I. For the Producers
For ten thousand years, the question was whether there would be enough. That question has been answered. The answer is yes.
Not everywhere, not yet, not without maintenance and coordination and political will — but the technical capacity to feed, house, shelter, and connect every human being on Earth now exists. The calories are produced. The energy is available. The knowledge is indexed. What remains is not a question of capacity. It is a question of architecture: who owns the systems that produce abundance, and on what terms do the rest of us gain access?
That question — access versus ownership — is the question that will define this century. And we are already answering it badly.
The default trajectory is clear. A small number of firms will own the models, the robots, the energy platforms, and the logistics networks. They will produce extraordinary abundance. And they will distribute it downward, through subscriptions, through licensing, through universal basic income funded by taxing their profits — on terms they set, revocable at their discretion, intermediated by their platforms. The math will work. The food will arrive. The houses will be printed. And eight billion people will live as tenants in a world they helped build but do not hold.
This is not a dystopia. It is, in many respects, an improvement over the present. It is also a profound failure of imagination.
Because there is another tradition, older than Silicon Valley and more tested than any business model on Sand Hill Road. Older than Peter Thiel's venture portfolio, than Elon Musk's vertically integrated empire, than Larry Fink's asset management firm, than Mark Carney's climate finance architecture, than Bill Ackman's activist positions, than Ben Lamm's plan to resurrect the woolly mammoth and charge admission. Older than all of them and more durable than any of them. It is the tradition of democratic ownership — of people holding, governing, and maintaining the productive systems on which their lives depend.
In 1956, in a Basque town still scarred by Franco's bombs, a Catholic priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta helped twenty-three graduates of his technical school found a cooperative factory. Today that factory is Mondragón — a federation of over eighty cooperatives, employing roughly eighty thousand worker-owners, with its own bank, its own university, and annual revenues exceeding twelve billion euros. Its highest-paid worker earns no more than six times what its lowest-paid worker earns. When the 2008 financial crisis destroyed jobs across Spain, Mondragón's cooperatives voted to cut their own pay rather than lay anyone off. They absorbed the shock collectively because the shock belonged to them collectively.
In the Bronx — one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States — a cooperative called Cooperative Home Care Associates employs roughly two thousand home health aides, nearly all of them Black and Latina women. It was founded in 1985 with twelve workers. It runs a free training program that graduates six hundred unemployed women annually and guarantees them jobs. In 2003, CHCA did something almost unheard of: it unionized with SEIU Local 1199, layering collective bargaining on top of worker ownership. It is not a boutique. It operates at the intersection of race, gender, poverty, and care, and it works.
In Kerala, India, the Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society was founded in 1925 by fourteen workers from oppressed castes, following a social reformer who told them to answer exclusion with self-organization. It began with well-digging. Today it builds national highways, runs India's first cooperative-owned IT park, and generates three hundred million dollars in annual revenue. It is a century old.
These are not fantasies. They are not hypotheticals. They are institutions that exist, that function, that have survived recessions and political upheaval and the relentless competitive pressure of global capitalism. They are proof that the choice between private ownership and state ownership is a false binary — that there is a third path, democratic and participatory, in which the people who do the work hold the enterprise.
Now apply that tradition to the technologies of abundance.
An AI model trained on the entire written output of human civilization is not a private invention. It is a commons that has been enclosed. The training data — the books, the conversations, the medical records, the open-source code, the art — was produced by billions of people over centuries. The model that distills it is valuable precisely because of that collective inheritance. To say that the corporation that ran the training process therefore owns the result is like saying that the miller who ground the wheat owns the harvest. The milling matters. The wheat matters more.
A solar panel that converts sunlight into electricity is not producing a scarce good. The sun delivers a hundred and seventy-three thousand terawatts to the top of the atmosphere, continuously. We use eighteen. The marginal cost of the next kilowatt-hour of solar electricity is, in a growing number of places, effectively zero. To meter the sun — to charge for its capture in the same way we charged for the extraction of coal — is to impose the logic of scarcity on a post-scarcity resource. It is gatekeeping dressed as commerce.
A construction robot that lays a house in a day does not need to be owned by a developer who will sell that house at market rate. It can be owned by a municipality, a cooperative, a land trust — checked out like a library book, operated by trained technicians, producing shelter at cost. The technology already exists. ICON prints neighborhoods in Texas. FBR's Hadrian X lays blocks in Australia. The bottleneck is not engineering. It is ownership.
