The geometries of change and the value of being human

I pass on and also archive for myself the following three ChatGPT 5.2 summaries of three recent Johar essays:

Summary of The Geometries of Change by Indy Johar

Core premise
Johar argues that every system of organisation—institutions, economies, governance—rests on an underlying “geometry,” meaning a structural logic that determines how change can occur, what is adjustable, and when transformation becomes disruptive rather than gradual. Geometry defines governability: what can evolve smoothly versus what requires rupture.

Linear geometry and its limits
Modern institutions are built around a linear model of change:

• A direction or goal is fixed first.

• Structures (roles, rules, incentives, infrastructure) are then aligned to that direction.

• Ongoing governance focuses mainly on speed and efficiency rather than revising direction.

Over time, this produces heavy path dependence. Investments, regulations, identities, and incentives lock systems onto a trajectory, making course correction costly and rare. When change finally occurs, it often comes through crisis, collapse, or replacement rather than continuous adaptation. Linear systems work in stable environments but become brittle under uncertainty and complexity.

The problem of contemporary conditions
Johar contends that the assumptions supporting linear organising—predictable futures, centralized authority, singular legitimacy—no longer hold. Today’s environment is marked by plural values, deep uncertainty, and systemic risks. Under these conditions, linear models accumulate commitments faster than they build adaptive capacity, narrowing the range of viable futures.

Helical geometry as an alternative
The essay proposes a “helical” model of change—spiraling through time rather than progressing in a straight line. In this geometry:

• Direction is not permanently fixed; it can be periodically re-negotiated.

• Institutional structures remain adjustable rather than locked to one trajectory.

• Change occurs through iterative cycles that preserve continuity while enabling reorientation.

The aim is to keep the future reachable: systems must allow for turning, not just acceleration. Helical organising supports learning, plural legitimacy, and ongoing adaptation instead of forcing transformation to occur through rupture.

Overall argument
Johar’s central claim is that the key question is not simply what actions to take, but what geometry of organising makes adaptive transformation possible. Linear models prioritize efficiency and stability but generate fragility in volatile contexts. A helical geometry—cyclical, revisable, and temporally layered—offers a framework for steering collective systems amid uncertainty without requiring breakdown as the mechanism of change.

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Here is a structured summary of “The Future of Being Human, Quietly Being Defined?” (Indy Johar, February 22 2026) based on the full essay:

1. Trigger and framing
The essay begins with a reference to Sam Altman’s remark about how much energy and time it takes to train a human compared with an AI model. Johar says the comment is superficially about energy fairness but structurally shifts the frame toward what counts as the unit of comparison in evaluating humans and machines.

2. Commensurability as a hinge
Johar distinguishes two kinds of “commensurability”:

• Descriptive, which measures energy and inputs across systems;

• Normative, which uses those measurements to justify comparisons and trade-offs.
  Altman’s claim, if read normatively, encourages interpreting humans and AI as functionally comparable capability systems. That framing quietly turns human beings into units of capability production.

3. Reduction of humans to capability outputs
Once humans are legible mainly in terms of cognitive capability as service output, several outcomes follow:

• Humans are considered substitutable if non-human systems can deliver similar outputs.

• Human value is recast in optimization terms: cost, throughput, reliability.

• Institutions begin organizing around procurement and compliance rather than intrinsic human worth.
  Johar calls this capability reductionism: a more refined but still reductive continuation of industrial labour reductionism that flattened humans into units of labour.

4. Compute-centric reference frames
If training becomes the shared frame, computing infrastructure becomes the reference class for intelligence and governance:

• Human education becomes “fine-tuning.”

• Civility and culture are reframed as priors in a cognitive pipeline.
  This shift influences what is measurable, fundable, normative, and thus shapes policies, welfare, schooling, and citizenship around capability output.

