A different kind of super-intelligence that captures the wisdom of the crowd ...
What Is Collective Swarm Intelligence? How Is It About to Change the World and Our Systems?
Below is a pitch deck for a collective intelligence platform called SWARM FORCE that paints an optimistic picture for humanity.
Swarm Force is a platform for harnessing and amplifying collective intelligence and group problem-solving in people. There are other smaller systems that already exist, but this video imagines one at large scale, and backs it up with evidence of why it should work.
If the philosophy of P2P, direct personal interactions is going to have effect on a larger scale, like humans able to influence their governnments, this is what needs to be developed. A tool to distil the opinions and preferences as well as the creative ideas of large groups of people into a unified statement that captures the public sentiment.
Here is Michel Bauwens on the transformative evolution of P2P into what he calls P4P...
A ‘Valley of the Commons’ special on the construction of the Archipelago of Regenerative Projects
From networking to federation
[Here is] what I now think is the most important conceptual transition: from P2P to P4P. The P4P concept was formulated by my friend and associate Jeff Emmett.
As a reminder, the original P2P concept primarily connected individuals, which then formed communities, acting as seed forms. But these seed forms are now a multitude, while still being relatively marginal in the power structure and productive capacity. Nevertheless, let’s not forget that they have exponentially grown, tenfold each decade since the 1993 pivot.
P4P, meaning “Peer FOR Peer (collective) Infrastructure — peer-to-place, if you like, or more usefully the place-to-place/community-to-community networking paradigm— asks how autonomous regenerative communities can connect with one another.
The distinction is subtle but fundamental. A network merely says: We are connected. It can mobilize rapidly, but has no staying power, as we have for example seen through the Occupy and 15M mobilizations. They do not have the infrastructure to accrue capital and social power.
A (con-) federation says: We are sufficiently interdependent to build something together.
Federating requires shared infrastructure, and not just knowledge, but access to capital flows, mutuality and solidarity mechanisms.
While P2P was the idea of individuals connecting and collaborating directly without intermediaries, the next step in the evolution of that concept includes intermediate layers, such as bioregional regeneration and a "cosmo-local" coordination level, on the way to building a new kind of society that respects our environment and our individual preferences, while being able to bridge the wide gap between individual efforts and world-wide (cosmic) coordination.
Three recent articles, written from very different ideological perspectives, point toward the same underlying reality.
One warns that open models may have only a short political window left before meaningful restrictions are imposed.
Another argues that the enormous data-center buildout is partly a defensive response by legacy software companies whose architectures are increasingly obsolete.
A third sees the same infrastructure as the foundation for automation, robotics, surveillance, labor displacement, military power, and centralized social control.
Taken together, these articles show that AI is no longer developing primarily as a software product.
A very relevant discussion of AI. As the technology gets adopted, it is becoming "control infrastructure" and with that, it acquires an importance that necessitates control of that technology, of who has access to it, of whether independent (distributed) AI capability should be allowed.
This opens a whole new can of worms that does need close examination and decisions to be made ...
“If [organizations] don’t have the ability to have sovereign data, sovereign AI, they’re essentially giving up their identity, their ability to define themselves…. The danger isn’t that AI will become ‘too smart.’ The danger is that it will become too concentrated. If only three companies in the world hold the weights for global decision-making, the tool becomes a weapon for undue, mass influence.”
~ Travis Oliphant
A Discussion of Open-Source AI
June 25, 2026
By Catherine Austin Fitts
Travis Oliphant is an entrepreneur and CEO and co-founder of OpenTeams, a company that “helps organizations deploy, support, and own [AI] technology at enterprise scale.” One of their tag lines is “Connecting Companies with Communities.” As a data scientist and software developer, Travis is known for his contributions to Python and as the creator of NumPy and a founding contributor to SciPy, which together formed a foundation for modern AI and machine learning.
When I was in Salt Lake City in the first week of June, Travis and I went into a studio to record this interview, continuing a conversation we had started when Travis and his team visited the Solari team in the Netherlands in early 2026. Our discussion focuses on how we can understand and manage the growing presence of AI in our lives.
