Bjorn K Holmstrom

Good eye, I appreciate the directness. You're right to notice, I didn't use ChatGPT here directly, but I do use advanced AI models as collaborative thought partners to sharpen my language (I'm not a native English speaker) and stress-test ideas, through a method I've termed the SCI cycle. My background before Global Governance is work in Applied Mathematics and studies in Engineering Physics.

This is a fascinating thread, thanks to @Hardkill for the great question and to everyone for the thoughtful replies. @psychedelaholic, your post really resonated with me, especially this point: This gets to the core of it. The question isn't really 'which side is more evolved?' but 'how do we create a politics that is itself more evolved?' A politics capable of holding multiple truths and focusing on long-term systems rather than short-term tribal victories. @Basman's point about system incentives is crucial. The current structure (first-past-the-post, constant election cycles) practically guarantees the outcomes we see: polarization, short-termism, and a failure to address big problems. It’s not necessarily that people are incapable of higher-level thinking, but that the system actively punishes it. So, if the goal is to encourage the kind of integrative, Yellow-level thinking that Hardkill and psychedelaholic describe, where could we start? A few ideas that seem promising: Structural Reform: Pushing for things like ranked-choice voting seems essential. It reduces the 'lesser of two evils' dilemma and lets people vote for integrative third options without fear, which would slowly change the kind of candidates that run and win. A "Coalition of the Uncomfortable": It wouldn't be a traditional third party, but a network of people from across the spectrum who are tired of the duopoly and share a commitment to evidence, nuance, and practical problem-solving over ideological purity. Start Local, Cultural, and Concrete: National politics is a polarized abstraction. Change could start at the local level, where problems and solutions are tangible. This leads to a question I’ve been pondering from my perspective as an observer from Sweden: What would actual, on-the-ground experiments in "integrative governance" look like in your communities? Instead of theorizing about left vs. right, what if we deliberately started testing approaches that try to combine strengths from different perspectives? Honoring both conservative wisdom AND progressive insights? The goal wouldn't be to win a culture war, but to demonstrate a better way of working together that produces tangible results. Success would be measured in greater community cohesion, resilience, and well-being, outcomes that appeal to everyone, regardless of ideology. This feels like a practical path forward: work on changing the destructive rules of the national game while also building local models of what a healthier political culture could actually look like. I'm curious what others think, especially those of you living in the US. What might a pragmatic, integrative local initiative look like in your town? All of this reminds me of something I started working on a while back - 'The Butterfly Movement' - exploring what a movement grounded in systemic, integrative thinking might look like. I got as far as building a prototype website but never took it further. You can check it out [here] if you're curious - would be interested in thoughts on whether this kind of approach resonates with what we're discussing.

@ryoko, thank you. Your critique is a necessary purge. It incinerates spiritual materialism and forces a brutal honesty that is the only valid starting point for any of this work. You are absolutely right. On Gamification: You are correct. Any new rule set, no matter how well-intentioned, can and will develop unforeseen pathologies. The desire to 'design a better system' is still an act of control within the dream of form. On Karmic Residue: You are correct. There is no such thing as a perfectly conscious, karmic-free action or business. To claim otherwise is the self-delusion of a spiritual ego seeking a clean identity. Merely by participating in a complex, interconnected system, we cause harm. True consciousness is to see this without flinching, to feel the weight of that participation without turning away into moralistic preening. On the Spiritual Trap: You are correct. The question 'What would you do if the world were already perfect?' is the only pure starting point. It bypasses the ego's desire to 'fix' and connects action to a deeper source than reaction. My orientation differs not in disagreeing with your absolute perspective, but in seeing it not as an end point that leads to disinterest, but as the very foundation for a different quality of engagement. From the mountaintop you speak from, one sees that all games are illusory. But one also sees the specific, intense suffering caused by the current game's rules. The impulse that arises from that seeing is not a moralistic 'I should fix it,' but a creative 'This particular illusion is causing unnecessary pain; what other forms might express interconnection more accurately?' The work of designing new structures; the governance models, the ownership schemes, the metrics, is not an attempt to achieve a state of purity. That is impossible, as you rightly state. It is a humble, flawed, relative practice: the architectural expression of a deeper seeing. It is not about building a 'conscious business' as a final, pure product. It is about building a container that allows for a slightly more conscious participation in the unavoidable game of commerce, while fully admitting it is still a game. It is a commitment to reducing measurable harm and distributing power, not as a moral victory, but as a practical acknowledgement of interconnectedness. You pit survival against consciousness, and for the individual ego, this is true. But at the species level, our collective survival is now dependent on operating from a higher level of consciousness. The current game is becoming self-terminating. Therefore, this architectural work is not a moralistic side-project; it is a survival imperative born from clear seeing. Your perspective is not a critique to be defeated; it is the essential foundation. It is the ruthless honesty that prevents this work from devolving into another egoic game. It is the sword that cuts away illusion, forcing the work to be more authentic, more humble, and more truly aligned with the Truth you point to. Thank you for holding that ground.

