the river that runs through the Valley of Grace).

It runs from the Franschoek Mountains above Cape Town in the west, through the Theewaterskloof Dam, through the fynbos slopes below Genadendal and Greyton and out toward the Breede River and eventually empties into the sea at Witsand to the east. The river system carries two commitments that most of the residents along its banks don’t know about. The first is to Cape Town, which draws roughly half its water from the dam. The second is to the estuary at Witsand, where a minimum freshwater flow keeps a functioning ecosystem alive at the river mouth. Both commitments are binding, thanks to the National Water Act.11 Only one of them generates municipal revenue. The other commitment is a public good with no price tag, and every dry season creates a tension between the City of Cape Town and the estuary. In other words, there’s a structural risk housed in the river system.

Ward 2 of Theewaterskloof Municipality, which covers 69,000 hectares of mountain, mission village, farmland, and river, is home to the BioHub of The Valley of Grace. The municipality is under a Provincial Financial Recovery Plan and the largest landholding has unresolved communal tenure dating back to 1998. As a result, much of the land has lain fallow and soil quality is questionable.

The question the BioHub is currently asking is what commitments each actor can pool toward outcomes that no single actor can produce.

Three Commitment Pools in the Valley

The water pool

The estuary commitment and the metropolitan commitment compete only under scarcity. Under conditions of abundance, both commitments can be easily honored. Periods of abundance can be increased through conscious human activity on the slopes, along the tributaries, and along the riparian corridors that feed the dam from above and the river below the dam. Infiltration on the fynbos slopes, alien clearing across the protected area complex, riparian repair on the feeder streams, and agroecological transition on cultivated land each produce additional baseflow downstream of the dam. Focussing on the hydrological cycle and the sea air coming in from the south and being forced upwards by our mountains could stabilize annual rainfall variations. Additional rainfall and baseflow are what lets more water reach the estuary without cutting the metropolitan draw, and what lets more be committed to the metropolis without stripping the estuary. Stated differently, every stakeholder along the river ecosystem are also contributors to the instrument that reduces the structural risk and resolves any potential conflict.

This is where the failed land negotiations become useful again.12 The Transformation of Certain Rural Areas Act treated communal land as farming land. On the largest holding in the catchment area, farming has produced nothing meaningful in a quarter of a century. When one views that same hectarage as an ecosystem services asset, a different picture emerges. The land is a hydrological contributor, a carbon sink, a biodiversity reserve, and a heritage estate. The Department of Agriculture has said funding is available for exactly this reframe. Communal tenure that has resisted commercial buyout for a generation turns out to be well suited to holding a long-duration ecological commitment. The pool takes the contribution and remunerates the contributor. The metropolitan user pays into the pool for the outcome.

The energy pool

Solar and wind are Market-driven capital answers to an infrastructural question. They arrive as equipment, generate output on a private balance sheet, and export value out of the catchment area. A river is a different kind of asset. The gradient from the headwaters to the confluence is a piece of geography that belongs to nobody and yet does work for everybody. Run-of-river micro-generation, sediment management, weir maintenance, and riparian shading that keeps water temperatures within ecological range are all components of a single infrastructure whose primary function is the river’s ecological integrity and whose secondary yield is dispatchable energy.

• Held as a commitment pool, the river remains an ecological system that also generates power.

• Held as a private asset, it becomes a power asset that also degrades an ecological system.

• The pool lets small generators, ecological monitors, farm-scale users, and grid interconnectors each contribute a commitment and each draw an entitlement. The generation asset is publicly held. The obligation to keep the river alive is publicly held with it.

The tourism pool

Cape Town will absorb tens of millions of domestic and international visitors in the current planning cycle. The city’s carrying capacity for that traffic is already breached on peak weekends (some would say every weekend). Every visitor the bioregion can appeal to is a visitor the city doesn’t have to provide water and other infrastructure for. The bioregional offer works as a decompression instrument: a distributed set of small settlements, heritage sites, conservation areas, and food-growing landscapes that a metropolitan visitor can move through for two days, four days, a week, before returning to the city. A pooled tourism offer means each actor in the bioregion (a mission museum, a hiking trail, a farmstay, a fynbos reserve, a Saturday market, a citizen science project) commits a share of visitor capacity into a common ledger. Revenue accrues to the contributor. Coordination accrues to the pool. The city is a beneficiary of a system it doesn’t own.

What Commitment Pooling Achieves

Commitment Pooling is a coordination form that predates the corporate balance sheet by several centuries and postdates it by however long the current arrangement lasts. Its logic is simple. Under a real division of labor, contributors put forward goods, services, hours, or ecological function into a shared pool. Participants draw on the pool by virtue of membership and contribution. Market price doesn’t govern the draw. State allocation doesn’t govern it either. The pool is a fourth coordination form sitting alongside kinship, institution, and market. The BioHub is the node that holds this coordination form. None of the other three can handle the coupling between an upstream hectare and a downstream tap.

The instrument I’ve described will become increasingly important, especially as the Decade of Dramatic Disruption creates pain points more severe than we’ve already seen. A municipality under financial recovery cannot fund watershed restoration. A conservation authority cannot underwrite tourism marketing. A private farm cannot sell hydrology into a market that has no way to price it. Communal land held under a failed farming statute cannot generate a revenue stream from its ecological function. Each actor is stuck at the edge of what its own coordination form allows. The pool is what makes the entire ecosystem productive.

The Emergent Coordination Form

In the Valley of Grace this is slowly becoming visible.

• A conservation society and a communal governance body are co-authoring a tourism proposal that treats a leopard corridor, a mission museum, and a citizen science project as a single offer.

• A wind farm’s community development mandate is being routed toward heritage upgrades in the settlements its grid connection passes.

• A food forest is being drafted as the founding group of a savings pool that will, over time, become a chartered financial commons.

• Communal land that has sat immobile under a farming statute is being reread as the ecosystem services asset it always was.

• A river that has been managed as a source of municipal water is being reimagined as an infrastructure that owes an estuary its ecological share and owes a metropolis its urban share, with upstream restoration as the instrument that keeps both promises intact.

None of this is anywhere near finalized and most of what I’ve described is tenuous, fragile even. The only point I’m making is that the Emergent coordination form is available. A bioregion becomes a BioHub when a specific place questions what its actors could contribute that shifts from ownership of infrastructure to commitment into the pool the infrastructure requires.

This is what Seeing Like a BioHub looks like, and it’s entirely different to Seeing Like a State. It’s night-and-day different to Seeing Like a Market.

That’s all for this week.

Over the coming weeks I’ll dive into further details about this Emergent form of coordination. Next week, I’ll share a BioHub diagnostic, which will help anyone in a bioregion identify whether they ‘see’ as a Tribe, Institution, Market, or Emergent. Early testing has raised some pretty interesting results.

Until then, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

Why this out-of-the-blue heads-up? A ‘download’ is a sudden burst of deep insight or a feeling of total connection. It feels like your mind instantly receives a massive file of new ideas, grand truths, or creative visions all at once, rather than learning them step-by-step. Academically, it’s known as an ‘expanded awareness event.’ I’m currently processing just such an event. These are my raw, as-yet-nonsensical field observations. Forgive what doesn’t make sense. More to come.

Background

I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a number of ‘downloads’ since my first in 2004 in Thailand, which I’ve written about before:

I’ve received three major downloads since then, and many more minor ones. My overly analytical (some would say left-brained) mind and my ability to spot patterns has identified the following variables that can stimulate/enhance such events:

1. The foundation is newly-formed neural pathways (known as neuroplasticity). It results in an expanded cognitive repertoire that boosts creative problem-solving. The process allows your brain to combine distant concepts, generate novel ideas faster, and adapt to unfamiliar challenges by drawing on a richer, more flexible network of stored memories and skills. AI can significantly help in this phase.

2. A radical change of situation. The science says that novel surroundings provide diverse sensory inputs, trigger the release of neuromodulators like alertness-boosting acetylcholine, and spark the growth of fresh synaptic connections as you navigate and learn new spatial or social cues. AI cannot help here.

3. Grounding in Nature. Nature forces the brain to process raw, unpredictable data from the real world. This physical interaction builds strong, lasting neural pathways that abstract concepts cannot create on their own. AI cannot help here.

All three factors have come into play over the past 48 hours for me personally, unsurprisingly triggering a ‘download’:

1. I’ve recently been using AI extensively to build the case for a Bio-revolution, which differs vastly from the

   1. Agri-revolution (12,000 years ago, which mechanized farming and high-yield crops)

   2. Indus-revolution (250 years ago, which scaled manufacturing via steam, coal, and automation)

   3. Digi-revolution (50 years ago, which connected the world through computers, the internet, and data, changing how we share information, run businesses, and automate tasks)

   
   New neural connections have exploded, thanks to a BioHub seed planted by and recently formalized by Metabolic,1 which builds on the idea of Bioregional Financing Facilities from and .2 The core of the Bio-revolution is grounded in the evolution of human coordination, as laid out in ’s TIMN model.3
   
   What started the exploration was a dream last night about swimming with orcas — go figure. I suspect the dream came from watching a recent documentary called Time and Water, a somewhat bizarre recounting of the history of the Icelandic glaciers.4 I have previously swum with dolphins in Hawaii in 1990 with — do I have to admit this — Anthony Robbins (who no longer offers this experience but you can google it).5 This dream was radically different, which probably opened the portal to what followed.

2. For reasons I won’t go into here, I’m spending the week in Hermanus, a coastal town 50kms south-southwest of the Valley of Grace.6 This change of location has switched my brain from a quiet, predictable inland mountain routine to a highly stimulating coastal environment. The shift has forced my brain out of autopilot by demanding active navigation of rugged cliff paths, processing intense maritime sensory inputs, and engaging with lively public spaces. Very different to what I’m comfortably numbed into by the valley.

3. Transitioning from hours behind a computer screen and engaging in local politics to hiking the Hermanus Cliff Path has (predictably) forced a radical shift in how my brain processes data. It has shifted my brain from an artificial state of predictable restriction to a natural state of unpredictable expansion, forcing dormant neural pathways to reactivate. While walking the cliffs this morning, a strong westerly wind came up, during what was a very calm, sunny morning. The rapid change in weather no doubt played a role.

As I said at the beginning, I have absolutely no idea where this is going, but I can sense something profound shifting. I hope to distill it all by Sunday’s newsletter, but until then…

That’s all for now. Thanks for being with me as I process this. 🤗

Michael 💚

6

Hermanus, known as the Whale Capital of the World, is a vital conservation hub in South Africa’s Western Cape. It sits between the Walker Bay marine reserve and the mountains of the Cape Floral Kingdom, protecting rare marine mammals and endangered plant life. See https://hermanus.org. Shown below is a map placing The Valley of Grace and Hermanus in perspective — the top arrow is the Valley and the bottom arrow is Hermanus. Note the commercial agricultural land use between the two.

A significant financial system event happened on 30 July 2026. A hedge fund called Situation Awareness LP, which started with an investment of $225 million, grew to $45 billion in under two years, printing a 439% net return through June 2026. In the week of July 27th, margin calls from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Bank of America forced the liquidation of the fund’s entire portfolio. As I laid out in Phase 5 of the Coercion Continuum, securities ‘ownership’ has been (quietly) legally redefined over the past 5 decades. As a result of the margin calls, the fund’s entire portfolio changed ‘ownership’ from the over-leveraged to secured creditors and their proxies overnight on 30 July 2026. This event proves the system is operating precisely as designed. This Research Brief places the event in the context of other developments (rapidly) unfolding.

Back in June, when I wrote about the Alpha Window, I made a claim that some have found hard to accept. I said that the monetary architecture is a more immediate threat than any ecological one, and that changes to this architecture are coming at us faster than the climate is changing.

I asked you, as a Threshold Guide, to pay attention to the invisible shift and to watch for the opportunity inside it. Some messaged me to say the argument made sense intellectually but they still wanted to see evidence. Fair enough. The trouble with an invisible shift is that it is invisible… until, on occasion, it isn’t.

On July 30, 2026, it became visible for about thirty hours. A hedge fund called Situational Awareness, run by a young AI theorist who had borrowed heavily to bet on the coming machine age, blew up.1 Its entire public stock portfolio, something like sixteen billion dollars of it, was sold in a single pre-market block to Citadel before most of Wall Street had woken up. There was no emergency meeting at the Federal Reserve, and no cascade of bank failures. The assets moved cleanly to the best-capitalized buyer, at a discount the forced seller had no choice but to accept, and by the end of the day the machinery had swallowed the shock and moved on. Nobody who mattered lost much of anything.

I asked Claude.ai (using Fable 5) to do a deep research run, within the context of the ten frameworks we’ve previously covered. The brief below is the result. It’s much longer and more technical than a Framer OS essay, so treat it as reference material rather than a Sunday read. I believe it’s important because of one structural point, which maps directly onto the language we’ve been building together.

The money system, the one that records who owns what and who gets paid first when things break, is being rebuilt at extraordinary speed and precision, onto digital rails that lock the current rules into place. In TIMN terms, that is the +M (Market) form finishing the job of consolidating itself and hard-coding its logic into the substrate. The Situational Awareness collapse is what that machinery looks like when it works exactly as designed.

Meanwhile, the physical world underpinning all of it, the water and power and soil and stable climate and the ability to still get insurance against natural disasters, is being repriced far more slowly, unevenly, and in most places not yet at all. One substrate is nearly finished being enclosed. The other is still open. That gap is the Alpha Window, seen from a different angle, and it is the whole of the opportunity I have been asking you to keep in view. The window to build a genuine +N (Network) form is closing on the financial side while it remains open on the physical side, which is precisely where a place-based, commons-rooted economy would have to take root.

Read the brief the way a Threshold Guide reads anything. Not for the market gossip, though there is plenty of it, but for the shape of what’s happening beneath the noise of the Market.

TL;DR

• Situational Awareness LP, Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI-thesis hedge fund, was forced into a one-block fire sale of its entire public equity portfolio to Citadel on July 30, 2026, after ~4x gross leverage turned a July AI-infrastructure selloff into cascading margin calls from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Bank of America — a textbook leveraged blowup that shrank the fund from ~$30–45 billion to ~$8–10 billion in weeks. This is a Documented Fact confirmed by NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, CNBC, FT, and Reuters.

• The event is best read (STRUCTURAL INFERENCE, the governing angle) as a clean, contained illustration of the same prime-broker/collateral machinery that produced LTCM (1998) and Archegos (2021): a forced liquidation resolved by private absorption (Citadel at a >10% discount) rather than a Fed-convened rescue — demonstrating that the securities-custody and collateral system channels distressed assets to secured creditors and the best-capitalized counterparties by design.

• The deeper structural thread — that “ownership” of intermediated securities is legally a security entitlementsubordinate to an intermediary’s secured creditors (UCC §8-511), operating within a monetary architecture being re-platformed onto tokenized/unified ledgers amid an AI-equity bubble, a live Strait of Hormuz war, and a closing “Alpha Window” — is presented as layered inference and Speculative Projection, with statutory facts kept strictly separate from interpretive framing.

• Structural Inference: The collapse marks the line between two systems that are being built at very different speeds.

  • The money system — who owns what, who gets paid first when things break, how ownership itself is recorded — is being rebuilt fast, with precision, onto digital rails that lock the current rules into place. The Situational Awareness failure showed that machinery working exactly as designed: a fund blew up overnight, and within thirty hours the assets moved cleanly to the best-capitalized buyer. Nobody in the system lost significant value.

  • Meanwhile,e the physical world that all of this actually runs on — water, power, healthy soil, a stable climate, the ability to still get insurance — is being repriced far more slowly, unevenly, and incompletely. The people building the money system can see it moving under them to the decimal point. The people depending on the physical system mostly cannot, because it has barely been priced at all.

  • One is nearly finished being locked in. The other is still open. For anyone trying to build a regenerative economy rooted in a place and its living systems, that gap is the whole opportunity: the window to establish a different way of holding land, water, and value is closing on the financial side while it is still open on the physical side.

• Structural Inference: In TIMN terms. The financial substrate being hard-coded into tokenized rails is the Market form (+M) consolidating and locking itself in. The physical substrate — bioregional, place-based, commons-dependent — is where genuine Network-form (+N) coordination would have to take root. The structural point is that +M is being fixed in place before +N has the monetary and legal architecture it needs to exist as a real coordination form rather than a network overlay sitting on top of intact Market logic. That is the (+T+I+M)^+N challenge in real time: the window to build +N substrate closes as +M finishes enclosing the rails.

The full detail, as well as an extensive reference list, which will take you far beyond the current market commentary, is available to paid subscribers.

It includes the following:

• Key Findings

• Section 1 — The Trigger Event (Documented Fact)

• Section 2 — LTCM, Archegos, and the Prime-Broker Channel (Structural Inference)

• Section 3 — Securities Intermediation (Statutory / Structural Facts vs. The Great Taking’s Interpretation)

• Section 4 — Monetary Reset / Digital Enclosure (Structural Inference)

• Section 5 — Middle East / Strait of Hormuz (Documented Fact)

• Section 6 — Coercion Continuum / Property Redefinition (Academic & Structural Inference)

• Section 7 — Physical Repricing and Ecological Awareness (Documented Fact / Structural Inference)

• Section 8 — Forward-looking Scenario Inputs (Documented Fact / Structural Inference)

• Recommendations

• Caveats

• References

Read more

Why this essay? There’s a lot going on right now, and one could easily make the case that everything is hopeless. But the worse things get, the more optimistic I become. A breakdown makes space for genuinely new ways of thinking about challenges to emerge. That’s what happened this week. A meeting between two initiatives in The Valley of Grace that have been at loggerheads for decades unblocked a blockage about land tenure that affects any regenerative initiative that involves land. In other words, every. single. one. The concept is called Protective Illiquidity (PI), and I hope it will be picked up by academics who are better suited than me to introduce the notion into general discourse. In short, PI preserves the coordination system that gives any parcel of land value. If you’re working with or on land that you want to protect from market forces and unlock funding, you’ll know how challenging it can be. The meeting was about this conundrum, and this essay explains what happened and why I think the unblock is significant.

Setting the Scene

As usual, a few context-setting snippets so that the remainder of the essay makes more sense.

• The global land challenge. Across the world, land held in customary, communal, or otherwise in-between forms like land trusts sits in an uneasy relationship with legal systems built to recognize individual, saleable title. Billions of people hold land this way, through ancestry, residence, or long use, with no title deed to show for it.1 When such land is formally resolved, the resolution most often converts it into freely alienable property, and the historical record shows what tends to follow: ownership concentrates, and the holders with the weakest documentation lose their footing first. This is one of the quiet, recurring tragedies of regenerative and community-based land work everywhere.

• TRANCRAA. In South Africa, the Transformation of Certain Rural Areas Act of 1998 governs twenty-three former ‘coloured’ rural areas, many of them old mission stations, whose land has long been held in trust by the state on the community’s behalf. The Act was meant to transfer that land to the residents or to entities they choose.2 More than two decades on, almost none of these transfers have been successful. The Valley of Grace is one of the places where the process has stalled, and that stall is where this essay begins.

• Coordination itself as an asset. We tend to think of value in terms of things: the land, the buildings, the factory, the orchard, or the bank balance. But a good deal of what a community is ‘worth’ can be found in how its people coordinate: the trust, the shared rules, the ways of deciding together and resolving disputes without a court. David Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework names the four forms this coordination can take: Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks, each with its own logic and its own way of holding a community together.3 When land gets converted into a purely Market asset, it is often this coordination that quietly dissolves, because the Market form runs on different rules than the Tribal or Institutional forms that came before. The emerging Network form is the newest of the four, and it may be the one best suited to holding regenerative value without extracting it. That’s why the form in which a resolution is defined matters as much or more than the resolution itself. This was the penny-dropping moment for me in this week’s meeting.

Now let’s dive into what happened in the meeting and explain Protective Illiquidity, without getting into too many technical details (although these are available if you’d like them).4

The Blessing in the Blockage

It was a cold Overberg morning, with fog lying thick in the valley, when four men from very different backgrounds met at Rietdak in Genadendal (Valley of Grace in Afrikaans).5 The man sitting across from me was Treasurer of the Transformasie Komitee, though he wasn’t there in any formal capacity that morning.6 The meeting had been convened by the President of the local Rotary club, who wasn’t there in his formal capacity either. Also at the table was the Pedi (Northern Sotho) coordinator for the Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, one of the world’s leading liberation-struggle archives.7 I was there as a valley resident who thinks too much about coordination systems. Nobody was there to represent any body. That was the point. When people put aside their official roles, they can sometimes say things an official role would forbid. The meeting hadn’t been called or sanctioned by any organization.

We all wanted a common outcome: to unblock a legal process meant to transfer land to the community, but which has stalled after two decades of constant bickering.

