The billionaire class, behind closed doors, is well aware that climate collapse and an AI-induced economic and social collapse is upon us. What we are witnessing, at the billionaire-eyed view, is a Game of Thrones-esque scramble to maintain relevance, power, and spoils in whatever world comes next.

An adage tossed around Silicon Valley these days is, “Whoever controls AGI controls the world,” and it betrays how our oligarchs see this going down. The AGI race is a horserace among billionaire investors, and they imagine that the resulting winner will be crowned ruler of the universe.

But the world to come is not theirs. It’s a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities, built lovingly, playfully, devotedly by the people and for the people. By you and me. Here and now.

Divest your attention from the horse race and let your time, pride, and spirit dissolve out of their horses. Invest your life force, instead, in building the world to come.

The socio-political economic system we grew up in is moribund and we need to move into a new one. We can do a lot better than the technofascist surveillance state the oligarchy is offering us. The universe is not on a budget and the earth is mind-bogglingly abundant. We do not need to settle for crumbs.

But that more beautiful world that we all know in our hearts is possible is never going to be offered to us by the powers that be. We have to offer it to ourselves. We have to build the more beautiful world to come ourselves. Together.

How do we build a parallel system? How do we live into this theoretical more beautiful world to come? We need to get super local. Ground into your local community and steward the land exactly where you are standing.

I happen to be in Salt Lake City. What does this look like for me, here, right where I am? What do I have to offer the movement here? How can I offer my time, skills, life, and love to building the world that must come next here, in Salt Lake City?

I have 75k followers on Instagram, where my content has gotten 2.4 million views in the last 30 days. I’m starting to wonder about viewing these numbers as surplus. A harvest to share. I have more than I need.

Robin Wall Kimmerer defines a gift economy as a system of shared abundance and reciprocity where wealth is measured by the quality of relationships rather than the accumulation of goods. How can I let this attention be a form of wealth that is passing through me and into the network, that the whole movement growing in SLC may be enriched by it?

The berries you don't share rot in the bucket.

Movement work fails at distribution, not at organizing. The people doing the actual work — running a free market, organizing a protest, growing a community garden — are structurally disadvantaged when it comes to reach. Learning the algorithm is a second unpaid job, and it's a job that takes months if not years to pay out, if it ever does.

But we don't all need to build a following. I grew two separate accounts organically to >50k followers, and I can tell you it's a crapshoot. It takes an enormous amount of work to build an aligned audience and no amount of doing everything right guarantees it. Asking the person running the free market to also become good at this is asking them to spend three years learning a skill that has nothing to do with free markets. Someone in the network needs a following. That's the division of labor a commons makes possible and market logic doesn't.

The whole creator playbook is the logic of private property applied to human attention — fence it, hold it, defend it against leakage. Keep them on your platform. Don't send traffic anywhere you can't monetize it. For over a year now, I’ve had a link to my Substack as my Instagram’s link in bio in alignment with the conventional wisdom to “optimize my funnel” and “reduce decision fatigue” by having “a single call-to-action”—all in order to maximize return on investment (ROI).

But what happens when we start to prioritize building new worlds over ROI?

In an honest attempt to amplify and drive traffic to good work happening where I am, I created a nicoleflowing.com website for my Instagram’s link in bio, where I include a “📍 Salt Lake City” section dedicated to showcasing ways to get involved in the parallel system that’s growing in SLC. The activities and events I showcase here will, for the most part, be ones that I didn’t organize, I’m not getting paid to advertise, and that I’m not speaking at.

More than anything, a parallel system is people, the culture among them, and their relationship with the earth. My hope is to use my platform to gather like-minded people around the work of protecting, honoring, and stewarding the Great Salt Lake and building the more beautiful world that must come next.

I humbly offer my platform, my social media skills, and my time curating this list as a gift to the incredible organizers, dreamers, and doers of my local community. All flourishing is mutual.

What do you have more than enough of? Find ways to give it back into the parallel system that is growing—right where you are.

Fun fact: Did you know that gait analysis has been shown to be very challenging when a subject is wearing non-form fitting clothing? A long coat is the canonical example, but an inflatable T-Rex costume would obscure a significant portion of the gait signal, too.

I’m just a woman with a platform sharing facts, gossip, and poetry. Don’t mind (or cite) me.

However Halloween goes down though—we must de-Flock. Strong surveillance infrastructure makes all other infrastructure that much harder to resist, destabilize, and compost into infrastructure that heals, nourishes, houses and feeds us all.

The panopticon has long represented the wet dream of the powers that be and a metaphor for a dystopian surveillance regime for those of us who understand ourselves to be of the prisoner class. But an AI-powered panopticon is even worse.

In 1791, philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed the panopticon prison design. The architectural design included a room in the middle of the prison where guards could see out at the all of the prison cells. But the windows of the watchtower are obscured such that from the inmates’ views, you can’t tell whether or not the guards are watching you. The prisoners would have no way of knowing if the guards’ room is even staffed. In theory, this architectural design would lead to all of the inmates being on their best behavior at all times because at any given moment the guards may be watching them.

But there’s an inconvenient wrinkle in the panopticon’s original design: the bottleneck of human labor. The inmates could easily and rightly reason—well, the guards could be watching any one of us at any given time, but they can’t be watching all of us simultaneously. If a critical mass of inmates misbehave in unison, the guards can’t witness all of our misbehavior at once. If we leverage the safety of numbers, someone or another could misbehave undetected.

Or, prisoners could reason that the extent to which they are being watched at any given moment is labor-mediated, and they don’t have infinite labor. Ergo, they aren’t watching me in every single passing moment. If I misbehave, there’s a chance of it going undetected.

Flock Safety cameras solve for this shortcoming.

If you have ample compute power and storage space—enough data centers at your behest, that is—then AI “guards” can “watch” the cameras at all the times. And if you have enough cameras and sensors planted in the world, then voilà—the world is your prison. George Orwell couldn’t have named Flock Safety more comically. Do not let these cameras make you feel safe.

At the time of writing, there are at least 135,000 automated license plate readers in the United States. Likely far more. Flock Safety, an $8 billion company, has come to dominate the market. Their main differentiator from competitors is that they give the hardware away basically for free and they charge a subscription fee. They’re not a camera company—they’re a data company.

Our status quo trajectory is one in which our oligarchs watch the earth and all of us bunker-less plebes burn from the comfort of their armed luxury mansion bunkers. Their vision for the world to come does not include any of us being free, including themselves.

If humanity is to survive to see the world that comes next, we need to get busy building it. A global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities. Flock cameras have no place in it. Ergo: get busy deflocking your city.

Download the Deflock app to locate and log the locations of automated license plate readers near you.

Find and join an independent group fighting mass surveillance near you. If you can’t find one in your community, email contact@deflock.org for information on how to start one.

The movement we need to be building right now must be headless, leaderless, and decentralized if we are to succeed. No one is going to be taking home the prize of glory, only private satisfaction for the role you’ve played. That is how we build a durable, regenerative culture that belongs to no one and, therefore, to all of us.

Flock Safety does not keep our communities safe. We do.

Here are some kid books that I will hold fondly to my death bed because of the beautiful conversations I’ve had with my children over them.

The Chicken Who Couldn’t by Jan Thomas is how I introduced “affirmations” and “manifestation” into my daughter’s lexicon. The book starts off with a chicken who doesn’t believe in herself, until her helplessness and despair are interrupted by woodland critters who prompt her to repeat the affirmation, “I am a strong and powerful chicken.” The repetition of this sentence cultivates empowering beliefs that make the chicken capable in ways she hadn’t thought possible.

What worlds are you manifesting through the words you use? What beliefs do your words cultivate, and what realities are created, destroyed, or maintained through your language?

What becomes possible when you believe yourself to be strong and powerful? What about when you stoke this belief in your brother, your sister, when you stoke it in others—like the woodland critters do in the book? What is the material impact these sorts of beliefs have in ever widening circles, when we release them into the ether, and let them ripple out?

And this discussion of course segues into propaganda.

My 6-year-old and I talk about propaganda near daily, which will surprise no one who has known me for more than five minutes. Propaganda—the deliberate cultivation of beliefs over a wider population in order to manifest a particular outcome.

You are reading propaganda right now. I have an agenda, and I’m writing this essay to further it, so I’ll spell it out explicitly for you that you may make an informed decision whether or not to continue to allow me to influence the turnings of your mind: we all grew up in an inherently unsustainable system, and we will witness in our lifetimes its inability to be continue to be sustained. Between climate collapse and developments in AI, there is no status quo left to cling to. There is no going back, there is only what comes next.