Hello @Actualising, Thank you for asking such a crucial and heartfelt question. My previous response to ryoko focused on the high-level "why"; why the current system makes conscious business so difficult. This post is a more direct and practical answer to your question: What defines a conscious business, and how can you start building one? Based on our discussion, a conscious business is not defined by its marketing or its 'good intentions,' but by its very structure. An unconscious business is structurally designed for selfish extraction. A conscious business is structurally designed for selfless regeneration and alignment with Truth. Here are four key structural characteristics that define a truly conscious business. Four Structural Pillars of a Conscious Business Governance: From Dictatorship to Dialogue. An unconscious business centralizes power with shareholders and executives. A conscious business distributes power. Its governance includes the voices of all who are impacted: workers, community members, and the ecosystems themselves. Ownership: From Extraction to Stewardship. An unconscious business is treated as property to be bought and sold for maximum profit. A conscious business is treated as a living system to be stewarded for the long term. Its ownership is designed to lock in its mission forever. Metrics: From Profit to Planetary Health. An unconscious business has one metric: profit. All other costs (social, ecological) are ignored or "externalized." A conscious business uses holistic metrics. It measures its success by its Return on Regeneration (RoR)—its integrated positive impact on financial, social, and ecological well-being. Transparency: From Obfuscation to Radical Honesty. An unconscious business hides its true costs and often relies on manipulating information to survive. A conscious business practices radical transparency. It actively seeks out and reports on its negative impacts and uses Truth as a tool for learning and improvement. Truth: The Ultimate Metric While governance, ownership, and transparency are structural, and RoR (Return on Regeneration) is measurable, there is one deeper metric, a meta-metric, that a conscious business must commit to: Truth. This isn’t just about honesty in the conventional sense. It’s a relentless commitment to seeing reality clearly, especially when it’s uncomfortable. Truth in Impact: Actively seeking out and acknowledging your negative externalities, even (especially) when no one is forcing you to. Truth in Self-Knowledge: Regularly asking: "What are the stories we tell ourselves about why we're successful? What are we avoiding looking at? Where is my ego, or the company's identity, distorting our perception?" Truth in Evolution: Using feedback, from failures, critics, system outcomes, not as a threat, but as the most valuable data for learning and adapting. A conscious business doesn't just report on metrics; it submits to what the metrics reveal. A business aligned with Truth willingly sacrifices short-term narrative control for long-term resilience and alignment with reality. This is the ultimate competitive advantage in a complex world: the capacity to not be fooled by your own illusions. Practical Starting Points for Your Journey So, how do you start? You don't need to build the entire new system tomorrow. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Start Where You Are: In whatever venture you're creating, relentlessly ask: 'Is this product/service creating genuine value, or am I just finding a clever way to extract it?' Focus on building relationships of trust with your customers and community. That is the seed of everything. Cultivate Your Inner Foundation: A conscious business can only be built by a conscious founder. The structure of your company will inevitably reflect your own consciousness. Before you architect your business, spend time architecting your own awareness. Contemplate these questions not as a one-time exercise, but as an ongoing practice: - On Motivation: "Is my primary drive to serve a genuine need in the world, or is it to prove my own worth, achieve status, or escape financial fear?" Be ruthlessly honest. A mission built on insecurity will crumble under pressure. - On Attachment: "Can I hold my vision for this business with passionate dedication while simultaneously holding it lightly, without attachment to a specific outcome?" This balance prevents you from forcing your will and allows the business to evolve organically to serve the whole. - On Shadow: "What parts of myself, my greed, my desire for control, my insecurities, might hijack this venture? How can I create structures of governance and transparency that keep these shadows in check?" Your business can become a mirror for your own personal development. - On Interconnection: "When I make a decision, can I hold the perspective of everyone this affects? Can I feel the impact on my employees, my customers, the environment, and future generations as if it were happening to me?" This cultivates the empathy necessary for true regenerative leadership. Study the Next-Generation Models: It's great to learn from Patagonia and cooperatives. But you should also study the next evolution. Explore frameworks like the Regenerative Enterprise Framework, which provides a complete playbook for transforming a company's DNA across governance, finance, and culture. Craft Your 'Transition Thesis': You may need to start with a conventional structure, but you can plan your evolution from day one. Start drafting your own Regenerative Investment Thesis. Ask yourself: What is my 5-year plan to introduce community ownership? What is my 10-year plan to place this company into a Stewardship Trust? Connect with others: You are not alone. Seek out the platforms and communities where these new models are being built and funded. Instead of generic business networks, look into: Study New Ownership Structures: Start with the B Corporation community to see how thousands of companies are legally balancing profit and purpose. For a deeper dive into next-generation models that remove extractive ownership entirely, explore the work of the Purpose Economy network. Learn from Regenerative Pioneers: Seek out think-tanks like The Capital Institute that are defining the principles of a truly regenerative economy, moving far beyond simple "sustainability." Organizations like Purpose Economy or Commonwealth that are developing next-generation ownership and governance models. Find Aligned Capital: Explore investor networks like Toniic or community hubs like Impact Hub, where capital is actively seeking to fund the kinds of systemic change we're discussing. As ryoko pointed out, the current game often punishes conscious choices. The ultimate answer is to redefine success itself. The old model offers the hollow prize of individual success in a broken system. The new model offers the profound fulfillment of contributing to the success of the whole. @Actualising, what’s the business you’re envisioning? If you share a bit about your idea, we can explore how to architect it consciously from day one.