I asked a question which has been bugging me for the past few weeks:

The fire behind us crackled in the silence. The Treasurer looked at me, unsure of whether I was being foolish or useful.

In the resulting conversation, I explained that a stalled resolution was perhaps the only thing currently protecting what the community actually values, which is their heritage and their connection to the land, the mountains, and the rivers. Had the land tenure issue been resolved, we’d likely be sitting with a commercial apple farm in our backyard, with regular spraying causing all forms of breathing difficulties for young and old; or a wind farm along the ridge of the mountains, completely changing the village setting, while destroying local families of Jackal Buzzards, Black-winged Kites, and Verreaux’ Eagles.

Let me be clear that I’m not defending institutional paralysis. Nobody around that plastic tablecloth wanted a stall in negotiations. The frustration among valley residents is real and won’t simply dissipate while the stall continues. But underneath the frustration I’d seen an emergent potential, and once you see it you can’t un-see it. And as it turns out, what we’re dealing with is one of the most common situations in all regenerative initiatives.8

Almost every regenerative project I know of eventually runs into some version of land held in some ambiguous, contested, or in-between status; a (lack of) title deed nobody can quite clear; a communal holding the law doesn’t know how to interpret; or a parcel where the ownership is genuinely unsettled and has been for a long time. The people doing the work experience this as an obstacle, a thing blocking the prosocial future they can picture. And the completely natural reflex is to want it resolved, cleared, and finalized as soon as possible.

My claim is that the reflex is where danger lies, especially in light of the ten frameworks we’ve previously explored:

Why illiquidity is worth protecting

Illiquidity means an asset (like land in The Valley of Grace) cannot be quickly sold or turned into cash without losing a lot of its value. Turning our valley into a commercial apple farm or wind farm would destroy its rural, natural setting. It would destroy the health of future generations, both human and more-than-human. The same goes for any parcel of land where tenure is unsettled.

My simple claim with Protective Illiquidity is that the inability to sell isn’t a weakness in the asset. Instead it’s a moat around protecting everything the asset represents that isn’t valued by the Market, but is valued by those who care for Earth. Land that cannot be alienated stays interwoven with the people who live on it, the food they grow, the heritage they carry, and the ways they have learned to decide and coordinate together. Protective Illiquidity keeps the value where the community can access it, instead of letting it flow to whoever arrives with the most capital. In short, Protective Illiquidity safeguards value within the community, whereas Liquidity extracts value from the community.

This is no fringe theory. It’s the story of the English enclosures,9 and the story of the allotment of Native American land under the Dawes Act, where communal holdings converted to individual title collapsed from 138 million acres to 48 million in under fifty years.10 The pattern repeats across three centuries and five continents, and the variable that predicts it is remarkably clean. The decisive question is whether the resolution makes the land freely alienable.11 Where it does, concentration of welaht follows.

My argument is that alienability is the mechanism that undermines the health and wealth of communities. The capacity to be sold is the specific property that allows the capture of an asset or even a community. Karl Polanyi saw this in 1944 when he called land a “fictitious commodity,” something treated as made-for-sale that was never made for sale at all, inextricably interwoven with the institutions and relationships that give it meaning.12 To form a market for it, he wrote, was one of the strangest undertakings of our ancestors. Selling it is what severs the interweaving.

That’s the point I was making in the meeting: The inability to sell is the blessing. The process failed to convert the land into something the Market could take and sell. Two decades of frustrating delay were also two decades of protection, achieved by no one on purpose and defended, in practice, by almost everyone with a stake.

The Bioregional Challenge

Now the hard part, because this is where a comforting story would end, but the more honest enquiry keeps pushing the boundaries.

Ambiguity around land tenure only protects the community under certain conditions. It protects while the community’s own governance is functioning, and while the community controls the ambiguity itself, with no external custodian controlling it on their behalf. The very same unresolved status that shelters one community can subordinate another. Where the people who hold the land in trust are trusted, and actually provide the roads and the water and the arbitration, the unresolved tenure underwrites a working local order. Where they aren’t trusted, the identical legal ambiguity underwrites quiet dispossession and residents paying levies for services they never see. The stall in negotiations we’re navigating is no more than a temporary shelter. A shelter buys time, but it doesn’t build the permanent solution.

Which brings us to where I think the bioregional movement needs to make inroads, in ways that matter for issues around land tenure.

When people say “resolve the land question,” they almost always hear “sell it, title it, and make it market-legible,” because in the paradigm most of us were raised within, resolution and saleability are the same thing. My claim is that they are two very different things. An unsettled asset can be housed in more than one coordination form (referring to the TIMN model):

1. It can be housed in a Market form, where it becomes alienable and the pattern above takes over.

2. It can be housed in an Institutional form, where a bureaucracy holds it and the failure mode is capture and paralysis (what we’re witnessing in The Valley of Grace).

3. Or it can be landed in a Network form, a commons the community actually governs, where inalienability is written in on purpose and the land stays interwoven with the people whose life it holds.

David Ronfeldt’s framework of Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks is the map that’s helped me navigate land tenure complexities in our valley, because it names the four forms and insists they have to be kept in balance, each with a bright side and a dark side. The error is treating the Market form as the only available resolution, when it most definitely is not. There is a way to resolve tenure that houses it in the Network form the community’s own governance already aspires to, and that resolution protects the value the way the accidental stall was protecting it, except on purpose, by design, and defensibly.

This is the door the Emancipation Architecture opens. We won’t step through that portal in this essay, because the design specifics are a working matter and this essay isn’t meant to be a how-to manual. What I want you to consider is simply this: The danger of resolving land tenure issues is in resolving into the wrong form, where the options are a Market form (Business-as-Usual) or a Network form (emergent). For the first time the distinction between the two are becoming clear, at least for me.

What This Means for You

If you’re involved in any kind of bioregional work, here is one thing you can take from this essay and test against whatever you’re building.

Before you try to resolve any contested or ambiguous land holding, stop and ask what coordination form the resolution will land it in, and whether that form is one the community can actually govern. The old question was “how do we clear this.” The better question is “what will this become once it’s cleared, and who will it belong to then.” That question, asked early, is the difference between an initiative that survives its own success and one that dissolves at the moment it appears to win.

If the question opens something for you, there are a handful of things worth getting to know, and I’ll name them as territory to explore, rather than steps to follow:

• The idea of Protective Illiquidity itself, the notion that an asset’s resistance to being sold can be the thing that keeps it valuable.

• Inalienability understood as a design property you build in on purpose, rather than a legal accident you stumble into.

• Elinor Ostrom’s work on how communities govern shared resources without either privatizing them or handing them to the state, and in particular the delicate question of how much outside recognition a functioning commons can absorb before recognition becomes exposure.13

• Ronfeldt’s TIMN, as the map of the forms an asset can land in.14

• And Commitment Pooling, which is the same principle appearing on the money side, credits that hold value precisely because they cannot be frictionlessly cashed out of the network that gives them meaning.15

None of these bullet points are a recipe for success. Rather they’re a reading list for a set of questions most people never think to ask.

What Remains Uncertain

I should be honest about what I can’t claim with any form of certainty at all.

That ambiguity exists as far as land tenure is concerned is well documented (see footnote 8). The historical record is clear that removing the ambiguity, in the Market form, concentrates ownership and wealth. What isn’t proven, not at scale and not across generations, is that a community can take an accidental protection and convert it into a designed one, and then defend that design across the decades and the personnel changes and the moments of institutional weakness when the enclosure pressure comes back, because it always comes back. Non-alienability is a thing you defend continuously, never a thing you win once and keep. Whether a small community can sustain that defense long enough for it to matter is the open question, and nobody gets to answer it from a position of air-conditioned activism. It has to be run as a live experiment, in a real place, with real stakes. The Valley of Grace is one place where we’re going to test it, and I’ll report on the outcomes in future essays.

Returning to Rietdak

We didn’t resolve anything in the coffee shop that morning. That wasn’t our intention. But it was an emotional ending, nonetheless. We were all moved by the shift we experienced.

What shifted was smaller and more durable than any form of resolution. All of us came to the meeting seeing twenty years of failure, a process that seemed incapable of completing, and an enemy we called the stall. By the time the fire had burned down we were looking at the same twenty years and could see that the stall had bought us time. It had provided shelter from a storm that no one knew was brewing. The question we walked away with was no longer how to end the blockage as quickly as possible. Instead, it was whether the accidental protection could be turned into a chosen one, something built and governed and defended, before the window that has stayed open for two decades finally closes.

I think it can. More than that, I think the model for doing it is worth building carefully and sharing widely, because the situation in this valley is applicable to a far wider audience. The same situation exists in most regenerative projects the moment the question of land is raised.

So this essay is both a statement of intent and an invitation. We’re going to try to build a working model for exiting the Market form and landing in territory that the Emancipation Architecture describes. And if you’re in a bioregion somewhere, nursing your own version of this blockage, wondering whether your stall is a failure or a shelter, I’d like to build a model with you. Drop a comment, or a DM, or reach out on LinkedIn.

It was still bitterly cold when we left the coffee shop. The fire was still going, and nothing was settled, and for the first time in a long while, that felt like just the right place to be.

That’s all for this week.

Who knows what I’ll dive into next week, informed by what’s unfolding here in our valley.

Until then, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

4

It has taken numerous AI-assisted legal explorations to come up with the framework. It’s probably the heaviest use (for me) of AI in a single week thus far. To spend an additional £14 in usage credits in just a few days is a big deal for me:

Why this essay? I’m a big fan of ’s work on Commitment Pooling.1 However, I’ve not been able to find any examples of it working at a scale larger than small, rural communities. During a meeting with our local municipality this week, a profound example popped up, unplanned and unexpected by anyone who was there. This essay explains what happened. While it’s completely specific to our local situation, I think you’ll find some resources that may prove helpful, especially if you’re curious about models emerging while everything around us implodes.

Setting the Scene

A few context-setting snippets so that the remainder of the essay makes sense.

• Our local municipality is the Theewaterskloof Municipality. From now on I’ll refer to it as TWKM.2 Our valley is called Ward 2 and there are a total of 13 wards in TWKM. Our local municipality forms part of a district municipality called the Overberg (ODM).3 It gets a little more complicated after that, so I’ll just say that we are nested in the wider Western Cape government (WCG).4 You can see how Ward 2 is nested in these various structures in a handy interactive South African district map.5 The important bit about this context is that it’s all geopolitical nesting — what I’ve laid out has nothing to do with bioregionalism.6

• Our local municipality (TWKM) is one of many municipalities in South Africa operating under a Municipal Finance Recovery Service.7 In essence, the municipality is bankrupt, as a result of high levels of fraud and corruption across all levels of government in South Africa. The context is that service delivery in all these municipalities is essentially non-existent, leading to common complaints from all businesses in affected areas. Personally, I view this as a wider global reality of the final phase of the Cycle of Globalization, rather than something to debate or question.8

• The Western Cape government (WCG) has made various commitments to double the number of international visitors. One proposal aims to do so by 2035.9 The other, a Tourism Growth Fund, is more aggressive and aims to do so by 2030.10 The context is that Cape Town, the primary destination, cannot handle this increased volume because of extant pressure on its already-inadequate infrastructure.11

• Our valley (Ward 2 of TWKM) has no official representative body. While there’s too much nuance to unpack here, there is a distinct racial divide between residents of a predominantly white tourist hub (Greyton) and a predominantly Khoisan heritage hub (Genadendal and settlements). The two towns are only 5kms apart, but may as well exist in different universes. To address this absence of representation, I am currently convening the Ward 2 Business Forum. You’ll find an explanation of why a business focus, as well as a link to our website in the footnote.12

• Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework is an important pillar in our valley’s revitalization strategy.13 We’ll be publicly launching the Valley of Grace Destination Management Plan in October this year, but there’s a top secret website preview in the footnote.14

• The meeting I attended this week was framed as a TWKM business partnership meeting. While hosted by the municipality, they made it clear that the onus lay on businesses to establish ways of solving challenges without municipal funding. They were playing the role of enablers and connectors, a to-be-expected signal of +N in the TIMN model. The meeting was part of the Western Cape government’s Economic Development Partnership program, again another signal of +N.15 The meeting opened with us all introducing ourselves, including an explanation of why we were there. Almost every participant started with a complaint around service delivery. There were three main themes: slow emergency responses and poor service at the only hospital in the area; transport, which covered lack of public transport as well as the state of paved and unpaved roads; lack of progress on a regional airport, which has been in discussion for at least 15 years.

• The energy of the meeting shifted significantly when I asked what commitments we could make to WCG to help them ease the inevitable infrastructure pressures that a doubling of international tourists would represent. It shifted the conversation from “what do we need” to “what can we offer.”

OK, that’s a heck of a lot of context setting. Now let’s dive into what happened in the meeting and explain the map at the top of this essay. Thanks for hanging in there.

The Shift

The shift from “what do we need” to “what can we offer” took about a minute. The consequences took the rest of the meeting, and are still unfolding in emails, calls, follow-ups, and quiet side conversations all this week.

Someone brought up the leopard cameras in our Nature Reserve, run by the Landmark Foundation.16 Someone else mentioned the Genadendal indigenous nursery, run by the Zonderend Water Users Association.17 A third voice named the Bot River biodiversity wine estates. Then Grootbos on the coast.18 Then CapeNature’s stewardship program, then Wild Restoration, then the Nuwejaars Wetlands. Within twenty minutes the room had assembled, out loud, a picture of the Overberg that none of us had ever seen mapped in one place before.19

By the end of the meeting the map at the top of Part 1 was underway. It shows forty-plus institutions, tourism operators, funders, and NGOs already running conservation and restoration work across four corridor segments from Witsand on the coast to Villiersdorp inland. The map’s power comes from putting long-existing entities on the same page for the first time.

What TIMN made visible

Ronfeldt’s four coordination forms sit inside each other. In our meeting all four were visible in the same room.

The complaints were +I. This was the trap keeping us waiting for institutions to deliver on roads, transport, and hospital services they can no longer fund.

The individual businesses in the room were +M. Each was engaged in fierce competition for their share of tourist spend, their share of grant funding, or their share of attention.

The Municipal Finance Recovery Service is +I trying to save +M from itself.

And what emerged when the question changed was +N. All of a sudden, forty-plus existing operators shifted their focus toward a shared offer.

Commitment Pooling has different forms too, and this is where Ruddick’s work helps us understand what unfolded in the room.

Vertical vs. Horizontal Commitments

Most writing about Commitment Pooling I’ve come across describes horizontal exchange. It takes the form of peers pooling with peers, inside a community, with commitments circulating among members. Ruddick’s work in Kenya is horizontal in this sense, and so is the ancestral Mweria tradition it’s modeled on.

What the Ward 2 Business Forum stumbled into on Wednesday morning is vertical.

The pool forms horizontally across the four corridor segments. It then points upward, offered as a proposition to the Western Cape Government that stands to see international arrivals double by 2030 and knows Cape Town cannot absorb the increase.

The offer is straightforward. The Overberg already contains most of the pieces of the destination the province says it wants to build. Coordinate with the corridor and the doubling target becomes achievable while easing the pressure on Cape Town’s infrastructure. Fail to coordinate with the corridor and the province meets its target by breaking its capital city.

That is a coordination move the province has no formal framework for receiving yet. The Economic Development Partnership program and the Partnering Platform suggest they are feeling around for one.

The Personal Penny-drop

Every institution we depend on is failing at some level. School boards, medical systems, city councils, healthcare networks, or provincial departments are all experiencing the limits of late-stage globalization. The reflex is to escalate the complaint upward, hoping +I logic will repair itself or swoop in as a savior. It rarely does.

The alternative is to ask what your initiative actually has to offer, and to whom it will appear irresistible. Complaining about the status quo may be justified, but it keeps us trapped in +I dependency. Committing whatever we have to offer shifts the entire possibility space into +N logic. The same words, spoken in different coordination forms, land in entirely different worlds. Institutions respond very differently to an offer than they would otherwise respond to a demand they’re completely unable to fulfill.

Three Things That Remain Uncertain

1. Whether WCG can receive what’s being offered. The +N form has to survive its encounter with +I logic, and that survival isn’t guaranteed.

2. Whether the shift can be replicated. I happened to ask a specific question at a specific moment in a specific audience and the response unlocked thinking we had no idea even existed. I’m entirely unsure whether the same outcome will result, given a very different setting.

3. Whether the Commitment Pool that emerged can maintain integrity when money starts moving through it. Ruddick calls the failure mode “+M capture risk.” A regenerative corridor can quietly concentrate benefits among lodge owners while passing over the communities on whose land the fynbos actually grows. Grootbos is both a world class benchmark and a warning at the same time. Whatever we build will need internal accountability structures, or the +M pattern will reproduce itself.

That’s all for this week.

Next week I’ll dive deeper into the Transformative Tourism pitch, as well as provide feedback from a meeting happening this week with representatives from national tourism.

Until then, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

16

https://www.landmark.org.za/campaign-page. Here’s a recent pic, sent by a close friend and reader of this Substack. Thanks TE!

Why this essay? It has been an exceptionally busy week, meeting with numerous business, community, civic, and local government leaders as we prepare our Bioregion Destination Management Plan. More on that soon. (If you’ve written and haven’t received a reply, I’m not ignoring you!) This essay, though, is about an interview with an AI researcher that triggered a thought experiment. The essay is highly speculative, but backed by rigor and research. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

First the interview itself, hosted by Steven Bartlett, who produces the Diary of a CEO Podcast.1 Despite its length (2 hours), it’s been viewed 3.5m times in under a week (as of this writing), so it’s obviously hitting a nerve. When it first came across my radar, I didn’t pay much attention to it on account of the typical clickbait title and fear mongering description. But when a colleague whose opinion I respect shared it directly (thanks MK!), I thought I’d better at least watch the introduction. I ended up watching the whole thing and made extensive notes.

The interview is with , a former OpenAI researcher and a prominent AI forecaster.2 He’s the founder of the AI Futures Project and the lead author of ‘AI 2027,’ a widely-read scenario mapping the trajectory of artificial intelligence. His follow-up, ‘AI 2040: Plan A,’ sets out how the world could still navigate superintelligence safely.3

In the interview, he explains:

• What he saw inside OpenAI that made him walk away

• Why the people building AI privately believe it’s coming even sooner than the public is being told

• What happens if AI becomes powerful enough that humans can no longer control it, and why he puts the odds of catastrophe as high as 70%

• Why almost every job could be automated, and what that means for the next generation

• The plan he believes could still lead to abundance and a future worth living in.

What he entirely misses in this interview, like most AI forecasters, is:

• The coming Decade of Dramatic Disruption that will make the conversation of ‘how many jobs AI and robotics will displace’ entirely irrelevant. I’ve written about why it’s naive to ignore the DDD here.

• The difference between Retail AI (chatbots) and Wholesale AI (surveillance), which I’ve written about here. All of Daniel’s forecasting focuses narrowly on Retail AI.

• The Gartner Hype Cycle and its relevance to AI, which I’ve written about here. Considering that we’re likely in the early days of a massive AI market correction, it seemed odd to me that he didn’t at least mention this.4 The oversight, intentional or not, reminded me of the Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get an individual to understand something when their salary depends upon their not understanding it.”

Should you watch the full interview?

If you’re remotely interested in some of the concerns being tracked by AI forecasters, I’d recommend that you make time available to watch. It certainly is worthwhile, especially if you keep the caveats above in mind.

While it’s not a prerequisite for the rest of this essay, watching it first may provide much-needed context. If you really don’t have the time, watch from the 30 to the 60-minute mark. That half-hour provides the necessary context for the thought experiment that follows.

The Thought Experiment

At about the 50-minute mark, Daniel says the following, referring to the major Big Tech companies:5

They’re focusing on automating their own research so that they can do everything that they’re doing faster. And they want to get to very high levels of general intelligence, and then deploy that out into the economy. So by the time AI comes for all these different jobs they will have had fully autonomous AI research happening for months maybe years. That means that the AIs will be vastly superhuman at AI research and probably also vastly superhuman at lots of other things.

Earlier in the conversation, at about the 30-minute mark, the conversation moved to Synaptic Pruning & Strengthening, which I’ll explain in more detail later in this essay. It was these two snippets of the conversation that led to the following thought experiment, which rests on five pillars. I’ll first describe the pillars and then describe where this could go, when we take into account the future of human coordination post the Decade of Dramatic Disruption. Instead of including dozens of footnotes, I’ve provided an extensive reference section below the essay. Here’s an overview of the five pillars (tapping on each link should zoot you directly to the relevant section, but I’m still figuring out Substack’s idiosyncrasies, so bear with me):

1. Infrastructure Mania and What Survives

2. Non-Monetary Lifeboats During Dramatic Disruptions

3. Pre-Monetary Coordination

4. AntiSocial and ProSocial AI

5. Residue From AI Bubble

Let’s dive in with each of the five pillars and then the Summary (link in case you want to cut to the chase).

