I care about the boring, good kind of democratic infrastructure: who counts as “we,” how a group works out what it thinks without surrendering agency, and what keeps coordination from collapsing into a . It is the same coordination layer I build for codebases, with higher stakes and uglier rollbacks.
Meta-crises and Game B
By meta-crises I mean the failures sitting underneath the headline ones: incentive traps, broken sensemaking, institutions that cannot update when the world moves. I keep returning to them because a bad merge in public life is a policy, and the rollback takes a generation.
Game B, in the sense I borrow from that community, is the bet that coordination can get sturdier without someone always having to lose. I treat it as an open question rather than a creed: who belongs in the demos, how citizens make sense of things together at scale, what bends the default away from zero-sum traps.
Resource and opportunity inequality sits near the root of most of what goes wrong downstream. I have little patience for pseudoscience. When I need to vent about I go to RationalWiki, David Gerard's Pivot to AI, and Wikipedia: knowledge kept open, curated, and hard to capture.
Polis and swarm tooling
With Superintelligent Group we are building dialogue-driven swarm tooling toward those ends. One planned venue is polis.superintelligent.group: granular representational democracy, informed by the AI “Habermas machine” work in Science, where a group's shared statement is refined out of its individual positions. The bar is whether a group can see how its shared position got assembled and disagree with a step in it instead of with a vibe.
The current work page has the platform stack, pod experiments, and threat model. Civics essays that outgrow a headline run long on the blog.
Stance on agents in public life
If agents start mediating science, governance, or education, I want an account of what they changed that a stranger can criticize, not a press release about autonomy. That is the foundation-model agents paper and the partnership stance, pointed at public life: you should see who decided what, and be able to push back.