AI can be centralized - the current situation - and it can be distributed. Big difference. We can run open source AI on our own computing equipment, keeping the data under local control ... Here is a very interesting interview going into detail on this.
This is rather in opposition to the theme of the channel, a networked, p2p society. Nevertheless, I think we do well to keep an eye on the developments in the "other camp", where rather than networking the will of the people, the idea is to substitute a machine - or rather an AI driven simulation - for any human decision making.
" ... the most revealing language in this document is not in its statutory text at all. It is in the directive report language — the “Items of Special Interest,” the committee’s instructions to the Department of Defense to study, brief, model, and assess. This is the connective tissue of governance, the place where intent is recorded before it hardens into program. It is non-binding. It directs briefings, not budgets. And it is, for exactly that reason, where you can watch an institution think out loud about what it intends to become.
Read that language carefully, and a coherent method emerges across a dozen scattered provisions. Not a single master program. A method. The committee asks the Pentagon to build a laboratory that can model and simulate industrial-base policy before enacting it. It directs the development of an artificial-intelligence capability to map the nation’s manufacturing base and match its capacity to defense needs. It funds a persistent synthetic environment that runs continuously across every operational domain. It encourages a shift from “point-in-time” audits to continuous monitoring of contractors, run by commercial vendors. It asks for real-time AI auditing of the Department’s own financial transactions. It points toward fusion centers that integrate commercial sensor data along the borders."
"A government does not need to announce a sweeping control system to begin governing by model. First it models. Then it maps. Then it meters. Then it monitors. Then it calls the result readiness."
This is rather in opposition to the theme of the channel, a networked, p2p society. Nevertheless, I think we do well to keep an eye on the developments in the "other camp", where rather than networking the will of the people, the idea is to substitute a machine - or rather an AI driven simulation - for human decision making.
And now for something entirely different: a unique walking seminar in Greece
I met my Greek friend George Anadiotis a decade ago in Berlin and we kept in touch by doing zooms every three weeks or so, something I do with about half a dozen other people. It’s my way to ensure a diet of intelligent conversations that I may not always find the occasion to do locally. It is one of the remaining blessings of the global internet.
With George, we have devised two different seminars in Lake Kaifas, an off the beaten track location on the South-west coast of Greece, not too far away from ancient Olympia, see the picture above.
During the first week, from the 17th to 23th of May, dedicated to be a participant during civilizational transitions, we will start the day with a philosophical walk (designed for very moderate walkers), while in the afternoon, my friend George will guide participants to ancient Greek and Hellenistic history. In the evening, we will exchange our collective learnings.
The second week is dedicated to George’s expert knowledge as an AI expert, and is entitled, “Pragmatic AI”. The goal here is to master AI as a tool, beyond any hype.
Now to the article itself, which exceptionally, is a transcript of a conversation I had with George, about the state of AI as a pragmatic tool, how it changes the forms of human organization, and how his upcoming seminar will tackle these challenges ...
Two interesting seminars (May 17 to May 30 2026 at Lake Kaiafas, Greece) on the use of AI as a tool in civilizational transition. Michel Bauwens and George Anadiotis
#BauwensInChina: reflections of a Commons-Oriented Traveler to the Chinese grassroots communities, who are seeking to tackle the meaning crisis amongst Chinese youth.
The Chinese P2P Paradox (4)
So, what are the implications of this paradox?
First, it means that the P2P model that we have been developing in the West may not be universally applicable. It may work well in a post-industrial context, but it may need to be adapted to the industrializing context of the ‘Rest’.
Second, it means that we need to pay more attention to the P2P dynamics in the ‘Rest’, and learn from them. We may find that they have solutions to the problems that we are facing in the West, such as the limits to growth, and the social and institutional crises.
Finally, it means that the future of P2P societies may not be a one-size-fits-all model, but a diverse range of models, tailored to the specific contexts and needs of different regions and cultures. This is a challenging but exciting prospect, and one that we should embrace with open minds and hearts.