Pillar 1: Infrastructure Mania and What Survives

Across all previous significant asset bubbles of the recent past, there’s a pattern that emerges. It happened with the construction of canals in the US and UK (1790s), railroads (1870s), and fiber (1996–2001). The pattern is that speculative capital overbuilds infrastructure that turns out to be useful only long after a period when investors are wiped out. The point is that the physical asset that remains becomes the backbone of an economy the speculators and investors never quite envisioned.

In the late 1990s, just as my tech career started, telecoms companies laid over 80 million miles of fiber across continents and under oceans. Roughly 85% of it remained “dark” (unused) until late 2005. Dark fiber was derided as a waste, but by the mid-2000s, it provided cheap capacity for broadband, cloud computing, and video streaming, which we all take for granted now.

The relevance to today is that AI infrastructure built during this current mania will survive the coming crash in degraded but functional form, just as railroads, canals, and fiber did. The valuable questions worth asking are who controls it after the (inevitable) market correction, and what coordination logic will it serve.

Pillar 2: Non-Monetary Lifeboats During Dramatic Disruptions

Historical periods of economic disruption show us another pattern: societies or communities that are willing to experiment with non-monetary or alternative monetary systems at the peak of the disruption generally fare better than those who don’t run such experiments.

The longest running example is the Swiss WIR, which has issued a currency not backed by Swiss francs since 1934. The biggest lesson from this experiment is that turnover in WIR is countercyclical. In other words, companies use it more during a recession.

The relevance to today is that communities (or bioregions) that are most primed to introduce alternative monetary systems prior to an economic correction are likely to navigate the otherwise inevitable signs of poverty unprepared communities will face (think food queues during the Great Depression).

In our valley, I’m particularly excited by the role an innocent game called Spirits of the Realms can play to provide that priming, without the complexities of attempting to introduce a new monetary system during periods of relative stability.6

To repeat the claim: communities with a pre-existing non-monetary coordination substrate — which could include mutual credit, reciprocity networks, community currencies, or smartphone games — show measurable countercyclical resilience during monetary crises. In short, if you have a bioregional focus, I would seriously consider introducing the Spirits of the Realms game into your community. Reach out if you’d like to know more before I manage to write up the results of the experiment we’re running here.

Pillar 3: Pre-Monetary System Coordination

Research into the early history of our valley has got me increasingly interested in the lineage of John Amos Comenius (1592-1670).7 He was a Moravian philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education. He lived during a pivotal period in history, straddling the transition from the end of Feudalism to the birth of what came to be known as Modernity. He witnessed significant changes in political, economic, and cultural landscapes, not unlike what we’ll be navigating as we get deeper into the DDD.

His particular contribution was Pansophism, a philosophical term that refers to universal knowledge or wisdom. The concept encompasses the idea of a comprehensive and all-encompassing understanding of the world, covering a wide range of disciplines and knowledge domains. The term is derived from the Greek words “pan,” meaning all, and “sophia,” meaning wisdom. Comenius envisioned a system of education that would provide individuals with a broad and interconnected understanding of various fields of knowledge, aiming for a holistic and universal wisdom. Zachary Stein has extensively explored this approach through numerous interviews and his 2019 book, Education in a Time Between Worlds.8

Of specific interest to me appears to be a bifurcation in Comenius’ lineage that happened sometime between 1620 (The Battle of White Mountain in which the Catholics defeated the Bohemian Protestant movement, forcing the suppression of The Unitas Fratrum which Comenius helped establish) and 1720 (the establishment of a settlement called Herrnhut at Berthelsdorf, Saxony one hundred years after The Unitas Fratrum was exiled).

• One line appears to have been carried south through Moravian missionaries (that’s the version of Comenius’ teaching that took root in our valley).

• The other line appears to be carried north and is extensively documented in the 2017 book by Lene Rachel Andersen, The Nordic Secret: A European story of beauty and freedom.9

The fascinating parallel is that both lineages entered non-monetary economies. In the north it was feudal settlements and in the south it was indigenous tribes.

In our valley, Georg Schmidt, who trained at Herrnhut, arrived at the Cape on 9 July 1737 and settled at Baviaanskloof (our valley) on 23 April 1738, establishing a teaching station among the Chainoqua Khoi. His entire approach focussed on literacy instruction in Dutch, the establishment of vegetable gardens, a water furrow to assist with irrigation, daily lessons under a pear tree, and a work-for-supplies exchange. By the end of 1738 he had 28 voluntary students. The Khoi economy he entered was non-monetary. Schmidt didn’t set out to establish a business. What he built was a coordination system: teach people to read, grow food, share labor, and organize time. I can find no record of any form of currency changing hands until much later when the British arrived. The British governor of the Cape Colony passed the Caledon Code (or Hottentot Proclamation) in 1809. It was a law that forced the indigenous Khoikhoi to have a fixed home. It also required them to carry a pass when moving around. In 1826, British currency was made the sole legal tender, formalizing the British pound sterling as the Cape’s official money.

Before the British arrived, the Moravians — in partnership with the Khoi and San tribes — had already established our valley as the second largest market town outside of Cape Town. From all the records I’ve found, Cape Town was a thriving market economy from around 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck established the Dutch East India Company (VOC) settlement and introduced Dutch guilder and various international trading coins. Money only appears in our valley’s historical records from about 1817, with the formalization of land ownership. Stated differently, between 1738 and 1817, a period of 79 years, our valley grew from nothing to become the second largest settlement outside Cape Town without a single cent changing hands. I find that a fascinating accomplishment, and it appears to trace all the way back to the teachings of John Amos Comenius (1592-1670).10

The relevance to today is that communities (or bioregions) have an historical precedent of a thriving market economy based on Contributionism rather than Exploitation right here in our valley.11

Pillar 4: AntiSocial and ProSocial AI

In an earlier essay, I discussed the difference between Wholesale and Retail AI:

In that essay, I said the following:

What you and I loosely refer to as ‘AI’ is only the retail face of an industry whose wholesale customer is the surveillance-commercial-military-intelligence apparatus. The retail product (chatbot, image generator, coding assistant and the like) and the wholesale infrastructure (behavioral prediction, military intelligence, and autonomous targeting) are different access tiers to the same tool.

I now want to make a further distinction between AntiSocial AI and ProSocial AI

AntiSocial AI extracts value from the people it interacts with. It concentrates capability in a small number of firms, treats users as data sources and attention as inventory, runs in centralized cloud infrastructure that depends on continuous fiat throughput, and optimizes for engagement and monetization.

ProSocial AI increases the coordination capacity of the community it serves. It runs on hardware the community can access without permission, treats users as participants whose knowledge shapes the system, operates under community governance, and optimizes for the health of a bounded place.

The first extends the logic of +M into the cognitive layer. The second is a candidate substrate for +N.12

Where this becomes particularly interesting is when we refer back to the interview that kicked off this thought experiment, specifically the mention of Synaptic Pruning & Strengthening of Neural Networks at about the 30-minute mark.

Without getting too bogged down in the detail, neural networks — in the biological sense — are the brain’s connective architecture: roughly 86 billion neurons, each forming thousands of synaptic connections to other neurons, producing a web of something like 100 trillion synapses. In a neural network, the intelligence lives in the connections between neurons and in the relative strength of those connections. Intelligence isn’t somehow stored in the neurons themselves.

Synaptic Pruning is the process by which the brain eliminates synapses that are weak, redundant, or unused. A human brain is born massively overconnected. An infant has far more synaptic connections than an adult. The developmental arc doesn’t build more connections over time. Instead, development relies on selective elimination: the brain sculpts itself by cutting away what it doesn’t need.

Synaptic Strengthening is the complementary process. Connections that fire repeatedly grow stronger. The shorthand is Hebb’s rule (1949): “neurons that fire together wire together.”13 The formal mechanism is called long-term potentiation (LTP). When a synapse is activated frequently, the receiving neuron becomes more sensitive to the signal, the connection is physically reinforced (more neurotransmitter receptors are inserted into the postsynaptic membrane, the dendritic spine itself enlarges), and the pathway becomes easier to activate next time.

That’s what happens in biology, and a similar process happens in technology (although I’m being careful not to make too many sweeping analogies because there are vast differences in how the two actually work.)

In the technological sense, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) could be compared to the biological process of Synaptic Pruning & Strengthening.14 Model pruning (a literal technique in AI, where redundant or low-contribution parameters are removed to make networks smaller and faster) is analogous to synaptic pruning. However, the biological process is bounded, embodied, and aligned with the organism’s conditions of existence. The AI process is unbounded, disembodied, and aligned with the institutional incentives of the companies running it. Hence, AntiSocial AI.

This section is already getting a little long and at risk of becoming too technical, so let me wrap up this section with a bold claim:15

Pillar 5: Residue From AI Bubble

Now we can move onto the final Pillar before I lay out the actual thought experiment we’ve been building towards.

In the asset bubbles we explored in Pillar 1, we saw that the asset class left behind after investors have lost their investment are inherently valuable some time later: canals, railroads, and fiber proved immensely useful when the time was right.

There is a slight challenge with AI in that the asset left behind after the bubble bursts (data centers, servers, and computer chips) depreciate significantly faster than previous asset classes. Stated differently, AI compute depreciates in ~3–5 years vs. decades for rails, canals, and fiber.

That is, until you consider the value of the model themselves rather than the technological equipment.

The value the AI boom has created isn’t the chips or the data centers. Instead, it’s the models themselves. The model is what remains after years of training, testing, pruning back the weak connections, and strengthening the useful ones, until what’s left is a compressed, working understanding of language, images, ecosystems, or logic. The chips may well wear out in a few years, and the data centers will become stranded assets, but the models will keep working, and can be copied for the cost of a download.

When the AI crash comes, the companies that built the models will be judged on whether they can continue generating profit at the scale their investors need. Many will fail that test, but the models themselves won’t disappear. They will sit in open repositories, on hard drives, in forks maintained by hobbyists and researchers, waiting for someone with a use for them. My bold claim is that bioregional communities could well be that someone. What Wall Street writes off as a failed bet, a valley or a watershed can pick up almost for free and use to coordinate itself through the Decade of Dramatic Disruption.

The Thought Experiment Summarized

As we know, we are in the late stages of the Cycle of Globalization, which will likely decisively end when the AI Bubble pops. When that happens (it hasn’t yet, but it appears to be close), we’ll start seeing systemic stress signals that confirm we’re well into the Decade of Dramatic Disruption, or the Great Depression of the 2030s. This is when we’ll see signs of current monetary system poverty similar to what was witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

What if, by the time the AI Bubble bursts, the AIs have completed sufficient Synaptic Pruning & Strengthening so that all that remains are ProSocial models, which appear worthless and wasteful (just like fiber was in the early 2000s) to the Business-as-Usual world?

These models can then be deployed, at very low cost, specifically in service of Bioregionalism and the next iteration of human coordination in the TIMN model, this time without an extractive monetary system. What will emerge are nodes of coherence representing places where the next form of human coordination happens.

• The same thing happened when cathedrals appeared across Europe after the Thirty and Eighty Years Wars after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. The Peace of Westphalia finally brought peace to mainland Europe, closing a calamitous period of European history that killed approximately eight million people. Cathedrals created “islands of sanity” and the peace treaty created the framework for modem international relations. The concepts of state sovereignty, mediation between nations, and diplomacy all find their origins in the text of this treaty written more than three hundred and fifty years ago.16

• The same thing happened when cities and stock exchanges started forming nodes of coherence as the Market form took shape.

• The thought experiment sees bioregions as nodes of coherence as the +M form of coordination reaches its inevitable conclusion.

Is this just a pipe dream?

The answer is it depends on what those of us who have read this far do with the thought experiment.

That’s all for this week.

Next week I’ll start unpacking how we’re thinking about Transformative Tourism and how we’re pitching it to national government as a strategy that can be rolled out across the country. That was meant to happen this week, but I’m afraid things are simply moving too quickly!

Until then, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

References

References are organized alphabetically within each pillar, then cross-pillar sources listed separately. Epistemic tags are used as follows:

• DF - Documented Fact

• AI-inf - AI Inferred: Triangulating three or more DFs using AI to assess patterns

Where a source was not read in full text (consulted via abstract, publisher summary, or authoritative secondary account), this is noted.

Pillar 1 — Speculative-mania infrastructure survives the crash

Ahamed, Liaquat. 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World. New York: Penguin Press, 2026. [DF] (Consulted via Fortune essay and interview; book not read in full.)

Ahamed, Liaquat. “I Won a Pulitzer for Explaining the Great Depression. The AI Spending Boom Terrifies Me.” Fortune, 2 June 2026. [DF]

Dell’Oro Group. “Worldwide Data Center Capex Rose 57% in 2025.” Press release, 17 March 2026. [DF]

Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Liberty Street Economics. “Crisis Chronicles: Canal Mania (1793).” 13 June 2014. [DF]

Fisher, Irving. Stamp Scrip. New York: Adelphi, 1933. [DF] (Cross-listed under Pillar 2.)

Gartner, Inc. “Gartner Hype Cycle Research Methodology.” gartner.com. Accessed July 2026. [DF]

Gartner, Inc. “Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, August 2025.” (Reported via secondary summaries; not directly accessed.) [DF]

KobeissiLetter, via IEEE Communications Society Technology Blog. Comparative AI capex as share of GDP infographic. 2025. [DF] (Market-analysis source; figures cross-checked against Dell’Oro and Real Investment Advice.)

Odlyzko, Andrew. “Internet Traffic Growth: Sources and Implications.” University of Minnesota, Digital Technology Center. Various papers, 2000–2003. [DF] (Odlyzko’s AT&T-era traffic research consulted via secondary summaries and his university page; individual paper titles not individually verified.)

Odlyzko, Andrew. “Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s.” University of Minnesota, January 2010. [DF/AI-inf]

Real Investment Advice. “Capex Spending on AI Is Masking Economic Weakness.” 2025. [DF] (Market-commentary source; GDP-share figure of ~1.2% cited with caveat on competing estimates.)

White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. ISBN 978-0-393-06126-0. [DF]

Willis, Carol. Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995. [DF] (Cited via secondary summaries; not read in full.)

Pillar 2 — Non-monetary coordination substrates and monetary crises

Balakrishnan, Sidhya, Roberta Costa, Johannes Haushofer, and Fábio Waltenberg. “Welfare Effects of a Permanent Unconditional Cash Transfer Program: Evidence from Maricá, Brazil.” NBER Working Paper No. 33089, October 2024. [DF] (Consulted via JFI release and abstract; full text not read. The “9% household-income increase” figure attributed to this paper elsewhere is NOT confirmed in the release.)

Dini, Paolo, and Laura Sartori. Various LSE working papers on Sardex, 2015–2017. [DF/AI-inf] (Consulted via secondary summaries and ResearchGate abstracts.)

Fisher, Irving. Stamp Scrip. New York: Adelphi, 1933. [DF]

Gaddy, Clifford G., and Barry W. Ickes. Russia’s Virtual Economy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2002. [AI-inf] (Cited as competing explanation for Russian barter; not read in full.)

Gómez, Georgina M. Argentina’s Parallel Currency: The Economy of the Poor. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. [DF]

Gómez, Georgina M. “What Was the Deal for the Participants of the Argentine Local Currency Systems, the Redes de Trueque?” Environment and Planning A 42(7): 1669–1685, 2010. DOI: 10.1068/a42309. [DF]

Gómez, Georgina M., and A. H. J. Helmsing. “Selective Spatial Closure and Local Economic Development: What Do We Learn from the Argentine Local Currency Systems?” World Development 36(11): 2489–2511, 2008. DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2007.11.015. [DF]

Guriev, Sergei, and Barry W. Ickes. “Barter in Russia.” In Paul Seabright, ed., The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [DF] (Cited via Woodruff and secondary summaries.)

Guriev, Sergei, and Dmitry Kvassov. “Barter for Price Discrimination.” International Journal of Industrial Organization22(3): 329–350, 2004. [AI-inf] (Cited as competing explanation.)

Kourachanis, Nikos. “Social Change and the Greek Welfare State Crisis (2010–2020).” Journal of Social Change (Walden University), 2015. [AI-inf]

Littera, Giuseppe, Laura Sartori, Paolo Dini, and Panayotis Antoniadis. “From an Idea to a Scalable Working Model: Merging Economic Benefits with Social Values in Sardex.” International Journal of Community Currency Research 21: 6–21, 2017. [DF]

Mattsson, Carolina E. S., Teodoro Criscione, and William O. Ruddick. “Sarafu Community Inclusion Currency 2020–2021.” Scientific Data 9: 426, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41597-022-01539-4. [DF]

Onken, Werner. “The Wörgl Experiment with Depreciating Money.” 1997. (Exact publication venue to be confirmed; widely cited in complementary-currency literature.) [DF] (Not read in full.)

Ruddick, William O. Grassroots Economics: Reflection and Practice. 2025. [DF] (In project knowledge.)

Sartori, Laura, and Paolo Dini. “From Complementary Currency to Institution: A Micro-Macro Study of the Sardex Mutual Credit System.” Stato e Mercato 107: 273–304, 2016. [DF/AI-inf]

Stodder, James, and Bernard Lietaer. “The Macro-Stability of Swiss WIR-Bank Credits: Balance, Velocity, and Leverage.” Comparative Economic Studies 58(4): 570–605, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/s41294-016-0001-5. [DF]

Woodruff, David M. Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999/2000. DOI: 10.7591/9781501711466. [DF] (Consulted via publisher summary and secondary accounts; not read in full.)

Pillar 3 — The Genadendal precedent

Atwood, Craig D. Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2004. [AI-inf] (Cited for Moravian communal-economy model; not read in full.)

Balie, Isaac. Die Geskiedenis van Genadendal 1738–1988. 1988. [DF] (Not read; identified as priority source for the money-timing question.)

Balie, Isaac. Genadendal: Its Golden Age 1806–1870. 1992. [DF] (Not read in full; cited via TIMN Research Proposal and secondary accounts.)

Bredekamp, Henry C. “Vehettge Tikkuie, alias Moeder Lena van Genadendal (1737–1800).” Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library 41(4), 1987. [DF]

Bredekamp, Henry C., and H. E. F. Plüddemann, eds. Angelika Flegg, trans. The Genadendal Diaries: Diaries of the Herrnhut Missionaries H. Marsveld, D. Schwinn and J. C. Kühnel, Volume I (1792–1794). UWC Institute for Historical Research, Publication Series B4, 1992/1999. ISBN 1-86808-115-X. [DF]

Bredekamp, Henry C., and Robert Ross, eds. Missions and Christianity in South African History. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995. [DF] (Not read in full.)

Engel, Katherine Carté. Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. [AI-inf] (Cited for the Moravian economic model in Bethlehem, PA; not read in full.)

Gillespie, Michele, and Robert Beachy, eds. Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. [AI-inf] (Not read in full.)

Gollin, Gillian Lindt. Moravians in Two Worlds: A Study of Changing Communities. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. [AI-inf] (Not read in full.)

Krüger, Bernhard. The Pear Tree Blossoms: A History of the Moravian Mission Stations in South Africa, 1737–1869.Genadendal: Moravian Book Depot, 1966. [DF] (Not read in full; the single most important unread source for Pillar 3. Claims attributed to it rest on South African History Online summaries, TIMN Research Proposal citations, and project knowledge.)

Schmidt, Georg. Tagebuch und Briefe (1737–1744). UWC Institute for Historical Research, 1981. [DF] (Primary source; not consulted directly.)

South African History Online. “Genadendal.” sahistory.org.za. Accessed July 2026. [DF] (Secondary encyclopedia source drawing substantially on Krüger.)

Viljoen, Russel. “Moravian Missionaries, Khoikhoi Labour and the Overberg Colonists at the End of the VOC Era, 1792–1796.” 1992. [DF] (Exact publication venue to be confirmed.)

Pillar 4 — Prosocial AI as +N coordination substrate

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “eBird Passes 2 Billion Bird Observations.” ebird.org, June 2025. [DF]

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Merlin Bird ID.” merlin.allaboutbirds.org. Accessed July 2026. [DF]

iNaturalist. “2025 Impact Highlights.” inaturalist.org, 2025. [DF]

iNaturalist. “Updated Computer Vision Model and Geomodel with Over 1,500 New Taxa (v2.26).” inaturalist.org/blog, October 2025. [DF]

Meta AI. “Llama 3.2: Revolutionizing Edge AI and Vision with Open, Customizable Models.” ai.meta.com, September 2024. [DF]

Meta Intelligence. “Small Language Models: Phi-4 vs Gemma 3 vs Llama 3.3 — Enterprise Edge AI [2026].” meta-intelligence.tech, 2026. [DF] (Market-analysis source.)

