The floor plan
Ten wings, one architecture
One wing is finished and open. The others are under construction, with their drawings on view. The Enduring Realm is the capstone, where founders put every other wing to work.
Each wing repeats the same five rooms: threshold, plan, laboratories, ledger and reading room.
- Open now
The Cathedral
The person, in four kingdomsFrom the atoms in a stranger's blood to the narrator who arrives late to her decisions: what a human being is, and how reliably it misjudges itself.
Signature laboratory: The Cascade Engine
Enter the wing - Under construction · nearest to done
A Stewardship Architecture
Civilisation's eight cyclesCivilisation as a living system whose organs can be read, can fail, and can be tended.
Signature laboratory: The Reproduction Dashboard A ledger that shows growth while the sustaining cycles draw down.
- Civilisation can be read as eight reproduction cycles whose health can be measured and whose failure can be diagnosed.
- Under construction · much drafted in papers
Designed, Not Given
Money and the work relationWho creates money, who sets the terms on which a life's time becomes someone else's asset, and who decides.
Signature laboratory: Follow the Money Watch a loan create a deposit, then ask who decided.
- The majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans.
- Financial capital exists to serve human flourishing, and human flourishing is to be pursued within the limits of the ecological base.
- Under construction · in embryo
What the Quarrel Is About
Political doctrinesEvery doctrine bundles three kinds of claim. Pulled apart, the fight can be about what it is actually about.
Signature laboratory: The Sorting Split any political claim into coordination, evidence and telos.
- Every political doctrine bundles three kinds of claim: which mechanism should coordinate, how systems behave, and whom the arrangement is for.
- Under construction · outline
The Realm of the Given
The cosmological realmThe forging of the body's matter, the borrowed fire we live by, and the floor no agency can reach.
Signature laboratory: The Forges Trace each element in your body to the star or event that made it.
- Nearly every element heavier than hydrogen and helium was forged in stars or stellar explosions.
- The iron in human blood was forged in stars that died before the Earth formed.
- Under construction · outline
A Settlement, Not a Law
The planetary realmAn operator's manual for the habitable planet: the gauges, the load a region carries, and the load it displaces.
Signature laboratory: Reading the Gauges A region's load, and how much of it is displaced elsewhere. Refuses to pronounce a carrying capacity.
Follow this wing: A Settlement, Not a Law - Under construction · outline
The Ancient Family
The ecological realmThe living machine, the wear it repairs and the wear it cannot, and the one creature able to alter it.
Signature laboratory: Repairable or Permanent Sort kinds of ecological wear into what the living world mends and what it cannot.
Follow this wing: The Ancient Family - Under construction · outline
What It Replaced
Civilisation's historyEach new form understood by what it replaced, and the price of progress reckoned without hymn or lament.
Signature laboratory: What Did This Replace? Apply the substitution-failure test to the clock, the police force and the school.
- Each new institution is best understood by what it replaced, and some replacements cost capacities no ledger records.
- The number 150 as a natural human group size is contested: a 2021 re-analysis put the plausible range anywhere from 2 to 520.
- Under construction · built last by design
What Keeps a Thing Itself
Any complex systemA cell, a firm, a language and a marriage, sharing nothing but their architecture.
Signature laboratory: Still Standing A system whose cycles stop while its materials remain.
- A complex system persists through the reproduction of its cycles, not the persistence of its materials.
- Capstone Capstone · founding cohort first, founder's edition to follow
The Enduring Realm
The founding of an institution or businessA sage's counsel to founders: how to build an institution that outlasts you, told through the realms that endured and the ones that fell.
Signature laboratory: The Founding A turn-based founding simulation whose every rule is listed, marked and arguable in a public rules ledger.
- The number 150 as a natural human group size is contested: a 2021 re-analysis put the plausible range anywhere from 2 to 520.
- The majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans.