Florence, 1450s. Us, now.
Three thresholds crossing in one decade, and why the window closes by 2030.
What comes out of the forge.
Essays on the questions I work on every day: how people and machines will coordinate, what trust costs when it can be verified, who owns the value of work, and what sovereignty means in an economy that no longer needs gatekeepers.
I lead Fucina Nexus Foundation, and I work with the ventures of the Fucina Nexus Program. Those are institutions with commitments. This is where I think in the open: the reasoning upstream of the work, argued at full length, signed by me, and dated.
Themes
Infrastructure and the convergence window
Why this decade is a rare opening to build new infrastructure, and how infrastructure that lasts actually gets built.
4 essays
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We don't build cathedrals.
Durable infrastructure starts under a real load, never on a guess about the congregation.
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Who owns the stone?
Harvesting a component is five agreements, and merging any two lets infrastructure rot.
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The Sovereignty Stack
The capstone thesis: the layers of sovereign economic infrastructure, in full.
The economy when agents read, buy and act
What happens to markets, advertising, security and care when software agents, rather than people, do the reading, buying and acting.
5 essays
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Accelerators still cast ingots
The cohort is an artifact of human reading capacity, and agents remove it.
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The internet was built for humans
Agents already act in the economy through human proxies, with nothing of their own.
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What happens to advertising when agents don't care about brands
When agents buy and trust is cheap to verify, persuasion stops clearing the market.
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$578M in 19 days. Zero code bugs.
Six audited contracts, no code bug, $578M lost: what single-contract audits miss.
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The mind that makes the machine useful
Assistive robots have the hardware. The missing layer is the mind.
Institutions rebuilt for delegation
How selection, competition, treasuries and governance change when the decisions made on other people's behalf can be checked.
4 essays
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The application is the company
When building is cheap, the gate can measure the company itself.
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Competition needs new economics
Centralised stages exclude talent, and token emissions extract from it.
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The treasury paradox
DeFi left its own treasuries idle and unhedged. The fix is a governance design.
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Governing ourselves into obsolescence
An institution that builds for self-governance has to run on it first.
From the workshop
Personal pieces on how this work began, and on finding others who had reached the same conclusions.
2 essays
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Two artisans, and what we lost in 1850
A blacksmith, a sculptor, and the sovereignty the org chart took away.
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An unsolicited confession of intellectual convergence
A flight, a post, and two theses built toward the same architecture.
How to read this collection
Every essay carries a status, a date and, where it has one, its origin.
- Hypothesis
- an argument I am still testing. Expect it to move.
- Position
- an argument I have tested against objections and hold.
- Revised
- changed since first publication; the note says what moved and when.
A status describes my confidence, and only mine. Nothing here commits the Foundation or any venture. Where an essay began as an earlier text, its own page says where and when.