The historical evolution of translocal civilizational infrastructures

The premises and preconditions for the emerging cosmological civilizational model are clearly visible in human history!

Emergency Appeal to support Michel Bauwens after a triple stroke health event:

Dear friends, readers and subscribers. Three weeks ago, I was struck by a triple stroke, which, amongst other things, deprived me of my capacity for speech for a while, and created significant cognitive confusion for a while. I was hospitalized in Chulalongkorn in Bangkok, and fortunately am now significantly on the mend, as you can see hopefully in the quality of the article below. However, this health event has bankrupted me as I am on a very low income and without medical insurance and my capacity for further healthcare, and to continue my work, depends on financial support, at least in the short term. (We are preparing the launch of a Cosmo-Local Initiative with a new team of collaborators) If you care for the kind of work you see in this Substack, part of my larger work for the P2P Foundation to accompany this civilizational transition that our world vitally needs, or in case you care for my person as such, please support me in this emergency fundraising.

There are three ways to support me:

• A donation wallet at michelbauwens.eth (0x10f8143bc228c252Bc282A4aaD6a5fd58A6D1549)

• A Wise account with IBAN BE18905867195565

• A thai account at 279-2-82087-8

You can also choose to take a paid subscription to this Substack.

More details are available at the bottom of this article.

A huge thanks for considering your assistance!

Context and Introduction for the article

Here is the context for the article:

One of the formulas from Kojin Karatani’s ‘The Structure of World History’ that I really appreciate is :

Capital - State - Nation

This refers to the unique integrative balance of the post-Westphalian nation-state system, which replaced the previous system dominated by a common religion, which had broken down in three centuries of religious strife, i.e. the Reformation Wars that had plagued Europe, pitting Catholics against Protestants. In this new integrative state structure, the Nation represented the new community, i.e. a sovereign people united around a monarch, the State represented the unified power, and Capital the new logic of value, which was no longer based on extraction value from the land, but from labor in pursuit of profit for private owners. This regime had a dynamic balance: forces within the Nation fought for influence in the State, which periodically adapted to new internal power alliances.

Karl Polanyi describes this as the “Lib-Lab” dynamic in his also major and important work, “The Great Transformation’. He notices, like many others, that within capitalism, there are economic and social cycles that last 50-60 years (Kondratiev cycles). The first half of the cycle is the high growth cycle, good for the forces of labor which are in high demand, and creates pressure for higher wages and social reforms. But that leads mid-way to a supply crisis, as capital is increasingly starved from profits. In the second post-peak part of the cycle, the forces of capital become again more dominant, deregulating the economy, which increases profits, but over time weakens the demand side (labor as consumers). Thus a new crisis creates the conditions for re-regulation and a new cycle. The lab period is when society wants to regulate the market forces to put them at the service of society, the lib period is when the market frees itself from that control. The state is the mediator for this, reflecting the balance of powers. If you want to picture an example of this, think of the crisis of 1970-73 as a supply crisis, and 2008, as the demand crisis.

This dynamic functioned more or less until the 1980s. With the Thatcher-Reagan counter-revolution, an expression of the supply crisis of the 1970s, capital globalized in earnest, creating global flows of finance, products, and people. But this changed the balance. From now on, the ‘nations’ were unable to influence their own ‘states’, as capital had become a global force.

In another article, we have offered a history of the evolution of commons institutions as regulatory mechanisms, which were dominant in tribal institutions, and important even in imperial systems, but were systematically eradicated in the new political economy of capital.

Hence our conclusion: to recalibrate a more balanced social and economic dynamic, we need to build translocal systems that can scale at the same level of the inter-state system and transnational finance. Our whole wiki is a testament to the pressure of global humanity to achieve this, through millions of humansinvolved in interconnected experiments.

So to repeat our strategic conclusions:

Globalization created powerful translocal institutions for two domains:

• states (through international governance);

• capital (through global finance and corporations).

But it did not create equivalent institutions for the commons.

As a result, the translocal sphere became structurally imbalanced.

Markets globalized.

States partially globalized.

Commons largely remained local.

The intuition behind the concepts we propose, such as the Magisterium of the Commons and the Axial Entities of the Noosphere, proposed by David Ronfeldt, is that a mature civilizational architecture requires a third pillar capable of representing and stewarding commons across scales.

This article gives a historical context justifying this intuition by looking at the historical record of attempts at translocal civilizational institutions.

