Chapter 2: The System — Companion Notes
Building coordination that scales without creating tyranny or chaos.
Read these next
- Wikipedia Governance Model: how 2,500+ bots and human councils coordinate millions without hierarchy.
- Bronze Age Collapse: the cost of centralized chokepoints when shocks hit.
- Singapore Smart City: AI coordination at city scale—benefits and risks.
Try this
- Map your local “glass houses”: what decisions can be recorded, auditable, and rotated today?
- Prototype a Diversity Guard test: run one decision through multiple, dissimilar communities and compare outcomes.
- Write a 90-day emergency charter with an automatic sunset and publish it for critique.
Key concepts explored
- AI as Referee: Measuring and flagging but never making final calls on ambiguous values.
- The Four Living Pillars: Infrastructure, Economy, MOSAIC (governance), and Cognitive Field.
- Proof-of-Diversity: The architectural defense against elite capture.
- Emergency Protocol: How crisis powers can exist without becoming permanent.
Historical parallels
- Tennis Hawk-Eye: How AI officiating transformed sports without replacing human judgment.
- The Hanseatic League: Networked governance that outperformed nation-states for centuries.
- The Internet’s Layered Architecture: How TCP/IP enabled global coordination without central control.
Coming soon
- Civic Node tooling: open ledgers, audit kits, and transparency dashboards.
- Templates for rotating councils and bias audits.