This post is an update on the direction HOLO is going into, and it involves not only P2P connectivity and at-the-edges computing/data storage but also the almost accidental development of a payment infrastructure that may grow into something exciting in good time.
Here is what Eric Harris Brown says:
"Strategic work always involves paying attention to the match between your efforts, and where the world is ready to receive those efforts.
Since our inception there has always been a small group of supporters who have understood the potential and need for the kind of deep p2p infrastructure that we are building, which allows for all kinds of un-intermediated direct interactions and transactions of all types. But at this moment in time we are seeing a new convergence.
As Holochain is maturing significantly, the main-stream world is also maturing into understanding the need for p2p networks and processes. As my colleague Madelynn Martiniere says: “we are meeting the moment and the moment is meeting us.”
And there’s a key domain in which this is happening: the domain of value transfer."
This post is an update on the direction HOLO is going, and it involves not only P2P connectivity and at-the-edges computing/data storage but also the almost accidental development of a payment infrastructure that in good time may grow into something exciting.
This video explores how Africa's internet could revolutionize the digital landscape and challenge established monopolies. This video exposes a groundbreaking development: Africa's bold initiative and its potential ramifications for global tech giants like Google.
This is Africa Strikes Back, the frontline of Africa’s political awakening, tech revolution, and global realignment.
We uncover the hidden power shifts shaping modern Africa; from rising leaders like Ibrahim Traoré, to the continent’s push to reclaim digital, economic, and military sovereignty. We expose the silent battle between Africa and Western control, the emergence of homegrown technologies, and how the new generation of African nations are turning the tables on centuries of dominion.
African nations have constructed a continental internet infrastructure that is capable of keeping African data within the continent. It bypasses the need for using centralized servers and applications based elsewhere. Silicon valley has serious competition now as other continents think of and discuss similar solutions as well ...
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." - W. B. Yeats
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart quotes Yeats well above and opens with a rift … a rupture not just of political control, but of memory, coherence, and trust. His story traces the unraveling of a living social system under the weight of colonial intrusion … not simply the arrival of outsiders, but the erasure of an entire relational logic that once held communities together.
That rift is still happening. It happens every time a community is told that trust doesn’t count unless it’s backed by money. That relationships aren’t reliable unless formalized by expensive regulated contracts. That coordination must be managed by platforms, institutions, or markets …. not by memory, promise, and collective intelligence.
"The most resilient systems don’t prevent failure. They survive because they know how to repair trust when it breaks." Will Ruddick on trust networks and commitment pooling.
Commitment Pooling as a Metabolic Process for Trust, Value, and Collective Flow
In her later years, Elinor Ostrom turned her attention toward what she called the "functional mechanisms" of successful commons - moving beyond typologies of resource coordination systems, but the minimal, adaptable protocols that allowed communities to coordinate care over time. She understood that lasting institutions do not arise from control or universal rules, but from simple agreements people can adapt, revise, and renew together.
The Commitment Pool Protocol offers exactly this: a simple, generalizable structurethat allows any group to exchange, limit, and track value as relational trust.
"If we approach this in the right way, it will spark a 21st Century Renaissance. A flourishing-forth of art, science, wealth and culture not seen since the Middle Ages."
We live in an era of unprecedented Centralisation.
Cultural, economic and political activity is largely dominated by a tiny number of increasingly powerful global institutions and wealthy individuals, at the expense of everyday citizens.
This process of Centralisation has been going on for decades, maybe centuries, and is driving levels of wealth inequality not seen before at any point in human history.
Decentralisation requires work. Fortunately, there are many good people working to make it happen. It will put power into the hands of the people, making much of today's centralised structure obsolete.
Why commons-based institutions now need to regulate the market and state, ‘cosmo-locally’
... imagine the following:
Local alliances of regenerative projects unite and create common digital identities and ‘sovereignties’, allowing them to autonomously engage with the regenerative sections of crypto capital.