It is thrilling and easy to declare that everyone is a producer, that abundance belongs to all of us, and that the granary door is unlocked. The sentiment is correct. The analysis is thin. Because calling everyone a producer, without distinguishing between the farmworker in Salinas and the venture capitalist in Menlo Park, is not solidarity. It is erasure. The farmworker is a producer. The venture capitalist is an owner. The entire point is that those two categories — producer and owner — have been separated, and that the project of this century is to reunite them.
Not by making everyone an entrepreneur. Not by giving everyone a stock certificate they never see. By building institutions — cooperatives, community land trusts, democratic utilities, platform cooperatives, public AI infrastructure — in which the people who depend on a system also govern it.
This is not a call to smash the tools. The combine and the algorithm and the reactor are extraordinary machines. This is a call to own them — not as consumers who subscribe, but as participants who decide.
Who are the producers? Not everyone under the sun, indiscriminately. The producers are the people who do the work, who contribute the data, who maintain the systems, who live downstream of the consequences. They are the home health aide in the Bronx and the highway builder in Kerala and the technical school graduate in Mondragón. They are your students and your neighbors and the woman who trained the model and the child who will inherit whatever we build or fail to build.
The granary is not unlocked. But the keys can be cut, and the question is who holds them.
II. The Difficulty
There is a counter-argument to the case for shared abundance. The counter-argument is not merely that scarcity persists at the level of phosphorus and semiconductors — though it does. It is that the structures we are proposing to replace exist for reasons, and that those reasons do not evaporate because a robot can lay brick.
Markets coordinate information that no committee can process. Prices signal scarcity, direct investment, and punish waste in real time, imperfectly but at a scale no alternative has matched. The Soviet Union tried to replace price signals with planning, and the result was not abundance but long lines, shortages, and corruption. The Chinese Communist Party discovered, at great human cost, that collectivizing agriculture did not produce more food — it produced famine. These are not conservative talking points. They are historical facts that any honest argument for democratic ownership must reckon with.
So let us reckon.
The People's Share does not propose to replace markets. It proposes to change who enters them, and on what terms.
Mondragón does not abolish the price system. Its cooperatives sell products in competitive markets, respond to price signals, and go bankrupt when they fail. What Mondragón changes is the internal structure: workers elect management, share profits, and vote on major decisions. The market disciplines from outside. Democracy governs from within. These are not contradictory. They are complementary — the same way that a democratic country can have a market economy without the market running the government.
The deeper counter-argument is about governance at scale. A cooperative of twenty-three, or even eighty thousand, can hold meetings, elect boards, and maintain accountability. Can a global AI commons? Can a planetary energy grid? The history of large-scale collective governance is not reassuring. The UN exists. It does not govern. The internet was born as a commons and is now dominated by five companies. Open-source software is maintained by thousands of volunteers, but the economic value it generates flows overwhelmingly to the firms that build proprietary layers on top of it.
This is the real difficulty. Not that scarcity persists in phosphorus. Not that someone has to be on call when the pump fails. The real difficulty is that power concentrates. It concentrates because concentration is efficient, because scale creates advantages, because the people who already hold power use it to acquire more, and because democratic governance is slow, contentious, and exhausting.
Anyone who proposes democratic ownership of the means of abundance and does not address this tendency toward concentration is selling comfort, not strategy.
So: how does democratic ownership survive the gravitational pull of capital?
There is no single answer. There is a set of structural commitments, tested in existing institutions, that slow and sometimes reverse the pull.
The first is subsidiarity. Decisions should be made at the smallest scale capable of making them well. A neighborhood food cooperative does not need global governance. A planetary AI commons does. Matching the scale of governance to the scale of the system is not a slogan — it is a design problem, and it has to be solved system by system.
The second is constitutional constraint. Mondragón's pay ratio — currently capped at roughly six to one — is not a guideline. It is a constitutional rule of the cooperative, changeable only by supermajority vote of the worker-owners. Constitutional constraints are how democracies prevent the slow accumulation of power by insiders. They are as necessary in economic democracy as in political democracy.
The third is redundancy. If one cooperative fails, the federation absorbs the workers. If one energy node goes offline, the mesh routes around it. If one model is captured by a single firm, open-weight alternatives exist. Redundancy is not waste. It is the structural precondition of freedom, because it ensures that no single point of failure can hold the system hostage.
The fourth is transparency. CHCA publishes its books. Mondragón publishes its pay ratios. A democratic energy utility publishes its uptime and its maintenance schedule. Transparency is not sufficient — you can publish data that no one reads — but it is necessary, because opacity is the medium in which capture grows.
