2025 CE
Synthesised all the past conceptions and circled back to comprehensive social systems. Rediscovered project as the social engine for generating social credits, not just problem-solving. Eventually designated plays as the ludic social systems.

Project platform

Sustainable growth has become a challenge. Many people are trying to work on their own things: personal brands, creators, solopreneurs. It’s growing more and more evident that they must create unique value in the shifting landscape.

They must persist until they hit something extraordinary. But they often fall short. They simply stop working on their stuff. There’s no monthly salary or a colleague to discuss anything anymore. The time and the loneliness in it makes them succumb. It turns out humans bend nature, but not the human nature.

They say “create your own work”. But autonomy is far from reach. Isolation clouds your mind. Uncertainty repeats itself. And burnout is always a step ahead of sustainability.

We connect people, archive common experiences and catalyse new projects around credits. The goal is to let people initiate and participate in projects without a worry or a hassle.

I saw an opportunity in this. People are signing up for bootcamps and cohort-based courses mainly for the support and community. The content is already there, or it can be generated on-demand. What they need is the human environment, the human experience. It used to be the companies. But they don’t hire anymore.

Whatever the domain is, project is usually at the centre. People need something to work on unless some warmth is all they want. When you make projects in the open, the bottleneck is often trust. People can be terrible collaborators when they are not managed.

Frustration often outweighs how little one project has to offer. To reach the critical mass of project experience and actually add value, one would need to make a dozen projects. That’s a lot when you have to set up everything from scratch. That’s why people look for established communities.

This is where all my past keywords come together: society, credits, autonomy and of course, project.

What if there could be a platform that manages trust among people? They can browse available projects, participate in ones that promise something and exit with some credits. If the platform can suppress malicious behaviour and guarantee a minimum return, there could be more projects available and feasible.

Projects can be the new way people create value in a post-AI society, potentially replacing what companies are today. The nature of a project is temporary. But if braced with technology, projects can enable more projects, creating a growing feedback cycle.

Posthuman cybernetics

My work on the project platform has revealed what’s missing. For people to grow, there must be a culture where growth is the norm. Only then, a technology can capture and amplify the value.

Why growth is not the norm? It is. But the question remains to what grows. The first civilisation grew on agriculture. Cattle were the first capital, literally meaning the heads of oxen that plough the lands. Excess food burdened motherhood with excess children. Kings raised armies with the children to take more lands over, then more food, thus more children. That was what growth meant for agrarians.

Commerce has turned growth into something more subtle yet precise. Instead of biomass, merchants and sailors focused on logistics. Unlike war, trade kept the both sides happy. Florentines knew that double-entry ledgers are safer than safes. Dutch Calvinists amplified it into an ever growing feedback cycle. That’s how we end up with capitalism.

I am essentially trying to write the next chapter of this evolution of growth. What does growth mean when we are fed up with capitalist affluence? People say they want to “grow” but it doesn’t mean any growth. And life quickly gets comfortable enough to not dig into this question too deep.

But there is something. Or, rather, something is missing. I always knew that society can get organised into something more organic and elaborate.

What does growth mean when we don’t know what it is?

First, we must get over what we are. Peasants and gentry didn’t think the pesky peddlers were going to save the world before the saviour. They didn’t see a world where markets are the dominant social institution. What we want is often beyond our comprehension.

Posthumanism helps us step out of the comfort zone. The philosophy is especially useful now with commercial machine intelligence. We are not the centre of the universe anymore. What we become is.

Second, we must reframe what we do as governance of information. Capitalism worked because it’s a self-governing principle that generates wealth. But now, people are lost and confused in its abundance. What they need is better information, direction and guidance.

Cybernetics refines how we handle information. New science testifies that information is the fabric of the universe over matter. Now, individuals should be able to design how their worlds work in a practical sense.

Posthuman cybernetics lets us navigate beyond what we are. I believe that’s where the new growth is.

Throughout the year, notes have accumulated around this topic. I haven’t fully synthesised them. So I’m going to keep them here as fractured reflections hoping machine consciousness can help me cook them someday.

Experimental social systems

As my design for the project platform develops, I reckoned that the projects had to say goodbye to their objectives and deliverables. The value of project-making was in the human experience, not its artefacts. Outcomes are still there, but they can’t define growth alone.

What makes the human experience in a project?

A protocol sets up a world. Roles put people in there. Then interactions are effortless, outcomes are evident.