Domain-specific alliances, say of all community land trusts in a trans-national context, are created, relying on global knowledge commons and shared innovation, common protocols of cooperation and coordination, and shared financing capacity.
These two types of trans-localized forces can co-own parts of their global commons infrastructure, while at the same time, regenerative parts of crypto capital create mechanisms for distributed co-ownership at the local level.
Government and multinational "big capital" institutions are life-determining forces. Michel Bauwens proposes to bring the people into play through a "cosmo-local" commons ...
A review of Kerry Bolton, Rise of the Dollar Empire: How America Dethroned Europe (Antelope Hill, 2026), 551 pp.
In September 1945 the Office of Strategic Services returned Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi, having spent the previous months providing him with weapons and training. When the French moved to restore their authority over Indochina, Roosevelt’s State Department blocked shipping for the returning French forces.
Two decades later the CIA, working through the AFL-CIO, was routing money to the Algerian FLN while simultaneously refusing France’s request for military aid to fight that same insurgency.
In November 1956, when Britain and France moved against Nasser, US financial pressure — a run on sterling permitted, then encouraged, from Washington — forced their withdrawal within days.
In 1967, six months after the anti-communist coup in Indonesia, David Rockefeller convened a Geneva meeting that carved up the Indonesian economy sector by sector among Freeport, Alcoa, and Japanese and French consortia.
Kerry Bolton’s Rise of the Dollar Empire: How America Dethroned Europe, published this year by Antelope Hill, argues that these episodes belong to a single story. The story is not the one taught in universities. The European empires were not overthrown by the peoples they ruled. They were dismantled by Washington and Wall Street, which regarded them as obstacles to the free movement of capital, goods, and labour that international finance required. The nationalist heroes who took power afterwards had, in almost every case, been cultivated by American intelligence, funded by American foundations, and inserted into economies made available to the IMF, the World Bank, and the multinational firms waiting for the imperial flag to come down.
In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Hedges interviews investigative journalist Whitney Webb, the author of “One Nation Under Blackmail,” who unravels the complex relationships between elected leaders, the National Security State, the state of Israel and Big Tech.
Webb discusses the methods being used in the Silicon Heartland, the area around Columbus, Ohio, where Les Wexner, who has ties to organized crime and was Jeffrey Epstein’s most notable benefactor, and other powerful billionaires such as Peter Thiel of Palantir, have made significant headway in creating a privately-run city — New Albany. She describes their use of innocent-sounding front groups, such as Jobs Ohio, private development corporations and political bribery to enrich themselves and create what they are marketing as Smart Cities.
Hedges and Webb expose the connections between the billionaires behind this effort and the State of Israel. Webb argues that Israeli startups have been promoted to Big Tech “so that US technological infrastructure on multiple levels would be so intimately enmeshed with Israeli interests that they could never meaningfully boycott Israel.” The same technological infrastructure is also being fused with the National Security State – intelligence and the military – to also make it dependent on the private sector.
This is about the forced data center buildout which is directed to provide the computation capability for both all-encompassing surveillance and the eventual emergence of a transhumanist future where “the end goal of humanity is to have humanity merge with AI in some capacity”.
No Corbetteer worth his or her salt would be surprised to learn that someone would be indefinitely blocked from Wikipedia for daring to suggest that Wikipedians respect intellectual diversity. But even the most battle-hardened, world-weary Corbettean cynic might be surprised to learn that that’s exactly what happened to the co-founder of Wikipedia himself.
Don’t miss this fascinating conversation as James discusses the nitty-gritty details of this latest act of online censorship and Wikigatekeeping with none other than Larry Sanger himself.
Wikipedia has long been taken over, so to say, by a number of anonymous editors who are making sure that their point of view is the only one that counts. Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of the project, has recently been "indefinitely banned" for his efforts to reform Wikipedia and bring back a space where a diversity of viewpoints finds expression. Sanger is here talking with James Corbett, bringing to light much of the background of how Wikipedia has gone down a path that is anything BUT disinterested reporting and documenting of facts ...