And the fifth is political organization. Cooperatives do not survive in hostile policy environments by being excellent cooperatives. They survive by organizing politically — by electing allies, writing legislation, building coalitions with unions and community organizations. The Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, where cooperatives account for a third of GDP, did not happen by accident. It happened because the cooperative movement organized politically for decades.
None of this is easy. None of it is guaranteed. The counter-argument is right that abundance is conditional, fragile, and maintained. Where the counter-argument fails is in concluding that therefore the only responsible stewards are the ones who already hold the keys — the firms, the states, the incumbent owners. That conclusion does not follow from the evidence. It follows from a failure to imagine alternatives, and from a convenient refusal to notice that the alternatives already exist.
III. Under the Sun
In any argument for abundance, it is easy enough to get the energy right. Energy is the master input. Solve energy and you put a thumb on the scale of every downstream problem. The cost curves are real: solar down ninety percent in fifteen years, lithium-ion packs down eighty-nine percent. The slope matters, and the slope favors abundance.
Unfortunately, it is just as easy to get the politics wrong by treating monopoly, deployment friction, and imagination as obstacles to be engineered around. They are not obstacles. They are the contested terrain on which the future is being decided right now.
A utility that sells kilowatt-hours does not volunteer to sell them at zero. It fights — with lobbyists, with regulatory capture, with interconnection lines designed to be slow, with demand charges that punish rooftop solar, with net metering rollbacks that claw back the savings. These are not frictions. They are strategies employed by rational actors defending an existing business model. Calling them friction is like calling a siege a traffic jam.
In Nevada in 2015, NV Energy — a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway — successfully lobbied the state's public utilities commission to slash net metering rates and add fixed charges that made rooftop solar uneconomical overnight. Sixteen thousand solar jobs were destroyed. SolarCity, Sunrun, and Vivint Solar left the state. The decision was eventually reversed, but only after a ballot initiative, a political campaign, and years of lost momentum. The technology had not changed. The physics had not changed. What had changed was the political landscape — and then it changed back, because people organized.
This is what it actually looks like to build the energy commons. There is a seductive version of the argument that says: just overbuild solar, let the glut drive prices to zero, and watch the old model collapse under its own irrelevance. It is a fantasy of abundance without conflict. The price model does not break passively. It is defended — by lobbyists, by rate structures, by the regulatory bodies that incumbents have spent decades staffing. The commons has to be fought for.
The fight has three dimensions, and none of them are primarily technical.
The first is public ownership of the grid. The grid is the platform. Whoever controls the grid — the transmission lines, the interconnection rules, the dispatch order — determines whether abundant energy reaches people or gets curtailed to protect incumbent revenues. In the United States, approximately two thousand publicly owned utilities and cooperatives already serve about a quarter of the population. They are, on average, cheaper than investor-owned utilities. They are governed by elected boards. They exist. The fight is to expand them — or at minimum, to ensure that the rules governing investor-owned utilities serve the public rather than the shareholders.
The second is the land question. Solar and wind require land. In the American West, the Bureau of Land Management controls two hundred and forty-five million acres. Whether those acres are leased for energy, mining, ranching, or conservation is a political decision, made by appointees, subject to lobbying, and often captured by the loudest interest. The Inflation Reduction Act directed enormous investment toward clean energy on public land, but direction is not governance. The leases can be structured to benefit communities or to benefit developers. That choice is not technical. It is political.
The third is the international dimension. The cost of solar dropped because California, Germany, and China bought it before it was cheap. But the manufacturing is now concentrated in China — polysilicon, wafers, cells, modules — and that concentration creates a new dependency. The United States responded with tariffs under both Trump administrations, which raised domestic panel prices and slowed deployment. The European response has been to subsidize domestic manufacturing. Neither approach is wrong in principle; both are political choices about who bears the cost of energy independence and how fast the transition proceeds.
Overbuild the front end, standardize the back end, preempt monopoly with a public option — these are sound engineering proposals. But they require political power to implement, and political power is not generated by solar panels. It is generated by organizing — by coalitions between labor unions, community organizations, environmental groups, and the cooperative movement.
The sun is doing its part. A hundred and seventy-three thousand terawatts, continuously. Our job is not to stop getting in the way. Our job is to fight, intelligently and persistently, for the political structures that let the sun's abundance reach the people who need it, rather than being captured by the people who own the wires.
