A Note to the Builders

The chapter you have just finished describes a specific project. The chapters that follow describe specific intellectual and operational territory the project is being designed to engage with. Before going further, something needs to be said directly.

This book is not the founding document of a company. It is the founding document of an idea, of which the project called Providence is one early attempt.

The architecture being described is not proprietary. The design intentions are not trade secrets. The questions being raised are not the intellectual property of any organization. The work itself is too large, too urgent, and too dependent on many simultaneous experiments for any single project to own it.

What this book is doing, in significant part, is naming a design space that has been radically underdeveloped relative to the urgency of the present moment and inviting the people who can already feel the necessity of building in it to begin. Providence is one such attempt. There should be more. There need to be more. The future of coherent coordination at planetary scale will not be built by any single organization, founder, technology, or community. It will be built, if it gets built, by many builders working in many forms, learning from each other’s failures, sharing what works, and refusing the gravitational pull toward enclosure that has captured nearly every previous wave of digital infrastructure.

So this is the request, stated plainly.

If you are a software engineer, designer, coordinator, governance practitioner, contemplative, ecologist, economist, or builder of any other kind who has been waiting for an invitation to begin work on the architectures this book is describing, consider this the invitation. The work is yours to do whether you ever encounter the people building Providence or not. The questions being raised are the questions you would have to answer in any case. The design problems Chapter Seven examines are problems whoever builds in this space will have to engage with seriously.

Build it. Build a version of it. Build something better than it. Build alongside it, in parallel, in competition, in collaboration, in whatever form your particular skills and conditions permit. Take the framings that are useful and discard the ones that are not. Cite the book or do not. Coordinate with the project or do not. Disagree with elements of the architecture and build the version you think would work better.

What matters is that the design space gets developed by people who care more about the work than about owning it.

There is a particular risk that needs to be named at this threshold. Coordination infrastructure of the kind this book describes is exactly the kind of design space that, if developed by extractive actors first, becomes substantially harder to develop coherently after. The patterns get set. The dominant architectures shape what comes next. Surveillance capital has roughly two decades of head start on any of this, and the resources flowing toward extractive coordination infrastructure dwarf the resources flowing toward regenerative alternatives by several orders of magnitude.

This is not an argument for despair. It is an argument for urgency. The window in which coherent alternatives can be built well, before the extractive versions become entrenched at scale, is narrower than most builders working on these questions yet acknowledge. The longer the work is delayed, the harder it becomes. The earlier the work begins, in many simultaneous forms, the more likely it is that something durable emerges.

This book is therefore not asking readers to adopt Providence. It is asking readers who can build, to build—in whatever form their conditions allow, with whatever architecture their judgment suggests, at whatever scale they can reach. The chapters that follow describe the intellectual and operational territory in detail because that detail is what builders need, not because the territory is being claimed.

The work belongs to whoever does it.