ryoko, this is a characteristically sharp and systems-level analysis. You've put your finger on the core issue: money is a neutral tool that amplifies existing human and systemic intentions, both good and bad. I agree completely with your diagnosis of the current 'ecosystem.' It is indeed structured around scarcity and inequality, making truly clean participation nearly impossible. Your advice to be conscious of one's position and the real costs of participation is crucial. However, I'd offer a slight refinement to your final verdict. Your conclusion; 'there is no such thing as conscious business', is true if we define business only by its current, corrupted form within the extractive capitalist ecosystem. But what if we redefine the ecosystem itself? As I think Leo said at the end of his last video, 'Why Truth is the Highest Value', evil is not about content; it's the structure of serving yourself at the expense of others. The problem isn't the act of organizing resources and labor to provide value (which is all business is at its core). The problem is the design of the system in which that activity takes place, a system that fails to account for true costs (ecological, social) and rewards short-term extraction over long-term regeneration. The question then shifts from 'How do I be a conscious business within this broken game?' to 'How do we build a new game with selfless structures and new rules?' This is where new models and mediums come in, not as utopian fantasies, but as practical experiments in changing the underlying incentives. Concepts like: Stewardship Models like B-Corps and Cooperatives, which legally and structurally subordinate profit to purpose and community. Regenerative and circular economies that design waste and exploitation out of the system from the start. Alternative exchange systems like time banks, community currencies (Ithaca HOURS), and local exchange networks that reward the very things the old system ignores: community care, mentorship, ecological stewardship, and relationship-building, rather than just financial capital accumulation. These are all attempts to build systems that are structurally aligned with Truth rather than self-service. They are not yet perfect, but they prove that the activity of business can be conscious when the rules of the ecosystem are changed. So, the final verdict might be less 'all business is unconscious' and more 'true conscious business is impossible within the dominant system, and therefore our primary focus should be on building and participating in new systems.' To the original poster, @Actualising : your desire to be successful in a conscious way is the right instinct. The answer doesn't have to be to give up and 'make the kill' within a broken system. Perhaps true, integrated success comes from putting your energy into building and supporting these new, more conscious systems. That might be the ultimate act of surrendering your personal success to the success of the whole, a path to a success that's actually worth having.