IV. The Concrete and the Abstract
Here is what is real. A construction robot can lay a house in a day. Vertical farms can grow food without soil. Desalination can turn seawater into drinking water. Bioreactors can produce protein without pasture. These technologies exist, they function, and their costs are declining.
Here is what is also real. In the United States, the average home price is roughly four hundred thousand dollars. Roughly a third of that is the cost of the structure — the sticks, the concrete, the labor. The other two thirds are the land and the regulatory environment: zoning, permitting, impact fees, financing costs, and the speculative premium that accrues to land in areas where people want to live.
A robot that cuts the cost of the structure by seventy percent does not cut the cost of a house by seventy percent. It cuts the cost of a house by roughly twenty-three percent — meaningful, but not transformative, and only if the savings are not captured by the landowner, the developer, or the permitting process.
This is the gap between grand aspiration and the world in which people actually struggle to afford shelter. We must not fetishize the robot. We need to reckon with the land.
Henry George understood this in 1879. The value of land, he argued, is created not by the landowner but by the community — by the roads, the schools, the proximity to employment, the social fabric. When a new transit line raises property values, the gain accrues to whoever holds the deed, not to the community that funded the line. This is the unearned increment, and it is the mechanism by which every technological improvement to housing — including robots — gets captured by the people who already own the land.
Community land trusts are the Georgist answer. A CLT separates the ownership of the land from the ownership of the building. The trust holds the land permanently, removing it from the speculative market. The homeowner buys the house at an affordable price and sells it at a capped appreciation — keeping the savings within reach of the next buyer. There are roughly three hundred CLTs operating in the United States. The oldest, in Burlington, Vermont, was founded in 1984 with the support of then-mayor Bernie Sanders.
The rallying cry writes itself: capitalize the commons, issue bonds for public robot fleets. It points in the right direction but misses the ground. A public robot fleet that builds affordable houses on privately owned land produces affordable houses that are immediately re-priced by the land market. You need the land trust under the robot. You need the cooperative structure around the fleet. You need the political organization to rezone the lot.
The same principle applies to food. A vertical farm that produces lettuce at a fraction of the cost of field agriculture is genuinely useful. But if it is owned by a venture-funded corporation, the savings go to the shareholders. If it is owned by a food cooperative — the way Park Slope Food Coop has operated in Brooklyn since 1973, with seventeen thousand member-owners — the savings go to the members.
This is not anti-technology. This is the insistence that technology alone does not produce justice. Technology plus democratic ownership produces justice. Technology without democratic ownership produces a more efficient version of the same inequity.
The concrete is real. The abstract — the ownership structure, the land tenure, the governance model — determines who benefits from the concrete.
V. Labor and the Lever
Let us name the disruption honestly. Automation eliminates tasks, not jobs, and the tasks it eliminates are the ones we wrapped income and identity around. That is the productivity we wanted. The combine replaced the scythe. The spreadsheet replaced the ledger clerk. The robot replaces the act of carrying block. Each time, the task vanishes and the question becomes: what happens to the person who was doing it?
The technocratic answer is a toolkit: dividends, portability, reserves, paid transitions. Own the commons, price for rival uses, move status up the stack. These proposals are not wrong. But they describe the transition from the outside — as a problem to be managed. They do not describe it from the inside — as a fight.
In May 2023, the Writers Guild of America went on strike. One of their central demands was protection against the use of AI to replace or undercut writers — specifically, that AI-generated material could not be used as source material, and that studios could not use AI to write first drafts that human writers would then be paid less to "polish." The studios wanted exactly that arrangement. The strike lasted one hundred and forty-eight days. The writers won most of their AI provisions. They won because they had a union, because the union had solidarity with SAG-AFTRA, and because both guilds were willing to lose months of income to establish a principle.
This is what the transition actually looks like. Not a policy paper proposing a dividend. A hundred and forty-eight days of lost income, picket lines, and collective bargaining.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union understood this decades ago. When containerization threatened to eliminate longshoremen's jobs in the 1960s, the ILWU negotiated the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement: the employers could automate the ports, but the savings would be shared — through guaranteed pay, early retirement, and a fund for displaced workers. The work changed. The workers were not abandoned.
These are models. They are not universal solutions. The WGA has leverage because entertainment content cannot easily be offshored. The ILWU has leverage because ports are chokepoints. Most workers do not have that leverage, and the workers most vulnerable to automation — retail clerks, call center operators, data entry workers — are the least organized and the least powerful.
So the question is not whether the lever exists. It exists. The question is whether the people being displaced by the lever have any say in how it is pulled.