Pl@ntNet. “Introduction to Pl@ntNet.” docs.plantnet.org. Accessed July 2026. [DF]

Pl@ntNet. Live statistics. my.plantnet.org. Accessed July 2026. [DF]

Ronfeldt, David. Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Societal Evolution. RAND Corporation, Paper P-7967. Santa Monica, 1996. [DF]

Ronfeldt, David. Commentary on TIMN information-technology pairings. P2P Foundation blog, 20 May 2009. [DF]

Ronfeldt, David. “Rethinking What ‘Tribes’ and ‘Networks’ Are Good For.” Substack series, various installments, 2025. [DF]

Stanford University, Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). AI Index Report 2025. Stanford, April 2025. [DF/AI-inf]

Cross-pillar and general sources

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. [DF] (Cited in project knowledge, TIMN Nodes analysis.)

Bromberger, Christian. “Football as World-View and as Ritual.” French Cultural Studies 6: 293–311, 1995. [AI-inf] (Cited in TIMN Nodes analysis.)

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt, 1957. [DF] (Cited in TIMN Nodes analysis.)

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. [DF]

Scott, Robert A. The Gothic Enterprise: A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [DF] (Cited in TIMN Nodes analysis.)

Footnotes

2

You can find Daniel on X and Greater Wrong. The two reports he’s written are https://ai-2027.com and https://ai-2040.com and he writes the AI Futures Project:

AI Futures Project

Preparing for a world with AGI

By Daniel Kokotajlo

Why this essay? Something significant shifted in our valley this week. I’m not quite sure WHY, so this essay lays out where my thinking’s at about bioregionalism as an emerging form of the next iteration of human coordination. My simple but rather bold claim is that each bioregion that can tell their story from a TIMN perspective, establishes itself as a node in the emergent global network of Mycelial Coordination.1

First a little context about the work I’m involved with in the Valley of Grace (Genadendal), Western Cape, South Africa. A small group of people came together in 2014 with a vision for the valley in which everyone thrived. With a more than 80% unemployment rate and the associated social ills that come with poverty, this seemed like a tall order. The group has changed shape over the years as people come and go, but the vision has remained consistent. Today I’m the only person left from the original group.

Over the past three years, we’ve partnered with an organization called Ranyaka Community Transformation, which is an urban planning non-profit and development agency. Through a series of community engagements we’ve mapped all 203 initiatives active in the valley and we managed to form a collaborative focussed on establishing a food forest on land made available by the Moravian Church. On the surface, this looks and feels like progress, but if I’m honest, it hasn’t exactly been plain sailing. We’ve constantly been hijacked by various groups who don’t like some aspect of the direction the community has told us they’d like to head in. In December 2025, when we thought we’d be able to conclude negotiations in what was to be the final community engagement meeting, the wheels again fell off. Some version of this pattern has repeated over the years, and I’ve heard from other bioregions that this is not uncommon. But the challenges aren’t the theme of this essay, so I won’t bore you with the (gory) details.

A few months ago, I was introduced to someone who was born in the valley but had spent most of his life elsewhere. Now that he’s retired from various corporate roles, he’s returned to the valley. As we got to know each other and trust developed, we started seeing the significant overlap between the work we’d been doing and what he wanted for the valley. More importantly, he knows the politics of the valley exceptionally well, through family members that kept him informed despite his absence. At some point I asked him whether there was perhaps a handful of (elderly) people who watch with bemusement what happens in the valley from the sidelines. In other words, are there people who know how complex the politics are and refuse to get involved in any initiatives because they don’t see any hope of getting anywhere. Turns out he did know of such a group. I suggested we meet.

That meeting took place on Friday, July 3rd, and the meeting went exceptionally well (rare for a first-time meeting with local community members). They were so inspired that we met again the very next day, and two more people joined. We then met again on Tuesday, July 7th, this time for a hike and drive through the valley. With each engagement, their excitement mounted. We had another meeting yesterday, Saturday, July 12th. This time, they’d brought a legal person with them who could advise on the formation of community cooperatives and trusts. This speed of engagement has never before happened in the valley, and these were all people I’d never met before. This is what I meant when I opened the essay saying something significant shifted in our valley.

The obvious question is, Why the sudden excitement, considering we’ve been plugging away at this for over a decade?

I believe it’s simply because we narrated the (tumultuous) history of the valley in a way that has never been told before. Using TIMN, I showed how forms of human coordination had evolved fairly precisely in the valley, summarized from extensive historical records of our valley:

• Pre-1737: The Tribal Kinship Pool - This period consisted of Khoekhoen herding and Soaqua hunting-gathering economies in the Riviersonderend range. It includes rock art, cave sites, and archaeological evidence that establish thousands of years of kinship-based coordination before European contact.

• 1737 - 1838: The Institutional Phase - Includes a long history of how a Moravian missionary established what came to be the largest human settlement at the time, outside Cape Town. Also shows how the building of a forge enabled the first form of Market to emerge with the making of hand-crafted Herrnhut knives, which entered the colonial Market from a community-led workshop and cooperative. Includes the release of 39,000 enslaved people at the Cape after slavery was abolished, many of whom came to the valley.

• 1860s - 1960s: The Rise and Slow Demise of the Market Phase - Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, British industrial goods started arriving by steamship, displacing local crafts. The Market phase begins dismantling the mission economy by price competition. Out-migration to cities begins and in 1950, the Group Areas Act forcibly removes non-white residents from their land.

• 1990s - today: The Network Phase (which really should be called something more akin to what unfolded, perhaps iNtegration Phase - Apartheid was a legislated false-tribe overlaid on the Market phase; its removal was the precondition for any real +N to become possible in the valley or the country. Mandela was released from prison in 1990, became president in 1994, and visited the valley in 1995, after which he renamed the presidential residence from Westbrooke to Genadendal. The ending of apartheid was the first time in South Africa that different races began collaborating. The TIMN sequence had been completed.

More importantly, I framed the progression as leading towards an Economics of Belonging, which transcends all forms of TIMN coordination. I made it clear that the choice facing all of us was whether we accept or reject the responsibility of making this visible to others in the valley, particularly school leavers.

This reframing of the valley’s struggles as merely the necessary baby steps to get us to the cusp of a new form of coordination that, if accomplished with integrity, could restore the valley to a destination that attracts people from all over the world.

I’ll be writing more about an Economics of Belonging in future. It’s essentially an economic system in which a community creates an institution that holds a common pool, governs how people contribute to it, and protects each member's right to draw from its output. This is the arrangement the Moravian mission economy ran for a century, the arrangement Mondragon has run at industrial scale since 1956, the arrangement Ostrom documented across centuries of surviving commons, and the arrangement the stokvel already practices in almost every South African township.2 It is old material, tested, and legible in law.

For this week, I just wanted you to know that a new narrative has very significantly and rapidly shifted the energy. We very quickly put an invitation together which we haven’t started circulating widely yet. But those who have seen it are super-inspired to get involved. You can get a sneak peek of the draft invitation here.

I don’t yet know whether this kind of narrative would be useful to other bioregions, but I suspect it might. If you’re doing any kind of bioregional work, I’d be delighted to help you craft your own TIMN narrative.

That’s all for this week.

Next week I’ll start unpacking how we’re thinking about Transformative Tourism and how we’re pitching it to national government as a strategy that can be rolled out across the country.

Until then, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

Why this essay? This is the final essay in our 10-part series of frameworks. It’s the one I’m most excited about because it makes real the theoretical groundwork I had to lay out to explain (mainly to myself) why we’re taking a very different — yet evolutionarily coherent — approach to the work we’re doing in our humble valley. The scenario I want to present hasn’t happened yet. I’ll describe it anyway, because it’s the future this whole series has been quietly working toward, with all the science to back it up so that you know I’m not smoking my socks.

It’s October 2035 and we’re sitting in a cosy meeting space inside the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK. Sir Tim Smit is convening the fourth annual Hansetag of what has come to be called the Living Commons.1 Forty-seven delegations are present. Each represents a bioregion holding its own currency, its own commons trust, and its own governance charter. None of them answers to any government, central body, or any other bioregion. What brings them together is that all of them have signed the same clearing protocol.2

At one of the long tables, a woman from the Overberg, South Africa sits with a printout in front of her. It shows a transaction that cleared three days earlier. Seven thousand units of her bioregion’s currency, backed by regenerative activity in the Valley of Grace watershed, was exchanged against forestry credits held by a cooperative in the Columbia basin.3 The clearing happened without a bank, credit card, or point-of-sale terminal and the exchange rate was set by a protocol her father helped draft in 2027. She’s twenty-one years old, and she’s excited about the new forms of human coordination models she’s been working on since she completed high school.

None of this has happened yet, but I can see this reality in the not too distant future because it’s the natural outcome of an evolutionary process already underway.

This is the closing essay in a series of frameworks for the end of normal. What I want to show is that the architecture we’ve been describing across these ten weeks has a real location, with real people living real lives. More importantly, they’re collaborating in a real global commons that already exists, even though it can’t yet be seen. By the end of this essay, you won’t be able to unsee what’s emerging.

What the essays have been building towards

Every framework in our series so far has been a piece of interpretive infrastructure. Each is a way of seeing the world, or a pattern that helps you read a situation in ways you might not have been able to read before. The obvious question, though, is where does any of this heavy theory actually connect with current reality? Is there anywhere on Earth where the six inversions, the constellation, the transvestment pathways, and the community currency issuance are all being attempted? Or is this airy-fairy theory that simply dies on the vine of “one day someone should try this”?

The reality exists, even if invisible

The good news is that what’s emerging is surprisingly impressive. Good news first, bad news to follow.

Somewhere between one hundred and two hundred bioregional and commons-based projects are operational worldwide, on every inhabited continent, and in every kind of geography.

• Mondragón in the Basque country, Spain, with eighty thousand worker-owners across two hundred and fifty enterprises.4

• Sarvodaya Shramadana in Sri Lanka, active in fifteen thousand villages.5

• Sarafu in Kenya, which and colleagues have documented in peer-reviewed work, running a genuinely non-fiat community currency across more than eighty communities and sixty thousand households.6

• Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi.7

• Regenerate Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest.8

• Kudumbashree in Kerala, India, organizing four and a half million women.9

• The Chikukwa Permaculture Project in Zimbabwe.10

• The Deccan Development Society in Telangana, India.11

• Guardians of Earth is running nine hundred and fifty-five active Nature Realms, each geofenced, each with its own community, treasury, and ecological score.12

That’s a lot of light in a lot of places, which is good news amidst all the ‘other stuff’ unfolding in our streams of system-determined content.

Here’s a spreadsheet I use just to track the largest and most visible nodes. There are many more (so apologies if I’ve not listed your particular project).

What I Learned from the Data

These examples are each inspiring in their own right, but there’s a structural finding that stopped me cold when I first spotted the pattern in the data: almost none of these projects meets all three important conditions.

1. The first condition is place. In other words, the project is bound to a real ecological geography like a watershed, a bioregion, or a landscape you can walk across. Kirkpatrick Sale laid this out in Dwellers in the Land (1985).13 A more recent paper in Planning Theory & Practice (2025), “Bioregionalism and Degrowth,” extends it into peer-reviewed contemporary work.14 Most projects meet this condition, because bioregional projects self-select for it. Check.

2. The second condition is commons. What this means is that the project holds or governs some form of commons protected from private enclosure. It could be land trusts, seed banks, cooperative ownership, indigenous territorial governance, or community forest management. The empirical foundation is Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990), which won her the Nobel in economics in 2009.15 It’s backed by forty years of case-study work to prove it wasn’t just theory. Ostrom demonstrated that networked commons can self-govern without central control across fisheries, irrigation systems, forest commons, and grazing lands. Somewhere between sixty and seventy percent of the projects on the global list meet this condition, some more robustly than others. Partial check.

3. The third condition is scaffolding. What I mean by this is that the project is held by an economic system that prices symbiotic behavior cheaper than extractive behavior.16 This is where almost every regenerative project fails, or more specifically, isn’t evolutionarily coherent. Almost every project on the list operates on the same fiat, interest-bearing, debt-backed money the rest of us operates within. As we saw in Framework 2, this monetary system encodes constant growth, which is the exact opposite of what their governance is trying to accomplish. Stated differently, their governance is symbiotic, but their money is extractive. The money wins every time, because the form of money dictates the price of every other behavior. In other words (and I’ve seen this happen over and over again) well-intentioned actors in a bioregional regenerative project inevitably resort to competitive behavior, because that’s what the money system dictates.17 Zero check.

Inter-bioregional extraction and competition

A huge penny-dropping moment arrived when I realized that bioregions are currently competing against each other, despite the rhetoric of collaboration in a global commons. This is a big deal.

Every bioregional project competes for the same pool of philanthropic capital, grant funding, impact investment, and donor attention. They have to, because there is no other substrate to draw from. Two regenerative projects in adjacent watersheds end up pitching the same foundations and courting the same wealth holders. Their governance charters call for collaboration, but their funding realities pit them against each other for survival. Our monetary system (or the Market form of coordination) sets the price of every other behavior. Right now, for a bioregional project, that price is competition against its natural allies.

The Network form is the collaborative coordination architecture I’ve been describing across these ten weeks. It’s the +N in Ronfeldt’s TIMN shorthand. Bioregional projects cannot instantiate the Network form while they’re still trapped inside Market-form competition for extractive-economy resources. The substrate holds them in the form the substrate was built for.

OK, that’s the bad news, but the good news is I see a way through this, despite how challenging it might appear to introduce a bioregional currency. It’s grounded in the observation that the bioregional movement has built the nodes, but it has yet to build the hyphae between them.

Hyphae are the thin white threads of fungal mycelium that carry information and nutrients across a forest floor. In the mature forest we discussed in Framework 5, the trees are the nodes, and the hyphae are what keeps the forest healthy. Without the hyphae, you have a clump of trees, each one competing for its own light and nutrients. With the hyphae, you have a coordinated system that redistributes surplus to where it’s needed.

Bioregional and regenerative projects worldwide today are a clump of trees. What’s missing is what makes them a forest, and Sir Tim Smit left us a clue about how we address this in the opening 2035 scene when he convened ‘the fourth annual Hansetag.’

The Hanseatic Hyphae

Between roughly 1358 and 1669, seventy to a hundred and seventy German-speaking trading cities coordinated their commerce, their diplomacy, and their collective defense without ever forming a state.18 They had no permanent officials, no central treasury, no standing army, and no shared coinage. What they had was a shared protocol:

• Trade privileges collectively negotiated.

• Dispute resolution processes agreed in common.

• A credible threat of exclusion if a member city violated the code.

The economic historians Ewert and Selzer describe the League as coordinating through “trust, reputation and reciprocal relations.” It held together for three centuries, which is longer than most modern nations have existed.19

The reason the Hanseatic League eventually fell apart is more useful to us than what they accomplished. The League held together as long as belonging was more profitable than leaving. When territorial states offered individual cities and better terms for going it alone, the incentive structure flipped on its head. The last Hansetag convention attracted only nine cities from the initial hundred cities or so. Stated differently, that’s a 90% rejection rate of a coordination form that worked exceptionally well… until it didn’t. Keep that in mind when you observe the rising rejection rate of the current Market form of coordination, represented by rising populist movements globally.

The peer-reviewed research that comes closest to describing what a bioregional Hansa would look like is Kostakis, Niaros, Dafermos and ’ 2015 paper in Futures, on what they call cosmo-localism: globally shared design commons combined with locally rooted production.20 The phrase cosmo-localism may sound academic, but the essense is the same as the Hanseatic League: shared protocols across autonomous nodes, coordinated without central control.

The architecture I’ve been describing over the past ten weeks is Hanseatic in shape, though it will need something the Hansa didn’t have: a normative code strong enough to hold when the material return from participation fluctuates. The Benedictines managed this for fifteen hundred years.21 The Cistercians nearly nine hundred.22 The Quakers roughly three hundred and seventy (so far).23 All of them maintained their forms of coordination despite challenging terms of what ‘belonging’ meant.

If the emerging bioregional nodes can achieve any form of coherence during the Decade of Dramatic Disruption (2026-2035), it will be because it holds elements of both Hanseatic coordination architecture and monastic normative durability.

The Connective Tissue

OK, let’s wrap this up with where I see this (potentially) going and why our humble valley may play a (somewhat important) role.

The research has reached its limits. Every component of the Emancipation Architecture already has its peer-reviewed foundations and in this essay I’ve done my best to lay out the historical precedents that could provide useful examples. What the literature doesn’t yet have, and cannot have until someone develops it, is the empirical evidence of an integrated system running as a new reality that conclusively shows the old is obsolete.24 This would include, as a minimum, demonstrating a multi-bioregion currency clearing, a commons trust holding land under regenerative mandate while a bioregional currency issues against verifiable ecological capacity, a Regenerative Participation Income seeded broadly enough to test whether the mechanism does what the theory says it does, and transvestment pathways carrying real capital from extractive holdings into commons form at scale. 😮

That evidence can only come from a working example, and it’s no small thing to accomplish.

This is why, in my humble opinion, the Valley of Grace might matter at a level beyond what we’re trying to do within the local community. What we’re hoping to accomplish is designed, from the outset, to generate the empirical data the peer-reviewed literature has been lacking. There’s a 2024 paper that specifically named what’s missing: concrete monetary and distributional proposals, empirically tested at scale.25 The Valley of Grace is a first attempt at exactly that. When the results come in, whether they confirm the design or force revisions, they’ll be primary data the next generation of ecological economics work is built on. I hope other bioregions will join us.

Yes, but how?

I’ve been following many Web 3, crypto, and decentralized governance experiments for more than a decade. One of them is Guardians of Earth (GoE). I must confess that I didn’t fully appreciate the role they might play in how this is all unfolding… until I created a Valley of Grace Realm on their platform. Another penny-dropping moment.

GoE runs a platform of 955 active Nature Realms globally.26 Each Realm is a geofenced piece of land with its own community, its own treasury of BioCultural Units, its own BioScore composite ecological health metric, and its own governance layer. The BioScore is not yet the ecological backing a full bioregional currency requires, though it’s the closest operational approximation I’ve seen. It gives ecological health a public, verifiable, comparable single number that means exactly the same thing between different bioregions. In other words, BioCultural Units are the clearing protocol, which I mentioned in the opening scene.

What GoE have developed matters because the BioScore is where a bioregion’s ecological health becomes publicly legible. When every bioregion in the table I shared earlier register as Realms, their ecological health becomes publicly legible. The exchange of BioCultural Units between Realms provides an interim protocol for inter-node exchange of nutrients (lessons learned) while the full bioregional currency architecture is being built.

This is the missing connective tissue. It’s the trellis on which the full clearing protocol Tim Smit’s 2035 convening depends on learns to grow. Between now and 2035, GoE gives the network somewhere to practice.

What The Valley of Grace Represents

As yet another in the emerging collection of bioregional nodes, Valley of Grace is insignificant. There are far more impressive nodes elsewhere. However, as I explained earlier, the research doesn’t yet have data on currencies backed by verifiable ecological capacity within a watershed, specifically clearing between nodes. This is how a forest measures overall health, and we have no global mechanism that can remotely match a natural system that measures and tracks system health the way forest hyphae does. This ecosystem would include, as a minimum:

• A Regenerative Participation Income paid in that currency to community members who engage in verifiable regenerative activity. Soil restoration, water stewardship, community care work, elder care, or childcare are all qualifying activities. That’s the broad-base seeding mechanism from Framework 6, and it’s genuinely novel territory.

• A Bioregional Commons Trust holding land in perpetuity, governed by a tripartite board no single party can capture. That’s the commons node in the constellation from Framework 7. Ostrom’s design principles predict this can work. Valley of Grace tests it under contemporary Southern African legal conditions.

• Transvestment Commitments from wealth holders converting extractive holdings into commons-backed capital. That’s Framework 8. The peer-reviewed literature on divestment is substantial. The literature on transvestment is essentially non-existent, because transvestment barely exists yet as a documented phenomenon at scale.

• An eighteen-month worldview and conceptual-repertoire phase before any currency is issued, because a substrate change (Material to Mycelial) without a consciousness change (Material to Mycelial) collapses back into the substrate it came from. That’s the developmental substrate this series has been building all the way through.

• Ecological Verification via the Guardians of Earth platform, which makes the valley’s ecological health publicly measurable and comparable to other Nature Realms globally. This is the beginning of the clearing infrastructure the 2035 Hansetag depends on. It also gives the peer-reviewed researchers of 2030 something they cannot generate for themselves from behind a desk: comparable, longitudinal, community-verified ecological and economic data from a live implementation.