A proposal for UBEE (Universal Basic Energy Equity) Capability Commons and Regenerative Data Centers
The new factories of artificial intelligence look quieter than the factories of the last industrial age. They sit behind gates and hum with servers, chips, cooling systems, backup power, security systems and fiber links.
Their basic input remains old and simple: energy.
Electricity becomes compute. Compute runs models. Models coordinate logistics, public services, business processes, agriculture, finance, education, health care, robotics and, increasingly, the automated work of institutions themselves.
An economic question follows quickly: who owns the value created when energy becomes intelligence?
A harder question stands before it: how much compute should be built, and under what conditions? Environmentalists and AI skeptics have reason to be cautious. A renewable-powered data center may still use water, draw on grid capacity, rely on backup power, import hardware with large embodied costs, produce e-waste and send local energy into distant profit.
This essay argues for a stricter test for AI infrastructure. A data center that claims regenerative purpose should show the local capacity it creates, the commitments it helps fulfill, the failures it repairs, the ecological boundaries it respects and the value that remains locally governed. A regenerative claim should include disclosure, along with the power for affected people and institutions to refuse, limit, delay or redirect infrastructure when ecological or social thresholds are crossed.
Can those data centers that are being constructed a bit everywhere, can they be meaningfully embedded in the local communities whose resources they use? Can there be an exchange between the data center and the community that satisfies both?
Will Ruddick thinks the answer is yes to both, and he outlines in a powerful essay how this could be modeled ...
Courtney Brown discusses how the Epstein disclosures are a very real layer of governance collapse that is happening now. This video is available on FarsightPrime.com with captions in 13 languages. Published 8 February 2026.
This video by the Foresight Institute dives into the Epstein matter, not into the files themselves but into the implications that the recent revelations, the release of a large number of files, even if redacted, have for the stability of our governing institutions and indeed for society as we know it.
Here once more the direct YouTube link to the video:
Here is a video by the Foresight Institute's founder, Courtney Brown. In it, he dives into the Epstein matter, not the files themselves but the implications of those recent revelations.
What will be the effects of the release of a large number of files, even if redacted, for the stability of our governing institutions and for the way we may decide our society should be run in the forseeable future.
Emails in the Epstein Files show first-hand accounts of powerful interests being protected from public scrutiny— via algorithm adjusting and information editing. But sometimes the footprint remains ...
The decline of Wikipedia as a robust, comprehensive and impartial font of information is not new. This conspicuous shift away from its original role, and its repurposing as a channel for narrative-propagation, has been well documented in previous World Council for Health articles.
Both the information in Wikipedia and the positioning of results on search engines can and have been hacked to make Wiki articles conform to a specific slant and to put certain search results in prominent position. Just a heads-up
A guest editorial by Michel Foata-Prestavoine. The Problem is the Transactional Symmetry, and the proposed solution is the Common Good Unit, a commons-based monetary system.
An overview and discussion of the communication and relation between the Bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, and the P2P Foundation’s founder, Michel Bauwens.
At the P2P Foundation, we believe in cosmo-localism. This means that we want to converge the ‘Archipelago of Regenerative Initiatives’, i.e the millions of people who are rebuilding a life-respecting web of value, with the coordination and capitalizing capacities of the Web3 ecosystem. This possibility was set in motion by the conceptual and technological inventions of Satoshi Nakamoto, and so we owe him a debt of gratitude.
This is a review of what I remember of the interaction between myself, Michel Bauwens, the founder of the P2P Foundation, and Satoshi Nakamoto, the ‘inventor’ of Bitcoin. I am doing this on behalf and at the request of my good friend, Yongkwan Choi, founder of the Commons Foundation, who recently launched the Satoshi Nakamoto Meme Coin.
Before starting, it has to be acknowledged that though there are similarities of purpose between the P2P approach of Satoshi and that of the P2P Foundation, there are also quite significant differences, and therefore, the relationship between both was one marked by a critical reception on the part of myself and the P2P Foundation network. It was never and still isn’t, a love at first sight.