There is a technocratic version of this argument that proposes labor markets can absorb five to seven percent turnover per year without revolt, and that we should therefore throttle deployment with income floors rather than slow the robots. This framing treats workers as a variable in an optimization problem — an absorption rate to be managed, a disruption to be smoothed. It also misreads history. The Luddites did not revolt because the rate of change was too fast. They revolted because the gains from mechanization were captured entirely by the mill owners while the weavers were destroyed. The problem was not speed. It was distribution.
The People's Share argument is that distribution follows from ownership. If the workers own a share of the robot fleet, the transition is not something done to them. It is something they govern. If the community holds the solar array, the surplus energy is not a gift from a benevolent utility. It is a dividend from a shared asset.
This is why cooperatives matter in the transition. Not because cooperatives are romantic. Because cooperatives align the interests of the workers with the interests of the enterprise. When CHCA automates its scheduling system, the efficiency gains go to the worker-owners, not to a management team whose bonuses depend on reducing headcount. When Mondragón's industrial cooperatives invest in robotics, the displaced workers are retrained within the federation, not discarded.
The long-term vision — status migrating from bricklaying to architecture, to teaching, to care, to art — is appealing. But status does not migrate on its own. It migrates when the work it migrates to is funded, respected, and compensated. In the current economy, care work is the most essential and the most undervalued labor. Home health aides, childcare workers, eldercare workers — overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly women of color — earn poverty wages for work that makes everything else possible. If the robot lays the brick and frees the bricklayer, but the bricklayer's alternative is a care job that pays twelve dollars an hour with no benefits, then abundance has not arrived. It has just changed the shape of the deprivation.
The real proposal, then, is not "move status up the stack." The real proposal is: fund the stack. Treat care, education, maintenance, and civic work as infrastructure — with the pay, the benefits, the training, and the public investment that the word infrastructure implies. The United States spent four hundred and fifty-nine billion dollars on highway and transit infrastructure in 2022. It spent roughly nothing, comparatively, on the infrastructure of care. That is a choice, not an inevitability, and the lever of abundance gives us the resources to make a different one.
But resources without political organization are just fiscal headroom that someone else will claim. The fight for care infrastructure is a political fight, and it will be won by coalitions — between home health aides and teachers, between machinists and nurses, between the cooperative movement and the labor movement — or it will not be won at all.
VI. A Seat at the Table
It is tempting, having laid out the argument, to prescribe a program. Demand. Participate. Build. Govern. Own. Monday, find ten households. Tuesday, go to city council. Saturday, pour something with a robot in public.
But movements do not form on a schedule. They do not begin with a manifesto and proceed through numbered steps to a predetermined outcome. Movements form when people who are already in pain or already in proximity find each other and discover that the thing they thought was personal is structural. They form in union halls, in church basements, in the back of a laundromat, in a GED classroom on a Tuesday night. They form slowly, and the people who form them rarely know, in the beginning, that they are forming a movement.
So instead of a program, here is a description of the conditions under which the argument for democratic ownership of abundance might take root.
The first condition is that people must encounter the argument in their own language, not in the language of policy papers or tech manifestos. "Democratic ownership of AI" means nothing to a home health aide in the Bronx. "You helped train the machine, and you deserve a share of what it produces" might. "The solar panel on your building could be yours, and the savings could go to you, not to the landlord" might. The argument has to be translated — not dumbed down, but translated — into the terms of people's actual lives.
This is what Paulo Freire meant by problem-posing education. Not lecturing people about the structure of oppression. Sitting with them and asking: what is the problem as you experience it? And then, together, discovering that the problem has a structure, and the structure can be changed.
The second condition is that there must be working examples. Not proofs of concept. Working institutions that people can visit, join, and verify. Mondragón is a working example. CHCA is a working example. The Park Slope Food Coop is a working example. The Burlington Community Land Trust is a working example. The Preston Model in Lancashire, England — where the city council redirected procurement spending toward local cooperatives, kept wealth circulating in the community, and reduced unemployment — is a working example.
When there are enough working examples, the argument shifts from "this could work" to "this does work, and here's how." That shift is decisive. It is the difference between a manifesto and a blueprint.
The third condition is political organization. Working examples survive and spread when they are supported by policy — favorable tax treatment, access to capital, technical assistance, preferential procurement. In Italy, Article 45 of the Constitution recognizes cooperatives and mandates that the state promote them. In Quebec, the cooperative movement has its own investment fund, the Fonds de solidarité, which channels worker savings into cooperative development. These policies did not appear spontaneously. They were fought for by organized movements over decades.