Below, we distinguish two different threads in the history of trans-local approaches.

1) Phyles, which served the reproduction of productive communities operating at translocal scale, within various civilizational spheres (internationally organized guilds, merchant diasporas, religious community diasporas without broader aims). A phyle is a type of translocally networked community system that has businesses and other institutions to create cooperation and support at the global level, for that particular community. It can be part of different civilizational spheres. This concept has been theorized by David de Ugarte.

2) Cosmopolises, which held the civilizational tissue together, at a trans-local scale, think of the Catholic Church, the Buddhist Sangha, the Islamic Ummah. A cosmopolis is NOT a geographic entity, it is a community of the mind as it were, a community of faith usually, which is connected translocally. However, it is a vital part of the integrative tissue of imperial systems. This is a concept that was proposed, as far as I know, by Venkatesh Rao.

3) A third emerging concept in the digital age is that of the Network Nation, conceived by Primavera de Filippi and colleagues from the network.nations collective (go to: https://network.nations for a direct link); and that of network states, as proposed by Balaji Srivanasan.

We believe that the network nation is an update of phyles, while the network state is an update of the merchant cities and states, and to the more recent experiences with Special Economic Zones, massively applied in the Chinese developmental model. Our suggestions for a future world order that rebalances the imbalance we have identified, i.e. what we call the Magisteria of the Commons or a variant of it that are called the Axial Entities of the Noosphere, are in some important way, an update of the Cosmopolis. This linkage is important as it stresses the historical rootedness of our approach.

Indeed, we believe that it is important to show the genealogy of these institutions and concepts, as it gives them a historical reality, so that what we are observing and proposing, is firmly rooted in the potentialities and realities observed in world history.

We will end with a speculative proposal on AI’s historical role which for us is neither primarily about labor replacement or artificial agency. Instead, we will propose it is civilizational synthesis.

Therefore, in the framework we propose:

• Phyles and Network Nations solve problems of translocal association.

• Commons Magisteria and AEONs solve problems of stewardship and care, translocally.

• AI solves problems of synthesis and intelligibility in the complex relation between the human and the non-human living world. It helps human deliberation with participation of the living world.

Throughout the text, you will find “In Summary” paragrahps, we reiterate the main argumentation of what you have read. They replace overview tables which I did not manage to technically transfer to this Substack version. This is the first one:

**

In Summary:

Governance → How do communities coordinate themselves across space?
Network Nations create autonomy and self-governance for translocal productive communities.

Stewardship → What must be regenerated, maintained, and protected?
Commons Magisteria and AEONs steward shared ecological, knowledge, and civilizational commons.

Synthesis → How do we understand and navigate overwhelming complexity?
AI-mediated collective intelligence synthesizes distributed knowledge and mediates the emerging relationship between human and non-human participants in shared ecosystems..

**

Please note we are NOT suggesting the replacement of the geographical based civilizational order by a trans-local alternative. Rather, we are seeking for new ways of integrating the geographical levels with the trans-local levels. But this definitely requires new human institutions that can function at that translocal level.

So let’s start with a more in-depth historical review!

What are translocal civilizational networks ?

Translocal civilizational networks are institutions, communities, and systems of coordination that connect multiple local societies across space without themselves constituting sovereign territorial powers.

Unlike states, they do not derive their authority from exclusive control over territory. Unlike markets, they are not primarily organized around exchange. Their primary function is to maintain continuity, transmit knowledge, coordinate activity, and sustain shared identities across geographically dispersed communities.

Throughout history, such networks have served as connective infrastructures linking local communities to larger civilizational horizons. They have often outlasted kingdoms, states, and empires, providing durable mechanisms for the preservation and transmission of culture, knowledge, norms, and collective memory.

Typology of Historic ‘Geographic’ vs Translocal Network Institutions

One way to understand the historical role of translocal networks is to distinguish between different mechanisms through which large-scale societies achieve integration.

The translocal form differs from both empire and nation-state. Rather than integrating populations through command or sovereignty, it operates through networks of cooperation, communication, and shared institutions.

**

In Summary: Three Modes of Civilizational Integration

Imperial Integration: societies are coordinated through command. The characteristic institution is the empire.

National Integration: societies are coordinated through sovereignty exercised within a bounded territory. The characteristic institution is the nation-state.

Translocal Integration: societies are coordinated through networks, shared institutions, and distributed forms of cooperation. Characteristic institutions include diasporas, guilds, scholarly networks, scientific communities, commons-based communities, and digital networks.

**

Most histories of civilization focus on the succession of kingdoms, empires, and nation-states. Yet equally important has been the existence of translocal institutions capable of linking communities across political boundaries.

These networks often function as civilizational connective tissue. They preserve knowledge across generations, facilitate communication between distant communities, and maintain forms of cooperation that transcend local political structures.

In many cases, they have survived the collapse of the territorial regimes within which they originally emerged.

We are working, for future publication in this substack, on a speculative and research based article in which we specifically look at the experience of the Jewish Diaspora as an alternative to an expansionist nation-state, focusing on the ‘distributed universalism’ inherent in the diasporic existence. Given the current tragedy in the Middle East, which is a tragic attempt to create a nation-state on an already populated land, it is worth looking at the continuation of diasporic existence as something positive, with lessons for the future. This experience stands out as unlike a phyle or a more traditional Cosmopolis, since the Jewish Diaspora maintained its own distributed ‘civilizational’ sphere, and that is a remarkable feat. We suspect that emerging Network Nations have a lot to learn from that experience, even if the survival of the Jewish people has been a challenge over the centuries.

* The Civilizational Value of Jewish Diasporic Extra-Territoriality

Let me share you a quote from the introduction:

“In the analysis of diasporic networks within the world-system, one encounters a recurring theme: the positive valuation of distributed existence as an alternative to territorial concentration and sovereign statehood. The significance of this convergence goes beyond the Jewish question as such. It raises a broader civilizational issue: can enduring human communities reproduce themselves through networks, shared traditions, and mutual obligations rather than through exclusive territorial sovereignty? In different ways, each of these thinkers suggests that dispersion need not be understood as a deficiency or an incomplete condition awaiting political resolution. Instead, it can constitute a distinctive mode of collective existence, one capable of generating cultural continuity, social cohesion, and even universalist forms of mediation between different peoples and civilizations. From this perspective, the Jewish diaspora appears not merely as a religious, ethnic, or national phenomenon, but as one of history’s most durable experiments in translocal organization. This possibility invites comparison with contemporary theories of distributed networks, peer-to-peer coordination, and commons-based forms of governance. While such parallels should not be overstated, they open a fruitful line of inquiry: namely, whether the long historical experience of diasporic Judaism can illuminate emerging forms of non-territorial cooperation and post-sovereign organization in the transition toward a new civilizational configuration.”

**

In Summary: Historical Evolution of Translocal Networks

We have compiled a tentative historical sequence of both types of institutions, i.e. phyles and cosmopolises:

Axial Age
The earliest translocal formations emerged around religious and philosophical traditions. Their integrative principle was a shared cosmology and ethical framework that could unite people across kingdoms and regions. Examples include the Confucian, Buddhist, Hellenic, and later Abrahamic traditions.

Classical Antiquity
Long-distance trade networks and merchant diasporas created enduring connections between distant communities. Their cohesion rested on trust, exchange, and commercial cooperation across large geographic spaces.

Late Antiquity
Rabbinic, Christian, and Buddhist textual communities developed sophisticated systems for preserving and transmitting knowledge across generations and territories. Canonical texts and educational institutions became the primary mechanisms of integration.

Medieval Era: The Jewish Diaspora
The Jewish diaspora demonstrated the possibility of maintaining civilizational continuity without territorial sovereignty. Shared texts, rituals, institutions, and covenantal traditions enabled dispersed communities to remain connected across centuries.

Medieval Era: Monastic Orders
Monastic networks linked communities across political boundaries through common rules, educational practices, and spiritual traditions. They became important vehicles for the preservation and transmission of knowledge.

Medieval to Early Modern Period
Armenian, Indian, Chinese, and other merchant diasporas developed extensive translocal systems based on kinship, trust, and commercial exchange. These networks often connected multiple civilizations simultaneously.

Early Modern Era
The Republic of Letters created a transnational intellectual community linking scholars across Europe and beyond. Correspondence, debate, and the circulation of manuscripts established a new form of scholarly integration.

Industrial Era
Scientific associations, professional organizations, and international movements expanded translocal cooperation around shared standards, research practices, and institutional norms.

Information Age: Open-Source Communities
Digital communication technologies enabled large-scale collaboration around shared knowledge commons. Open-source communities demonstrated how globally distributed contributors could coordinate complex forms of peer production.