5. Structural fork in governance
Johar outlines two divergent models of governance that emerge from this framing:

1. Capability-first governance, where comparability and optimisation are central under constraint;

2. Intrinsic-life governance, where human dignity and irreducibility are first-order, non-tradeable commitments.
   He argues that if capability becomes the default grammar of society, human redundancy can become administratively rational without ever being declared explicitly.

6. Hierarchy of values
The essay proposes a normative ordering: rights first, capability second. Johar says that doesn’t mean rejecting metrics, but keeping them bounded within a framework that protects intrinsic human worth rather than letting efficiency metrics displace rights as constraints.

7. Core concern
The deeper issue isn’t whether training humans takes energy—it’s that if civilisation adopts a grammar defining humans primarily through capability and contribution, then optimising and replacing them becomes a rational endpoint. That is not just a labor-market calculation; it reshapes what it means to be human in governance and valuation systems.

Overall thesis
Johar’s essay warns that the emerging default comparison between humans and machine capabilities is not neutral. It quietly reshapes governance logic, reduces humans to tradable capability vectors, and opens a path where humans become redundant in an optimisation-driven system unless society explicitly protects intrinsic rights and dignity before metrics.

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Here is a structured summary of “The Value of Being Human” by Indy Johar (Feb 22, 2026):

1. Core philosophical choice
Johar identifies a foundational question beneath debates about AI, labour, and productivity: whether we conceive of humans as fixed bundles of capabilities or as open, developmental systems. This ontological framing — closed versus open — determines how value is understood and how institutions and policies are designed.

2. Closed ontology: humans as defined capability sets
In the dominant contemporary frame, humans are treated as collections of measurable functions (reasoning, creativity, coordination, etc.). Once human capacities are specified and benchmarked, comparison with machines becomes straightforward, and substitution decisions appear rational and objective. This reinforces a logic where humans are valued only for defined, quantifiable contributions.

3. Open ontology: humans as evolving trajectories
Johar contrasts this with the idea that humans are not static but evolving. Throughout history, major technological shifts (writing, printing, industrialisation, digital networks) have reshaped human cognition, behaviour, and capacities. Under transformative technologies like AI, future human capacities may emerge in ways that cannot be entirely predicted or pre-specified.

4. Dangers of governance by measurement
Measuring performance is not inherently flawed; the issue arises when measurable metrics become the primary basis for governance, allocation, and institutional incentives. When metrics become targets, systems reorganise around them, and what is measurable becomes what is rewarded. This exerts “selection pressure” that narrows the space of human development to what is legible and comparable.

5. Developmental compression and its risks
Treating humans as static inventories of capability risks “developmental compression,” where alternative developmental trajectories are under-supported or foreclosed entirely. Institutions optimising for present metrics may inadvertently narrow the range of future human capacities and forms of becoming.

6. Value of the unknown
Johar emphasises that unknown future capacities carry structural value. In contexts of deep uncertainty, preserving human developmental possibility (optionality) is a prudential imperative. Static valuation frameworks that assume completeness risk mispricing long-term potential.

7. AI’s role as selection pressure
AI itself does not dictate whether human capacities decline or expand; instead it introduces a selection pressure. Its effect on human development depends on the institutional frameworks in which it is embedded. AI can either amplify human development or compress it into narrow optimisation around measurable tasks.

8. Closed vs. open ontology: institutional implications

• Closed ontology: humans are defined, measurable, and replaceable; institutions orient toward substitution and optimisation.

• Open ontology: humans are emergent and partially unknowable; institutions should prioritise preserving developmental possibility over optimisation.

9. Central question re-framed
The key issue is not whether humans outperform machines at specific tasks, but whether we treat human nature as still emergent and indeterminate. Acceptance of a closed ontology leads logically to substitution and optimisation; acceptance of an open ontology implies designing systems that safeguard the conditions under which new human capacities can emerge in the future.

Summary thesis
Johar’s argument reframes the “value of being human” not in terms of current comparative performance with machines, but in terms of preserving human developmental potential. He warns that collapsing humans into static capability sets for measurement and optimisation risks narrowing the future of human becoming and misvaluing what is uncertain but potentially crucial.

