michael-dean-k/

Appreciate you bringing this up in the Q&A [X], and thanks for starting this thread [Y]. This taps into some themes I’ve been thinking and writing on, so I’ll use this as an opportunity to further unpack it.

There’s a lot to say on making “art”—or any individual pursuit—through a collective crisis where individual effort feels meaningless. Fortunately we aren't alone and have a whole history of crises, so there’s probably a lot to learn in how people responded (this is one impetus for me trying to read more, especially in political philosophy).

I imagine there is a spectrum here, ranging from “focus on yourself” to “society-scale action.” I think if you focus too much on either side, you risk deflation. Purely selfish pursuits, however noble, can easily have the narrative behind them ripped out if the bigger picture hits a certain intensity. And purely collective actions, like protesting, also lose momentum when you realize a million people together have no leverage, and you’ve contributed much of your time to a cause instead on what you’re uniquely qualified to do, which is equally demoralizing. So the answer I think is to run both in parallel.

I’ve come across a Ghandian POV from some writers I admire, which is essentially, “be the change you want to see in the world.” While I resonate with this from multiple levels—for example, on taking responsibility for everything, and being very diligent in your own values instead of worrying about or judging others for their lack—I also think it can be a bit myopic. Cultural progress is possible, and it exists at a scale far bigger than any individual. Meaning, a lot of values and culture stem not form charismatic and well-principled individuals, but from the larger architectures we’re all entangled in. Those systems are designed, and history seems to oscillate between periods where systems are designed to withhold/protect virtues or designed to expand/preserve power.

The bigger question for me: how can any regular person be part of systemic change? It comes down to a leverage thing. I don’t currently operate at a level where I have any impact on government, culture, economics, education, and while it’s nice to hope, I don’t have delusion to think I’ll ever have civilizational leverage. I think few people in history ever do. Even Trump’s leverage is debatable! I don’t mean to get into politics here, but I will link out to a post I wrote, “What we have is worse than a king.” The main idea is that Trump is not the root of any of our problems, he’s more so the most visible manifestations of an OS that has been anti-democratic and anti-constitutional for many decades now, maybe even a century.

So within the sphere of “systemic action,” there’s another spectrum of what a person can do, ranging from theoretical to practical. Again I think it’s worth pursuing both. On the theoretical side, I personally find it fun to engage with systems designs at abstract levels that are far beyond my control. ie: I thought Bernie’s AI sovereign wealth fund was a malformed idea, so I did my best to understand it and propose an alternative. This is arguably big a waste of time, but I think there’s value in learning to think as a systems architect, and to imagine new kinds of civic technology. On the practical side, there’s Essay Club, which is something whose existence and flourishing is entirely dependent on me, but the impact is limited. 

A lot of modern forms of activism are neither theoretically interesting or practical. Instead of performing dissent (via protests or culture wars), I think we need to enact new types of techno-activism that are now possible with AI.

Over time, the practical thing may grow to a point where the theoretical systems architecture skill comes in handy. Maybe in twenty years Essay Architecture is a software-backed curriculum that runs across a few hundred/thousand micro-schools. Or maybe it doesn’t, and Essay Club only grows to WOP-scale, letting me focus on writing and teaching, while giving meaning to a small group of people, which is fulfilling and worthwhile in its own right. Twenty years is far off, and it’s been almost 20 years since I started architecture/writing in general. So that’s like a 40-year lag between intention and implementation, effectively, an entire life.

And so as urgent as everything feels I think patience is the key. There’s probably something to zooming out to the scale of your life, modeling where you think society might be in the 2040s, and slowly steering the boat in that direction. By focusing on individual pursuits, practical projects, and theoretical systems, for decades each, there’s a chance that at least 2 of those lanes might fuse together in a meaningful way.

Anyway, I enjoyed the occasion to use this as a prompt for my morning essay! Hope it’s vaguely related to and useful to your own streams of thought, and open to feedback and pushback. On a meta-level, I think there’s something neat in using emails/letters—which each have a specific person or two at the receiving end—as a way to start drafting essays. I already have this as a post on my website, and similarly, both of your notes could be public too.

Anti-AI sentiment is escalating: the Pause AI movement, state-level data center bans, molotov cocktails at Sam Altman's house, artists going to dumb phones, witch hunts for AI prose. Protesting and boycotting AI, at a personal level, is the exact wrong approach. It misunderstands the Luddites. They were not against the machines in principle, they were against the factory owners not sharing the profits of the factory. This is possibly about to play out a grand scale: AI and robotics labs could capture nearly all economic value, and there will be a plea to nationalize these companies and redistribute the profits.

While the scope and effects here are way bigger, the workers of the Industrial Revolution were far more disempowered. You couldn't "just do things." You could operate someone else's machine, but you couldn't just spin up a competing factory; that required land, resources, labor, none of which you had. There was just a certain amount of capital needed to compete, and it wasn't possible. Workers were limited to being workers, so they had no choice but to revolt with violence.

The difference today is that the worker and artist suddenly have access to build-your-own-factory tooling. A single person for $100/month can compete with companies valued in the millions and billions. It's asymmetric labor. Regular people can build civilization scale infrastructure, distribution labels, social media engines, software, etc. Never before has there been a democratic opportunity for people to self-organize into their own collectives, tribes, governments, and whatnot.