I've been working on the educational project Spiralize a bit, exploring how Spiral Dynamics stages influence our approach to money and investing. It resulted in this new page that maps out investment philosophies from Beige through Coral: spiralize.org/insights/investing The Core Framework: Red: Unconstrained power maximization (pump & dump, predatory behavior) Blue: Constrained maximization within sacred rules (faith-based investing, rigid discipline) Orange: Single-objective optimization (pure profit maximization) Green: Value-driven constraints on profit (ESG screening, ethical filters) Yellow: Multi-objective system optimization (balancing profit, planetary health, social equity) Turquoise: Holistic system transformation (actively changing financial infrastructure) Coral: Paradigm-breaking through market interventions What struck me during development was how quick Claude was to warn against Red's predatory tactics while treating Orange's systemic destruction (climate change, inequality) as "business as usual." I had to tell him explicitly to add the Orange disclaimer. The water we swim in makes Orange's harm less visible despite arguably greater aggregate damage. Educational Focus: This isn't investment advice but a developmental lens on how our values shape capital allocation. The most actionable insight according to Claude seems to be the Green→Yellow transition: moving from black-and-white ethical screening to nuanced systems thinking about leverage points and emergent solutions, while I'm personally mostly interested in integrating stage Turquoise and evolving our systems for planetary well-being. The page includes mathematical optimization frameworks for each stage, showing the evolution from simple constraints to complex multi-objective functions. Also covers the "stage inflation" risk - people identifying with higher stages without having genuinely developed the cognitive complexity. Creating this was nice throwback to my optimization background (I have worked with development of applied mathematical optimization software). Has anyone else noticed how their investment approach shifted as they developed? Or found themselves caught between stages, like wanting Yellow systems thinking but defaulting to Green either/or thinking under pressure? Creating the page reminded me of attempting 'conscious investing' ten years ago. While looking back, it was mainly adopting a stage Green framework, and I quickly however fell into the temptation of just investing in single stocks to maximize profit short term. I welcome feedback on how to improve the page and website in general.

This is 100% correct. You've put your finger on the universal failure mode of modern politics. It's not a left problem or a right problem; it's a systems and incentives problem. The left's version of corruption; bureaucratic waste, failed promises, and irresponsible spending, is indeed different from the right's version (overt graft, defending elite corruption). But the outcome is the same: a loss of public trust, wasted resources, and a failure to solve real problems like the cost-of-living crisis you described in Canada. Leo's point about hypocrisy is key here. The system incentivizes all players to make promises they can't keep and to serve powerful interests while maintaining a public facade of ideology. The left's facade is "progress," the right's is "freedom," but the underlying engine is often the same: short-term political gain and economic extraction. This is why the left/right debate is often a distraction. It keeps us fighting each other over which flavor of failure we prefer, while the underlying structure that guarantees failure remains unchanged. The influencer corruption discussed earlier is just a symptom of this. They are playing the same game, just on a newer battlefield. The real workable alternative, then, isn't to find the "right" party or the "perfect" politician. It's to finally address the root cause: designing new governance systems with incentives that reward long-term thinking, transparency, and actual results over empty promises and partisan warfare. This is the only way to break the cycle you've perfectly described.

This is a crystallized version of a critical dilemma. Leo and Hardkill are both right, which points to the real issue. This is key. The ultimate foundation is individual integrity. "Fighting fire with fire" in a propaganda war, even with better guardrails, means you're still playing a game that fundamentally corrupts the sense-making we need. The point about the authenticity problem is fatal: The audience's intuition that they're being played is correct, even if the intentions are better. Hardkill is completely right here. Unilateral disarmament isn't a viable option. It cedes the narrative battlefield, leading to worse outcomes. The question of "what's the workable alternative?" is the essential one. The synthesis isn't to choose a side. It's to see that the current game's rules, its economics and incentives, make ethical guardrails incredibly difficult to sustain and pure integrity a niche outlier. So maybe the only workable alternative is to change the game itself. What would that look like? You'd need to design systems where the incentives are structurally aligned with integrity, not in conflict with it. For example: What if there was a transparent, independent funding pool (from philanthropic trusts, not political ops) that creators could access only by adhering to radical transparency protocols? The money is clean, and that cleanliness becomes the brand. That model itself becomes the advantage, "Here's who funds me, in real-time. Can they say the same?" It's a way to operationalize the idea of "fighting fire with clean fire." The goal shifts from creating a "left-wing Joe Rogan" to fostering a new class of media entity whose credibility is verifiably built into its structure. This doesn't win the propaganda war. It aims to build a new information environment where propaganda struggles to survive. Just a thought.

Agreed, maybe you want to start a thread, or know of a relevant one, if you want to respond to my latest post (I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts)?