If Valley of Grace works the way I can see it working, the model can be transferred to other bioregions, without first having to implement individual bioregional currencies. If it doesn’t work, we’ll learn something specific about why, and we’ll adjust. Either way, the next round of evolutionary learning will be built on evidence that doesn’t currently exist.

So What?

If you’ve followed this series of essays, you now have a worldview healthy enough to navigate the transition the Decade of Dramatic Disruption brings. You may not have all the answers yet, and that’s OK, because nobody does. But what you can now do is read a situation through an evolutionarily coherent lens, which you may not have been able to do three months ago.

• You can see the substrate below the surface and you can see how the current system determines behavior.

• You can distinguish beween nodes (rah-rah-regen projects) and hyphae (the connective tissue enabling flow).

• You can spot a divestment story where previously you might have heard a solution.

• You can name a coercion phase or mechanism when it appears on your radar.

• You can spot an alpha window when it opens, and you know it won’t be long before it closes.

That’s what this series has been for. The essays were the vehicle, but the worldview beneath it is the much more valuable outcome you now hold (with reverence).

Step Through the Threshold

There’s only a single, simple, significant invitation: Name the bioregion you live in.

That’s it.

• Name the watershed.

• Learn its boundaries.

• Find out where the water in your tap comes from and where it goes to.

• Learn what grows there before anyone built a road or installed plumbing.

• Learn who else lives there, what commons already exist, and who governs what happens in the commons.

Every bioregional project in the table above started with someone doing just this. Someone who lived in a place and became curious about what that place actually represented. From that curiosity, possibilities blossomed. And if you’re already active in a bioregion, register it on https://www.guardiansofearth.io/ so we can start sharing nutrients.

I don’t know whether Valley of Grace will produce meaningful operational results within this decade.

I also don’t know whether other bioregional practitioners will start sharing nutrients globally.

What I do know is that a coordination form is attempting to prolong the old, tired and obsolete Market form. Whether the transcendent Network form takes shape before it can be crushed is entirely up to whatever you and I do next.

That’s all for this week, and for this entire series of theory.

What comes next is hands-in-the soil application.

Until then, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

21

Benedictine monasteries operate as a highly effective, decentralized form of coordination based on the Rule of Saint Benedict. Rather than a rigid top-down hierarchy, the movement unites hundreds of autonomous abbeys globally through shared cultural, operational, and spiritual frameworks. See ’s exceptional 2024 timeless essay:

The Sacred Images Project

Benedictine Empire - how the Holy Rule conquered Europe

In today’s post for all subscribers, I thought we could take a closer look at the development…

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2 years ago · 35 likes · 3 comments · Hilary White

Why this essay? I’m super-excited to finally reveal why it was important to lay out the ten frameworks that ground how a Threshold Guide thinks. This is an introductory essay to the next series, which will look at patronage throughout history and propose a new form relevant to today, called Mycelial Patronage. This is how the (r)evolution will be funded.

In the 1460s, Cosimo de’ Medici gave Marsilio Ficino a villa and a stack of Greek manuscripts. Medici had just one specific request: translate Plato into Latin. Over the next two decades spent in the villa, Ficino reimagined European intellectual life. He delivered something priceless: a prestige system the wealthy family of bankers commanded because they had built it.1 When the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1494, the regime fell, but the Renaissance itself kept going. It had already been embedded in printed texts circulating across Europe, and it kept circulating for two centuries after the family lost political power.

At the same time, in Augsburg, the Fuggers were richer than the Medici.2 Jakob Fugger financed emperors. He built the Fuggerei, sixty-seven houses of social housing still standing today, five hundred years later. He patronized humanists and artists. He also organized the collection of indulgence revenues for the Archbishop of Mainz. A Fugger agent literally held the key to the indulgence chest. When Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door at Wittenberg in 1517, the Fuggers chose to oppose the Reformation because their position felt threatened. That choice cost them their legacy and the family had to end their profitable financial deals with the Pope.

The point is simply that of these two banking dynasties, one is remembered as a builder of what came next, and the other family desperately clung to a system that was ending. The Medici’s identity was linked to the eventual spread of the European Renaissance. The Fuggers’ wealth depended on the old order holding. A combination of unpaid royal debts and expensive wars slowly destroyed the family’s vast wealth over the next century.

My rather simple claim is that we’re at a similar moment in history and we will see some wealthy families clinging to what’s ending, just like the Fuggers did. There will also be wealthy families who want to be remembered as architects of the emergent. If the emerging order is bioregional, distributed, and organized the way a forest floor organizes nutrient exchange, then the next question is: what does mycelial patronage look like? Who will take a Medici position and who will take a Fugger position in a transition that this time is global?

The extensive research I’ve been doing has sent me down rabbit holes of every meaningful civilizational reconstruction initiatives I can find:

• The Benedictine network after the collapse of Rome,

• The Abbasid translation movement,

• The Carolingian Renaissance,

• The medieval universities,

• The Cistercians,

• The Jesuits, and

• The Hanseatic League.

Each of these historical cases span about a thousand years and half a dozen civilizations. Instead of a pure historical escavation, I was interested in unearthing the consistent patterns across all of them, and that’s what the next series of essays will lay out.

There are three features that show up, that I believe are important today:

1. First, the patron was constitutively invested. By which I mean their identity and position in the emerging order depended on the reform succeeding. The Medici needed the Platonic revival because it gave them cultural authority no amount of banking could secure on its own. Charlemagne needed monastic schools because his empire relied on written documents and he needed literate administrators who could read them across all the provinces. The investment became the governing apparatus, leading to a meaningful legacy for the patron. Where the patronage was decorative (the Fuggers patronizing humanists while collecting indulgence revenues), it dissolved the moment the world shifted.

2. Second, the patron was embedded in the emerging order. Stated differently, their assets were denominated in the system that was forming. The Carolingian prince-bishops held institutional and political assets anchored in the new Christian governance infrastructure. The Florentine merchant-humanists sat inside the emerging commercial order with liquid wealth and civic power they controlled directly. Where the patron’s assets were anchored in the declining system (the Fuggers, or the late Roman senatorial aristocracy), the patron went down with it. Boethius served the Ostrogothic court and was ultimaterly executed by it. Cassiodorus chose to leave the court, founded a monastery, and transferred classical learning into the substrate that survived. The point is that the side a wealthy family chooses to support during moments of civilizational resets matters signficiantly when legacy is being considered.3

3. Third, there was a replication mechanism that survived the founder. As an example, the Rule of St Benedict was a portable operating system. It was a complete specification of daily order, authority, labor, and reading that could be instantiated at any monastery without reference to a central headquarters. When the Carolingian empire fragmented after 843 and central authority collapsed. However, the network survived because every household had been taught the code. There was no single point of failure. The Cistercians engineered this deliberately with their Charter of Charity: an annual General Chapter, a filiation system linking every daughter house back to its mother house, annual visitation, and local autonomy within enforced translocal standards. The medieval university achieved the same thing through the ius ubique docendi, the right to teach anywhere in Christendom without re-examination. A degree from Bologna was honored in Paris, which was honored in Oxford. Contrast Roger Bacon, who poured a million words into the Opus Majus for a single pope. When Clement IV died in 1268, the entire architecture of support died with him, and Bacon was silenced by his own order.

I know I’m referencing a ton of history here. I’m simply mentioning it all to show that these three features (constitutive investment, embedding in the emerging order, and a replication mechanism) are present in every successful historical case I’ve found. More importantly, they’re absent in every failure, which means there’s a valuable lesson for us.

What struck me as I worked through the research is that every form of patronage that carried all three features, across the full historical record, was hierarchical. There was a patron above and a project below. Capital flowed downward through a relationship of dependency, however enlightened the dependency may have been. This didn’t particularly surprise me, given that hierarchy is an outcome of Material Consciousness, the pattern we’ve seen for the past 12,000 years. But with the emergence of Mycelial Consciousness as part of the next Major Evolutionary Transition, I couldn’t help wondering what form of patronage could flip that hierarchical trend.

This is why the ten frameworks had to lay a solid foundation on which we can change the question about how the (r)evolution will be funded by structurally embedding patronage in the emerging order.

If the emerging order is mycelial (Framework 5), if coordination is a property of the substrate (Frameworks 1, 2, and 3), if the structural inversions reverse the direction of value flow (Framework 6), and if the commons trust and bioregional currency are the replication mechanisms for this transition (Frameworks 7 and 8), then patronage in the emerging order cannot flow downward from an apex. The substrate must distribute the patronage function the way a forest floor distributes nutrients. In other words, capital enters the substrate and becomes the substrate. The commons trust holds it in perpetuity, the bioregional currency circulates it, and the clearing layer connects one bioregion’s substrate to another’s.

I’m calling this Mycelial Patronage, and I believe the term has evolutionary significance. By that I mean this form of patronage would have made no sense during a period of Material Consciousness, but that it does make sense at the moment of a potential momentous leap to a new form of human coordination.4 The patron’s capital does what the Medici’s did: it becomes constitutive of the emerging order. And it does what the Benedictine Rule did: it replicates without a central node. What it does for the first time is dissolve the hierarchy. Capital that enters a bioregional commons trust through transvestment is placed into a structure where governance belongs to the bioregion, where the returns are ecological and social, and where the replication mechanism is the network itself. The patron who takes this position has done something no Medici ever did: surrendered control of the capital to the substrate it funds, and gained standing in the emerging order precisely because they surrendered it.5

The next series of essays will explore this territory. We’ll go into detail of the historical cases. We’ll look at the structural conditions that separated the Medici position from the Fugger position across a thousand years. And we’ll dive into the question of what happens when those conditions are met inside a substrate that is, for the first time in human history, designed to distribute the patronage function across a living network.

One final point: Every historical case of durable multi-scale patronage I can find operated at smaller, more homogeneous scales than what the bioregional transition requires. The Quakers held coherence through dense normative agreement at the scale of thousands of people. The Hanseatic League maintained coherence through shared commercial interest across a region. The Jesuits managed global coherence through formation and obedience within a self-selected religious order. None of them achieved coherence across the heterogeneous, non-voluntary, multi-million-person scale that a network of bioregions would need. The historical record says this kind of distributed coherence is possible in principle. That said, there is no clean precedent at the scale the work demands. We’ve also never before seen the emergence of Mycelial Consciousness at the scale I’m witnessing. That’s what makes me quietly confident that the time is right.

The Medici gave Ficino a villa, some manuscripts, and a bunch of cash that made no material impact to their financial holdings. What they received back was the emergence of an entirely new world. The Fuggers gave the Archbishop of Mainz a loan and got back the Reformation, arriving uninvited at their own front door. One family’s capital was oriented toward the world that was forming. The other’s was locked into the world that was ending.

That’s the space we’ll play in over the next few weeks.

Until then, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

Why this essay? In Framework 8, we walked through transvestment, which is the act of moving accumulated wealth out of the system that produced it and into commons that cannot be seized. The essay described the 2022 Patagonia transfer, and explained what it took for that family to cross the threshold. What it didn’t address is the timing question. Transvestment as a category has been theoretically available for decades. Why now? What about this precise moment makes transvestment and the work of a Threshold Guide urgent? That’s what this essay answers. We’ll explore the structural window that opens during the collapse of a system. That window opened when the Strait of Hormuz closed in March 2026. It won’t stay open.

The story so far

We’re building an argument over ten frameworks, and we’ve covered eight so far:

• Framework 1 introduced the S-shaped growth curve to show how living systems grow first slowly, then quickly, then slowly, just as the human species is experiencing now.

• Framework 2 showed that money is an instrument of coercion shaped by those who issue it.

• Framework 3 examined how the money system is threatening those who built success and have accumulated wealth.

• Framework 4 explained how the required human cognition and technology capable of birthing an alternative are emerging in our lifetime.

• Framework 5 looked at mature forests as the living example of distributed coordination at scale.

• The six inversions in Framework 6 showed what a monetary system designed for life would look like across each of its six features.

• The constellation covered in Framework 7 showed the structure that avoids triggering the existing architecture, which will want to suppress it.

• Framework 8 introduced the conversion of accumulated wealth out of the existing system into commons that cannot be seized, and walked through what it takes to cross that threshold.

What we need to address now is when this systemic transvestment happens, and why the timing has never been more ideal for the system to change in ways that are beyond even the wildest prosocial dreams.

Setting the Scene: Hawarden, Iowa, October 1932

It’s October 1932 and upwards of 30 trains a day pass through the town, connecting Hawarden to Sioux City, IA, and Iroquois, SD. The town has just over two thousand inhabitants and the First National Bank of Hawarden is open, but times are tough. Half the merchants on Central Avenue carry customer debts they no longer expect to collect. Charles Zylstra, the high school principal, has been thinking about a German economist we’ve already discovered, whose book has just been translated into English. Silvio Gesell died in 1930 and left behind a simple idea: money that loses a fraction of its value at regular intervals will circulate faster, because nobody will want to hold onto it.1

Zylstra spent months convincing the Hawarden merchants to try it. Most eventually agreed, but only because of how dire the situation was. When the Great Depression of the 1930’s hit, everyone felt that they were at a point of no return. There was no money and no jobs. It was hard for most people to buy even the basic necessities; prices were low, but people couldn’t afford to go to the store. So the town issued three hundred pieces of paper, each printed with a serial number and a value of ONE DOLLAR:

On the back of each was a grid of thirty-six small boxes. With each transaction, the person handing the scrip over had to affix a three-cent stamp into the next available box. When all thirty-six boxes were filled, the City redeemed the scrip for a regular dollar. The math worked out almost exactly: thirty-six stamps at three cents each is $1.08. The dollar redeemed the scrip and the eight cents covered printing costs.2

The first $300 of Hawarden scrip generated $10,800 of transactions before they were redeemed. Each scrip dollar changed hands thirty-six times. A piece of paper issued by the community moved through the town’s grocery counters, hardware stores, feed lots, and lumber yards thirty-six times because nobody wanted to be the one holding it when the next stamp came due.3

Word spread quickly. Yale’s Irving Fisher came to Hawarden in person to see what the fuss was about. He called the scrip “hot money” that burned the pocket of every person holding it. Pathé sent a film crew. Liberty and Collier’s wrote it up. Chase Manhattan asked for a specimen for its collection of unusual money. By February 1933, Zylstra had piloted a bill through the Iowa State Legislature giving all ninety-nine counties the right to issue stamp scrip. By the spring of 1933, more than a hundred American towns were running variants of the same idea.4

In those same months, across the Atlantic, the Reichstag burned and the Enabling Act passed. Hitler held dictatorial power within ten weeks of taking office. By the autumn of that same year, the Austrian central bank had shut The Miracle of Wörgl down. By the autumn of the following year, Roosevelt’s New Deal had absorbed the scrip movement in the United States and the experiments had quietly faded from the front pages.5

In those eighteen months, three structures took root in circumstances that didn’t exist before the arrival of The Great Depression. One was authoritarian consolidation; one was centralized democratic reform; and another was distributed, local, place-based, below the radar emergence. The third didn’t survive at scale, while the first two did. This simple outcome provides rich lessons for the Decade of Dramatic Disruption we’re currently in (2026-2035).6

Why it’s important to track these early money experiments

Again, I understand that discussions about monetary systems can fry the brain cells. This is important, though, and here’s why…

As you no doubt know, most activists today focus their energy on ecological crises: carbon in the atmosphere, plastics in the oceans, toxins in our food, topsoil washing off fields, plummeting fertility rates, species disappearing, and a whole host of other metacrisis-related symptoms. These concerns are entirely valid, and this summer’s heat wave across Europe makes this angle of debate much more visceral. However, what gets less attention (because it’s less visible) is the system itself within which all human activity takes place and which leads to the ecological concerns.

Donella Meadows, in her 2008 book, Thinking in Systems — A Primer, said, in essence, that a system determines behavior.7 Stated differently: all our social systems (designed for the steep part of the S-curve) produce steep-curve behavior. Contrary to what most people believe, this isn’t ‘human nature.’ It’s simply a system determining behavior. This system includes the form of money we use (discussed in detail in Framework 2), and until we understand how much this system determines our behavior, any discussion exclusively about the human impact on environment is a waste of time. Sorry.

Philip Zimbardo (1933-2024), who was best known for his controversial 1971 study, the Stanford Prison Experiment, had another way of saying the same thing. The study, intended to examine the psychological experiences of imprisonment, revealed the shocking extent to which circumstances (the system) can alter individual behavior. Here’s the brutal truth he discovered:

In other words, the behavioral change activists long for is a pipe dream… until we acknowledge the system within which the behavior takes place.

That’s why we’ve spent so much understanding this (money) system and what happens when attempts are made to reset the money system itself.

My argument is that the monetary architecture is a more immediate threat than any ecological threat, and that changes to this architecture are coming at us faster than climate is changing. A Threshold Guide pays attention to this invisible shift and observes an opportunity.

Don’t believe me that money shifts quicker than climate does? Neither did those living through the heyday of the 1920s.8 When the Great Depression started that monetary system reset between 1929 and 1933, the daily life of an ordinary household collapsed within three or four years. Banks closed, making savings disappear overnight. Mortgages were called in. By 1932, American farms were being foreclosed at the rate of around two hundred a day, and the Dust Bowl that became iconic was the ecological consequence of an economic collapse that drove farmers to plow land that should never have been plowed. The causation ran from the monetary system outward, and the ecology suffered.

History rhymes.

We’re facing exactly the same pattern today, with the same sequence of causation. As I’ve laid out here and here, the global monetary system is currently being reset. Whatever ultimately replaces it will shape what is possible in every other domain, including the ecological one.

There is absolutely no way we can stop this planned reset. What we can do instead is understand what Nature does when a systemic shock arrives. We’ll use a forest fire as an example of such a shock.9

Panarchy Theory, or what ecologists learned about forest fires

In 2001, the Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling published a paper that turned out to be one of the more useful pieces of systems theory of the last fifty years, at least in my not so humble opinion.10 He was trying to describe what actually happens when a complex system like a forest, a fishery, or an economy experiences collapse. He’d noticed that the standard story (system grows, system peaks, system collapses, system rebuilds) skipped over the most interesting part of the cycle, which is what happens in the gap between collapse and rebuilding.

Holling broke the cycle into four phases:

1. The growth phase, where the system is exploiting available resources, which he called r.

2. The consolidation phase, where the system has matured and is locking in its structure, which he called K.

3. The release phase, where the structure breaks down, which he called Omega.

4. And the reorganization phase, where new structures can take root, which he called Alpha.

Most of the cycle is predictable: growth follows recognizable patterns and consolidation produces predictable, standard ideas that can be anticipated. Collapse, however — if and when you can see it coming — sends out weak signals of something truly novel emerging. However, the Alpha phase is the one that determines what comes next. It is brief, confusing, volatile, and the only window during which structures that were locked out by the previous K phase could establish themselves.

This is the moment when the forest canopy has entirely burned away and sunlight reaches the forest floor for the first time in decades. Seeds that have lain dormant in the soil can suddenly germinate. Many of those seeds will die, but some will take root. The ones that take root could become the next K phase. They will lock the next system in place by closing the canopy again. And for the next several decades, no other forest floor species will get to see the sunlight.11

A forest after a fire looks like death, chaos, and destruction, but there’s something deeper at work: selection. What grows back is whatever was already there as seed, root, or rhizome when the shock reset whatever was there. The Alpha Window is a short, unstable moment, that’s consequential out of all proportion to its duration. The Day of Dramatic Disruption (DDD) opens the seed bank of options and selects from whatever has been quietly waiting for the moment.12 Which means, the type of seeds lying around matters enormously.

The 1930s as an Alpha Window

The 1929 crash — followed in 1931 by the Credit-Anstalt collapse in Austria, the run on the Reichsbank in Germany, the British exit from the gold standard, and a cascade of bank failures across central Europe — produced an Omega phase across the industrialized world. This is the necessary release phase, where the structure breaks down. By 1932, the equivalent of the forest canopy had been burned away globally: US unemployment was around 24 percent, industrial production had halved, international trade had collapsed by two thirds, and twelve thousand American banks had failed.

The Alpha Window opened on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, the catastrophic day the Wall Street Crash began, and the catalyst for the Great Depression that followed (the reorganization phase).

What competed for the light, during that reorganization phase, were architectures with very different design assumptions about money, work, ownership, and political authority. We tend to remember the period as two distinct stories: the New Deal in the United States (market-regulated capitalism), and fascism in Germany (state-directed capitalism). History records that those were the only available options competing. But the fuller picture is that there were three categories of architectures germinating simultaneously, and it’s worth quickly comparing them:

Three Historical Reset Architectures

The most important observation about the architectures that followed, is that they required a globally significant event to trigger them. World War 1 was the trigger, closely followed by World War 2 (just in case).13

Today’s equivalent globally significant trigger is Hormuz. It may not look like it today, but that’s only because the true consequences will only be felt 12-18 months from the date of closure. WW3 is non-military. It is supply chain closure (and there will be more to come if Hormuz proves to be inadequate).

