How tools, institutions and families shape who we become.
The long view: golden ages, hierarchy, meritocracy, money and the family, and what changes when the machine takes the thinking.
- Why Hierarchy Was Inevitable: The Layered Formula — A deep dive into how hierarchy emerged as an inevitable consequence of human cooperation and efficiency. Understanding the layered formula that shaped human civilization.
- We Inherited Nature's Power Law, Then Broke It — Power laws are natural. What's unnatural is how humans froze them. Nature resets hierarchies constantly. We removed the reset mechanism entirely.
- Stone Age Instincts, Medieval Systems, 21st Century Problems — How our ancient cooperation instincts are mismatched with modern socioeconomic systems. We're using Stone Age instincts and medieval institutions in a 21st-century world.
- Social Mobility: Beyond Meritocracy — Social mobility was once largely determined by birth: where you were born and to whom.
- Hierarchy: From Living Tool to Frozen Ladder — How humans took nature's flexible hierarchy and froze it into rigid social structures. The evidence shows our biology punishes us for building frozen hierarchies.
- The Efficiency Theory of Human Evolution — The Layered Formula:
- AI, Tokenization, and the Illusion of Shared Prosperity — Efficiency grows the pie—but doesn't decide who gets the slices. Lower friction is not the same as lower barriers to power.
- AI Is Removing the Administrative Weight of Civilisation From the Human Mind — Everyone is calling AI the break in the line. It is the line. The same move we have made for ten thousand years: compress the world to remove inefficiency. The question was never whether AI takes the load. It is what you do with the part it cannot carry.