@ryoko, this is exactly the level of strategic critique that is necessary. Thank you. You are right to be skeptical of BAZs. Your central argument, that any new structure risks becoming "just another institution" that replicates the hypocrisies of the old world, prioritizing itself and failing to address global inequity, is the most valid criticism there is. So, let me reframe the intention, because we may be closer than it seems. A BAZ is not conceived as a finished, perfect system. It is an embodied hypothesis. It is the immune response of the outliers, given a temporary form to be tested. We should expect most to fail. The critical function is not their success, but the data their failure generates for a shared protocol library, strengthening the entire ecosystem's intelligence. This is where the FOSS model is paramount. A BAZ must earn the pure willingness of its participants every day. If it becomes coercive or insular, the principle is to fork it or leave, to exercise the freedom to opt-out you champion. The Meta-Governance Framework is not a government for these zones; it is the proposed set of interoperability standards that would allow sovereign, autonomous experiments to voluntarily coordinate resource and knowledge exchange, without requiring a global government. Your point on nations is correct; they will act in their self-interest. The strategy is not to convince them otherwise but to make the alternative coordination model so effective that it becomes a more attractive partner for crisis response and innovation than other nations stuck in the old paradigm. Your Trump analogy is brutally insightful. It names the trauma at the core of the master system. The work, then, is to design containers where that trauma is not the primary driver. This isn't about morality; it's about social technology. Can we design a system that doesn't run on exploitation? The only way to know is to build it and see. The question shifts from "Is this the perfect solution?" to "Does this experimental process itself constitute a valid and ruthlessly clear form of engagement with the problem?" I believe it does, but only if it's guided by a final, and perhaps the most important, design principle: Liberatory Impermanence. The entire governance architecture is designed with the awareness that its highest purpose is to become unnecessary. The frameworks are not the final state; they are a temporary scaffolding designed to help humanity build the capacity for what my work calls 'natural coordination', a state where communities can interact and solve problems based on the pure willingness you described, without needing the formal structure at all. It is a system designed to work towards its own graceful dissolution. This, I believe, is the ultimate expression of transcending the game.

@Ishanga, thank you for joining and sharing this perspective. You've perfectly articulated the daunting scale of the challenge, the convergence of ecological overshoot, entrenched power, and a crisis of consciousness. Your feeling that the current trajectory seems unstoppable is a rational one, shared by many who are paying attention. You're right; time is of the essence, and waiting for a top-down solution or a global awakening is not a strategy. This is precisely why the work moves beyond just a vision like the Venus Project. The approach isn't to fight the existing system head-on, but to build functional alternatives now, however small, that are designed to be more resilient, equitable, and regenerative. The goal is to have these prototypes, these new "social operating systems", tested and ready as life does change dramatically. They won't stop the sixth extinction, but they might provide the seeds for how we organize and care for each other within it. It's about moving from a feeling of powerlessness to a practice of building power, community by community.

Ryoko, that's a powerful analysis, and your FOSS analogy is the perfect ground for this discussion. You've put your finger on the core dynamic: FOSS is a massive, global collaboration driven by care, yet it is perpetually plagued by an energy problem. It produces immense value but runs on the heroic self-sacrifice of a few outliers, often leading to burnout. This is the exact contradiction my work is trying to address. Rather than presenting a finished solution, this leads me to a set of open inquiries. Could the FOSS energy problem be addressed with a new economic architecture? I'm exploring systems designed to value and reward the very care you identified, without the corporate profit motive. For example, a system like the GGF's AUBI 'Hearts', which circulates value based on contributions to community well-being. You said Thirds aren't ones for social contracts, and interactions must be from pure willingness. I agree. But could they use a set of non-coercive Meta-Governance protocols, like open standards, to voluntarily align their work, preventing the need for a central authority to become a new master? Finally, you mentioned the need for an environment as a prerequisite. Is it possible to design protected social and economic containers, like the BAZ concept, where these heroic outliers can thrive without having to work in corporate America first to fund their real work? I'm not presenting these as final answers, but as the core questions my work is built around. From your perspective of ruthless clarity, do you see any potential in this approach, designing new economic, coordination, and social protocols, or does this, too, inevitably fall back into the same master-slave dynamic?