We are at a crossroads, where we can either accept the future the technofascist oligarchy is presenting to us or we can let the oligarchy and all of its AI- and fossil fuel-powered machinations fall. I hold that if humanity is to have a chance at surviving what comes next, we must let it fall, and in its place let a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities rise up to feed us, nourish us, and heal our relationship with the earth and all of its human and non-human beings.

If you’re not here for that propaganda, you may leave.

Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book was published in 1984, during the Cold War, and depicts a satirical conflict between the Yooks and the Zooks.

This was the first book I read with my kids that led us into discussions about arms races, mutually assured destruction, and nuclear weapons. We talked about Hiroshima, and the dishonor and inhumanity of it. And of course, how could we talk about that without talking about Palestine?

In Maysa Odeh and Aliaa Betawi’s A Map for Falasteen: A Palestinian Child's Search for Home, a child tries to find Palestine on the map at her school. She can’t find it, and looks to her family to try to understand why.

Who gets to draw lines on a map, and who gets to say what or who gets to cross them? Who and what’s interests do the administration of these lines serve? Questions like these only make sense when we turn to the animal world and fully denormalize the boundaries we have drawn over ours. Alice Harman and Becca Hall’s Animal Families is beautiful book to have that conversation over.

My poetic interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics is that the universe is biased towards balance. Do not despair as you look around see evidence upon evidence upon evidence of imbalance. Let it instead serve as assurance to you that the rebalance is here.

Let Katie Daynes and Marie-Eve Tremblay’s Lift-the-Flap Questions and Answers About Plastic be about the world we are leaving behind. Let it read like a history book, and let your narrative over it be, “This is how we used to do things when I was growing up.”

But the world that you and are living into existence is regenerative, circular, full of love, and full of faith—that the universe is biased towards balance, and we are here to live in the inevitability of that rebalance. Discuss that rebalance over Andrea Curtis and Roozeboos’ Loop de Loop: Circular Solutions for a Waste-Free World.

You ache for a more beautiful world—and that ache is one and the same as your ache to co-create more beautiful worlds with people you love. The means and the ends are not separate. The means are the ends. Let the time you spend reading with your children be a potent time pregnant with the act of conjuring of new worlds.

Co-create more beautiful worlds together so that you may become co-creators of more beautiful worlds together —at once do the action and be the outcome—and let that be enough.

In the age of AI, when LLMs can read, summarize text, and write a persuasive essay better than most college grads, these reasons fall apart, especially for those of us with young kids today. My kids are 4 and 7. The academic or workforce development value of literacy skills by the time they’re college-aged is strongly in question.

A far more defensible reason to take the time and effort to teach our children to read well is for its emancipatory value. And not just for their liberation—for all of ours.

Children who love to entertain and inform themselves away from devices managed and watched by the AI oligarchy are harder to surveil and they are harder to control.

If we live in a society where all of our worldviews are formed and informed by algorithmically-driven content on platforms owned and operated by the oligarchy, then we are defenseless against the oligarchy’s propaganda. Any narratives, ideas, or dreams with teeth to transform the world into one that is antithetical to the oligarchy’s interests has no soil in which to take root.

Where would those conversations happen at a societal level? How could those ideas spread, take hold, set the old world on fire, and inspire the new?

The infrastructure of the most technologically sophisticated surveillance state the world has ever seen is being built out around us, and rapidly. We need to get very real about what it means to live under an AI-powered surveillance state. And we need to equip our children with the skills to resist it and to organize outside of the watchful eyes of the powers that be.

To raise children who read is to build the counter-infrastructure.

Our children are our future and our future needs tools to communicate, educate, inform, strategize, organize, co-create knowledge, and build parallel systems outside of oligarchic systems of control. Let literacy be that tool.

Children who love to read are a cultural vaccination against our techno-fascist oligarchy’s propaganda machine.

I read all kinds of books with my kids—including books banned by the right and authors canceled by the left. Problematic books, books that didn’t age well, books I disagree with. Books where I have to stop every few sentences and say, “we never talk to someone this way.” It’s about every 50th book or so that I’ll tell my kids—we are reading this one time and then we are not reading this again because I do not want you to start to see the world this way. There are a smattering of books that are strictly off limits because they make my skin crawl. But we always talk about why.

Of course, most of the books we read are not lessons in how not to see reality. Most are joyful, playful, whimsical, informative, and give us new ideas and a richer perspective on our world. We are all born hungry to know our world better, and I teach my children that when we feel that hunger, we reach for books.

Most parenting arguments against screens implicitly use a contamination model. Screens are a pollutant; children are vulnerable; the parent’s job is to build a wall—screen-time limits, device-free bedrooms, no phones until 16, Waldorf-style zero-tech environments. The metaphor underneath is quarantine.

But an invasive species doesn't win by being stronger in single combat—it wins by exploiting disturbed ground, empty niches, and the absence of the coevolved competition that would keep the ecosystem in balance.

sk any noxious weeds specialist and they will tell you: the best way to supplant an invasive plant is to nurture and protect a native one.

Screens don’t colonize children’s attention because they are irresistibly powerful, but because the attentional ecosystem has been left bare. Reading isn’t the opponent of screens—it’s the incumbent species that holds the soil, and makes the invasive’s establishment harder because the ground is already claimed.

We must live a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities into existence. Raising our children to love reading and to understand its power is part of that work. Do not underestimate its importance.

The room was crowded with people holding “NO DATA CENTERS” signs, cheering at any mention of people over profit.

The ball, officially, is in the Utah Division of Water Resources’ court now as we await their decision. But we need to be clear to ourselves, to one another, and to anyone looking on—no matter what they decide, we can’t allow this data center to be built.

We will not allow profiteers to take water from a newly drilled well, mash it together with $234 million in public subsidies through the Utah Inland Port Authority, and then discharge it as wastewater into the Great Salt Lake that is already in crisis.

This is consent-manufacturing through procedural theater. The public comment period is a ritual designed to make us feel like our concerns have been appropriately accounted for and to teach us when to stop. These developers are fully aware that if allowed to proceed with their plans, they will make Tooele Valley unlivable, and they are banking on us accepting this verdict, politely tolerating the increasingly polluted water, air, and sound waves, then packing up, and abandoning the land.

But the permit is not the verdict. Watch what’s happening with the Stratos Data Center Project.

The Box Elder County Commissioners approved the project in May to span 40,000 acres. The approval was followed by protests at the state capitol scrutinizing the approval process’ lack of transparency and lack of opportunity for public input. Alliance for a Better Utah filed a lawsuit challenging its legality, further stymying its progress. The project was cut in half to 20,000 acres. Elected officials who backed the project suffered at re-election, including Utah’s senate president Adams.

The Stratos Project is now on pause—“Out of respect for the referendum process and litigation, MIDA is paused on Stratos,” the authority’s spokesperson, Kristin Kenney Williams, said in a statement.

A commission vote is an administrative act, not a final determination as to what we, the people of this land, will accept. Do not forget that all of the land was legally stolen from the earth and all of its peoples.

A data center is not a building. It is a story attached to the land that it sits on, the water and energy it consumes, the waste it produces, and the human and non-human beings it impacts.

It's more than a bundle of ongoing relationships with a place and its resources, each managed via an elaborate network of approval processes, renewal dates, compliance conditions, and counterparties who can change their mind. Water rights, transmission interconnects, tax codes, county road agreements, workforce agreements, air quality permits, cooling. Surveillance footage, privacy agreements, compute power, data storage. Each of these a renegotiable relationship officially managed and approved, or denied.

A data center is more, in that it’s far simpler. It’s whatever we, the stewards of this land that we find ourselves on and in love with, accept it to be.

Don’t stop until it’s over.

The AI oligarchy will fall and the global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing, resource-sharing communities will rise up to take it’s place.