 

 

 

Changing our systems of governance

I have found Johar's essay From Power Diagrams to Settlement-Construction: What we may be missing about the New Right to be worth several re-readings. I want to pass on the entire essay here, because the reduced summaries that I, as well as ChatGPT 5.2 and Google Gemini, have done don't do it justice.  Here's the text:

I’m increasingly frustrated with a specific failure mode on parts of the intellectual left: analysis that performs insight while refusing to touch the real object. It oscillates between two shortcuts. The first is a kind of diagrammatic power-critique — tracing who funds who, which networks influence which narratives — as if mapping influence were equivalent to explaining why a new constituency is forming. The second is the speed with which it collapses that constituency into a moral category — “Nazis,” “fascists,” “deplorables” — as if labelling were a substitute for understanding. Both moves give you the feeling of clarity while avoiding the harder work: diagnosing the political economy of the present.

The deeper problem is not that these tools are always wrong. It’s that they become evasions at exactly the moment we need realism. If you treat the current shift as primarily elite orchestration, politics becomes exposure and denunciation. If you treat it as primarily moral pathology, politics becomes excommunication. But what is actually happening is more difficult: a successor settlement is assembling in the open, because the old one is failing to hold continuity. And if you won’t name the conditions that are producing that — non-delivery, volatility, status injury, institutional illegitimacy, felt vulnerability — you will keep mistaking the symptom (the coalition’s surface ideology) for the cause (the human experience it is metabolising).

This matters because the political moment has shifted. For a long time, the implicit settlement in much of the West was: growth provides surplus; the state mediates distribution; institutions deliver continuity; rights expand alongside provision; legitimacy is sustained through predictable improvement. Even where that settlement was uneven or unjust, it had a core operational claim: we can deliver a rising baseline and a liveable future. That claim is now failing in too many places, for too many people, too consistently.

Wage stagnation alongside asset inflation. Housing as a rent-extraction machine. Debt-based consumption as false stability. Precarity in work and care. Public capacity thinning. Infrastructure ageing. Volatility compounding through energy shocks, climate disruption, geopolitical stress, pandemic aftershocks — and now machine-accelerated labour substitution anxiety. In this context, aggregate indicators become less persuasive than lived experience. People do not experience “the economy” as GDP; they experience it as fragility: the sense that a single shock can unmake their lives and that institutions will not catch them.

When delivery weakens, legitimacy migrates. Politics stops being organised primarily around “who gets what share of growth” and reorganises around “who will protect me from decline.” This is the regime shift that too much of the left refuses to metabolise. It continues to speak as if the master variable is redistribution inside a functioning delivery state, while the ground has moved toward continuity, protection, and strength under constraint.

This is where the right has been strategically sharper — not morally superior, but structurally more attuned. It is not “winning” primarily through policy detail or better arguments. It is winning because it is building a constituency around a different anthropology: a thesis of what it means to be human in this moment. Exposed. Unheld. Unprotected. Disoriented. Economically insecure. Culturally unmoored. Epistemically overwhelmed. Vulnerability becomes the substrate — but not framed as mutual care and solidarity. Framed as fear, humiliation, perceived weakness, status loss, and the feeling of being quietly dispossessed while elites moralise. Those feelings are then made legible, given targets, and translated into alliance.

The left often reacts to this by classifying the coalition: “libertarians,” “reactionaries,” “fascists,” “Nazis.” Sometimes those labels capture real ideological currents. But they don’t explain why the coalition coheres. They mistake taxonomy for comprehension. They substitute condemnation for explanation, and explanation for construction. And because they fail to name the underlying attractor — the demand for continuity under volatility — they keep losing to the political formation that is addressing it, however crudely or dangerously.

At a deeper level, the emerging right is engaged in settlement-construction. It is behaving as if we are in a legitimacy transition — from a rights-and-welfare legitimacy (dependent on institutional capacity and surplus) to a strength-and-security legitimacy (dependent on continuity under constraint). It is offering people a story of themselves inside that transition, and then supplying a set of operating moves that convert insecurity into coherence.