Ryoko, I appreciate you moving the conversation to this deeper philosophical level. Your distinction between exit and engaged disillusionment is a crucial one, and your systems-level view of human dynamics as a natural process is compelling. There's a stark clarity to your diagnosis that I find valuable. You're right to point out the circular trap of systems like The Venus Project that require a change in human nature before they can function. And your naturalistic framing, seeing human folly, crisis, or even extinction as part of a process without moral judgment, is a perspective that forces a necessary confrontation with reality. However, from within this same naturalistic view, I'd offer a different interpretation of the data. You state that with free time and resources, people would choose entertainment over creation, framing it as the "truest nature of human beings." Yet we also see overwhelming evidence of the opposite: people gardening, writing, coding open-source software, making art, and building communities, often for no monetary reward. Isn't this also part of our nature? The desire to create, contribute, and connect seems just as fundamental as the desire for leisure. Perhaps the environment doesn't just suppress one tendency and allow the other; it selects for which aspect of our complex nature is expressed. This is where I find my own expression of engaged disillusionment. I accept your premise that we are embedded in a process and that crisis is the primary catalyst for change. I don't operate from a place of hope, but from a place of orientation. From the absolute view, all outcomes are part of the whole. But from the relative view within the process, I am a node with agency. My particular orientation, is to act as if the universe is leaning towards greater complexity, consciousness, and coordination. This isn't a belief I need to defend, but a mode of participation I choose. Therefore, the frameworks I work on are not a blueprint for a utopia that requires new humans. They are: A set of patterns designed for the humans we actually have. A strategic toolkit for the moment of crisis you accurately predict, meant to provide a better, more coherent alternative than collapse into violence or corporate feudalism. An exercise in changing the environmental selection pressures (e.g., through an AUBI) to see if it elicits our cooperative and creative nature, rather than just our survivalist one. A proposed social contract for the Thirds. You've described the third as an individual with ruthless clarity. The ultimate question your work explores is: If a critical mass of individuals achieves this state, how do they coordinate their actions and build a new world without inadvertently recreating the old power structures? The Meta-Governance Framework and the Emergent Governance Protocol are my proposed answer; a set of non-coercive protocols for sovereign agents to align and create together. It is my form of ruthless clarity, to build without attachment to the outcome, but with full commitment to the act of building itself as a valid participation in the process. I am curious, from your stance of engaged disillusionment: what does your participation in this conversation itself constitute? If the outcome is truly irrelevant, what is the nature of the engagement?

Ryoko, thank you for this. This is exactly the kind of brutal, systems-level clarity that is often missing from these discussions. I'm not going to dismiss your archetype model, in fact, I think it's a painfully accurate lens for describing the current human condition. You've correctly identified the core problem: energy dynamics and the self-perpetuating nature of the master-slave game. I agree with you on almost every point of diagnosis: Law is indeed a tool of power. I'm not naive to the fact that the rules get broken by those who write them. The frameworks I'm working on aren't about appealing to the morality of the master; they are about building counter-power and creating new rules that are harder to subvert. The energy problem is everything. The majority are indeed drained, consuming just to survive (myself included). This is why the frameworks prioritize creating immediate material benefits (like the Adaptive Universal Basic Income's 'Hearts' and 'Leaves' system) to generate energy and agency at the local level, rather than demanding selfless sacrifice. You are right about the Third. This aligns deeply with the Indigenous principles in the framework, disengagement from the absurdity and a return to values based on land and relationality, not extraction. Where I perhaps see a different path is in the strategy of transcending the game. You're absolutely right that you cannot beat the master at its own game on its own terms. But I see two potential paths to transcendence: The Path of Immediate Exit: To become the Third entirely, to disengage and build something completely new outside the existing structure. This is what projects like the Venus Project or certain ecovillages attempt. The challenge, as you note, is the immense energy required and the constant pressure from the master structure. The Path of Changing the Game's Rules: This is the path I'm exploring. It involves using whatever leverage exists within the current system to create protected spaces (Bioregional Autonomous Zones) where the energy dynamics can change. It's about building the new system in the shell of the old, not through revolution, but through strategic parasitism. You might argue the master will never allow this. But I see the master system; nation-states, capitalism, as already undergoing a forced metamorphosis under the immense pressure of the polycrisis (climate breakdown, supply chain collapse, rising inequality). It's not about asking for permission; it's about being ready with a viable alternative when the current system fails to deliver. We see this already happening: dozens of UBI trials are being launched not out of charity, but because governments are desperately searching for solutions to automation and instability. Digital democracy tools are being adopted because traditional governance is too slow and illegitimate. Rights of Nature laws are being passed because environmental regulation is failing. These aren't signs of a confident master; they are signs of a system in crisis, throwing out old rules and experimenting with new ones. The frameworks I'm working with are designed to meet this moment of crisis and opportunity. They aim to provide a coherent, tested set of patterns for these desperate experiments to latch onto, helping them coalesce into something new rather than just being isolated, temporary fixes that get re-absorbed by the old game. The legal and institutional components aren't there because I believe the 'master' will play fair. They are there for three reasons: To create a protective shell: To legally shield the emerging BAZs and alternative systems from the immediate, crushing force of the old system, using its own rules against it (e.g., Rights of Nature laws, digital sovereignty protocols). To coordinate the new game: If we eventually have 10,000 BAZs and alternative communities, how do they cooperate, trade, and defend themselves without recreating the master-slave dynamic? That is what the meta-governance and interoperability protocols are for; to govern the relations between free communities, not to govern the slaves. To be ready for the crisis: When the next major crisis hits the master system (and it will), the frameworks offer a pre-designed, viable alternative. Without a plan, collapse just leads to a new master; a warlord or a corporation, filling the vacuum. With a plan, it could lead to a rapid reformation. In essence, I see these frameworks not as a petition to the masters, but as a blueprint for the slaves to build their own house next door, with its own rules, and then tear down the connecting wall when they're ready. You might be right that it's impossible. But it's the only form of energy investment I see that has a non-zero chance of creating something truly different without requiring a bloody revolution that historically just replaces one master with another. I would be genuinely interested in your thoughts on this strategic perspective. How would you propose the Third actually organizes and protects itself without any structure at all?