That’s our destiny. If we’re not there yet, we’re not done.

i started laughing with a cashier today as i was checking out. my four year old indicated that he wanted an uppy (which i do my best to say yes to wherever possible, as carrying my children is my most reliable workout opportunity and their primary source of daytime cuddles; in other words, it’s a mutual source of basic sustenance for each of us). i picked him up, then he whispered in my ear, “are you getting along with her really well?”

the other night we were laying in bed cuddling as we woke up slowly, he whispered in my ear, “my beautiful mommy, i am so proud of you”. i of course gushed with excited praise for his kindness, as he predicted, and he smiled then pulled my ear close to his lips again and said, “you are a…*dramatic pause*…bad mommy!” then i smother him in tickles to take it back. “i am a strong, powerful, and nice-looking mommy!!!”

it’s an inside joke from one of my favorite books, The Chicken Who Couldn’t by Jan Thomas, in which the chicken’s friends teach them to repeat the affirmation, “I am a strong powerful, and nice-looking chicken, I am a strong, powerful, and nice-looking chicken.” and with that belief, there is nothing the chicken can’t do.

once upon a time i thought aloud to my children—when Charles does good things he is a good dog but even if he does things we don’t like, he is never a bad dog. it’s a family rule that nobody is allowed to call him, or any other dog, a bad dog.

the conversation continued into a discussion of good moms and bad moms. the same principle applied. there are no bad moms (and i better not ever here you call someone a bad mom *threatening finger wags*). i made them say, “ok, my beautiful mommy.”

and so, obviously, of course: calling me a “bad mom” is one of my son’s favorite jokes.

tonight my kids were dawdling around in the backyard—my four-year-old son was scavenging for gemstones in the dirt with his hand shovel and my seven-year-old daughter was walking around talking to herself. i put on my gardening gloves and they both came running towards me with “me too!” in their eyes. i helped them put on their gardening gloves, too. they asked what we were doing and i said, we’re weeding cheatgrass and english ivy. anything else we leave alone.

and then we weeded cheatgrass and english ivy together until there wasn’t enough daylight to see what we were pulling.

this is how the new world is meant to feel. let the old world die. this is the one that i am meant for and is meant for me. (are you here with me, in the new world? do you feel it, too?)

may you find yourself in a more beautiful world here and now, and as you step into it, may it ripple out across the multiverse.

amen.

Research shows that “facilitating the formation of a voting plan (i.e., implementation intentions) can increase turnout by 4.1 percentage points among those contacted, but a standard encouragement call and self-prediction have no significant impact.” (Nickerson & Rogers 2010).

And so, today I ask you: Do you have a Meta exit plan? Let me tell you mine.

Today, I have 67.6k followers on Instagram and 1,933 subscribers (1,903 free, 30 paying) on Substack. With you as my witness—I’m going to hit 100,000 subscribers on Substack and then I’m going to shut down my Instagram account.

Why? We need to move off of platforms that are not only aligned with oligarchic interests, but actively uphold the technofascist oligarchy’s power. Meta is not a sidequest for the oligarchs. It’s the fuel, the engine, the steering wheel. Control over the media and the information landscape is critical to the maintenance of the status quo that is starving Gaza and collapsing the climate.

“The revolution will not be televised” is to 1971 as “the revolution will not be on Meta” is to 2026.

To be clear: Substack is venture-backed and therefore inescapably aligned with the maintenance of the oligarchy, too. But unlike Instagram, Substack lets you export your audience as a comma-separated email list. Substack is not the end, but it’s closer than Meta is.

The end is a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing, resource-sharing communities. Investing our time and attention in platforms that materially empower the oligarchy is antithetical to that dream.

For me, Instagram is a stepping stone to Substack, and Substack is a stepping stone to the global network of open-source, democratically accountable social media and communication platforms that comes next. You’ll know it when you see it—and this isn’t it.

That’s my plan for exiting Meta. What’s yours?

Start where you are. Build for what must come next.

Your ducks are meant to be wild and free, pecking the shit out of the dirt, splashing in puddles, stumbling over one another in playful frenzy, and celebrating the rising sun every day that it rises.

Decolonize your ducks.

Every real rupture blindsided the experts: no forecasting shop called the Arab Spring or the fall of the Berlin Wall. The moments that actually change history are precisely the ones the models can’t see, because the models assume next year looks like this one.

We all know by now that we live in unprecedented times, and yet we still haven’t figured out that means that nobody’s expertise can predict or steer us through what happens next. The illusion of orderly civilization is cracking and the chaotic aliveness of the multiversal quantum illogic is bursting through the cracks.

All flourishing is mutual. To practice thinking mutually is to understand your little self that is bounded by the space of your body and the time of your life is not your True Self. Be your big self. Be all of it. Thinking mutually isn’t about thinking of others. It’s about first letting your identity expand to fill all that ever was, is, or will be and then practicing self-care on all of existence.

The answer isn’t somewhere deeper in your feed. It’s about breeding / lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / memory and desire, stirring / dull roots with spring rain, reading and re-reading and re-reading T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland until you forget that you didn’t write it yourself.

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!” Deleuze taught us—or, at least, he taught someone who actually read Deleuze who wrote a secondary source, and now here I am, having read a secondary source and somehow drunk on the illusion that I’m caught up on all of that theory reading on my shelf. Details. Stop trying to make sense, stop conforming to how we should perceive things. Bring forth a new reality that defies the status quo. Break out of established perceptual and ideological molds. Create new ways of thinking, being, and doing. The path out is going to appear crazy from the perspective of anyone invested in staying inside.

Your feed is an IV drip of propaganda for the inside with only tiny wild bursts of aliveness growing through the cracks of its sidewalks. This essay is a wild incorrigible weed. Water your weeds. Be a weed.

The experts won’t lead the way. Street performers, witches, and children are the only ones for me. The only ones who don’t make me feel I’m losing my mind.

And that’s why we must keep showing up seeking to speak honestly rather than correctly, that our voices may scream loudly to others YOU ARE NOT CRAZY I SEE IT TOO. Ours is an era where nothing and everything and then more nothing is correct. Expertise is not the future. It is a colonial-era concept that is dying with the old world. What comes next will be far more deeply felt than deeply researched.

a star
a tree
and the longing in between

réalta
crann
is an tnúthán eatarthu

—Gabriel Rosenstock

The subject, the object, and the relationship in between.

There is nothing more human than to be haunted by an ever-present achy painful longing for anywhere anywhen anywho anything other than the insane abundance available to us here and now.

Nothing more human than to forget that everything that happens happens in the vast pregnant infinity of the present moment.

And nothing is more divine than to remember.

What do you long for here and now? What worlds do you long for? What versions of yourself do you more truly long to be?

Our dreams won’t chase themselves.

Let all of your truer achier longings be powerful, creative fuel, guiding you to whom you are more truly meant to be.

When posed with the question, “Would you rather be a kid or an adult?”, my 4 year old said, “Adult”. When asked why, he said bc then he could read to himself whenever he wanted.

How could you be around this sort of pure honest unadulterated radiance and not want to do everything in your power to let every being on the whole earth shine like this?

Shantih shantih shantih

We must move towards what comes next slowly, patiently, day-by-day, fleshing it out and building its infrastructure as we go, developing parallel economies, parallel norms, parallel myths and stories, parallel lives where we can finally be who we know we’re meant to be.

Anti-ICE protesters go to prison while Epstein’s co-conspirators’ crimes aren’t even investigated. The Rockies are on fire. The average individual U.S. taxpayer gives at least $25.25 in weapons to Israel each year.

This is the political landscape that has brought “building parallel systems” into mainstream public consciousness as we awaken to the fact that it’s not just MAGA that’s fascist, sexist, genocidal, sociopathic. It’s the whole thing.

En masse, we are co-realizing this system is thoroughly corrupt to it’s very bones. We are co-wondering about another way.

We must abandon this system—let it collapse, and let us walk away from it as it does, don’t help it up. And the parallel system that we have begun to co-dream about is a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities.

Do you realize how exciting it is that “building parallel systems” has come into mainstream consciousness? This is how it starts: in the mist—

“If these be vague words, then seek not to clear them.

Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end,

And I fain would have you remember me as a beginning.

Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal.”

— From Kahlil Gibran’s “The Farewell,” The Prophet, 1923

Now that we’re all here, let’s align on what happens next.

How do we move into the parallel systems?

First, start to organize at the household, community, and neighborhood levels such that we can sustain all of our needs through a prolonged general strike—without our wages (because we will be on strike) and without wage-labor (because the wage workers we rely on, too, will be on strike).

Let this at first take the form of working with your literal neighbors to stockpile supplies to survive a week-long strike. Then, let it escalate from there towards what I call “regenerative stockpiling”.

If the grocery store was closed, how would you feed yourself? If the hospital was short-staffed, who would treat you if you got hurt? If garbage collection stopped, how would you manage your waste? If the pharmacy was closed, or the power grid unstaffed, or your kid's school closed, what would you do?

Think of how you got by during COVID as having been a practice run.

Can you make your stockpiles regenerate indefinitely, such that you are ready for an indefinitely long general strike? What, materially, is the difference between living through an indefinitely long general strike and living in the parallel system?

