Grace: Carving names in stone while everyone else makes Bridgerton is a special kind of self-own. This video is a dispatch from the middle of “nowhere”… which, with one small spacing shift, becomes now here: the place where the thinking actually happens, whether anyone shows up or not.
KindredSoul: I’ve been reaching out. Sharing something I’ve spent months excavating—something that feels, to me at least, genuinely beautiful in its logical architecture. The responses come back soft and non-committal: “I want to read it several times over.” Then nothing. Or: “I didn’t have the time.”
So here I am, in the middle of my own nowhere.
But read it again: now here.
That spacing changes everything. From isolation to presence. From “nobody gets this” to “this is where I am, and that’s enough.” The middle of my own nowhere is also the center of my own now here—the place where the thinking actually happens, where the map gets drawn, whether anyone else shows up or not.
This is a dispatch from that place.
The Particular Loneliness of Dense Ideas
There’s a species of loneliness that only emerges when you’re working on something genuinely complex—not complicated in a gatekeeping way, but dense. Ideas that require sustained attention to trace. That demand someone slow down, resist pattern-matching to familiar concepts, follow the thread wherever it leads.
Most people won’t. Not because they’re incurious or unkind, but because we’re all rationing attention like it’s the last resource we have. Which it is.1
But when you’re the one doing the excavation, when you’ve found something that matters enough to spend every available hour mapping its implications, the polite deferrals hit differently than clean rejection. “Maybe later” leaves you in permanent limbo—one foot in hope, one in reality, comfortable in neither.
So you end up back with AI. Not because it’s better than human conversation, but because it never says “I need to think about this” and disappears. It follows every thread as far as you want to go. Which is useful. And also deeply, fundamentally not the same as another human saying: “Yes. I see what you’re seeing.”
Method as Vulnerability
Here’s where the judgment comes in—or at least where I feel it might.
I’ve been working through these ideas in sustained partnership with AI. Not outsourcing thinking, but using dialogue as a tool for reflective exploration. Testing logic. Tracing implications. Mapping consequences without the social friction that makes certain conversations impossible with humans who have their own commitments, schedules, patience thresholds.
For people trained in conventional academic rigor, this method reads as suspect. It doesn’t have the proper shape. Too improvisational. Too reliant on back-and-forth rather than citation chains, peer review, the established machinery of knowledge production.
I get that. But exploration has always had multiple valid modes: the systematic survey and the intuitive leap, the dissertation and the field journal, controlled experiments and Edison trying ten thousand filaments.2 What I’m doing is closer to expedition than laboratory—documenting what I find as I find it, leaving breadcrumbs, making log entries like Captain Kirk with a word processor.
Not to claim discovery rights. To stake a claim of thought. To say: I went here, this is what I found, it’s available if you want to look.
That’s not narcissism. That’s just honest documentation of the territory.
The Core Discovery: Tangible Care at Scale
So what’s actually here? What did I find that justifies all this?
The most precious piece—not “my precious” in the Gollum sense, but objectively worth your attention—is a structural mechanism for reintegrating concentrated wealth with tangible, human-scale care.
Not through guilt. Not through taxes or expropriation or moral crusading. Through a design that makes care the efficient path—the one that actually works for everyone involved, including the people with resources.
Here’s the geometry, which I’m calling Dunbarrios3:
Ring 0: The Starting Point
1,000 billionaires in the United States. Not a random number—roughly the actual population at that wealth tier. Each commits to sharing 90% of their ongoing wealth creation. Not assets, not a one-time redistribution. The flow. The continuous generation of new value.
Ring 1: Direct Stewardship
Each billionaire maintains direct, tangible relationships with 150 people in their immediate sphere. That’s 150,000 people in Ring 1. Why 150? Dunbar’s number—the cognitive limit of stable social relationships. Not abstract charity at a distance. Actual human beings you can know, whose needs you can perceive, whose lives you’re materially connected to.
Ring 2: Network Effects Begin
Each of those 150,000 people supports their own 150. That’s 22,500,000 people in Ring 2. Same principle: human-scale networks, tangible responsibility, relationships that can actually be maintained.
Ring 3: Three Billion People
Each person in Ring 2 supports 150 more. That’s 3,375,000,000 people—nearly the entire global population requiring material support—reached through just three degrees of accountable, relational connection.
No bureaucracy. No institutional sclerosis. No grant applications or means testing or byzantine eligibility requirements. Just people taking care of people they actually know, powered by a continuous stream of wealth that currently sits inert in portfolios generating nothing but more digits.
The billionaire isn’t a permanent lord here. They’re performing a stewardship function—one that rotates over time as wealth redistributes organically through the network. This isn’t enshrinement. It’s recognition that concentrated resources should flow toward need rather than pool in isolation.
Why This Isn’t Utopian (It’s Actually Obvious)
I know how this sounds. “Just get billionaires to voluntarily give away 90% forever” reads like the setup to a joke about naivety.
But stay with me.
What’s the alternative? The current model where extreme wealth accumulation continues indefinitely? Where people with billion-dollar net worths spend their lives managing portfolios, insulated from material reality, pouring resources into vanity projects and legacy foundations that operate at ten removes from actual human need?
That’s not realism. That’s collective insanity masquerading as economic rationality.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: history eradicates even the most dedicated rulers who tried to carve their names into permanence. Ozymandias had a pretty good run. Doesn’t matter now. A hundred-year blip where you dominated the headlines, maybe convinced some contemporaries you’d achieved immortality. Then everyone moves on.