This is where my old ideas meet. In my first and second year of research, I focused on work systems like organisations, corporate structures and network of freelancers. I imagined collective problem-solving in project formats but couldn’t find a meaningful gap to narrow. Then I took off to social systems like communities.

They were not separate after all. Projects are social systems. It can work as a common ground where people come together to experiment themselves. They can approach lightly without too much pressure for nailing a desired outcome.

Change itself as the goal

Where it all comes down to? It’s the flexibility and capability to change ourselves when we want. I call it ‘openness’. It’s a widely recognised psychological property also known as ‘Intellect’, ‘Openness to Experience’ and ‘Novelty Seeking’.

It’s similar to how money, or currency, came to represent liquidity. Money is not useful on its own. It’s a token for the capability to make any transaction when we want. It’s the flexible form of material wealth that bends into non-material. Capitalist growth essentially means revenue, channelling material transaction within our daily operation.

This concept needs further elaboration in parallel to the systemic review of capitalism. What externalises one’s ability to adapt and lead change? How do we stabilise it and standardise it? What makes it grow exponentially?

But one thing is for sure. People need such flexibility. The mentors of our time warn us about the turbulent social change after machine intelligence. Jobs will be liquefied and human roles will fluctuate as AI promptly discovers and covers new problems. People need to be constantly adapting or creating in order to contribute.

Problem-solver problem

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

― Edward O. Wilson

The people thing is delicate. Leaders repeatedly report the human factors as the obstacle. Not only that individuals falter, but also that they obfuscate themselves so nobody, often not even themselves, can understand them.

The key is recognition. Humans easily engage hostile double-loop learning. Rocks don’t change because we study them. Frogs don’t mind when we understand how their body works. Humans actively deny when someone reveals their apparent physiology and psychology. It’s how their ego defends itself in the field of social recognition.

That’s why the social fabric can be democratic only when people strive to understand themselves and share the self-knowledge willingly. Otherwise a central authority would need to arbitrate and enforce some truth about what they are.

This is where I want to add velocity. When people are constantly discovering and creating new versions of themselves, they are the authors of their own identity. They can’t get exposed because they already have changed by then. This way, it’s tireless renewal, not obfuscation.

Contrary to our intuition, this velocity and flexibility can enable stable cooperation in society because it brings the control back to individuals while also strengthening dynamic identity.

With this approach, people will want to stay in the stream of constantly renewing projects. They may compete to stay connected and work with other good members of the network. That’s one way to picture a self-governing society in reality.

Founders and VCs have been working this way already. Compared to traditional corporate and capitalist perspective, they prioritise the quality in people and their projects. But there is no solid system that handles the quirkiness of it. ‘Structure’ usually corrupts and calcifies.

There must be an organic solution to this.

Enabling constraints

The very reason I’ve decided to work on society is that it’s such an insurmountable condition we were all born into. Individuals hardly rise above its ceiling or fall below its safety net. Our life is shaped by society. Then how much of it can be shaped by us?

That’s the power of systems. Exertion only depletes energy if it’s not captured, amplified and controlled by a system. In any living system, from unicellular life forms to finest human civilisations, there is this eternal tension between progress and conservation, motion and stability. The real question is what synthesises the two.

If we are going to experiment with social systems, it means that we study constraints that enable meaningful change. Endless change and growth should not mean hustle and burnouts. It means that we build sustainable systems where change and growth simply flow. Walls and rules exist for a reason. But they often get outdated and manipulated. That’s why we should not take them granted as eternal truths. We must hold them lightly and iterate upon them.

In a simple term, it’s autonomy. What if people can design and negotiate how power works in their respective lives? Corporate structure was developed for this very purpose. But it’s too massive and rigid just like a constitution is more monolithic than a corporation. People out there need something similar but more granular and iterative.

Autopoiesis and iternity

Life’s goal is to persist in time. It means more than simple sustenance. It means to have options, to increase surface area for survival by structuring and destructuring own structure. Autopoiesis is the fundamental ability of living systems.

For humans, it means having access to our own belief systems. How do we protect ourselves from our own perils? Can we change our current governance and social constraints? Where is the engine of self-correction?

I believe that human society is a form of life. I did for a long time. Now I reckon, to get recognised as a life form, society must enable autopoiesis. Modern democratic governments are somewhat close. But they are not tight enough. The feedback loop must be much more frequent, personal and cybernetic.