1. Architecture one: Authoritarian consolidation through state command of the monetary and industrial system. Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, and Imperial Japan all took shape inside this Alpha Window. The Reichstag Fire happened on February 27, 1933. The Enabling Act passed March 23, 1933. Hitler held dictatorial power within ten weeks of becoming Chancellor. The seeds for that consolidation were planted in the National Socialist organizing of the previous decade. When the fire came through, they were ready.14

2. Architecture two: Centralized democratic reform through national fiscal and regulatory intervention. This was the New Deal in the United States, the Popular Front in France, the Swedish Social Democratic model under Per Albin Hansson. These seeds were planted in the progressive reform tradition of the 1900s and 1910s. By March 1933, FDR had declared a bank holiday, passed the Emergency Banking Act, and begun the legislative cascade that would produce Social Security, Glass-Steagall, the FDIC, the SEC, the CCC, and the WPA. The architecture consolidated within five years.15

3. Architecture three: distributed, place-based, locally organized economic structures. This was the scrip movement in the United States; The Miracle of Wörgl; the Mondragón cooperative tradition, whose roots reach into this period through Father Arizmendiarrieta’s formation; the Scandinavian cooperative federations; the kibbutzim in Mandatory Palestine, founded earlier but consolidating institutionally in this window; the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day in 1933. These were seeds already in the ground. They germinated and produced real structures.

This third architecture didn’t consolidate as rapidly or at the scale of the first two. Wörgl was shut down by the Austrian central bank in September 1933. The scrip movement in the US was absorbed into the New Deal and had quietly faded by 1934. The cooperative movements that did survive, including Mondragón and the kibbutzim, survived as enclaves inside the architectures that took the window. The seeds were real, the sunlight was real, but what the third architecture lacked, in 1933, was the structural infrastructure to scale before the canopy closed.

By 1939, the window had slammed shut. The two architectures that closed it were authoritarian consolidation and centralized democratic reform. Each was a different answer to the same Omega phase. Each was a different answer to the question of who controls money, and through it, work, ownership, and the conditions of daily life. The seeds of the third architecture remained in the ground for another ninety years.

The 2030s Alpha Window

On March 2, 2026, the Strait of Hormuz closed… and our Alpha Window opened.

What is racing for the sunlight, this time, is four very different architectures. Three of them are pre-built and have been waiting in the wings for some time:

1. US private stablecoin architecture16

2. China’s e-CNY and the mBridge cross-border settlement network17

3. The BIS unified ledger, formalized through Project Agorá18

The fourth is the work we’ve been describing across this series.

All three pre-built architectures are now operational at some scale. All three are racing to capture the Alpha Window. What they share is the operating logic of the system that is fracturing. The currency in each is backed by sovereign debt, with all the growth pressure that implies. The issuance pathway in each is hierarchical, with the central bank or its private substitute at the top. The growth instruction we traced in Framework 2 sits inside all three, encoded at the substrate, with better technology and tighter surveillance than the system they are replacing. The seeds in the ground are not new species. They are the same species with sharper teeth.

The fourth architecture is bioregional currencies backed by ecological and labor capacity; commons trusts holding inalienable land; and cooperative enterprises operating under regenerative mandates. A constellation of small entities at three nested scales, with no single throat to choke. This is the architecture whose seeds were in the ground in 1932 in Hawarden and Wörgl and the early kibbutzim, and whose seeds didn’t consolidate in time. The structural infrastructure wasn’t quite ready. The collective consciousness required for acceptance at scale wasn’t yet fully developed.

This time, it might be. That is the work of a Threshold Guide.

What this asks of the Threshold Guide

None of us, except for a few exceptions, will be designing a commons trust, or implementing new monetary systems, so that’s not the ask.

The first ask is just to see the window. The cascading consequences from Hormuz will unfold as policy mistakes, blame will fall on the usual political enemies, and markets will be discussed as if their behavior were independent of the architecture underpinning them. What the Threshold Guide can see, and what most people cannot, is that the architecture itself is at stake, and what consolidates next is being decided right now.

The second ask is patience with the germination process. The alternative architecture we’ve been describing isn’t currently a well-defined option. Most of the structural pieces are still being built. The Valley of Grace prototype, which next week’s Framework 10 will walk through, is one site among what will need to be many. In the meantime, the work is to keep the conversation open, to keep the language available, to make sure that the people you guide will recognize the fourth architecture when they encounter it. Because they will encounter it. The window is now open.

The third ask is that you stop waiting and wondering. The architectures that emerged from The Great Depression took root because organizers had been working on them for years before the window opened. The Nazi Party had been organizing since 1920, and the New Deal team had been drafting reform legislation in the Brain Trust through the 1920s. The cooperatives that survived were the ones whose institutional infrastructure had been built in the 1910s and 20s. The window doesn’t reward those who start building when the wildfire comes raging through; it rewards those whose seeds are already in the ground.

That’s all for this week.

Next week, in Framework 10, we’ll close this series, which I know has been tough going intellectually (especially for me as I attempt to lay this out as best I can). We’ve spent nine essays building the conceptual architecture of how a Threshold Guide thinks about money, coercion, growth, and the structural transition of the system we’re currently inside and which is dictating our behavior. Framework 10 will take the architecture to a real place: The Valley of Grace, a rural bioregion in the Western Cape of South Africa, with twenty-five thousand people, low formal employment, deep indigenous knowledge traditions, and an economy that already operates partially outside the formal monetary system. It’s where my daughter and I call home, and it’s one of the places where the fourth architecture is being seeded. I’ll walk through what’s being built here, why we’re doing what we do, what’s been learned so far, and what it would take to make the prototype reproducible across other bioregions.

Until then, remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

6

My claim is that the start of the Decade of Dramatic Disruption will be recorded in history books as commencing on March 2nd, 2026, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz:

Why this essay? My claim is that in order to fully understand AI, the longer arc of cognitive evolution also needs to be considered. This essay presents source material, structural arguments, and key evidence across four themes relevant to AI within the context of late-stage civilization. I guarantee it’s an entirely different angle to any AI-related conversation you may be having now. It’s also the foundational understanding that anchors a Threshold Guide as we navigate the Decade of Dramatic Disruption (2026-2035).

Setting the Scene

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in how humans use information technology.1 I was introduced to computers when my father brought home a Commodore 64 in my final school year, way back in 1984.

I was introduced to coding when I completed a COBOL coding course in 1987.2 My very first formal employment (with Coopers & Lybrand, now PWC) was to develop the first electronic billing system for the Witwatersrand Regional Services Council in Johannesburg in 1988. Ten years later, in Washington DC, I directed the implementation of Iridium’s billing system across North and South America during deployment of the world’s first global satellite telephony network, long before Musk started fantasizing about Mars.3 This was my real-world introduction to what I’d eventually come to understand as the Noosphere.4

In 2000 I started learning about website publishing and I registered my first domain name in 2003 as a side hustle. My objective was to get a three-letter phrase (WW3) to the top of Google’s search results, which I accomplished in just six months. What I hadn’t fully appreciated is how much I would learn about the link between information technology and human cognition, meaning I learned how a simple website can directly shape someone’s thinking.

For many years, the site remained in positions 1 and 2 on Google, ahead of Wikipedia’s listing on the same topic. I eventually sold the site in 2006, and the buyer continues to earn revenue from it twenty years later, almost entirely unchanged from the original version.5

In 2004, I started what was to become a 2-year sabbatical, during which I dived deep into the world of cognitive evolution.6 This was a field I had no idea even existed, but in hindsight my early career in information technology laid a foundation for what has remained central to my thinking today: the evolution of human cognition and coordination. Part of that journey led me down the collapsology path, in which I learned about the cycles of civilization.7

I mention all of this as important context for what I’m going to say about AI. The short version is that I’m neither techno-optimist nor refusenik. Rather, my approach to understanding AI is:

1. Where the tool sits in a longer arc of cognitive evolution;

2. How and why institutions in our late-stage globalized society use the tool;

3. How the tool will evolve to support future human coordination.

OK, that’s a pretty tall order, so let’s tackle this as an introduction to four major themes, each of which I’ll unpack in future essays, provided you’re interested.

The four themes are:

• The Evolution of Social Tools and Cognition: the trend observed over 3.5 million years of human development

• Retail and Wholesale AI: the distinction between how individuals and institutions use the same tool

• The AI Hype Cycle: observations about pre- and post-bubble developments

• The Future of AI in the Context of Human Coordination: or what might come after the invisible hand of the market

(Drop a comment and tell me which theme you’re most curious about so I know what to write about next.)

Ready?

Theme 1: The Evolution of Social Tools and Cognition

A Major Evolutionary Transition in Cognition (MET) is a reorganization of life that changes how we store information, how we transmit knowledge, and how we organize human life. Stated differently, we establish new ways of perceiving our surroundings, organizing meaning, and coordinating activities in response to the meaning we come up with.

Think of each MET as a giant leap the human species had to take to get us to where we are today. There have been four giant leaps over the past 3.5 million years and each was intimately linked to a new class of external tool. Each tool progressively changed what could be perceived and coordinated.

There is a fifth MET emerging now, and this is where AI enters the scene, so let’s look at them all together so we can see the pattern. I am grateful to , whose 2021 book, Emerging World: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Future of Humanity, helped me produce the following summary:8

Notice how each tool externalizes a function the biological body previously performed:

• Oral language and ritual externalized how we shared knowledge, where we previously learned by copying (miming) simple actions, without the need for detailed instruction.

• Written language externalized how we remembered, where we previously had to rely on stories told over and over again around the campfire.

• The clock externalized our sense of time, where we previously relied on our eyes and skin to sense the rising and setting sun.

• The map externalized spatial relation, where we previously measured distance by how long it took us to walk from object A to object B.

• Machine learning externalizes pattern recognition across high-dimensional datasets that on their own lack narrative (or meaning).

We’ll come back to the relevance of this trend in increasing externalization, but for now just notice the pattern.9

Theme 2: Retail and Wholesale AI

For this theme I want to distinguish between the ‘retail’ use of a tool and the ‘wholesale’ use of the same tool, or more specifically how citizens use a tool compared to how institutions use that same tool.

The easiest way to see this distinction is to look at a tool we all use daily: money.

At the retail level, money is a medium of exchange. We earn it, spend it, save it, and borrow it. At this level, the tool coordinates activity between people and institutions, like your employer or your business.

At the wholesale level, money is created by central banks and bond markets price sovereign risk with it. Institutional traders move trillions of dollars’ worth of it per day for purposes that have nothing to do with what you and I use it for. The wholesale system determines interest rates, which determine who can borrow, which determines which businesses survive, which determines who has a job. The wholesale system shapes elections, foreign policy, and the life expectancy of populations that have no idea what’s happening at the wholesale level. The retail user holding a banknote and the wholesale institution holding a derivatives portfolio use the same tool, but the relationship between them is far from symmetrical. The retail user operates inside a system where the largely-invisible rules are defined at the wholesale level. The rules don’t benefit the retail user, though the retail user’s participation is required for the system to function.

What you and I loosely refer to as ‘AI’ is only the retail face of an industry whose wholesale customer is the surveillance-commercial-military-intelligence apparatus.10 The retail product (chatbot, image generator, coding assistant and the like) and the wholesale infrastructure (behavioral prediction, military intelligence, and autonomous targeting) are different access tiers to the same tool. Retail users don’t have access to the same functions wholesale users do, even though both may be using the same underlying platform.

In her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), Shoshana Zuboff coined the term “instrumentarian power,” which she defines as the power to know and shape human behavior at scale through automated, networked computational infrastructure.11 Think any platform algorithm that determines what you see next, for example YouTube and Facebook. She is careful to distinguish this from totalitarianism, which is the transformation of the state into a project of total possession. Instrumentarianism is the transformation of the market into a project of total certainty.12

Instrumentarianism leads to technocracy, which is a shift from democratically accountable governance toward systems-managed governance by algorithms.13 Wholesale AI provides a prediction and management layer capable of handling complexity that current bureaucratic models cannot handle. That’s the reason for Trump’s Stargate $500 billion data-center initiative,14 the $725 billion annual hyperscaler AI capital expenditure,15 and the IPO-scale public market absorption we’re witnessing in 202616 (see Theme 3). These are the financial signals of a technocratic build-out that has outpaced any democratic mandate.

OK, this theme has already become much longer than I expected, so let’s wrap it up for now. Let me know in the comments if you’d like a deeper dive. The main thing to be aware of is the distinction between these very different uses of an umbrella label we (lazily) call AI. Knowing the difference is baseline literacy for a Threshold Guide navigating the giant leap from Material to Mycelial cognition.

Theme 3: The AI Hype Cycle

Gartner’s Hype Cycle is a standardized model that tracks technologies through five phases: Innovation Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment, and Plateau of Productivity.

The 2025 Hype Cycle for AI placed Generative AI (meaning the retail version) in the Trough of Disillusionment.17 AI agents and AI-ready data sit at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.18

Incidentally, the wholesale version of AI sits entirely outside this cycle, and I’ve written about this previously:

The easiest comparison to this AI Bubble moment is the 2000 Dot-com Crash. It didn’t destroy all websites and the entire internet. Instead, the bubble removed the first wave of companies and made space for the second round. The same pattern will likely unfold with this cycle. The interesting question, at least for me, is what will emerge as second-generation products and services.

Current LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Xai, DeepSeek, and the like) are simply statistical machines trained on large datasets so that they can predict the next token (letter/word/sentence). They are powerful pattern-matchers, but they don’t build internal representations of how the world works. They cannot differentiate between causality and correlation, cannot plan in the way cognitive science understands planning, and they produce confident output that often turns out to be false (confabulation/hallucination).

Stated differently, LLMs operate only in language, a 70,000-year old tool. What we are discovering is that the tool of language can, at best, provide a simple, discrete space to understand our physical world in a linear, predictable fashion. At worst, the tool becomes hopelessly inadequate when we attempt to fully express the rich nuances of our non-linear, complex, more-than-physical world. The retail version of AI you and I are familiar with is entirely inadequate to deal with our more-than-physical world, but it is a necessary stepping stone to understand what could come next.

Research by and tells me that the current LLM moment isn’t the AI moment.19 What we’re seeing is merely the first commercial moment of a longer structural shift. The systems that do governance-grade work (that can reason about cause and effect, that can hold a model of an environment, and that can be audited and trusted in high-stakes settings) will combine neural pattern recognition with symbolic reasoning and world models.

And that leads us neatly to the next and final theme in this essay.

Theme 4: The Future of AI in the Context of Human Coordination

I am grateful to , whose 1996 TIMN model helped me understand the evolution of societal organization into four fundamental forms, which I’ve written about before: Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks.

You’ll notice in the diagram above I’ve proposed Bioregions as the emerging node of coordination, based on my own experience in our tiny bioregion, The Valley of Grace in Western Cape, South Africa.20

My claim here, with the detail to be covered in a future essay, is that a cognitive tool capable of supporting bioregional governance needs world models as proposed by Belle and Marcus. It needs to know that changing a variable upstream has consequences downstream. It needs symbolic reasoning over ecological constraints.21

A bioregion is by definition more complex than any municipal council can cope wth. Watershed flow, soil microbial composition, pollinator counts, fire load, aquifer recharge, microclimate drift, species movement, and social cohesion indicators — all thrown together into a single giant bucket — require an externalization tool that the linear story-form of Mythic consciousness and the scientific proof-form of Material consciousness are inadequate to organize knowledge. The MET framework from Theme 1 suggests that bioregional governance becomes possible only when a Mycelial-class cognitive tool exists. AI is that tool’s first plausible form.

There is much more to cover under this theme, but this essay has already become too long. For now, what’s important is that the next architecture is already being built, and the threshold-ready guide should be tracking what’s emerging, rather than fixating on whether chatbots and data centers are good or bad. We’ll cover these tools in upcoming essays. If you already know of creative uses of AI in bioregional governance, please drop a note in the comments.

That’s it for today.

Michael 💚

Why this essay? In Framework 7, we discussed a constellation, which is a set of bioregional bodies, each one holding a piece of custodial land and a community currency, with no single point of failure across the whole. What we didn’t answer was the question of money. Where does the capital come from to fund a constellation that has stepped outside the system that enabled capital accumulation? That’s what we’ll tackle in this essay, which entirely rejects the notions of impact/systemic investing, ESG, corporate social responsibility, charity, and philanthropy.

The story so far

We’re building an argument over ten frameworks, and we’ve covered seven so far:

• Framework 1 addressed how living systems never stop growing, otherwise they die; their form of growth simply changes, just as a teenager’s physical growth spurts eventually morph into growth of wisdom.

• Framework 2 showed that money has never been neutral; it is an instrument of coercion shaped by those who issue it.

• Framework 3 examined how coercion has reached the phase where it activates against even those who built success and have accumulated wealth.

• Framework 4 explained the we’ve never had a non-coercive monetary system. We also saw that the required consciousness and infrastructure capable of birthing an alternative are coinciding in our lifetime.

• Framework 5 looked at mature forests as the design specification for distributed coordination at scale, with mycelial mutualism as the working model.

• The six inversions in Framework 6 showed what a monetary system designed for life would look like across each of its six features.

• The constellation covered in Framework 7 showed the entity architecture that holds the inversions in place, without triggering the existing architecture to suppress it.

The question we now need to address is what it would take for the accumulated capital from 5,000 years to cross the bridge from an extractive, coercive system to a system that supports life at the top end of the S-shaped growth curve we discussed in Framework 1.

The Importance of Self-Interest

I want to be clear about what I’m not addressing or suggesting in this essay. I’ve spent more than a decade chasing impact investing and/or systemic investing through either philanthropy or corporate social responsibility. Those approaches do not work at the scale required, so I’m entirely rejecting them. They may work in some settings, but we’re discussing an entirely different setting in this series of essays. Both impact investing and philanthropy carry an implicit story about the wealth holder, in which the wealth holder gives something up in exchange for a moral position.1 In the framing we’ve laid out in the preceding seven essays, that story is evolutionarily incoherent, because it continues the same mode of thinking that drove the steep part of the S-shaped growth curve.

In stark contrast, I want to discuss a structural move that wealth holders can make to get their capital out of a steep-curve system and into a gentle-curve system. It is a pure self-interest move that comes about when someone recognizes that the steep-curve system has already been quietly rewired to devalue (at best) or entirely remove (at worst) their accumulated wealth.

In short, my claim is that all accumulated wealth is about to be taken by a rapacious system designed to concentrate resources in the hands of a few.

Most natural resources have already been siphoned up. The slurping sound we hear now is the last of what remains at the bottom of the parfait glass of globalization: financial resources.

This creates simultaneously a systemic risk and an opportunity.

David Rogers Webb’s 2023 book, The Great Taking, documents the complex legal architecture already in place for the financial siphoning to happen.2 Over the last fifty years, in OECD jurisdictions, securities ownership has been redefined in ways most account holders are entirely unaware of. What was once title to an asset is now a contractual claim that sits below secured creditors, held inside a chain of intermediaries that, in a crisis, leave the original holder with nothing, or very little. Think Black Thursday, October 24, 1929.3

The important point is that the architecture is statutory and already in force. A sufficiently large market dislocation or correction activates it automatically (in other words no one can be ‘blamed’ when it occurs). The Hormuz Crisis is the trigger for that correction, even though we haven’t yet seen the systemic impacts. Those impacts are likely to arrive by late 2026 or early 2027, irrespective of when an agreement about Hormuz is reached.

Here’s a diagram showing what happens during margin calls triggered by a systemic shock like Hormuz. You may not understand it if you don’t hold a share portfolio or a pension fund. If you do, this should keep you awake at night.

What evidence do we have that an elite class already have this mechanism in place?4

In November 2016, the World Economic Forum published an essay by Danish politician Ida Auken titled Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.5 A WEF video released in the same month memeified the essay into a single line: By 2030, you will own nothing, and you will be happy.

The meme has been interpreted as a marketing campaign that backfired and as a joke. Webb’s assessment interprets it as a forecast. So do I. The legal infrastructure to make “you’ll-own-nothing” factually true for most holders of paper wealth was already in place by the time the 2016 WEF essay was published. Whether “you’ll-be-happy” will turn out to be factually accurate is for each wealth holder to evaluate.