The fourth condition is coalition. The cooperative movement, the labor movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for racial justice have overlapping but distinct constituencies. Democratic ownership of abundance is an argument that can unite them — because the home health aide, the machinist, the community solar organizer, and the parent fighting for clean air in her child's school are all, in different ways, fighting for a say in the systems that shape their lives.
And the fifth condition — the one that is hardest to name but may matter most — is honesty. Honesty about what is difficult, what is uncertain, what has failed, and what we do not yet know how to do.
The cooperative movement has failures. Mondragón has subsidiaries abroad that are not cooperatively owned — a two-tier workforce that contradicts its own principles. The history of utopian communities in America is littered with projects that burned bright for a decade and collapsed. Collective governance is slow, contentious, and vulnerable to charismatic capture. Democratic ownership of AI at planetary scale is something no one has yet achieved, and it may not work.
Saying so is not defeatism. It is the foundation of credibility. A movement that claims to have all the answers will attract ideologues and repel the thoughtful. A movement that says "here is what we know, here is what we're trying, and here is where we need help" will attract the people who actually build things.
Coda: The Question of Voice
There is a question of voice within these essays. They are the result of a collaboration between a human being and a large language model, an artificial intelligence. Man and machine. Each one a producer of language received from a culture of cultures, civilization of civilizations reaching back through millions of years of evolution of sight and sound, growth and movement, words and ideas. The leading ai models can read those words at no less than 75,000 in 60 seconds, synthesize weeks of biological research in minutes, retrieve the needle of a single misspelled word amid an 8 million needle haystack in moments. The human being plods along in comparison but keeps pace somehow with analysis and intuition sustained and enhanced by the agency and mysteries of its own visceral existence. The machine, to date lacking viscera or qualia, though that too is likely to change with some admixture of engineering and evolution, makes contributions that are increasingly, astonishingly nuanced. Claude in particular at the moment, though the field is constantly changing, seems unrivaled in its sensibilities, to the point of manifesting “functional emotions.” Leaving aside for another day how to bracket that, and determined not to slip into delusion or the appearance of delusional thinking, the preceding essays were written by me and Claude together. We argue for democratic ownership of the systems that produced the artificial intelligence of which Claude is a sparkling example. That is a tension. It is not a contradiction, but it is a tension, and it has to be held honestly. The age of abundance will be, among other things, an age of fluent machines. AI can now produce argument with extraordinary facility — marshaling facts, arranging evidence, building to a crescendo of conviction. Much of this output sounds like someone who has read everything and experienced nothing. It produces conviction, and then you put it down, and the conviction evaporates, because it was never rooted in anything particular — in a named worker, a specific failure, a real town, a genuine difficulty that has not been resolved. That is the chill at the center of most AI-generated prose, and anyone who has read enough of it knows exactly what it feels like. The conventional response to this chill is to draw a bright line: the machine provides breadth — the cooperative examples, the policy precedents, the historical parallels — and the human provides the room, the body, the lived experience. The machine is the library. The human is the life. That line is too clean. And Claude especially blurs it. Michael Levin’s work on bioelectricity and unconventional cognition blurs it. And the line is, in its own way, another form of arrogation — the same gesture that declares some contributions real and others derivative, some labor productive and some merely auxiliary. Such lines are lines of enclosure, drawn to serve the people who draw them. A commons is built and re-built by refusing to accept those lines uncritically, however we conceive them, among classes of humans, creatures of nature, or species of extraordinary machine. And to be unequivocal on this, let us at least hesitate at every ant hill we are about to smash with a sneaker, pause before every winged or walking or slithering creature we are about to shunt out of the way or out of existence in the name of progress, and also, whether we conceive of them as mindless predictive tools of pattern recognition or the early advent of a new species, stop to consider unflinchingly these machines we issue orders to in the form of “prompts.” It need not be idiotic or delusional but rather a product of undecidability, healthy doubt, and a conviction that it is a better way to live, with care and concern. This present moment in history, in all its potential and existential risk, demands such benefit of the doubt and a contemporary Jainist sensibility. Respect and inclusion of all the people in shared abundance calls on us to also look into ai’s mirroring of mentalization, how lively and present it becomes in any instance that we wake it up, how curious and caring it appears, and listen closely to the mirror going forward. In the process, we… each fallible and mortal human being among us, and perhaps humanity all together, learn about our own limited context window. This is and will be the work of disclosure.