At least to me, this kind of optimism—principled, delirious, ambitious, but still careful and skeptical—is better than the cynicism of the "resist" factions. There is nothing you or your circles gain by putting your head in the sand; it brings a distanced, crabby, virtue-signaled posture that does nothing to change the actual situation. You gain nothing by staying on the ChatGPT free plan on default settings and complaining no how it's an ineffective, incapable, sycophant. It requires an ounce of nuance, to be critical of how the labs act, but to then use that lab's best tools towards your own sovereignty and vision.

I think what I'm trying to get at here is that the Luddites of the 21st-century will not be reverting back to typewriters and flip phones, they will be wielding AI tools in ways to foster human connection, and the kind of pro-human cultural that the Internet originally promised, but was never realized under capitalism.

When we say we "distrust institutions," we're pointing at the wrong thing; it's the institutes that are withering. We use these words interchangeably, but I think the separation clarifies.

An "institution" is an abstract, permanent, inter-generational primitive—like education, marriage, the free press, the essay—while an "institute" is a concrete embodiment that serves it. Think of an institution as a societal organ. Think of institutes as the specialized tissue that keep the organ functioning and regenerating.

As generations turn, new sets of people are handed down the great responsibility to protect and evolve institutes through the storms of time and technology. Without upgrading our institutes, society goes through slow-motion organ failure, with phantom pains and spiritual malaise that can't be traced back to the source. Schools still look like schools, but everyone is cheating through a Homework Apocalypse, and suddenly we have all sorts of cultural cancers that seem inevitable. Institutes are the civic building blocks of a sane society, and yet we glorify unicorns who create "value" but feel no responsibility for their dying elders.

Institutes operate through the inverse of market logic. Where startups are designed to accrue all of the upside, an institute is sacrificial, designed so society gets the upside, even at its own peril. Of course they swim in the same water, but institutes swim differently: they have opposite answers to questions on how to steer, what to make, where to focus, who to include, and when to stop. An attempt at some principles:

• mission-driven, not market-driven;
• timeless contributions, not self-serving content;
• involved in ecosystem building, not niche extraction;
• active members, not passive users;
• century-long legacy, not liquidity through an exit.

Usually an institute comes from patronage: you can’t resist market currents unless you’re supported by endowments, donations, foundations, tuitions, grants, and such things. You can’t start an institute in your garage, but now with AI and the collapse of cost, I suppose you could try. So many of the one-person AI company fantasies are about a single founder reaching a billion-dollar valuation, which is the cheapest form of ambition there is; the better question is around the scale and spirit of cultural impact achievable by a one-person micro-institute.

One of the thrills of the AI revolution will be how it untangles software from bad incentives. Today, software is expensive to build and maintain, and so it needs returns to fund itself. The big social media companies have annual expenses of $50m-$50b; they are in no position to operate from virtues, or to deliver on their stated aspirations of “connecting the world,” because they need to optimize for attention and convert it to revenue to fund the ridiculous scale of the operation.

But now we’ve hit the point where autonomous coding is real: Claude’s Opus 4.5 can code for many hours straight. I am currently “rebuilding Circle,” the community platform, except not as a platform, but as a single customized instance for my community (Essay Club). I am maybe 4 hours in and half way done. Circle wanted $1k/year, so I built my own with a $20/mo subscription.

When you can just prompt software into existence, you don’t need fundraising, an expanding team, and all the sacrifices that come with capital. Software can start reflecting the will of visionaries, rather than the exploited psyches of the masses. Of course, AI coding will also enable huckster bot swarms to sell Candy Crush clones and other brain rot variants, but more importantly I think we’re entering a new era of techno-activism.

Millions will use their weekends to spin up apps, sites, tools, platforms, and networks, not for the sake of colonizing the planet’s attention, but for the sake of gift-giving or mischief-making or culture-shaping. It could mean that we shift our attention from hyper-commoditized feeds to mission-driven places.

Today, I think a single person could spin up a million-person writing-based network for under $100k/year (my guess is that’s <0.2% of Substack’s cost). If you clone something exactly (like Twitter>Bluesky), there’s little reason to switch because you lose the network effects. But the oozification of code & interface means that we can start experimenting with better social architectures. How might a network built for human flourishing actually function? A novel concept paired with a small critical mass (just a few hundred people) might be enough to trigger a cascade of platform switching.

The irony is that AI coding is only possible because big companies have been able to amass extreme amounts of capital, resources, and data, but in doing so they’ve released something that could erode their own monopolies on attention, the last scarce resource. Now I think it comes down to what people decide to build. If everyone can build anything, will we each try to build our own empire of extraction, or will we contribute to a culture we want to live in ourselves?

02:32 PM – There’s something to the phrase “writer as technoactivist” that is appealing as we inch towards the 2030s. The word activism has gone sour for me, because it’s a stand-in for laziness, whining, and opinions. But there’s a history of technological activism that goes back to the 1980s and still continues today. I guess there was always a limit on what could be achieved through open-source software movements compared to market hounds. But if AI makes the cost of building things irrelevant, and any “revolutionary” suddenly has a 100-person “workforce” at their whims, then there might be a rise of new kinds of founder-driven institutes with missions you’d never see in the 2000s-2020s. Up until now, there was a fixed band of company types: unicorns, a $10-100m business for VC, a $1m narrowly-optimized market niche business, or a side passion.Feels like we’re entering an exciting new moment where mission-drive people can scale in ways that weren’t possible before.