Information Age: Crypto and Blockchain Communities
Blockchain networks introduced new forms of distributed coordination based on digital protocols rather than centralized institutions. These communities represent one of the most recent experiments in translocal organization.

**

Viewed as a whole, this sequence reveals a recurring pattern in civilizational history. Alongside kingdoms, empires, and nation-states, there has always existed another layer of social organization: translocal networks capable of connecting communities across space through shared beliefs, institutions, protocols, and forms of cooperation. Their historical forms have evolved—from religious traditions and merchant diasporas to scientific communities and digital networks—but their underlying function has remained remarkably consistent: the creation of coherence without centralized territorial sovereignty.

What is the difference between Phyles and Cosmopolises

Both David de Ugarte and Venkatesh Rao are proposing historical categories that illuminate both past and present:

* The Contribution of the Phyles Concept

For David de Ugarte, the phyle is not merely a future networked organization. It is a recurring historical form: a productive and cultural community capable of maintaining coherence across territories and political jurisdictions.

Under that interpretation, many historical formations can be read as phyles:

1. the Jewish diaspora;

2. Armenian merchant networks;

3. overseas Chinese communities;

4. Indian trading diasporas;

5. perhaps even medieval guild networks.

What distinguishes them is not ethnicity per se, but their ability to reproduce social, economic, and cultural life across political boundaries.The phyle therefore becomes a historical category for understanding translocal communities.

In his book Phyles, Economic Democracy in the Network Century, David Ugarte had noted the difference between phyles and the ‘fake community dynamics’ attempted by capitalist firms: “the quest of community by transnational companies, what is known as Neo-Venetianism, and the building of companies by Neo-Venetianist communities are two movements which are only apparently convergent. Both take as their starting point the distinction between the respective spaces and social rules of community and business. Nonetheless, while companies subordinate the community to the increasingly empty generation of value for stockholders, Neo-Venetianists subordinate their economic tissue to the space of greater personal freedom: community life.

No two more different attitudes could be found.”

* The Contribution of Cosmopolis concept

If one reads it historically, a cosmopolis is any civilizational space held together by shared symbolic, communicative, and institutional infrastructures that transcend territorial boundaries.

Empire is an integrative geographic rule, that is in essence ‘multi-ethnic’ and multi-cultural, but it vitally needs connective tissue. This connective tissue were provided by the ‘ideologies’ of ‘communities of faith’ which were itself not ‘terrotirial’. The Pope and the Sultan were at the head of translocal religious communities, ‘communities of the mind’ that supported the temporal integrative power of the empire, but were not to be confused with its geographic nature:

Examples might include:

1. the Buddhist ecumene;

2. the Islamic world;

3. Latin Christendom;

4. the Republic of Letters;

5. contemporary Internet culture as a new republic of letters ...

A cosmopolis is therefore larger than a phyle.

One could say that:

• Phyles are translocal communities.

• Cosmopolises are translocal civilizational spaces.

Perhaps this suggests that the local is not just embedded in geographic contexts of nation and empire, but also in translocal contexts.

In Summary:

This suggests that there are at least three scales of civilizational organization:

The Local: villages, cities, and communes sustain the everyday reproduction of social life.

The Translocal: phyles connect dispersed communities through shared identities, institutions, productive activities, and forms of cooperation.

**

The Civilizational: cosmopolises create the symbolic, cultural, and institutional space within which multiple communities and networks can interact across large scales.

Together, these three layers form a nested architecture: the local grounds social life, the translocal weaves connections among communities, and the civilizational provides a common horizon of meaning and coordination.

Network Nations and Network States vs. Magisteria of the Commons and the Axial Entities of the Commons

We distinguish, therefore, two distinct historical pathways, in which the ‘phyle’ tradition points to network nations and network state development, but the Cosmopolis tradition points to altogether new ‘cosmo-local’ institutional arrangements.

Trajectory 1: The Sovereign Phyle

This trajectory extends the logic of the phyle toward some form of autonomous or quasi-sovereign political community.

Historically, many diasporas, merchant networks, and translocal communities operated without sovereignty because they had no alternative. Today, digital infrastructures make it possible for translocal communities to aspire to forms of governance, law, identity, and even diplomatic recognition independent of territorial nation-states. This is the world of Network States and, in a somewhat different register, Network Nations. The network state proposals of Balaji Srivanasan are clearly linked to the merchant cities and states tradition, and seek some territorial sovereignty, or territorial agreements with existing geographical states to obtain degrees of ‘geographic’ autonomy, while network nations do not seek specific links to territories and are happy to exist as translocal distributed networks.