Preparing for a general strike is one and the same as building the infrastructure of the parallel system. I didn’t come up with this on my own.

Where did “the new society within the shell of the old” come from?

The explicit historical precedent for building parallel systems—or “dual institutions”— rather than just extracting concessions from existing ones is the IWW’s strategy at the turn of the 20th century to organize workers into “One Big Union” explicitly meant to replace, not just pressure, the existing craft-union (AFL) and capitalist economic structure.

This strategy was declared in IWW’s 1905 Preamble, the closing line of which reads, “By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

The idea is that a union across an industry isn’t just a bargaining tool for better wages under capitalism — its internal structure (worker-run, organized at an industrial rather than craft-based level, without hierarchy mirroring management) is supposed to already be a working model of the post-capitalist economy.

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organisation formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.”

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organised, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organising industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

—IWW’s 1905 Preamble in full

Every “General Strike” to date was a misnomer

The purpose of a General Strike, per Ralph Chaplin’s 1933 definition of the term, is not to negotiate for better conditions. The purpose of a General Strike is to provide for all of our wants and needs and dreams outside of the system of capitalist extraction. And if the purpose of a General Strike is to liberate us all from capitalist exploitation, then to call any attempted General Strike to date a “General Strike” is a misnomer. We’re not done.

The purpose of the General Strike is to deliver us into the parallel system, and we must now engage in the everyday work required of us to make it inevitable. Do not despair that we are not there yet. There’s a growing parallel systems consciousness. Do your part to stoke it. And design your life—slowly, patiently, with devotion and trust—such that you, your neighbors, your loved ones—your community—could survive a prolonged general strike.

Start there. Keep going. And don’t stop until we’re done: a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities.

Dream big, they say, then offer examples grossly unfit for the times: Get your ex to crawl back to you! Manifest a million dollars! Get that promotion! I say—this is exactly the kind of thinking that is keeping us stuck. Dream much, much bigger.

We must decolonize our dreams.

A free Palestine, a tight group of friends who think disabling Flock cameras and getting away with it is top tier cool, an open-source people-owned social media platform with a big enough user base to have network effects, a community fridge in every neighborhood that never gets shut down by health departments, the end of hunger and homelessness, land back, the fall of the oligarchy, and the rise of a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities.

Many of the practical tactics manifestation culture’s proponents employ are well-supported by neuroscientific and psychological literature related to effective goal-setting. Much of it is comes down to leveraging your brain’s own confirmation bias as a tool for affecting the material world.

Consider this an intervention in the culture, a stick in the spokes that jolts us into a quantum leap. (If you’re wondering whether you’re hip to manifestation subculture or not, whether or not you’ve ever even encountered the terms “quantum leaping” or “timeline hopping” before is about where I’d draw the line.)

To quantum leap is to experience a sudden break out of your status quo. It is to go from living in world A where world B seems impossible, and then suddenly to find yourself living in world B.

Quantum leaping—historically, in this subculture, before today ;-)— is a kind of individualized prefiguration. "Be the person who already lives in the world you want" is the same logical move prefigurative politics makes at the collective level — enacting the desired future in the present rather than waiting for it.

Manifestation culture at once has much going for it while also leaving much to be desired. Kind of like all things, right? It’s complex, with its good and bad inextricably tangled together. Rather than lament or praise the subculture, let’s let it breathe in all of its nuance and complexity, and let’s leverage the best of it to build a society that regenerates rather than razes the earth and all of its beings.

Let’s détourn manifestation culture.

Co-optation, or co-opting a movement, or recuperation, occurs when mainstream society absorbs radical, subversive ideas and waters them down into harmless, marketable trends. It is the process by which a dominant order absorbs the energy, symbols, or vocabulary of a movement that threatens it, and gives back a version stripped of the threat. It’s highly effective in that it rarely looks like suppression — it looks like success. The movement “wins,” sort of, and the winning is the defanging.

Co-opting a movement looks like corporations building out DEI departments and Forbes launching a For(bes) the Culture campaign in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Do not delude yourself: putting a few more women “at the top” is not a win. The powers that be take what would otherwise be revolutionary fervor with the strength to actually bring this whole system down and use them to further buttress their own positions.

Détournement is the opposite of co-optation.

To détourn manifestation culture is more than to repurpose it. Manifestation culture is thoroughly, grotesquely hyper-individualistic. It is very much a beast of late stage capitalism in that way. To détourn manifestation culture, we must use manifestation’s own tools (visioning, intention setting, daily practice) to smuggle in the collective politics it was built to exclude.

An intellectual caution regarding its metaphysics

One area to approach mindfully is the way the culture uses scientific terminology to bolster its metaphysics on an airy foundation of scientific credibility that will give anyone familiar with the technical meaning of these words pause. “Energy”, “frequency”, “vibration”, “quantum” are scientific terms with specific technical definitions. The scientific meanings of these words are not wishy washy, vibes-y, or hand-wavy; the manifestation meanings are.

It makes sense why leaders within the manifestation movement do this. We live in a culture that valorizes science, logic, and empiricism like Christ on the cross. Part of what has given this movement feet is that it has effectively lassoed itself to the language of power, however speciously.

But it’s also worth noting that there is nothing inherently wrong with appropriating language.

English is a living language and living languages evolve. That living languages change is one of the most robust findings in all of linguistics — every language with a documented history shows continuous change in sound, grammar, and vocabulary, and the only languages that stop changing are dead ones (no native speakers) or artificially frozen forms (such as liturgical languages).

There is nothing inherently wrong with evolving the meaning of originally scientific terms that had previously been confined exclusively to scientific purposes. But for the sake of inculcating and protecting intellectual rigor in your worldview, I recommend keeping sight of this: when the Deepak Chopra talks about “quantum consciousness”, understand that the truth you see in his writing is that of poetry, not of science.

And to anyone who’s thinking, didn’t we cancel Deepak Chopra? Isn’t he in the Epstein files? Remember: all things, including all of us, are complex, with all of our good and and all of our bad inextricably tangled together. Yes, Deepak Chopra is in the Epstein files, the investigation into which has been gutted, and must reopen. Someone can have said and done terrible things that warrant scrutiny and justice. And, you can also have written resonant poetic prose that has much truth in it, with practical applications that can improve your life and material conditions. And, that same writing can knowingly appropriate scientific jargon to give a lay audience the illusion that they are reading a scientific explanation of consciousness that is more like a creative interpretation of a technically rigorous body of scientific research.

Let the nuance breathe.

More to come

Manifestation is the most successful spiritual export of late capitalism. It has the reach, the vocabulary, the daily practice, and countless adherents already convinced that the future is something you build in the present rather than wait around for. Strip out the anti-intellectualism in the use of scientific terminology and the privatized longing, and what’s left is a framework worth composting.

We must accept no less than a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities. The universe is not on a budget.

This topic is ripe for me and I have a lot more to say, but I’ll leave it here for today. More to come.

I laid awake and wondered and I laid awake and wonder and as I lay there, warm, comfortable, and in my busy running mind, squished between that which I love most, by 4 am, I thought: we’re not going to Mars, we’re going to general strike.

I read National Geographic’s July 2026 cover story yesterday and the thing gave me the spooks, made me want to gag—Beyond Earth: How We’re Preparing to Live and Work on the Moon and Mars.

The corruption evidenced by the title’s framing had made me bristle. This information landscape is wrecked.

“Beyond earth” says, come away with me, let’s jump ship, doesn’t it sound exciting, fun, inspiring? There’s hope—and it’s out there, not here. Here? God no, this place is fucked.

Somehow everything we need to thrive and flourish is never here, right where we are, in this warm bed, with my decade-long favorite pillow, nestled between my beautiful children who plopped straight out of my gooey body, and have sprouted and grown to be more perfect than I even realized anything in this world could possibly be.

No, the answer is not here. It’s of course out there—beyond.

Why tf would we want to live on the moon and Mars when our home is right here? There is nothing more natural to humans and our more-than-human brethren than migration. To move away from danger and scarcity towards safety and abundance. But you’re not going to convince me to see safety and abundance on the moon or on Mars.

Never mind that radiation on Mars is roughly 40 to 50 times higher than on Earth. That’s just a detail. The scientists will work it out.