Transvestment is the move a wealth holder could make when they understand what is being forecast… and choose to play their cards differently… before the forecast is fulfilled. A move like this also funds a regenerative architecture for the broader community, but the primary reason to consider transvestment is the preservation of one’s own capital from a system that has been designed to take it away.6 Remember, the WEF (not my) forecast gives us roughly four years: By 2030, you will own nothing. I wouldn’t wait till Christmas 2029.

What Exactly is Transvestment and is There an Example?

On the morning of September 14, 2022, Yvon Chouinard sat in a private office with his family and a small group of lawyers. The papers in front of him transferred 100% of the stock of Patagonia, the company he had built over fifty years, into two new structures. The Patagonia Purpose Trust received all of the voting stock, while the Hold Fast Collective received all of the non-voting stock, which carries 98% of the economic value of the company. The transfer was irrevocable, which means no future Chouinard can undo it, and no future Chouinard can extract the wealth.7

Excess profits from Patagonia, after reinvestment in the business, now flows to environmental causes through the Hold Fast Collective.8

In the public coverage of the transfer, the word that appeared most often was “donation” and a few outlets used “gift.” The Chouinards themselves used a different sentence. The letter Yvon published that day opened with the line: Earth is now our only shareholder.

That profound sentence describes a structural transfer from traditional shareholders. The company has moved into a regime that the surrounding system has no claim on, and the founder named what happened with deliberate precision. What most readers heard when the story broke in 2022, was a generous billionaire “giving away” his wealth before he passes. What actually happened was something the investment world still doesn’t have a word for. The papers moved a three-billion-dollar company across a threshold, into a structure the financial system cannot touch.

While I have no evidence to confirm this, I’m suggesting that Chouinard’s move was a structural exit from a coercive monetary system. Whether it was his intention or not, he’s provided a prototype to examine and implement.

Why a Threshold Guide Needs to Understand Transvestment

I get it. Money system discussions completely fry your brain. You and I are just ordinary citizens who don’t have the levels of wealth families like the Chouinard’s enjoy, so why should we concern ourselves with understanding complex financial concepts that make absolutely no sense, no matter how much anyone tries to explain?

The good news is that a Threshold Guide does not have to master the economics:

• The legal mechanics that made Patagonia’s transvestment possible took specialist lawyers years to assemble.

• The monetary system Webb describes runs on statutory amendments and trust law and the back-room machinery of central securities depositories, enough to fry anyone’s brains.

• The constellation has governance protocols the average governance guru wouldn’t understand.

Each requires a lifetime of study, and you have your day-to-day life to deal with. The architects of this work are other people.

Your role is just to know that a shift is happening, including within the monetary system itself. Something that can’t quite be described is moving through all of the steep-curve systems that got us to this moment. The Patagonia transfer is one expression of it, and wealth holders who are starting to ask different questions are another. None of us generated this shift, and none of us will master it. The shift doesn’t need any of us to understand its architecture, or to force it in any particular direction. That role falls to forces beyond our comprehension.

What we are called to observe and amplify are the subtle signals we receive confirming the shift is underway:

• Perhaps it’s that job you were turned down for.

• Perhaps it’s not being able to find meaningful employment anywhere.

• Perhaps you were rejected for a loan that would have helped you meet financial obligations.

• Perhaps it’s an account you were trying to open and they rejected you, without any logical explanation.

These are all subtle signals of the steep-curve systems shutting down, and while the rejection may hurt, there is a greater wisdom unfolding.

What I’m suggesting is that a Threshold Guide is the person who can sit across the table from a wealth holder and say: You and I are both trapped inside this system. The architecture is hard on us in different ways. That’s the kind of conversation that can lead to the question of what to do next. And right now, wealth holders (at least those who are thinking deeply about these things) don’t know what to do next.

The only advice the financial advisory industry can offer the wealth holder is divestment. Sell the oil stocks and buy the ESG fund and adjust the portfolio toward companies with better disclosures. The wealth holder does these things and notices that nothing structurally changes. The asset moves from one position inside the system to another. The buyer is now where the seller was, and the system is unaffected by the swap.

What forward-thinking wealth holders are actually asking is whether there is anything they can do that removes their wealth from the system entirely. There is. It has a name and legal precedent and working examples, and it asks something of the wealth holder that existing financial advice doesn’t come close to addressing.

That is what the rest of this essay walks through. Again, it’s not necessary to understand all of the technical details, but knowing at least a little of what’s unfolding gives you a different perspective on any discussion about impact investing and the like.

Why Divestment Doesn’t Cut It

Divestment is a buy-sell decision.9 The owner of the asset sells and another buys. The asset simply changes hands. Inside the legal and financial regime that defines what the asset is, nothing has shifted. The asset is still a contractual claim on a stream of future income. It is still legally precarious in all the ways the modern monetary system makes contractual claims precarious. Phase 5 of the Coercion Continuum still applies to it. The new owner is now exposed to the same activations the previous owner was trying to step out of.

The oil company whose stock was sold is now owned by an investor who has no qualms about owning it. The fund that received the divestment dollars is still inside the system whose rules require continuous growth. The wealth that crossed from one account to another is still in the same regime of value. Value, in that regime, means price. Price is set by markets. Markets are governed by the same incentives that produced the conditions the wealth holder was trying to step away from.

Divestment is a moral gesture inside a system that responds only to economic incentives, not morals. Divestment isn’t a structural move.

To be fair, I’m not entirely dismissing divestment. Many people who have divested did so because it was the only move their advisors told them about. The intent was good, but the mechanism was inadequate. The work now is to find investment options that are adequate.

What Transvestment Actually Is

The word transvestment describes a transfer of capital out of one regime of value and into another.

How are the two regimes different?

In the first regime, the one that anyone with investments is familiar with, value means price. A thing is worth what someone will pay for it. The system that holds the things is the market. The legal architecture supporting the market is the architecture of private contractual claims. Most of what is called wealth lives inside this regime.

In the second regime, value means the generativity of living systems. A forest is worth the soil it builds, the water it holds, the carbon it sequesters, the community it sustains, and the generations it feeds. The system that holds the forest is the commons, and the legal architecture supporting the commons is the architecture of inalienable trust. A commons is held in such a way that it cannot be sold off, cannot be collateralized, and cannot be seized.

Bollier and Hulst put it this way: a transvestment is more than a money-making transaction. It is an affirmation of shared commitments to commoning, to bioregional markets, to a different theory of what value means. The money moves and the meaning moves with it.

This is why transvestment is structurally different from charity, philanthropy, and impact investing. Charity keeps the asset inside the first regime and uses some of its excess for socially approved purposes. Philanthropy does the same thing through institutional foundations. Impact investing tries to do well by doing good, which keeps the underlying value definition (return on investment) intact. All three of these are moves inside the first regime. None of them constitute crossing a threshold.

Transvestment is a crossing.

The Five Pathways to Cross a Financial Threshold

Five pathways have been worked out, in detail, for how the crossing can be made. Each accommodates a different kind of asset and a different level of commitment. The full architecture can be found in a longer thesis this essay summarizes.10 Here’s the brief version:

1. Land and productive assets can be transferred into a Bioregional Commons Trust that consists of farms, forests, buildings, and productive facilities. The trust holds the asset in perpetuity. The land is governed by stewards selected for competence, on ninety-nine-year renewable ground leases that mirror the long-running Community Land Trust model, legal in most countries.

2. Financial capital can capitalize the currency reserves of a Bioregional Financing Facility.11 The fiat money backs the issuance of a regenerative currency at full reserve during the establishment phase. As the bioregional economy strengthens, the reserve ratio can decrease, and the original capital can be gradually returned.

3. Patient capital can endow regenerative enterprises directly. Interest-free or below-market loans, repaid in the bioregional currency the enterprise operates with. The wealth holder receives a yield that has to be spent locally or gifted onward, which keeps the capital cycling through the commons.

4. Intergenerational vehicles can convert inheritance into commons endowment. Estate structures pass an income stream to heirs in bioregional currency, with the underlying capital held perpetually by the commons trust. The family retains material security and a meaningful position in the community. The wealth, as a private holding, ends.

5. The demurrage dividend is the slow-acting fifth pathway. Bioregional currencies carry demurrage, a small holding charge that recirculates back into the commons. A wealth holder who lives inside the bioregional economy contributes to the commons through the holding of currency itself, with no explicit transfer required.

The point of the list is that each option matches the actual situation of the person, the asset, and the bioregion. All of the legal architecture for transvestment already exists under current US and most Western nations law. This is how Patagonia was able to structure their investments the way they did.12

What the Crossing Means

In the old regime, the wealth holder’s relationship to the asset was one of ownership, which means the asset belongs to them. Their authority over its use was proportional to the size of their position. The board seat and the controlling stake were functions of how much they owned. So was the practical voice in how the company ran. Authority was purchased through accumulation.

In the new regime, the asset belongs to the commons. The wealth holder no longer owns it. Their authority over its use is no longer proportional to capital. It is proportional to membership in the community the commons serves. The Bioregional Commons Trust is run by stewards selected for competence. The bioregional political authority handles rights questions. The cultural sphere handles questions about what gets funded. The wealth holder participates as a community member, with a voice, with experience, with the standing earned over a lifetime of work. Authority has become a function of contribution.13

This is the threshold the person crosses. It is the part of transvestment that has nothing to do with money, and it’s usually the part the wealth holder finds most challenging. Why?

Most wealth holders have spent their adult lives operating inside a structure where capital and voice were the same thing. The amount of equity you held was the amount of voice you had. To relinquish the equity is to relinquish the voice. To trust that a different kind of voice will emerge on the other side, a voice earned through participation, requires a leap that the financial system never asked the person to make. The leap is real, the fear is real, and the grief is real, because something is being given up that was, in some way, a redefinition of self.

What the wealth holder becomes, on the other side, is what Stephen Jenkinson and Orland Bishop have called an elder.14 An elder is a person whose authority in the community is earned through wisdom, presence, contribution, and care. The elder has no equity stake. The elder has standing, and the standing is granted by the community and can be revoked by the community. The elder’s meaning comes from inside relationship, with all the constraints relationship carries.

This is the move transvestment requires. The investor becomes an elder, and the capital becomes community-held.

The wealth holder who completes this move discovers something the financial system couldn’t predict: the new position is more secure than the old one. The community embraces them, and the land that feeds them cannot be seized. The currency they spend cannot be inflated to nothing in a margin cascade. The healthcare they receive doesn’t depend on private health cover or a brokerage statement that might become illiquid overnight. Their grandchildren grow up inside a container that has a secure future.

The wealth holder’s privilege hasn’t ended, but it has changed shape in significant ways. It has become a privilege of membership in a living community. Instead of the numbers on the brokerage statement being the basis of safety, the relationships become the basis of their ongoing well-fare.

Not Charity, Philanthropy, or Impact Investing

• Charity is excess from accumulation, deployed for good purposes. The accumulation continues and the structure remains unchanged. The excess does some good, but the wealth holder remains a wealth holder, and the system that produced the accumulation remains the system.

• Philanthropy is institutionalized charity. A foundation is established, the foundation deploys excess, and the accumulation continues, often growing further under management. The structure again remains unchanged.

• Impact investing seeks financial return alongside social or environmental return. The accumulation continues, and the structure remains unchanged. The metrics of success still include the financial return, which keeps the underlying value definition (price, growth, yield) intact.

All three continue our steep-curve systems. In other words, they are evolutionarily incoherent.

Transvestment ends the accumulation and builds a bridge to a gentle-curve system. The wealth moves into a structure that holds it on behalf of the commons in perpetuity. The wealth holder loses the position of being a wealth holder and gains an environment which honors them as an elder. The structure changes and the value regime changes entirely.

Most financial advisors don’t know how to talk about transvestment because the category itself makes no sense in their framework. They are trained inside the first value regime. The vocabulary they have for any move with the word “give” in it is the vocabulary of charity. They will tell the wealth holder to give carefully, to give tax-efficiently, or to give in a way that preserves the principal. Sure they’re offering advice that can’t be faulted, but it’s advice for a system that’s ending.

The Threshold Guide who can hold the conversation Framework 3 introduced is often more useful at this point than the financial advice. The guide can name what the wealth holder is actually asking. The question has moved past how to give well, toward how to step across the threshold.

The Unknowns

I have to be honest about the many uncertainties Framework 8 has to acknowledge. There are two main uncertainties:

1. First, the commons-side infrastructure is partial. Patagonia worked because the receiving structures were available: the Purpose Trust, the Hold Fast Collective, the Newman’s Own legal exemption, and the lawyers who knew how to draft the documents. For a wealth holder in most bioregions today, the equivalent receiving structures are partly built. The pioneers who cross now will help build what is still missing, and they will cross into something that is being assembled around them. This is real, and unavoidable. The earliest stewards of any commons architecture have always lived inside a half-finished building. It’s uncomfortable… and it’s also where meaningful construction actually happens.

2. Second, the psychological crossing is a real consideration. This essay assumes the wealth holder will arrive on the other side of the threshold intact and at peace. Some will, and some won’t. Those who have spent forty years inside a structure that defined them by their accumulation won’t always be able to release that definition. The architecture cannot do that work for them. The work has to be done by the person, with the help of those who love them, with the help of Guides (that’s you!) who can hold the conversation, and with the help of communities that can receive them. This architecture supports the work, but there is much inner work required before a candidate transvestor can fully cross the threshold.

Both uncertainties are an integral part of navigating the Decade of Dramatic Disruption. I can’t pretend that this work is easy, and it certainly isn’t for everyone. But there is a pathway through the threshold.

That’s all for this week.

Next week, we’ll cover Framework 9, The Alpha Window, which is a window of opportunity that opens after a systemic shock. Think of a forest fire. After the fire, sunlight reaches the forest floor and seeds that couldn’t germinate before suddenly can. But the window doesn’t stay open indefinitely. I’ll walk through what the Alpha Window is, how it directly affects transvestment, and what it asks of those willing to step through the window.

Remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

We are living on a threshold, a time of drastic and rapid change in the world. It’s an unsettling time because we don’t know what to expect, and many of us are feeling a lot of stress and anxiety.

I find it helpful to remember that humans have faced and survived many transitions, crises, and catastrophes over thousands of years. People lived through different specific circumstances in different times and places, but their emotional experiences were the same because we are all human.

Perspectives is a series of essays that looks at how different people in different times and places have found ways to manage the challenges that they faced. Maybe some of their strategies will be helpful for you.

Let’s go back in time to England in 1770, early in the Industrial Revolution. Picture a small town on the green countryside. A farmer is delivering bundles of wool to the spinning shop. Inside, several family members are sitting at spinning wheels, making the wool into thread. Further down the street is the weaver. Here, skilled craftspeople work on looms to weave the thread into cloth. Our last stop is the tailor who sews clothes by hand. These skilled tradespeople are their own bosses; they work in family businesses that have contributed to the local economy for generations. Since every step in the process is done by hand, clothing is expensive. Average people don’t have many items of clothing, but their clothes are well made and last a long time.

The people in 1770 didn’t know it, but their world was about to change drastically. In 1781, the steam engine was improved so that it could run large machines, like looms for weaving cloth. This was when the Industrial Revolution really took off in England and quickly spread throughout the world. Big, ugly factories were soon coughing out coal smoke and producing lots of cloth for a low price.

The surge of inexpensive cloth put many local spinning and weaving shops out of business, and the craftspeople often had no options except to get a job at the factory. Men, women, and even young children worked long hours in dangerous conditions where fingers or even a hand might get trapped in a machine and crushed. Factory workers often lived in crowded, filthy apartment buildings and earned low wages. These conditions were not healthy and led to the spread of disease.

This brings us to another terrible fact of life in England (and other places) at that time: tuberculosis, also known as consumption. Tuberculosis is a lung disease. A little cough gradually gets worse until the patient is choking while coughing up blood and phlegm. Tuberculosis is treatable today, but in the eighteenth century, most people who caught it died in great suffering and misery. Many, many people died, even those who were young and strong.

Do the hardships of this time in England remind you of any aspects of our world today?

• New technologies bringing rapid and drastic changes

• Factories polluting the air and water

• Family businesses closing due to circumstances beyond their control

• Skilled craftspeople forced to work in terrible conditions

• Local economies turned upside down

• Rich factory owners getting richer while their employees barely survive

• Widespread disease with no effective treatment

• Tragic death of innocent people

At last we come to John Keats, the topic of this essay. Keats was an English poet who lived from 1795-1821. When Keats was fourteen, his mother died of tuberculosis. A few years later, he cared for his brother who was sick with tuberculosis.

Let’s just pause a moment to imagine what that must have been like: watching his brother choke while coughing up blood, becoming weaker each day, struggling more each day just to breathe. How impotent John must have felt being unable to do anything to help other than provide basic care and comfort until finally his brother died. Shortly afterward, John himself started coughing, and he knew what was coming.

Keats expressed his feelings through his writing. His poems are complicated, reflecting his complicated world and his conflicting emotions. Like many of us, he struggled with questions like these: Why is the world so unfair? Why are some people so cruel? Why do bad things happen? Why did I have this bad luck (tuberculosis)? What will my future look like? What’s the purpose of my life?

Keats often felt exhausted and discouraged from trying to answer these questions, and I suspect many people today can relate to his feelings. Then, while reading a book, Keats had a flash of insight which he developed an idea called a Negative Capability. Here’s how he described it in a letter to his brothers:

“. . . [W]hen a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Let’s take a look at that quote and consider what Keats meant. Normally when we hear the word negative, it means something bad. But actually Keats meant that he had developed the ability to be peaceful in the midst of a crazy world. To exist “in uncertainties” without getting stuck in “irritable reaching” of trying to figure it all out. To be peaceful with NOT knowing all the answers.

So there are two parts to the Negative Capability. First Keats acknowledges that the world is crazy and he is incapable of figuring it out. Second, he learns to exhale and be at peace even in the crazy world that he can’t understand.

A Negative Capability is healthy alternative to three unhealthy extremes:

1. Denial: “The world isn’t really crazy at all; it makes perfect sense if you understand things like I do.” These over-confident people with an “I know it all” attitude are usually annoying to others, and they are also deceiving themselves. Believing that you have it all figured out is comforting, but it is really true? Probably not.

2. Surrender: “The world is crazy. Life sucks. Let’s get high or drunk or play video games 24 hours a day.” This relieves the pressure by giving up. It’s escaping the world or hiding from the world.

3. Overwhelmed: “The world is crazy! I have to figure it out!” This approach will drive a person crazy because you can’t figure everything out, not really. No one can.

With his Negative Capability, Keats found a way to live in a crazy world that was both honest and healthy. He acknowledged that the world often doesn’t make sense, that things are unfair and unpredictable. He admitted that he didn’t understand everything and that he could never figure it all out. BUT he’s peaceful with that. Instead of getting stressed by his not knowing, he accepts it.

It’s important to remember that ACCEPTANCE of reality does NOT have to mean being passive. Acceptance of reality is the necessary first step to working for change. (We’ll look at Perspectives on working for change in future essays.) To effectively help others or change the world, we need to be operating from a solid foundation. Negative Capability was Keat’s foundation. He essentially said, “The world is crazy. It’s impossible to understand a crazy world in a logical way. But it’s ok. I can be peaceful in my heart even as I acknowledge the craziness and the fact that I don’t have everything figured out.”

A Negative Capability is not the enemy of rational thought or science. The two can work together very effectively, especially in a crisis situation. I think of the movie about the Apollo 13 mission to the moon in 1970. Careful thinking and lots of math and science were necessary to plan this mission and launch the spacecraft. And then the unexpected happened: an oxygen tank exploded, and the astronauts’ lives were suddenly in danger. Let’s consider the different ways the NASA scientists might have responded.

1. Denial: “We did all the math and science correctly. All our previous missions turned out fine. Everything will be ok this time too. The oxygen tank didn’t really explode. We don’t need to do anything.”

2. Surrender: “The astronauts are going to die. It’s a shame but there’s nothing we can do.”

3. Overwhelmed: “Oh no! This is terrible! I don’t know what to do!”

The NASA scientists started with a Negative Capability by facing the truth: this was a very dangerous and unexpected event! They had never experienced this circumstance before and didn’t know what to do. They took maybe a minute to freak out, but then they settled down and thought logically: “Ok, is there anything we can do? What are some options? Let’s work together to explore options and see if we can fix this problem.” They faced the truth but maintained enough peace that they were able to work effectively to solve the problem. In the end, they brought the astronauts home safely.

So how can a person today develop a Negative Capability? It certainly takes some practice. Here are a couple strategies that might be helpful.

• Quiet Your Mind: Keats said that a Negative Capability was the opposite of “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Fact and reason are both wonderful and essential aspects of life, but when we get caught in a brain chatter endless loop of “irritable reaching” we aren’t making any progress; we are just making ourselves exhausted and discouraged. Mindfulness practices and meditation are some ways to help quiet the mind.