The core question is:

• How can a translocal community become self-governing?

The emphasis is on:

1. membership;

2. identity;

3. governance;

4. jurisdiction;

5. autonomy;

6. sovereignty (even if non-territorial).

In this sense, Network Nations and Network States may be understood as a new generation of phyles adapted to the digital age. They seek to become enduring political communities rather than merely connective infrastructures. However, their ‘merchant’ ideology, akin to the model of the Dutch merchant republic in the 16th century *based on cooptation processes which locked in the power of the merchant-based oligarchy) may opt for corporate forms to express membership and governance. In a network state, you may not be a citizen of a polis, but a ‘shareholder’ of a new type of company.

Trajectory 2: The Commons Magisterium

A very different trajectory begins from another question:

* Who protects and develops commons that transcend both markets and states?

This concern appears in discussions of the Fifth Magisterium of the Commons and in David Ronfeldt’s reflections on AEONs (Axial Entities of the Noosphere).

The emphasis here is not sovereignty but stewardship.

Such institutions would not primarily exist to represent a people, a nation, or a membership community.

Rather, their role would be to:

1. maintain knowledge commons;

2. steward ecological commons;

3. preserve long-term civilizational memory;

4. coordinate across territorial jurisdictions;

5. articulate local, regional, and planetary interests.

The core question becomes:

* How can translocal commons be governed without either state domination or market enclosure?

At this stage, this is a speculatively anticipated structure, but it is anticipated by interconnected structures of care, that are based on networked cooperation of open source and regenerative communities. Check out Austin Wade Smith’s book, Ecological Institutions, to learn more. Austin’s work is well represented in our wiki as well.

In Summary: we have distinguished Sovereign Phyles and Commons Magisteria:

Two distinct forms of translocal organization appear to be emerging.

Sovereign Phyles—represented by Network Nations and Network States—focus on the autonomy and self-governance of distributed communities. Their organizing principle is membership, their goal is collective agency, and their historical ancestors are diasporas, merchant communities, and other translocal networks.

Commons Magisteria—represented by proposals such as AEONs and Magisteria of the Commons—focus on the stewardship of ecological, knowledge, and civilizational commons. Their organizing principle is responsibility, their goal is regeneration, and their historical ancestors are monastic orders, scholarly communities, scientific institutions, and other custodial traditions.

The former asks: How can communities govern themselves? The latter asks: How can commons be protected and regenerated across scales and generations?

**

Towards Translocal Institutions that are Convivial and Ecological: Opening up to non-human participation

< the non-human must become not merely protected, but socially and institutionally present.>

This section is an attempt to integrate those insights of Austin Wade Smith on Ecological Institutions:

The history of translocal organization has largely been the history of human communities creating institutions capable of coordinating across space while maintaining cohesion over time. Merchant diasporas connected distant markets, religious traditions linked dispersed believers, scholarly networks maintained civilizational continuity across political boundaries, and contemporary digital communities coordinate knowledge production on a planetary scale. Despite their differences, these formations share a common characteristic: they organize relationships among humans.

Even the newest translocal forms, such as Network States and Network Nations, remain largely within this tradition. Their central concern is how distributed communities can achieve greater coherence, autonomy, and self-governance beyond the constraints of territorial states. The primary question they address is one of collective agency: how can a community govern itself when it is no longer defined by a common territory?

Yet a different question is beginning to emerge. The challenge facing contemporary civilization is not only how to coordinate human communities, but also how to maintain the ecological and material conditions upon which those communities depend. Climate systems, watersheds, biodiversity, soils, oceans, forests, and the planetary cycles that sustain life all operate across scales that exceed both local governance and national sovereignty. They are shared realities, yet they lack effective forms of representation and stewardship.

This suggests that a new category of translocal institution may be required. Whereas earlier translocal forms were primarily concerned with coordinating people, these emerging institutions would be concerned with stewarding commons. Their constituency would not be limited to human members, citizens, believers, or participants. Rather, they would be responsible for maintaining the conditions that make social and ecological flourishing possible.