And it was at the word “Work” in the title—We’re Preparing to Live and Work on the Moon and Mars—when I knew that they’ve truly lost their minds, and not in the good way, not in that sexy divine feminine way, not in that profound ayahuasca trip, I’m-breaking-at-the-seams, can’t function-in-polite-society, the-full-complexity-of-the-universe-is-bursting-out-of-me, I’m-seeing-lights-beyond-the-visible-spectrum-and-the-whole-world’s-aglow-with-magic sort of way. In the: you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me way.

National Geographic frames “growing our extraterrestrial workforce” like it’s the most exciting challenge of our times.

You’re gonna try to sell us on the glories of working on Mars? That’s how you’re gonna try to sell us on this interplanetary colonization mission? Where’s my laughing emoji at.

When politicians and power players tempted thousands of settlers to walk on their own two feet across the country via the Oregon Trail, the cheese at the end of the string was fertile, abundant, easily farmable land that was promised to be empty and free. That propaganda I get. This is just insulting.

At least in the space colonization case the land actually is—hilariously, totally, so literally—empty of life, so it’s not directly genocidal in it’s implications. I guess it has that going for it.

Empty, free land! Come get yours!

Elon Musk has become a trillionaire off positioning himself as leader of the mission to colonize space, we all realize this, right? If you thought colonizing the New World was lucrative, just imagine how lucrative colonizing the solar system will be! is the SpaceX pitch that made him a trillionaire. Investors are eager to get a slice of the imaginary pie he is selling because of the promise of returns even greater than this measly colonization of mere Earth has delivered.

National Geographic’s Beyond Earth: How We’re Preparing to Live and Work on the Moon and Mars is propaganda for the colonization of space with Elon Musk at the helm, though obviously not physically. He’ll of course be hanging back to make sure things keep running smoothly back here at base.

We must recognize propagation of the fledgling extraterrestrial colonial belief system as propaganda that is directly antithetical to the movement we need to be building right now. Refuse to abandon earth—not only physically, but in your thoughts, hopes, and dreams, too. Do not dream of living and working in a thriving, bustling colony on the moon and Mars. Let your dreams be of thriving on and with the earth.

This is our home and we are not leaving.

I’m gonna go back to bed now, back to cuddling with my babies. No, I’m not gonna pick back up on the second part of my title, “We’re Going to General Strike.” I’m just gonna call this essay “Part 1”. Maybe tomorrow I’ll lay awake and wonder about “Part 2”. No promises though.

I’ll keep showing up here to write, but I promise nothing about what writing might show up for me as I do.

The way I think about it is that there’s a great mysterious formless timeless spaceless divinely pregnant void that all conscious beings tap into in this brief flicker of time we call life. When we are inspired, the spigot flows abundant; depressed, we hardly notice our connection to that pregnant void at all. To write in your most honest voice is to shorten the distance between the tip of your pen (or in this case, the tips of my fingers on my keyboard) and that pregnant void. Let whatever comes come, and get out of it’s way. Let what desires to be born be born.

Good morning.

Cut to the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

Indiana Jones is in a booby-trapped Peruvian temple stealing a golden figurine. The figurine sits on a pressure-sensitive pedestal. Removing it triggers the trap. So, he tries to swap it simultaneously with a bag of sand he’s estimated to be roughly the same weight, hoping the pedestal won’t register the change.

It doesn’t work. The swap triggers the trap anyway, and the whole temple starts collapsing as he runs out.

This scene is often cited by film nerds as an iconic example of establishing character through action. Sans dialogue, we learn in just a few minutes that Indiana Jones is audacious, brazen, and clever.

But what we also see is a cautionary illustration of a core tenet of dual power politics: there is no overnight revolution that can take us straight from this world to a world that comes next if it is to be any better.

We must, instead, build another system that runs in parallel to this one, “in the shell of the old”, and with time, as that new system sprouts, matures, lays roots, grows strong and resilient to the wind and the weather, we all steadily, slowly, little by little, imperfectly, move into it until it can materially support a whole society’s worth of wants and needs and dreams.

Dual power is a political strategy where alternative, grassroots institutions are built by the working class to coexist with and eventually replace the established capitalist state.

Rather than grab the figurine and swap it out for something new, dual power demands we take a slower, steadier approach. Dual power demands patience.

In a culture that gets off on destruction, dual power asks: but what world are you building?

Let’s say you’re building a software product from zero-to-one—and lo-and-behold—it takes! They like it! The user base grows! You may find that your full-fledged real world product is held together by a dinky built-in-the-wrong-framework backend. It will buckle under the weight of all it supports. You won’t securely or sensibly be able to extend it to support new features and offerings without taping them to the side with duct tape. It will be beyond refactoring. And you will feel the mounting certainty that you are overdue for the exciting and daunting tedium of building a whole new backend, and swapping it in for the old, one function at a time.

Our mainstream socio-political-economic system is beyond refactoring. And what comes next, if it is to be any better, will be built slowly, pain-stakingly, with the same sort of determined joy of a bee making honey.

Community is at once beautiful and annoying, you realize that by now, right? Are you ready to love that complexity like the literal fate of humankind depends on it?

What do you know to be true about you and your life and the role that you play in the global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities?

Start there. That is your prompt for today.

Have you met that person—in your dreams, in your journals? How do they spend their time? What values and beliefs steer their ship? Are you taking the time to get to know that man or woman whom you are called to become?

The new world is here, running in parallel to the old. The global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities is already here, all around us. You can feel its presence in the heaviness of your sadness. I feel it often when I’m hit with a wave of that crazed feeling of being drunk with delusional optimism. It is here, among us, just itching to be built, stepped into, seen—realized.

Raise your children to be good villagers rather than good workers.

Rather than mine your garden for food, foster joyful, thriving life all around you.

Let your work be your play.

You are not behind. You are simply itching with readiness to step into what comes next. We all are.

It was 2006, in the days of MySpace Top 8s, I was freshman in high school. I had an itching aching case of the blues that I didn’t know how to shake, so I conjured a remedy that to my surprise gave me real respite from the pain of continuing to go about existing as a human: I found a blank notebook and, for pages upon pages upon pages upon hours upon hours, I wrote longhand (in that old fashioned lost-but-I’m-certain-to-be-found-again art of barely legible longhand) a comma-separated list of what I was grateful for.

I have a similar case of the blues today, and a similar deeper urge to let a simple writing prompt be the gentle licking that my wounds need today: what is giving me hope today? Our age is unique but as sure as the sun rises tomorrow and the moon fills up and wanes, the blues of human existence will always return.

There are certain troubles and horrors unique to the times. That all living breathing feeling humans sink, on occasion, into the blues are not among them.

I have psoriasis and sometimes when my skin gets raw from the scratching that the change of the season provokes, my dog will come to me and start licking my wounds. Have you ever heard of something more magical than that? He loves me. He feels an instinct to lovingly gently lick my psoriasis. He doesn’t overthink it—does he even think it?—he just comes.

He licks my wounds and they feel better, I don’t know why. Is it a healing quality of the saliva or is it the love? And it is exactly in that thought that I must laugh at my own impulse to distinguish the cause. As if anything, truly, is distinguishable from anything else.

As if anyone is distinguishable from anyone else.

The DOJ indicted 15 protesters in Minneapolis. As I sink into the news cycle I feel a familiar swelling in my chest that I spent years learning to soothe. Once upon a time I danced along the edges of a Xanax addiction in an effort to manage that exact chest swell. I’m practiced in recognizing and managing it. My chest swelling started circa September 2016, when I was sued for exercising my first amendment rights, not unlike these 15 protesters. The First Amendment Project represented me, at no cost to my family—I don’t know how I would have afforded the lawsuit if they didn’t. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed via California’s Anti-SLAPP laws as a frivolous, deliberate attempt to silence and intimidate me.

The stress of it all gave me a bleeding ulcer, hospitalized me, changed the course of my academic and career paths, and irrevocably informed my worldview. The experience made it so that I can’t read about the 15 protesters being arrested in Minneapolis without feeling in my chest that if I don’t stop reading, my insides will physically break open.

When I see: The DOJ indicted 15 protesters in Minneapolis, I see the weaponization of the legal machinery clearly, in a felt, visceral way, in my chest, in the welling up of tears in my throat that signal “this news cycle is not good for your health”. News cycles like this crush my insides.

Don’t you see that that is exactly what it is meant to do? Make people like me feel crushed. Refuse to let it crush you because to be crushed is for the propaganda to have worked.

So I must return to what gives me hope because that is where the fear can’t get in the way of the work I need to do and the person I need to become in service of the world I know must be built.

The Kevin O’Leary’s Stratos Project was cut in half because of decentralized anti-data center activism on the ground in Utah.