• Practice Metacognition: Metacognition means being aware of your thoughts. Our brains can get into a constant chatter loop that plays in the background without our even noticing, like a TV always playing in the next room. Observe your thoughts. Try to notice when you are in the “irritable reaching” mindset. When you find yourself struggling to make rational sense of something, consider if this is something that can be understood in a rational way. If the answer is yes, then great! There are many things we need to figure out that require thinking, such as saving the astronauts on Apollo 13. But sometimes the answer is no, this can’t be understood rationally.Why did I have to get tuberculosis? Why do good people die young? Questions like these don’t have logical answers. If you’re “irritably reaching” about things that are more spiritual, try to breathe and recognize that logic is not going to find an answer.

• Think About Your Track Record: As you go through your day, notice all the things that you don’t know. Here are some of my things: “How does the microwave work? Why does the copy machine always run out of paper in the middle of my job? Why is that other driver being so obnoxious? Will there be a long line at the grocery store when I’m ready to check out? If I buy a lottery ticket, will I win?” When we start paying attention, we will probably realize that we live with lots and lots of things that we don’t know. Many of these things we’ll find out in time (grocery line), others we’ll probably never know (obnoxious driver), and some we could find out if we really wanted to but we probably won’t bother (microwave). We are able to live peacefully with the unknown in many aspects of life. It’s true that life-impacting unknown things are much more stressful than the copier paper. My point is that we do have a track record of living with the unknown in smaller ways. With practice, we can build on that track record and become a little more peaceful with the life-changing unknowns.

• Trust Yourself: This strategy builds on thinking about your track record. When I go to the grocery store, I don’t know if the line will be long. If it’s short, I’ll be glad! But if it’s long, I’ll deal with it. I’ll look at the magazines or at my phone while I’m waiting in line. Most people have the ability to adapt to circumstances and deal with things in the moment. Unexpected things happen, but if you’re reading this, you have a success rate of 100% for making it through bad days. Although the grocery store line is not a very important disruption to life, I find it helpful to remember that I can usually deal with unexpected things pretty well. That’s not nothing.

Remember, finding peace in the middle of craziness does NOT have to mean giving up. Cultivating a Negative Capability gives you a solid foundation for helping others or creating something new and better in the world.

John Keats’ offering to the world was his collection of poems and, perhaps even more important, his idea of the Negative Capability. Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. Finding a way to have peace in his heart did not save his life. But the Negative Capability meant he was better able to enjoy his life instead of staying caught in a loop of “irritable reaching” for answers that could not be found.

Why this essay? The previous Framework (6) laid out six structural opposites of extractive money. We discussed Wörgl, the small Tirolean town whose bridge and ski jump are still standing, built in 1932 with currency that lost value every month it sat in an account. Wörgl proved that even a small slice of those six inversions, run by townsfolk with no economic training, can produce real prosperity.

The Miracle of Wörgl came to an end with a single letter from the Austrian National Bank.

This week’s essay addresses how to avoid a single institution being captured or shut down. The answer is a constellation, and we have an example constellation that has been ticking away below the radar in Egypt since 1977.

The story so far

Framework 1 placed the S-curve at the center of everything: living systems never stop growing, and all living systems follow the same trajectory of slow, then fast, then slow growth. Civilization, at least as we know it, has been riding the fast, steep part of the curve for twelve thousand years, and that steep part is now tapering off.

Framework 2 identified the engine that drove us up the steep part: an extractive, debt-based monetary system with a single instruction encoded into its architecture: grow or die.

Framework 3 traced that grow-or-die instruction through time. Chattel slavery became debt bondage. Debt bondage became wage compulsion once the commons were enclosed. And now, the most recent phase is enslaving even those who thought they were free.

Framework 4 asked why an alternative had never been tried at scale, and answered that the consciousness and the infrastructure required to run cooperative monetary systems at scale had never co-existed before. They do now.

Framework 5 showed how the template for cooperative exchange has been running under our feet in the forest the whole time. Mature mycorrhizal networks are the working example.

Framework 6 specified what an alternative monetary system would have to do, and showed that Wörgl had already tested an early prototype in 1932.

That brings us to Framework 7.

The SEKEM Story

Setting the scene: a desert sixty kilometers northeast of Cairo

In 2000, soon after the world learned that the Y2K bug was a nothing-burger, I travelled from London to Cairo for my first taste of Egypt.1

The occasion was a friend’s 40th birthday party. We’d worked together in Australia and the US, and he wanted to celebrate the milestone in his penthouse on the banks of the River Nile. And what a celebration it was!

A handful of us survived the party and made our way across town at 2am to El Gato Negro, a watering hole frequented by locals, in Mohandiseen, Cairo. It was my friend’s favorite local to escape the heat of Cairo.

It was in that bar that I first heard the fascinating story of Ibrahim Abouleish.2

In 1956, Ibrahim Abouleish moved to Graz, Austria, 400km from Wörgl, the town we discussed in Framework 6. He spent twenty-one years there, accumulating a doctorate in pharmacology, an Austrian wife, a family, a comfortable career, and a sense that his country needed him at home. He returned to Egypt in 1977, saw a vision of seventy hectares of forest in an untouched desert sixty kilometers northeast of Cairo, and bought the land.

He had no farm experience and the land had no water. Egypt was sliding into the conditions many of us are familiar with in 2026: state corruption, broken schools, broken clinics, torn social fabric, and an economy that served only a handful at the top of society.3

The history of what became the highly profitable and successful SEKEM cooperative has been well documented.4 What’s less commonly spoken about is how Abouleish built a constellation.5

The first piece of the constellation was the biodynamic agriculture itself: regenerated desert soil, trees strategically planted as windbreaks, and irrigation channels fed by a single well. That part took years and it’s what most people know SEKEM for.

While the farm was still finding its feet, Abouleish was already building the other pieces of the constellation. A Waldorf school opened on the site for the children of the workers and grew into a full primary and secondary school system. He opened a medical center for the families. By 1984 he had founded the SEKEM Development Foundation, a non-profit body separate from the farm and the companies, holding the cultural and educational work.6 The Foundation is funded by a fixed share of the companies’ profits and answers to its own board.

The companies continued multiplying. There are eight of them now, each a separate operating entity under the SEKEM Holding. Libra farms the original land and partners with around two thousand other farmers across Egypt. Mizan grows organic seedlings. Hator handles fresh fruits and vegetables. Lotus does herbs and spices, ISIS produces organic foods and beverages, NatureTex makes organic cotton textiles, and ATOS Pharma produces medicinal herbs and natural medicines. Ecoprofit provides sustainable management consulting services.

In 2009 a presidential decree authorized Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development.7 It opened to students in 2012, with the first Faculty of Organic Agriculture in Egypt, alongside Faculties of Pharmacy, Business, Engineering, and Arts. The University is a separate legal entity, with its own funding sources, its own faculty, and its own research programs.

When I lay all of this out, it sounds like a single family-run empire, but it isn’t. The companies trade with each other and each one runs its own books. The Foundation is independent, the University is independent, and the school sits inside the Foundation. The medical center is also held by the Foundation. The cooperative of SEKEM employees holds a third position alongside the Holding and the Foundation, and answers to neither.

SEKEM consists of three interrelated bodies at the core:

1. Eight companies under the Holding company.

2. A university, foundation, school, medical center, and a cooperative.

3. Around two thousand farmers in the supply network and about fifteen hundred people in the living community on the original land.

If you wanted to take SEKEM apart, you’d have to figure out where to start.

And then the state came

In 1984, Helmy Abouleish, Ibrahim’s son, became the CEO of SEKEM. He took over the executive leadership of the entire social enterprise after his father suffered a period of ill-health

In April 2011, a few months into the Egyptian revolution that ended Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year rule, the outgoing regime arrested Helmy.8 The charge was corruption, an absurd claim for anyone who knew what SEKEM stood for. In hindsight, the intent of the arrest was clear. It wasn’t just a farm and a school and a clinic that drew their attention.

The perceived threat was something larger: a working demonstration that a community in Egypt could feed itself, school its children, heal its sick, and trade its goods internationally without depending on the institutions a Mubarak government had spent thirty years controlling. Mubarak’s regime had survived by controlling the conditions of its citizens’ dependence, and so it had good reason to notice when a community quietly stepped outside those conditions and kept going.

The prosecution eventually dropped all charges after a hundred days in jail. Helmy spent those hundred days without a phone, without a computer, and without contact with the operation he ran. He used the time, he later said, to think.

While he was doing that, SEKEM kept operating.

The farms kept producing, the companies kept shipping, and the school kept teaching. The medical center kept treating, the Foundation kept running its programs, and the university kept preparing for its opening the following year. The cooperative kept meeting, and two thousand partner farmers across Egypt kept harvesting and kept getting paid.

When Helmy was finally released, Egypt had a different government and SEKEM still remained SEKEM.

That’s what the Wörgl experiment never had the chance to demonstrate. Wörgl had one institution, one town council, one currency, and one slate of officials. The state wrote one letter and the institution came to a grinding halt. SEKEM was built on a different premise. The state went for the apex, but the constellation held its shape and continued thriving.

Why Wörgl could be shut down

The Miracle of Wörgl ended because the architecture was fragile. There was one issuing body, one council that could be sued, and one mayor who could be ordered to comply. There was just a single bank account that the central bank could refuse to clear, and one town hall that the police could surround. The structure was elegant, but the structure was also singular, and singular structures can be ended by singular acts.

There are a few historical examples that avoided this same demise. Robert Owen’s New Lanark.9 Fourier’s phalanxes.10 Mondragón cooperatives ran into a similar limit when their flagship, Fagor Electrodomésticos, went bankrupt in 2013, but the resilience of the entire cooperative kept them going.11 Most cooperatives, intentional communities, and currency experiments have less depth and therefore end quicker.12

The six patterns I introduced in Framework 6 are the minimum requirements for a regenerative economy. The current monetary system is designed for capture and rewards anyone willing to compromise and meet the requirements of continued capture (including philanthropic and charitable efforts). An experiment that refuses to compromise to capture attracts the attention of the system and attempts will invariably be made to shut it down. But that doesn’t mean there’s no hope.

How to build resilience against institutions

I’ve spent more than two decades working on and with various aspects of cooperatives, intentional communities, and currency experiments. I’ve seen the passion of those who are bitten by the bug of an alternative way of coordinating human activities, especially in the light of so many injustices in the existing system.

I’ve also seen most of them fail outright or lose momentum. It’s sad when it happens, but each failure brings numerous lessons.

It’s the lessons from those failures that led to the drafting of The Emancipation Architecture. It’s a huge document, which, taken as a whole, is organized across three nested scales.13 SEKEM provides a prototype of what a functioning model looks like in practice. These, I believe, are the minimum scales that should be addressed if something like SEKEM emerges elsewhere.

Scale 1: The Bioregion

The first scale is the bioregional one.14 This is the scale of one place, one community, one piece of land, and all the people who depend on it. At this scale, three functions have to be held by three separate bodies that cannot capture each other.

1. The Commons. The land itself, the productive facilities, the watershed, and the ecological infrastructure. Held in trust, outside the market, permanently. SEKEM’s land isn’t formally held in inalienable trust under Egyptian law, although it functions as a commons in practice. (It also helps being in the middle of an inhospitable desert, where land is less in demand.) For now, it’s the principle that matters: the land and the productive infrastructure sit in a body that cannot (easily) be sold, mortgaged, or seized.

2. A local medium of exchange. This is the bioregional issuance and demurrage function from Framework 6. SEKEM still uses the state-issued Egyptian pound today, although numerous discussions and thought experiments have been held. The principle is that the function of issuing the local medium of exchange needs its own body, answerable to the community.

3. Productive enterprises. The farms, the workshops, and the businesses that turn the work of the bioregion into goods and services. These operate on commons-held land under regenerative mandates, paying ground rent to the commons body and paying their workers in the bioregional currency. SEKEM’s eight companies are the living prototype and have been operating as such for forty-eight years.

So the first scale of a workable constellation consists of three functions and three separate bodies, none of which are able to act unilaterally over the others.

Scale 2: Bioregional Exchange

The second scale is the inter-bioregional one. This is the scale at which individual bioregions connect to each other. SEKEM gives us a partial picture of this scale through its export trade across Europe and North America, although the full architecture demands two more functions.

1. A clearing mechanism must exist, so that bioregional currencies can trade with each other. If your bioregion uses one currency and mine uses another, we need a protocol for converting between them in ways that don’t let either currency capture the other. The Inter-Bioregional Clearing Protocol, drawing on Will Ruddick’s work in Kenya, specifies this function.15

2. A learning network must exist, so that what one bioregion discovers travels to the others, including the failures. The pattern here is mycelial: information flowing across the network, with no central editorial control. SEKEM’s research, published through Heliopolis University and the international Demeter biodynamic network, plays a version of this role.

Scale 3: Human Production

The third scale is the enterprise scale that coordinates the needs versus the productive capacities of the land, individuals, and families living in the bioregion. The enterprise is community-owned and serves the households that keep the cooperative enterprise functioning. Service cooperatives at this scale progressively replace the household’s fiat-denominated obligations with bioregional alternatives. The easiest to start with is food from local regenerative production. Then, housing built by the community on commons-held land. Energy could be produced based on bioregional resources (electricity generated from flowing rivers instead of solar that requires external resources, for example). Education through a locally-managed school. Healthcare through a medical center that prioritizes locally developed healing modalities. Care for elders, provided by the community itself rather than the individual family.

For over forty-eight years, SEKEM has built almost every item on this list for the people who live on the land. They provide housing on the site, food from the farms, schooling for the children, and medical care for the families. Dependence on external systems has been reduced, line item by line item, as each function moved inside the constellation, building their resilience as the constellation grew.

Why a constellation is resilient

Any single node within a constellation can be removed and the rest of the constellation can adapt and remain operating.

This is the structural property Elinor Ostrom won her Nobel Prize for documenting, across hundreds of real cases of commons governance over centuries.16 The principle she identified is called polycentricity.17 This is a system whereby decision-making is distributed across multiple overlapping bodies, with no single actor able to act unilaterally. The governing systems include tripartite boards, community assemblies, councils of people chosen for competence, and associations linking one bioregion to the next. Importantly, each of these bodies conform to all legislation that applies to them.

Polycentricity isn’t as complicated as it may sound. You already live inside polycentric systems. A high-functioning family has overlapping authority (mother and father make decisions in different domains based on their areas of expertise). A well-functioning classroom outside the traditional education system takes input from children, parents, and the wider community, rather than relying only on the teacher and principal. A functioning Community of Practice intentionally spreads its decisions across all of the voices represented. The authority in all of these examples is distributed, overlapping, and answerable to everyone who participates.

An intentional constellation design asks that the institutions a community depends on for its survival behave the way the best human systems you’ve ever been part of already behave. Most of the otherwise creative initiatives I’ve seen don’t take these core design principles into account and so invariably run out of momentum at some point.

A constellation is also resilient against the kind of attack twenty-first century institutions cannot resist. The state can write a letter to a town’s mayor demanding compliance. The state can revoke a charter, freeze an account, arrest a CEO, or file an injunction. But the state has trouble justifying sending the same notification to forty different bodies in three different legal forms operating under five different governance structures across two scales. The notification has to be crafted taking into account the legislation that each node operates within. Even then, removing one node leaves the others standing. This is how we use the law creatively against the state.

In SEKEM’s case, Helmy Abouleish’s prison term during the Arab Spring didn’t stop the farms. When Mubarak fell, all of the operations kept going. When el-Sisi took power in Egypt in July 2013 following a military coup, the medical center kept providing services. Two presidents have come and gone since the revolution. SEKEM has outlasted both of them and is now preparing the next generation in a university that didn’t exist when Helmy was arrested.

What you can do

OK, so how does this affect you as a Threshold Guide? I know it can all sound theoretical and unrelated to your day-to-day concerns.

Take the work that’s most meaningful to you, and ask a simple question.

It could be a single platform you publish on, or a single institution that accredits the work you do. It could be a single funder, or a single piece of software. Maybe it’s a single relationship that, if it ended, would end the work. Perhaps it’s a single building, or a single license, or a single person who holds knowledge that no one else has.

Find just one. One is enough.

Now ask the second question.

The honest answer for most of us is that more of our work hangs by a single thread than what’s comfortable. In our valley, we are far too reliant on an increasingly failing municipality to offer basic services like water and sewerage.

The good news is that you don’t have to immediately fix anything. What you’re doing is building a polycentric awareness. In time, you’ll be compelled to build a second entity that can function as an equal node in your constellation. And then a third.

Turn your work into a constellation small enough that you can hold it, and resilient enough that it can hold itself.

The first step is simply polycentric awareness. Most are entirely unaware of how reliant we are on single points of failure.

What remains unknown

The full three-scale constellation I’ve proposed (including a bioregional currency and exchange) doesn’t exist yet.

• SEKEM demonstrates the bioregional scale (Scale 1) and the principle at the human production scale (Scale 3), and it participates in international networks that gesture towards the inter-bioregional scale (not quite Scale 2).

• Mondragón demonstrates resilience at the level of human production (Scale 3).

• The Catalan Integral Cooperative demonstrated the bioregional issuance property (Scale 2) until pressure from the Spanish state ended its currency.18

• Various community currencies in Kenya, Brazil, and Germany have run pieces of the Scale 2 design for years.

None of them have run all of the three scales together. The architecture as a whole is composed of working parts, each of which has been demonstrated somewhere. The integration is the part we’ve not yet seen.

This is a different kind of uncertainty from what surrounds most utopian proposals. I’m not asking whether the design could work. Each piece of it already works. I’m asking whether someone, somewhere, will take the trouble to assemble all three.

A few candidates are already building momentum. There are bioregional initiatives in British Columbia, in the Cascadia bioregion, in parts of Italy, in southern Africa, in the American southwest, and in central Europe. Each of them are running some subset of the design, and each of them is learning important lessons. The learning network exists in early form, and some are working on formalizing the learning.19

I honestly don’t know whether any of these candidates (including where I’m involved, the Valley of Grace in South Africa) will create sufficient coherence to demonstrate the full constellation… before significant food shortages start showing up as a result of the closure of Hormuz. The coherence cannot be magically conceived by the visionaries and Threshold Guides alone. Coherence will be conceived by the people in these bioregions who can see what’s coming and what’s emerging… and can tell compelling stories about the constellation.

A constellation of wells

When Ibrahim Abouleish stood in the Egyptian desert in 1977 and saw something most others couldn’t, his vision was of a single well drawing water from the aquifers below the sand. He could see trees and forests thriving. Despite all the evidence, he knew the barren land would turn lush when humans work with nature. Nature couldn’t do it on her own. He knew that animals and people would come for the water. Insects and birds and butterflies would settle in the shade. He could see it when others couldn’t.

He held a vision of a single well.

Forty-eight years later there are wells right across the Egyptian desert that draw on what the SEKEM constellation proved was possible: organic farms supplying processing facilities, biodynamic methods spreading through the partner network, schools using the curriculum Heliopolis developed, and hospitals using the natural medicines ATOS makes. The original seventy hectares are still there, still green, and still feeding fifteen hundred people. The constellation around them grew quietly while no one paid attention to what was emerging. The constellation has survived and thrived.

What the Decade of Dramatic Disruption asks of us is one more constellation, and then another, and then another, until there are too many to count; until there are too many to be resisted by the state. Each one forms the centre of coherence, conceived in its own bioregion, and supporting its own community. None of them will be stopped by a single injunction, because there is no central authority to oppose.

The Wörgl bridge built in 1932 still stands today, even though the Wörgl scrip is gone. The bridge survived because the structure outlived the institution that built it. The constellation asks something larger of us. The pattern of building has to itself become uncapturable, because there is no single experiment that can be captured.

A thousand Wörgls; a thousand SEKEMs. Each one holding its own piece of custodial land, its own currency, and its own people. None of them can be ended by a single injunction from a central authority, because there is no longer any single authority that can stop constellations that want to be born.

A constellation has no CEO and no point of failure. That is the point.

That’s all for this week.

Next week, we’ll cover Framework 8, which I’m calling The Crossing. Each constellation has to be funded somehow, and the capital that has been accumulating in the old system has to find a way across. Divestment sells to another buyer inside the same old system. But transvestment moves wealth out of the system entirely, from assets that can be seized into commons that cannot. I’ll walk through what that crossing looks like, why it asks something different of the wealth holder than divestment does, and what happens to the person who commits to this process.

Remember to love the ones you’re with, and frame on!

Michael 💚

The recording above goes glitchy from 01:30 till about 04:00 - perhaps skip that bit. The rest of the call was a monologue with me responding to audience questions.

Thank you to those who joined us live, and thank you for being patient.

Blessings!

Michael