From this perspective, proposals such as the Magisteria of the Commons and David Ronfeldt’s AEONs (Axial Entities of the Noosphere) represent something qualitatively different from Network States or Network Nations. They are not primarily mechanisms for collective self-government. Nor are they intended to become sovereign actors competing with states. Their purpose is stewardship rather than sovereignty.

The distinction is subtle but important. A Network State asks how a distributed community can govern itself. A Magisterium of the Commons asks how shared commons can be protected, regenerated, and transmitted across generations. The first begins from membership; the second begins from responsibility.

Austin Wade Smith’s work is particularly valuable in this context because it shifts attention away from the familiar opposition between local and global scales. Ecological systems themselves are organized across multiple levels. Watersheds, bioregions, migratory corridors, ocean systems, and atmospheric cycles do not conform to political boundaries. They require institutions capable of operating across scales while remaining grounded in concrete ecological realities.

This insight suggests that future translocal institutions may increasingly function as mediating structures linking human communities to the larger living systems within which they are embedded. Their role would not simply be to represent human interests but to maintain the long-term viability of the relationships between human and non-human worlds.

Historically, one could argue that translocal institutions have gradually expanded the scope of their concern. The next step may involve institutions dedicated to the stewardship of shared ecological and civilizational commons.

The significance of this possibility is not merely institutional. It implies a shift in the very subject of civilization. Earlier forms of social organization were primarily concerned with the ordering of human affairs. The emerging challenge is whether civilization can develop institutions capable of consciously maintaining its relationship with the larger web of life upon which it depends.

**

In Summary, we can suppose Three Logics of Collective Organization:

Representation asks: Who belongs?
Its primary concern is the organization of human communities. Nations, diasporas, and Network States all operate within this logic.

Stewardship asks: What must be maintained?
Its primary concern is the protection and regeneration of shared commons. Conservation bodies and commons institutions exemplify this approach.

Ecological Participation asks: Who or what must be present?
Its primary concern is the inclusion of both human and non-human actors within collective decision-making. This is the horizon toward which proposals such as AEONs and Commons Magisteria appear to point.

**

The next civilizational challenge may not simply be to build institutions that connect humans across distance, but institutions that connect human deliberation with the realities of the living world upon which it depends.

AI as a Civilizational Mediator Between the Human and the Non-Human

The emergence of artificial intelligence introduces a new dimension to the evolution of translocal institutions. Unlike diasporas, phyles, network states, or commons magisteria, AI is not itself a human community or a governance institution. Its significance lies elsewhere: in its capacity to mediate complexity.

Two converging developments help explain why AI may become a crucial component of future civilizational architectures.

The first concerns knowledge. The information age has dramatically expanded humanity’s capacity to produce, store, and circulate information. Scientific research, technical documentation, cultural production, economic data, and social communication now grow at rates that exceed the capacity of any individual—or indeed any institution—to synthesize. Humanity possesses unprecedented amounts of knowledge, yet faces increasing difficulty in creating coherent representations of that knowledge.

In this context, AI can be understood as a universal synthetic machine. Its role is not merely to retrieve information but to generate integrated representations of increasingly fragmented knowledge domains. As the volume of available information continues to expand, AI may become an indispensable infrastructure for maintaining civilizational intelligibility. It offers the possibility of continuously producing synthetic understandings from the growing ocean of distributed human knowledge.

The second challenge concerns the relationship between human societies and the larger living systems upon which they depend. Ecological regeneration, biodiversity preservation, climate stabilization, watershed management, material throughput, and energy transitions all involve forms of complexity that exceed direct human perception. Modern societies increasingly confront systems whose dynamics unfold across scales that are difficult for human institutions to comprehend, monitor, and coordinate.

Here AI may play a second and potentially even more important role. It can function as a mediator between the human and non-human worlds, at all scales, from the hyperlocal through the bioregional and the national and the continental, all the way to the planetarity scale: it is indeed a ‘cosmo-local’ mediator!

The issue is not that AI speaks for nature, nor that it replaces human judgment. Rather, it can help render visible processes that would otherwise remain largely invisible to human perception. Ecological feedback loops, biodiversity indicators, material and energy flows, climate dynamics, soil health, watershed conditions, and planetary boundaries can all be translated into forms that become intelligible within human deliberative processes. You may recall that I did a first mapping of these new human capacities before AI was a generalized technology, in our report, P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival, while we surveilled the new capacity of p2p and commons technology to be a ‘neguentropic’ (anti-entropic) force in our earlier report, The Thermodynamics of Peer Production.