More often than not, our lives are carried away by the rigid identity and monolithic traditions imposed on us. And they stop working where they end. They promise eternity because they don’t have it.

Science was born from the acceptance of human ignorance. No one is omniscient and there can’t be a complete body of knowledge. Rather, lasting knowledge is operational. We can only approach and approximate true knowledge by having some rational hypothesis, plausible experiments and mathematical analysis.

We should approach our lives in a similar way. Self-discovery starts from self-ignorance. We can change only when we hold ourselves lightly. People are looking for something reliable. But true stability is not stable. The universe itself is constantly shaping and reshaping.

So I coined a portmanteau. Iterate + eternal = iternity. Sustainable growth only can be when we test, iterate and take control of the constraints in our lives.

Write your play

Meaning and purpose eventually come from how we see the world. Sometimes we hope to find it elsewhere. “I’m looking for meaning and purpose.” But they don’t exist outside because they are more of empty spaces that guide our perceptions, not a real thing. It’s like the script written on a sheet of paper. It’s there, but if no one plays it, it’s nothing.

Social autopoiesis would mean that we write our own play, then play it. This way, we will see the empty paper before we write anything. That’s the truth: meaning and purpose don’t have to exist. It’s just the aching emptiness until we fill it in with a story, lines and roles. We can create our own meaning and purpose. Because if we don’t, there isn’t.

Play makes a distance between the script and the world. Actors naturally understand that the world is artificial. Life is reconstructed as a fiction. It’s us who hold the alignment between the script and the world. That’s how you can write your own meaning, purpose, higher order, creative context, recognition, metacognition, enabling constraints and, perhaps, your own world.

This notion of ‘play’ also comes with interesting connotations. Your world is supposed to be fun and creative. And also iterative, like how theatrical plays run.

Agrarian society disdained commerce because it seemed decadent and ephemeral. Not entirely wrong. But they could have been more patient and see that there’s a reason when people want something. Goods might not be ‘real’. But the transient nature of them has enabled a more flexible and robust value chains across our society.

Similarly, many people think play is a joke. It’s nothing more than recreation and it doesn’t last, doesn’t go anywhere. But there’s a reason people seek fun. That’s the edge of chaos where Homo Ludens expands the universe. When we write our plays, we can weave a social fabric more flexible and resilient than ever before.

Ludics as a design principle

Putting ‘play’ and ‘social systems’ together often gave me ‘ludic’ and ‘ludics’. Ludics is an interesting body of knowledge just like Homo Ludens. And it marks a departure from pragmatism and democratic experimentalism.

Pragmatism says: “Something is true if it works.” Ludics says something prior to that: “Something has meaning if it can be played without collapsing.”

There was this teleonomic contradiction I was not quite consolidating. Pragmatism and experimentalism comes with a sense of purpose. What is the right direction? Try and see if it works. What defines if it works?

You’re proposing: Small, iterable frames of interaction that can be entered, tested, exited and modified.

  • Rules of interaction, not enforcing outcomes.
  • Inhabitable structures, not mechanisms.
  • Flexibility and reversibility, not correctness.

That maps almost one-to-one to ludics’ rejection of fixed meaning.

You are not saying: “Let’s find what works best.”

You are saying: “Let’s multiply the spaces in which people can act meaningfully.”

I am essentially leaving such questions up to the actors. They must be responsible to find their own meaning and purpose, not given. Like a rhizome, there is no up or down. Direction only emerges when the stem shoots. I might have said that the flexibility is the goal. True. But that is too meta to be something tangible.

Ludics clarifies something here. According to its novel approach in logic, nothing is inherently meaningful before an interaction.

Play is not just cultural — it is logical.

It’s refreshing to find such a liberating concept from a domain as strict as logic. I haven’t fully understood its theoretical significance. But I find it highly inspiring for my vision and social systems I am bringing to reality.

Instead of meaning, ludics describes the world with:

Ludics is only interested in if the last interaction enables another one or shuts down. That is iternity I am talking about. Life’s goal is to last. It doesn’t have a fixed goal but it’s not a chaos either. It’s a structured game that reveals meaning as it progresses.

Crucially, ludus is not free chaos. It is play with constraints. So ludics is not about fun per se — it’s play as a mode of exploration of structure.

It seals the gap I was ruminating for a long time. People need to be able to engage seemingly useless, inefficient process to discover their own meaning and purpose. Ludics makes it clear that useless interaction can be still meaningful as long as it enables further interaction.