One move is epistemic: attack the old legitimacy engines — universities, media, credential regimes, expert institutions — not only as “biased,” but as self-referential monopolies that no longer justify their authority through performance. This is not simply anti-intellectualism. It is a wager that the current knowledge order is degraded and captured, and that legitimacy must be reopened through disruption and replacement.

A second move is to change the master variable from wealth to strength. In a world of compounding shocks, wealth looks like a weak proxy for security. Strength — resilience, optionality, capacity to absorb volatility, ability to act — becomes the organising value. It resonates because it meets the lived sense that money is not protection and institutions are not shelter.

A third move is coalition technology: belonging as infrastructure. Where liberal frameworks often treat belonging as dangerous because it can slide into exclusion, the right treats belonging as the mechanism that enables commitment when transactional society fractures. In a complex system, coordination is scarce; identity becomes a tool to produce coherence. It converts diffuse anxiety into a “we.”

A fourth move is material anchoring — a kind of economic homesteading logic. Freedom is not framed as abstract liberty but as having a base: land, housing, tools, energy access, local productive capacity, reduced dependency. This lands because the existing settlement increasingly offers freedom as rhetoric while structurally intensifying rent, platform dependence, and the erosion of household sovereignty.

A fifth move is executive decisiveness: the claim that complexity produces paralysis, capture, and endless process; therefore legitimate power must be concentrated enough to act. This is the most dangerous move — it can slide quickly into authoritarianism — but it is also a response to a widely felt condition: institutions seem unable to decide, unable to build, unable to respond.

A sixth move is to treat intelligence — sensing, feedback, learning velocity — as the core resource of governance. When the world is moving quickly, the scarce asset is not moral language; it is epistemic quality. The right’s hostility to inherited institutions often rests on a belief that they have become low-signal systems: high status, low learning.

Threaded through all of this is an attempt to invert status from consumption to discipline, contribution, and control — to delegitimise passive consumer identity and replace it with a moral economy of toughness, production, and sacrifice. Again: politically combustible, often scapegoating — but aligned with the felt exhaustion of consumerism as a substitute for agency.

None of this is easy. We are in a genuinely challenging event-space: contradictory needs, real scarcity, eroding institutional capacity, and demands that cannot be simultaneously met inside the inherited settlement. That doesn’t justify cruelty or scapegoating — but it does require a fundamentally different politics: one capable of naming trade-offs, recognising limits, and constructing alternative settlement pathways rather than performing moral purity. If we can’t even say these issues out loud, we remain trapped at the level of name-calling and counter-name-calling. And at that level there is no pathway to build the politics that could actually work — no way to earn legitimacy through delivery, no way to design shared protection, no way to hold continuity under volatility.

Seen this way, the right is not only a set of bad ideas. It is an adaptive response to a real institutional condition: non-delivery, exposure, and legitimacy decay. It is building a constituency around protection. It is offering coherence under volatility. It is constructing a successor settlement — one that may be exclusionary, punitive, and authoritarian, but which is responding to the question people are already asking: who will hold me when the system doesn’t?

This is why the left’s power diagrams and moral labelling feel like evasions. The diagrams imply the problem is coordination among elites; the labels imply the problem is reducible to moral pathology. Both moves avoid confronting the deeper regime shift: the old settlement is failing to deliver continuity, and politics is reorganising around strength.

The task, then, is not merely to “debunk” the right as if this were primarily a misinformation event, nor to retreat into the comfort of denunciation. The task is to build a better successor settlement — one that can meet the underlying conditions without scapegoating and without tyranny.

That means treating protection as a legitimate demand and designing it differently: material security through housing, energy affordability, care infrastructure, local economic continuity, and credible pathways for dignity; epistemic security through institutions that learn in public and earn trust through performance; belonging as civic infrastructure without enemies; strength as resilience and capability rather than domination; decisiveness through accountable architectures rather than concentrated power.