In this sense, AI may become a bridge between two forms of complexity: the complexity of human knowledge and the complexity of living systems. It can help synthesize what humanity knows, while simultaneously helping humanity perceive the conditions that sustain life itself.

This suggests a distinctive role for AI within an emerging commons-oriented civilization. Its primary function would not be sovereignty, governance, or representation. Rather, it would contribute a new layer of collective intelligence capable of enhancing humanity’s capacity for sense-making across scales. I’m anticipating this problematique in two tentative and speculative research essays which I will later adapt for publication in this Substack:

• Toward a Distributed Hermeneutics of the Commons

• Universalism as Negotiation

Historically, civilizations have developed institutions for power, exchange, and knowledge transmission. The contemporary challenge may require a new cognitive layer capable of integrating knowledge across domains while facilitating meaningful interaction between human societies and the larger ecological systems within which they are embedded.

From this perspective, AI appears less as an autonomous actor than as a civilizational mediator. It becomes part of the infrastructure through which human communities, translocal institutions, and ecological systems can become mutually intelligible. If Network States address questions of distributed governance and Commons Magisteria address questions of stewardship, AI may address a complementary challenge: the creation of shared intelligibility in a world of increasing informational and ecological complexity.

Postscript

This is as far as I have gotten! I hope you have appreciated this attempt at synthesis and integration of rather significant bodies of knowledge and human experience.

I have a lot more of such integrative insights available in a major article that appeared in a weird kind of edited book of the Philosophy Portal community, which has the strange title ‘Rosy Cross’. This strange title is related to the attempt to think through the dynamics of a ‘Second Axial Age’ dynamic. The first Axial Age represented the transition from the first post-tribal imperial systems, which were based on an extraordinary level of violence, to a humanized form of civilization, based on ethics and emerging individual consciousness. But this has now led to an unsustainable level of individual atomization and fragmentation. Hence, the need for some kind of correction and the creation of a new level of collective cohesion which must preserve the achievements of personhood, not abolish them. The group of people writing in that volume believe that the rational needs grounding in non-rational (not irrational) axioms, but that they must be rationally defensible. Hence the attempt to re-evaluate the Christian tradition, not to copy-paste it, but to transform it into something new.

My contribution does not tackle this issue directly, but is a 50 page synthesis explaining the explorative path of the members of the network around the P2P Foundation, and its attempt to rethink the future, based on the emerging seed forms of the last two decades.

See, the ‘Breaking the Third Information Barrier’ entry in our P2P wiki, to have an idea of the Table of Contents, but ask me for a pdf version if you are interested, via my email: michelsub2004@gmail.com .

Erik Haines’ comment may give you a reason to read it:

< “ the most generative single piece of constructive thinking I have encountered in recent years on this terrain “ >

“Michel Bauwens’s Breaking the Third Information Barrier in Rosy Cross—the same anthology to which I contributed—is the dialogue partner I want to name explicitly here. Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, has been building since 2005 a substantial body of work on commons-based peer production drawing on Karatani’s Mode D—the regenerative networks that emerge as the ethical-axial response to civilisational extraction-regimes. His chapter in Rosy Cross is the most generative single piece of constructive thinking I have encountered in recent years on this terrain, and the convergence between his project and the new integral humanism I am articulating is one I expect to develop at length in future work. Bauwens works from the political-economic infrastructure side; the new integral humanism works from the philosophical-anthropological side. Both orient toward the same horizon: the genuine democratic encounter that Dallmayr names integral pluralism and that Maritain named integral humanism. Readers who want to follow this conversation should obtain the Rosy Cross anthology; Bauwens’s chapter and my own sit on either side of the question Cadell Last has posed for the volume.“

(

On Enchanted Flatland: Iain McGilchrist & the Problem of Romantic Liberalism

)

More details about the fundraising featured in the beginning of the article:

The Wise account:

• A Wise account with IBAN BE18905867195565

Associated address: Vaartstraat 94, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium

• A thai account at 279-2-82087-8

Kasikorn bank 279-2-82087-8

SWIFT KASITHBK

194 Chotana rd, Changphuk t, Muang a, Chiangmai

Thailand 50300

(Thai banks have no IBAN)

Personal address: 7/5 Moo 3, Chotana Rd.

A Muang, T. Changphuak

TH-50300 Chiang Mai, Thailand

If you want to connect with me through the various apps: +66937245884