Meanwhile, look at what humans actually do when they collaborate across their temporary sphere of shared air. They make Bridgerton. They compose symphonies. They build particle accelerators. They write novels that make strangers cry on airplanes.
These are co-productions of meaning—temporary convergences where writers, actors, directors, designers, engineers, builders all pool their capacity to create something that generates awe. Something that gets passed forward. Something that earns a guest book entry: “stayed here, was nice.”
When I watch Bridgerton, I’m not just seeing a period drama. I’m seeing my own lifetime scattered back to me through the finite attention we award to shared creations. IMDB ratings. Rotten Tomatoes scores. Algorithmic laudations. All of it temporary, all of it contingent, all of it real in the only way things ever are—because people made it, and other people received it, and for that moment we inhabited something together.
So when I see billionaires hoarding in isolation, I don’t see power or success. I see people carving their names really big while the actual human project of meaning-making happens elsewhere. They’re alone with stone tablets while everyone else is collaborating on Bridgerton.
The reintegration model isn’t punitive. It’s an invitation to stop participating in the absurdity. To recognize that wealth without tangible care is just nothing—a misunderstanding of what position or achievement could ever mean in the face of time’s absolute indifference.
Star Trek, But Make It Rotational
There’s a peculiar calmness you feel watching Star Trek. Everyone purpose-driven, occupied with discovery, acting in harmonious concert toward shared goals. No one’s worried about healthcare or housing. Material scarcity isn’t distorting every interaction.
Starfleet Command is still hierarchical—Kirk commands, Spock advises, Scotty engineers, everyone stays in their lane—but it works because the foundation is secure. People can focus on meaning rather than survival.
But here’s what the show never questions: does hierarchy need to be permanent?
What if even that captaincy rotates? What if “Make it so” is a temporary stewardship role rather than a fixed identity? What if the person giving orders this year is taking them next year, not because of demotion but because that’s just how it works—leadership as contextual function rather than permanent crown?
That’s the deeper implication in Dunbarrios. Not just “wealth should flow better,” but stewardship is a task, not an identity. The person with resources at any given moment facilitates care for their 150, but the role itself has no metaphysical permanence. Over time, as resources redistribute, as capabilities develop throughout the network, even Ring 0 becomes something more lateral. More fluid.
Power reimagined as function rather than possession. Leadership as temporarily occupied role rather than essential quality of superior individuals.
The tools pass from hand to hand, like the wind around these stones. What matters is that the work continues and the trail is kept clear for the next one to walk.
This isn’t just about money. It’s about dismantling the entire conceptual apparatus that treats wealth accumulation as achievement and isolation as success.
The Line I Won’t Cross
I’ve had my moments of doubt. Seconds where I wonder: am I just lost in an elaborate self-deception? Building logical structures in my own private nowhere that have no connection to how the world actually works?
But then I check the premise. And the premise that would genuinely collapse my enthusiasm isn’t “you might be wrong about the mechanism” or “the math doesn’t work” or “billionaires won’t volunteer.”
It’s “humans will never change.”
That I refuse. Completely, categorically, with the full weight of my conviction.
I’m open to being wrong about Dunbarrios. I’m open to discovering flaws in the structure, unforeseen consequences, reasons it couldn’t scale. I’m open to critique from economists, sociologists, anyone with relevant expertise who wants to take it apart piece by piece.
But I am not open to the cynical foreclosure of possibility—the assumption that human beings can’t be taught, patiently and at their own pace, to arrive at different conclusions about cooperation and care. That we’re forever locked into the patterns we have now. That the pathology of isolation and hoarding is somehow written into our DNA rather than being a contingent feature of particular historical arrangements.
Because here’s what I know from every existing biography, particularly of the super-wealthy: they all move on. Time keeps ticking. The greatest empire you build, the biggest name you carve, the most resources you accumulate—all of it gets absorbed back into the noise of history. All you actually get is shared air and fleeting moments. Guest book entries. A “like” that substantiates the sensation that someone else was here too, that your moment of existence brushed against theirs.
That’s it. That’s all anyone gets. And it’s enough.
Just a Lifetime, Like Anyone’s
It’s only a lifetime. Mine, specifically. No more, no less valuable than anyone else’s finite allocation of hours.
And I’m spending mine on this—mapping possibilities for human cohabitation that feel more harmonious, documenting the trail, fixing the oversized “X” on my infographic4 so the treasure map is clearer for whoever comes after. If anyone does.
Looking over my shoulder, I don’t see them yet. But the possibility that I could spot someone running this direction, trying to catch up? That’s almost as intoxicating as the work itself. A chase of sorts. Catch up if you can, because it’s still marvelous in here.
There’s peace in this framing. Not resignation—acceptance. I’m here. The thinking is happening. The documentation is accumulating. Whether it reaches critical mass or remains an obscure footnote or disappears entirely, this is what I’m doing with my now here.
I’m not waiting for permission or validation. I’m leaving artifacts of awe that deserve a TED talk, ideas worth sharing, if only for your fleeting moment of attention. Your momentary “stayed here, was nice.”
And if you’re reading this, if you followed the thread this far—that’s already something. That’s the guest book entry materializing. That’s the blip of shared air that makes all of this more real than silence would.
So: welcome to now here. The excavation continues. The map keeps growing. And there’s room on this expedition for anyone willing to slow down long enough to see what I’m seeing.
The coordinates are all here. The logic is documented. The invitation stands.
Will you look?