Nevertheless, it remains quite significant that Satoshi chose the P2P Foundation for this first public sharing of the White Paper, choosing to write to Michel Bauwens both publicly (on the Ning forum of the P2P Foundation) and privately (personal email). This indicates that Satoshi was not only aware of our work, but recognized it as important, and saw sufficient commonalities with his own.
Read the whole article on Michel Bauwens' substack here:
I remember well Satoshi's publication of his Bitcoin White Paper. My first reaction at the time was:
"Great stuff.
This is the first real innovation in money since the Bank of England started to issue its promissory notes for gold in the vaults, which then became known as banknotes.
I believe an open source currency has great potential. A bit like Google becoming the default search engine for many of us."
Just like Michel Bauwens, I did not jump into the fray to obtain coins, adopting the "let's wait and see" attitude. I wasn't interested in an investment opportunity but in a widely used, real world functioning open source currency, something Bitcoin did not become.
Have you ever felt like power just circulates among elites?
That anger rises, systems shift, people change … but nothing really changes?
I see people fighting. Arguing. Upset over politics… over power, wealth, inequality... my entire life. It seems like an inescapable loop.
There are many offering answers for how to come into agreement .. visionary approaches: the Three Horizons, Holacracy, Sociocracy, Communism, Democracy... and so on. So many frameworks. All of them holding some truth - yet like blind folks all trying to describe an elephant …. they grasp at coherent integration of the commons. Not metaphorical commons. Living, breathing, grassroots economics.
It’s like a gaping hole in our map. No matter how you transfer ordivide up governance - without a working mechanism for the commons … you end up back in a power-overstructure... instead of a power-with one...
The game is not to take power away from those who have it. What's important is to start realizing our own power as individuals in groups, and to build a new foundation ... where power flows differently.
Turning Points in History Require Revolutionary Thinking
I am proposing this essay by Julius Ruechel as relevant to the discussion on P2P as an excellent example of the reasons why we have to overcome the current political system of conservatism vs. liberalism, by whatever names those opposing ideologies may go.
There is simply no solution within the political dichotomy of opposing factions periodically handing over power from one end of the spectrum to the other.
My comment after reading it was as follows:
"Thank you for this essay, the first part of which I enjoyed reading and no, I’m not a paid subscriber to your substack.
I was especially interested in the overview of historical changes in society, which shows that, whichever way the pendulum swings, we are still in the same see-saw of apparent change that ultimately leads nowhere.
The takeaway for me is that the era of strong leaders, be they conservative or revolutionary, may be drawing to a close.
The future, in my view, is not in any system that requires a leader but in a bottom-up kind of organisation as exemplified by the emerging P2P movement, where emphasis is on direct peer-to-peer connection and organising. That may require some time to come to maturity, but it will be the wave of the future, if humanity is ever to make it out of the authoritative era into liberation and emancipation.
If you are interested in diving more into the philosophy at the bottom of P2P, I recommend the substack of Michel Bauwens, the founder of the P2P movement, which you can find here: https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/
Kind regards
Sepp Hasslberger
Ps: I do not know if you would like to publish this comment (I find I have no access to do so) but if you do, I hereby give my consent."
To find the essay by Ruechel, click on the headline or use this link:
The era of strong leaders, be they conservative or revolutionary, may be drawing to a close. We need to find a way to push the power down to the level of the people, not by periodic elections but by a real re-organization of things from the bottom up ... is p2p the way to go?
Before I start explaining the logic implicit in the title of this article, please read carefully the following statement, which you should see as ‘preliminary evidence’ for the thesis that I will propose...
Michel Bauwens has a different take on AI and its role in the evolution of human society ... a very interesting take I might add, bringing agency to "the man in the street" and helping the spiritual component take its rightful place.
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If the philosophy of P2P, direct personal interactions is going to have effect on a larger scale, like humans able to influence their governnments, this is what needs to be developed. A tool to distil the opinions and preferences as well as the creative ideas of large groups of people into a unified statement that captures the public sentiment.