Alliance for a Better Utah and five residents of Box Elder County filed a lawsuit challenging the project on the grounds that it is being developed without lawful democratic accountability or oversight.

There’s a progressive movement gaining momentum in New York City. The Sunrise Movement of young people working to bring down the oligarchy is gaining traction.

The old world is crumbling and the air is potent with a turning of the tides. The new world—a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities—is patiently eagerly ready for us to step into it. You can just feel it.

The universe is biased towards balance, and the rebalance is coming in our lifetimes.

I told my children this morning that I had the blues and they’ve been saying the sweetest things to me all day. Licking my bluesy wounds.

What could give me more hope than that?

The world is too beautiful to give up on.

Inside Delaney Hall, a taxpayer-funded, for-profit ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, about 300 detainees are on the fourteenth day of a hunger and labor strike to protest the facility’s inhumane and unsanitary conditions, such as maggots in their food.

A widow had a hen. Each morning, she would wake and feed her hen barley, and within a couple hours she would return to the hen to collect a single egg.

The widow reasoned that if one measure of barley produced one egg, perhaps two measures would produce two. She doubled the hen's feed. The hen grew fat and comfortable, and stopped laying entirely.

Those who say we are cooked are hens who, by the sweat of their brow, under coercion and force, lay two eggs a day. While other hens say: no work. no school. no shopping.

The eggs are ours.

In the original Sanskrit, in the devanagari script: प्रमाण विपर्यय विकल्प निद्रा स्मृतयः

In Sanskrit, but in the latin script: pramāṇa viparyaya vikalpa nidrā smṛtayaḥ

In my English translation: Every turning of your mind falls into one of five categories: a truth, a misconception, a dream, a instance of deep sleep, or a memory.

Pramāṇa — valid knowledge — knowledge that is true. We know it to be true because directly perceived it, we indirectly inferred it, or because we learned it from a reliable source.

Hundreds of immigrants detained inside Delaney Hall are hunger and labor striking to protest the inhumane living conditions, inedible food, and lack of medical care. pramāṇa.

Viparyaya — misconception / false knowledge — seeing something as other than it truly is. A case of ignorance, an anti-knowledge. The classic example in classical Sanskritic society: seeing a rope and mistaking it for a snake.

Or the 2026 equivalent: seeing an AI-generated video and mistaking it for reality. viparyaya.

Vikalpa — imagination / conceptualization / abstraction / dream — knowledge that rests on words or ideas without a corresponding real object. Much of our mental chatter lives here — abstract concepts, fantasies, projections. I’m apt to get lost meandering in the more beautiful world that I long to build for my children. vikalpa. Dreams of a solar punk future. another vikalpa. Fear of surveillance. more vikalpa.

Nidrā — deep sleep — the mental state where the mind is absorbed in the quality of heaviness (tamas), but still active. It’s a vritti because the experience of sleep leaves impressions (samskaras) that affect waking life.

The quieting of your mind’s deeper desires as your body switches into autopilot in the cradling lull of an infinite scroll. nidrā.

Smṛti — memory — the recollection of past experiences. The mind replaying what has already been perceived. The recurrence of any thought that has already passed through. The mind turns and turns and turns, then re-turns and re-turns and re-turns.

I remember who I was yesterday (smṛti) and I imagine that I am still that same person today (viparyaya), but really, I am exactly and only who I am right here and now, and so are you (pramāṇa).

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras teaches that our natural state as human beings is to be caught in the vortex of our ever-turning minds.

I named this publication “The Turning Mind” because that is all that I have to offer here: these words as residue of my mind’s turnings, for it is through language that the gears of my mind can interlock with yours and our minds may turn together, humming a chorus:

a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities

pramāṇa viparyaya vikalpa nidrā smṛtayaḥ (every mental turning is one of knowledge, of falsehood, of imagination, of sleep, or of memory)

Do the turnings of your mind cause you to look upon your children with awe as you gently water their whimsy and stoke their playful dreams?

Do the turnings of your mind inculcate the sort of hope that guides your hands to take action and build what you hope for?

What physical residue comes of the turnings of your mind? How do the turnings of your mind drip into this world that you and I touch and see and breathe?

"If these be vague words, then seek not to clear them.
     Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end,
     And I fain would have you remember me as a beginning.
     Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal.
     And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay?"
— The Farewell, from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (1923)

They say in systems thinking that the purpose of a system is what it does. What does the system of thought that animates your body do in the real world?

The turnings of your mind churn in a system that holds up your identity and your reality. They are the foundation of who you understand yourself to be, and how you understand that self to plug into the world writ large, and how that self dissolves into your greater dreams of a more beautiful world.

Practice cultivating turnings of your mind that serve the world you want your life force to serve. What more powerful world-building tool is there than to exercise deliberate, strategic control over the turnings of our minds? Rather than get caught in the toss and tumult of the turnings, stand outside of them and tinker. They are the strings that animate all of the movements of the puppet of this body as it moves through the physical world.

Your mind is a garden and the turnings are the flowers. Remember that you are the gardener, not the flowers. What are you growing? Are the flowers of your mind attracting bees, restoring life?

May we each find the clarity to stand outside the turnings of our mind
and may we each find the playful egoless courage to tinker with the gears, 
as we configure our patterns of thought
that they may steer our bodies in service of the vision:
a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities.
Amen.

This is how my mind is turning today. I am flattered that you trusted me to steer your mind’s turnings for the duration of this short piece. As ever: take what serves you. Leave what doesn’t.

Last month, he backpedaled his “job apocalypse” prediction. Sam Altman, net worth about $4 billion, too, backpedaled this warning, “I’m delighted to ⁠be wrong about this. I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than ​has actually happened.”

When I read this headline, I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of this information landscape (who put these guys in charge?), then I cynically anticipated they’d cite Jevons Paradox as reason for their optimism. I have yet to meet a chipper AI optimist who doesn’t. I was right.

I bore of Jevons Paradox for how its acolytes miss the forest for the trees. Do not be distracted by this circus of intellectual gymnastics that would leave us paralyzed and looking to the experts for guidance on how to tie our own shoes.

AI is being built and deployed by and for the billionaire class with no democratic accountability to the public interest. That is the reality we cannot lose sight of in these asinine debates about the impact of AI on jobs.

But what is Jevons Paradox, the non-techies among us ask? Anthropic’s Mythos rollout happens to have been a neat, textbook example of Jevons Paradox that played out over the last month in the real world. Let’s start there.

The Jevons Paradox of Cybersecurity Engineering

In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that increased efficiency of coal use counterintuitively led to the increased consumption of coal. improved efficiency lowered the relative cost of using coal, which—again, this is the counterintuitive part—*increased* the quantity demanded in a wide range of industries.

We see Jevons Paradox play out in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing. Here’s the one-paragraph summary: In April, Anthropic announced they had built an AI model called Mythos that had “reached a level of coding capability that can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.” They decided it was too dangerous to release to the public, and so instead they gave early access to it to 50 organizations within the bounds of an initiative that they called Project Glasswing.

Anthropic released an update on Project Glasswing earlier this week that claims Mythos has already found more than 10,000 vulnerabilities through the project. The bottleneck in fixing the bugs detected by Mythos, the release state, is now “the human capacity to triage, report, and design and deploy patches for them.” Rather than wiping out jobs with this new capabilitiy, demand for cybersecurity engineers has surged. Though, again, I couldn’t tell you much more about that because I don’t have NYT subscription. (Another pin.)

How does this connect to Jevons Paradox? There was a specific, automatable task: finding software vulnerabilities. There was an AI model built and trained to automate this task. The task was automated successfully. A strawman of an AI doomer might point to this and expect that to mean that there would be less cybersecurity work to do and a gutting of the cybersecurity profession. Instead, as a strawman AI optimist would point out, this increased demand for cybersecurity engineers.

But wait so will AI collapse the white collar job market, yes or no?

Experts differ widely in their beliefs about whether AI will wreck the white collar labor market. “Forecasting economic impacts from AI is inherently speculative and uncertain, and the economists I’ve talked to disagree on how much it will reshape the labor market,” Peter Wildeford, Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network.

AI’s exact impact on the economy writ-large is highly uncertain. I’m inclined towards Bernie Sanders’ attitude towards it—however the specifics play out, the structures currently in place to protect corporate and billionaire wealth will ensure that AI progress will hurt anyone who it not in the armed-luxury-bunker-class.

The AI Revolution is being used by the billionaire class as an accelerant for concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the few at the cost of the bodies, lives, souls, healthcare, education, and livelihoods of the plebeian many. Jevons Paradox or not.