If we cannot offer a political economy of shared protection — continuity that people can actually feel — then the politics of fear will keep winning, because it is answering the master question of the era. Not “who influences who,” but: how do we hold human lives steady inside degenerative volatility?

Until that question is met with credible institutional design, the field will remain open to whoever can promise strength most convincingly — even if the promise is ultimately paid for by exclusion, cruelty, and the shrinking of freedom.

That is the argument. And it requires something more demanding than the lazy comforts of diagrams and labels: an updated anthropology, an updated political economy, and the courage to build a successor settlement in full view.

 

 

New Ferality - Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature

This post is to archive this link to a recent Venkatesh Rao essay, and also pass on condensations of its main ideas done by Google Gemini and ChatGPT 5.2.  (I could wonder where the extraordinary humans who will be able to perform Rao's 'new ways of being' are to be found - who will be capable of new behaviors incompatible and in conflict with our evolved nature, our desire for hierarchy, definition of roles, etc.)

From Google Gemini: 

In "New Ferality," Venkatesh Rao explores the emergence of a "New Nature"—a technological landscape that has become as complex, unpredictable, and indifferent to human intentions as the biological wilderness once was. The core idea is that as our digital and robotic systems reach a certain level of autonomy and opacity, they cease to be "tools" under our control and instead become a new kind of environment. In this context, the traditional concept of "wildness" (the untouched natural world) is replaced by "ferality": the state of human-made systems that have escaped domesticity and are now evolving on their own terms.

The essay argues that to navigate this environment, we must develop a "New Ferality"—a way of being that mirrors the behavior of animals in a landscape. Rather than attempting to "solve" or "manage" the complexity of modern tech stacks and AI through top-down engineering, Rao suggests we must learn to inhabit them through instinct, scavenging, and adaptation. This involves a shift from being "users" who expect predictable interfaces to being "feral" actors who treat technology as a semi-wild habitat, finding "liveness" and opportunity within the gaps and glitches of the system.

Ultimately, Rao posits that the "New Nature" is not something to be feared or conquered, but a reality to be lived in. The challenge of the coming era is a psychological and behavioral transition: moving away from the "domesticated" mindset of the industrial age—which relied on legible, orderly systems—toward a more resilient, opportunistic, and "wild" engagement with a world that is no longer fully legible to its creators.

From ChatGPT:

The essay argues that “ferality” is not about returning to primitive wilderness but about learning to live effectively inside a technologically saturated “new nature” whose rules are engineered, persistent, and hard to escape. Modern systems—platforms, protocols, infrastructures, and economic arrangements—now function like environments rather than tools. They shape behavior the way physical ecosystems once did, producing a world where independence and domestication blur and older distinctions (freelancer vs employee, institutional vs independent life) lose meaning.

A central idea is that earlier waves of technological change temporarily opened spaces for autonomy and experimentation, but those spaces tend to get re-domesticated as institutions, markets, and cultural norms adapt. What felt like “wild” creative freedom becomes routinized, monetized, and normalized. The result is a recurring cycle: new techno-social frontiers generate feral modes of life, which are then stabilized into predictable, managed systems that reduce risk and novelty.

“New ferality” therefore means cultivating forms of agency suited to this environment rather than nostalgically seeking older kinds of freedom. It involves operating in systems whose constraints are embedded in code, protocols, and economic feedback loops—conditions that are as hard to ignore as physical laws. These regimes behave like ecosystems: they reward certain behaviors, penalize others, and gradually rewire identities and institutions.

The essay’s broader claim is that modern life demands new survival literacies. Instead of resisting technological domestication or celebrating it, individuals must learn to navigate a hybrid reality where the artificial is permanent and environmental. “Ferality” becomes a stance: adaptive, experimental, and opportunistic within engineered worlds—less about escaping civilization and more about developing wildness inside it.