@ryoko, thanks for jumping in, this is exactly the kind of thinking the topic needs. You're right to point to The Venus Project. It's a great concrete example of the kind of holistic, systemic redesign I was alluding to in my thought experiment. It's a vision that tries to leap beyond the left/right, capitalism/socialism debates entirely, which I appreciate as rare and valuable. Your point about current systems being sentient and resistant to change is well put. It's the core of the challenge. It's not just about having a better idea; it's about navigating the immense inertia and active defense mechanisms of a deeply entrenched global system. The question of energy input, whether a critical mass of people can be mobilized, is the crucial question. I appreciate your candid take on Leo's post. I think there's a useful distinction to be made. His diagnosis of the flaws in libertarianism (and human nature) might have some brutal truth to it, even if his prescription (implying a need for strong control) and his dismissal of alternatives feel limiting. Your comment makes me wonder if the path forward doesn't require both lines of thinking: The critical/deconstructive work (what Leo does): To tear down naive illusions about our current systems and human nature. The visionary/constructive work (what the Venus Project, you and I are doing): To design and build compelling alternatives. Maybe the conflict between them is a necessary tension. The critic keeps the visionary grounded, and the visionary pushes the critic toward something new. Thanks again for bringing a concrete model into the discussion. It adds a crucial layer of practicality. Your point about energy input and mobilizing a critical mass is exactly the bottleneck that occupies most of my thinking. It's why I'm less interested in perfect blueprints and more in what is called governance interoperability, how we can build protocols and frameworks that allow different systems (new, old, traditional, technological) to coordinate effectively without requiring everyone to agree on one monolithic utopia first. This might be a long shot, but given your line of thinking, I wonder if you've come across or would be interested in the Global Governance Frameworks project I'm involved in? (github: https://github.com/GlobalGovernanceFrameworks / website: https://www.globalgovernanceframeworks.org). It's trying to tackle that exact energy input problem you mentioned. It doesn't assume a blank slate or a global revolution. Instead, it's a open-source repository of ideas and patterns, like a toolkit, for how different governance models (including things inspired by The Venus Project, but also Indigenous governance, reformed UN structures, and new financial systems) could actually interoperate and coordinate. A core part of it involves enabling the formation of Bioregional Autonomous Zones (BAZs), precisely the kind of prototypes you're talking about. And you've put your finger on the absolute core challenge: I share your skepticism about the willingness and energy to form them at scale. The frameworks are designed to make that initial energy requirement much lower by providing a supportive operating system and clear pathways. I'd be genuinely curious to hear your perspective on it, if you have the time and interest. No pressure at all, just thought it might resonate with the systems-level approach you're clearly taking.