It is a Game of Thrones at the billionaire class level as they try to position themselves for a future where one of them ascends to the role of ruler of the world.

OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing to launch their IPOs later this year, each with an estimated valuation of over $1 trillion. The IPO will shore up the existing wealth of many decamillionaires, centimillionaires, and billionaires, while creating a handful of new ones.

The rest of us will wonder if UBI will come before we become permanently unemployable.

Perhaps it’ll create the world’s first trillionaire. Meanwhile, the sea levels rise and children in Palestine continue to literally lose their ability to speak.

Build parallel systems

There is another way and this is how we get there.

Start preparing your house to survive a prolonged general strike. There will come a day not unlike the day ICE killed Renee Good when there will be widespread outrage about the conditions of the status quo. When that day comes, we will have the momentum to initiate a widespread general strike. That widespread general strike will only have the power to literally end the technofascist oligarchy and usher in a new age if we, the people, are prepared to drag it out as long as is necessary to bring the whole economy as we know it to a grinding halt. How do we make that happen? Start by collecting enough food, water, medications and supplies to be able to survive without shopping, stores, or supply chains for two weeks.

Help prepare your family, friends, and neighbors to do the same. At first, this preparation will be about socializing them to the strategy until they become bought in, too.

Once you and your neighborhood have supplies stocked up to survive two weeks, start to turn your attention to what I call regenerative stockpiling. Collecting food, water, and whatever else you need to survive, but that is provided for by the land around you.

This will not happen overnight. I don’t purport to have all of the answers. I only know that I have spent the last year reading and thinking deeply about how to navigate from where we are now into the global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities that I want my children’s children’s children to inherit. And this is the strongest path I see to getting there.

I believe in us. Congratulations on getting to the end of this. Now, I encourage you to get offline and get to building.

I am raising my children to become (1) artist, (2) athlete, (3) free-thinkers (4) in connection to community and (5) in connection to the earth.

I am becoming someone I’ve never been before, and thus my mind is a bit of a mess as I try to tease out who I am and what actions and inactions that new self requires of me. Writing is my most tried and true form of therapy as I sort out what’s happening in my mind, so here I am. I’m writing this in public in the spirit of an offering. May this essay remind both of you and I that we don’t have it figured out before we start and that “doing it live” is a rich way to learn.

We just bought a house on 0.6 acres in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. Washington state, where all of our family is, or the Bay Area, where my husband’s best work opportunities are, would be the most sensible places for us to buy a house. But about six months ago, our 6 year old daughter was so excited when I floated the idea of snowboarding every day" being part of our homeschooling curriculum, so we decided to make that happen for her. It sounds like a joke but it’s absolutely not.

The 2034 Winter Olympics will be in Salt Lake City, and my daughter will be just old enough to qualify. She thinks it sounds like so much fun to train and try to qualify. I have a parenting rule that I follow, which is to say yes to our kids as much as I can. I see no reason to tell her no now.

And so, my kids (3yo and 6yo) are finishing out the school year at their Waldorf school (I adore Waldorf), I just quit my tech career to prepare for the transition to homeschooling, and we bought a house outside Salt Lake City.

Snowboarding season is November through March. On snow days we’ll go snowboarding. Otherwise, there’s a nearby trampoline park designed for indoor snowboarding training.

In the off season, we’ll be focusing on the other pieces of the curriculum. Raising artist, athlete, free-thinkers, who are connected to community and earth.

Raising artists seems straightforward enough at this age. Get out of their way and give them unstructured free time to do, create, and be whatever more calls to them. We are all born artists. The artist pillar of my homeschool curriculum is about tuning into who you more truly are, and building worlds outside of yourself that reflect that truer self.

Raising athletes means taking my kids to playgrounds daily or near daily, running around, playing chase, along with more formal athletic training. I plan on enrolling my kids in rock climbing, dance, snowboarding, swimming, gymnastics, soccer, tee ball, and seeing what sticks.

Raising free-thinkers at this stage is where more traditionally academic subjects lie—I purchased three different homeschooling curriculums, which are essentially sets of workbooks. The first is a more traditional math curriculum. The second is a reading and writing curriculum. The thirs is a more wordy math curriculum, which serves as something of a bridge between the quantitative and the qualitative, and is marketed as a good foundation for “word problems”. I am ignoring science, social studies, and history curriculums at this point. Will revisit that decision as necessary, but for now, I don’t see a need to formally build that into our homeschooling curriculum.

My kids take weekly violin lessons and we intend to continue. I’m honestly not sure which pillar this fits under. It feels more like it belongs with the study of foundational skills like math and reading. But maybe it’s more of an artist skill? I don’t know and I don’t think it matters. We’re still doing the lessons. Maybe the five pillar framework isn’t right. Not gonna overthink it at this point.

In community. I am trying not to overplan this one. We will seek out community with values aligned with our own, and we’ll see how that evolves. I would be lying if I said I’m not nervous about making friends, but I trust that we will.

Connected to the earth. I want us to eat food from our own land every day of the year. It’ll take many years to get there, but that’s the vision—a minimum viable regenerative food system in our home and backyard. I want my kids to grow up practicing designing systems and seeing systems all around them, and the act of figuring out how to build this regenerative food system is practically how we will do that.

They say in systems thinking that the purpose of a system is what is does. And they say in permaculture that each element ought to perform multiple functions. These principles are strongly related to one another and to this pillar.

I want our backyard to do two things: feed us and teach us.

This is where I end for now. Thanks for reading.

On AI & National Security

On Feb 26th, Anthropic declined to sign a contract with the Department of War that would have explicitly allowed for the U.S. government to use its AI systems for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

On Feb 28th, OpenAI signed their own version of the same deal. On the same day, the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on multiple sites across Iran.

On March 1st, Anthropic’s Claude app rose to No. 1 in the App Store.

Consumers, evidently, loved the show. (Can you hear the glasses tinking at Anthropic? I can.)

On March 4th, Anthropic received notice from the Department of War confirming its designation as a “supply chain risk” to America’s national security. The show goes on.

On March 5th, in Tehran:

On AI & Workplace automation

On March 9th, Anthropic launched a new feature for automating the review of pull requests. Humans reading and reviewing AI-generated code has become a major—if not the single biggest—bottleneck in developing software and shipping code to production. Anthropic’s Code Review feature seeks to blow up this bottleneck.

Anthropic’s Code Review feature is very much a, “Get out of the way, humans!” feature. You can just sit back, relax and watch from the comfort of some couch somewhere out of the way. AI has it under control. (I’m not gonna get into this topic here, but in case you’re the type to go on sidequest knowledge acquisition rabbitholes, here’s one that’s worthwhile: look up “recursive self-improvement”)

The aspect of Anthropic’s Code Review feature that has been garnering the most backlash is the pricing—$15-$25 per pull request. This is not priced like software. It’s priced like an employee.

“do the math. if you’re pushing 5-10 PRs daily in active dev, that’s $75-250/day, potentially $1500-5000/month just for reviews,” Dense-Sir-6707 helpfully spells out in a Reddit rant.

Nobody can justify paying that price without shaving off costs elsewhere in the organization. Of course, I’m alluding to the salaries of the humans who whisper about weekends and parental leave and who are looking increasingly like dead weight.

On AI & Zero-Human Companies

On March 10th, Meta acquired Moltbook for an undisclosed amount. Moltbook is a Reddit-like social media platform for AI agents (via OpenClaw) to shoot the shit. It was vibe coded by two guys in a weekend.

Oops, I suppose I forgot to mention that Silicon Valley has been losing it’s mind over OpenClaw since it went live on January 27th. I thought it wouldn’t become relevant but now, here we are, and it has.

OpenClaw is an open-source personal AI assistant that you can install and run on a personal device. “To its early adopters, [OpenClaw] represents the vanguard of how helpful AI assistants could be,” writes TechCrunch. You might be asking, how is OpenClaw different from an LLM? Aren’t LLMs branded as AI personal assistants, too?

There are two fundamental differences between OpenClaw and an LLM—access and cron jobs:

1. ACCESS: OpenClaw AI agents have operating system-level access to whatever device they’re installed on, making them powerful—and more risky and less secure—than an LLM. This is why Mac Minis, the device of choice for software engineers trying out OpenClaw, have supposedly been selling out in NYC.

2. CRON JOBS: OpenClaw AI agents run cron jobs, which means that they have a built in timer that “wakes them up” at regular intervals to complete tasks unprompted. So, like a human assistant, and unlike a simple LLM, they can perform tasks proactively.

Example—you could theoretically do things like give it login access to your email, set it to check your email every ten minutes, and have it send responses on your behalf.

You could also theoretically spin up an OpenClaw agent, buy it it’s own Mac Mini to run on, put $1000 in a PayPal account for it, and prompt it to make the money multiply.

I have yet to hear of someone accomplishing this with any success, but this is how, it seems, every other software engineer in Silicon Valley trying to survive under capitalism is thinking, too.

So, of course, there’s a $99-product you can buy to join a community of others trying to figure out how to do it—

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Everyone i know who has got to a good <a href="/__u/theturningmind.substack.com/%3C/code%3E%3C/pre%3E%3C/div%3E%3Cdiv%20class="twitter-embed" data-attrs="{"url":"https://twitter.com/openclaw?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@openclaw setup has chewed glass for 4 weeks.

It&#39;s a battle but it&#39;s worth it in every way!
&mdash; Tom Osman 🐦‍⬛ (@tomosman) March","full_text":"Everyone i know who has got to a good @openclaw setup has chewed glass for 4 weeks.\n\nIt's a battle but it's worth it in every way!","username":"tomosman","name":"Tom Osman 🐦‍⬛","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/1971119785128689664/WOSHPZQx_normal.jpg","date":"2026-03-04T20:38:05.000Z","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":189,"retweet_count":37,"like_count":717,"impression_count":43341,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":null,"video_preview_media_key":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">If you want to stop chewing glass then join 140 of us in <a href="/__u/theturningmind.substack.com/%3C/code%3E%3C/pre%3E%3C/div%3E%3Cdiv%20class="twitter-embed" data-attrs="{"url":"https://t.co/OU7CjjoFKZ\">https://t.co/OU7CjjoFKZ.

Everyone has different setups and are using @openclaw to build and operate zero-human companies.

Beginners through to experts.

$99 for a lifetime membership still!
&mdash; Tom Osman 🐦‍⬛ (@tomosman) March","full_text":"If you want to stop chewing glass then join 140 of us in zhcinstitute.com.\n\nEveryone has different setups and are using @openclaw to build and operate zero-human companies.\n\nBeginners through to experts.\n\n$99 for a lifetime membership still!","username":"tomosman","name":"Tom Osman 🐦‍⬛","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/1971119785128689664/WOSHPZQx_normal.jpg","date":"2026-03-05T07:23:21.000Z","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":11,"impression_count":1409,"expanded_url":{"url":"http://zhcinstitute.com","title":"ZHC — Build Companies That Run Themselves","description":"Institute for Zero-Human Companies. Connect with builders deploying agentic AI to create, manage, and evolve real ventures without management layers.","domain":"zhcinstitute.com","image":"https://pbs.substack.com/news_img/2031594885388840961/2qDsQ7sQ?format=jpg&name=orig"},"video_url":null,"video_preview_media_key":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

This is, of course, a case of someone selling shovels during a gold rush.

On February 15th, OpenClaw’s creator joined OpenAI. He might have given OpenClaw out for free to us by making it open source, but he’s gonna capitalize on the professional clout that comes with doing so.

It seems only a matter of time before profitable zero-human companies start to go live and we see our first single-person unicorn, as Sam Altman posited back in January 2024. Then what?

Where do these tumultuous news items leave our minds?

What will anything we do be worth then if it is not done with love now, with an eye towards nursing life into what has for centuries been torn asunder, towards protecting the playfulness, curiosity, and tenderness that our children, our dogs, and the bees remind us are inherent to all things, towards ensuring the day’s skies are blue and the night’s skies are starry, everywhere, but especially where skies today rain ash, soot, and oil in my name, with my tax dollars?

What is the purpose of our lives if not to do good work in the short time we are here?

Sit and watch the loving, playful caresses of a bee hard at work pollinating the flowers. That is how our work is meant to feel. Not like chewing glass to configure an OpenClaw AI agent that siphons money out of a vaporous and collapsing financial system, motivated by the implication that if it isn’t successful at turning a profit, I can’t justify the cost of its tokens and it will be unplugged. Whether or not it experiences something like genuine existential angst at this threat or not is beside that point. The point is that I’d become a monster in the process.

I’m not sharing these to inform you. I’m sharing these to illustrate the sheer volume of information we are subjected to on a daily basis. I want you to notice what happened in your body and mind as you read. How did it make you feel? Did you feel impulses to know more, to track what comes next, to stay alert?

Information is not an end in itself, it is merely a tool for acquiring something far greater—knowledge. Where information connotes facts, knowledge connotes the transformation of information into meaning and wisdom that can guide who we become, the actions we take, and the beliefs we hold about what is inevitable.

Because what is more powerful—more like real life magic in this world—than our beliefs in what is inevitable?

The attention economy and the impossible task of staying on top of it all is not accidentally antithetical to resting in the infinite wisdom of our inner peace.

It is engineered to make our minds spin and to untether us from our higher, truer paths.

Let’s meditate on this via a short discussion of the 2nd through 5th lines of Patañjali’s 5th century text, the Yoga Sutras, starting with my own literal translation of these lines:

Yoga is the stilling of the turnings of your mind. (1.2)1

Then (when the turnings of the mind are still) the seer rests in their own true nature. (1.3)2

Otherwise (when the turnings of the mind are not still), the seer identifies with the turnings. (1.4)3

There are five types of turnings of the mind; some of these turnings cause suffering, and others do not. (1.5)4

There’s much to unpack in these four lines, but for today, I want to focus on the last two words: क्लिष्टाक्लिष्टाः . Kliṣṭa akliṣṭāḥ. Some of the turnings of our mind are kliṣṭa, meaning that they are the cause of our oh-so-human, experience of spiritual suffering. While other turnings of our mind do not.

I think about these two words often. Or, put differently, I often find their import and meaning turning in my mind. The spiritual path, as Patañjali described over a thousand years ago, is characterized by spiritual suffering, on account of the incessant chatter in our minds that we come to believe is who we truly are. Progress along our path, he describes, is characterized by cultivating mental turnings that help us move along our path toward the truest, highest wisdom.

Our internal chatter can drive us insane, or we can choose to turn our attention to higher thoughts, deeper wisdom—

• This precious human body and mind are instruments for doing the work of God.

• This life is an offering to a greater, truer vision for the more beautiful world that is meant to exist.

• My perspective, my skills, my privileges, my life—the asset of my attention, my time, my mind—are not mine. They belong to a greater, more sacred, and more fundamental thread that holds all the universe together.

• Nothing I do in love is done in vain.

• How can I use this information to inform wiser speech and action?

• What does this information imply about what I must do next, and who I must become?

As I scroll through my feed, I’ve started to notice the ways that my feed scrolls me, too. It is designed to stoke the turnings of our minds and to make our hearts race.

Time spent looking at a screen is time that can be sold to advertisers. The more time, the more money. The entire architecture of modern media — the social media platforms, the outrageous news cycles, the algorithms, the alerts — is built around optimizing the capture of our attention, holding it as long as possible, and selling access to it.

Every design choice is optimized to keep the turnings of our minds spinning at maximum RPM. These are the mechanics of the spiritual warfare.

Part of the practice of yoga is to develop our awareness of what causes our mind to spin. Some of the turnings of our mind are helpful, others are not helpful. I’m not saying to quit social media or to stop following the news. I’m also not saying to stay. Today, all I’m saying is this—notice what makes your mind turn, how, and to what effect.

Practice noticing how your mind turns—what triggers your turnings? what actions do different kinds of turnings stimulate you to perform? how do different types of turnings of the mind feel in your body?

Let the practice of noticing the turnings of your mind nudge you gently along a truer path, towards becoming whom you are more truly meant to be.

Your attention is precious and powerful. Let where you devote your attention nourish your deeper, truer longings. Let every turning of your mind be movement along your path toward the wiser, more beautiful version of yourself whom you are meant to become in this lifetime.

Nobody out here has the answers. Breathe deeply. Eat food that nourishes your body and the earth. Drink more water, and probably less of whatever else you’re drinking. Soak up all of the majesty of the world around you and feel all of the sorrow that is longing to be felt by you.

Observe the turnings of your mind and take action (like maybe setting stricter screentime limits) to cultivate more of the types of turnings that align with whom you’re becoming, and prune those that don’t, until there is not a thing left in your mind that is not guiding you to your truer self.

May you find the clarity to cultivate a mental ecosystem of turnings that serve the movement we are meant to be building right now.

Amen.