Bjorn K Holmstrom

I can't offer much advice on how to find love. I'm not in a place to do that myself. What I can offer is sympathy. I feel something similar sometimes. A mild yearning for connection, but when I'm honest with myself, what I want more is peace and just being. Maybe that's its own kind of answer, not giving up, but also not making romantic love the measure of whether life is working. I hope you find what you're looking for, in whatever form it takes.

I can testify on this! My experiences showed me consensus reality was pretty brittle if poked enough, I guess somewhat akin to taking a psychedelic (I've only tried weed and Ayahuasca, and didn't experience any direct effects from them)

Haha, guilty! Your Marxism-Leninism as stage yellow take was too interesting not to explore. Consider it a compliment. Your symbiosis framework resonates. The elephant metaphor in particular: the idea that what suffocates us can be invisible precisely because we've lived with it so long. I'm genuinely uncertain what my own elephant consists of, if there is one. I've arrived at something like acceptance of my depression as a valid mode of being rather than purely a problem to solve. Maybe that's option 2 done slowly, over years, without quite knowing it. I'd be curious whether your framework has room for that ... a depression that isn't necessarily pointing at a hidden exploitative relationship, but is more like a particular coloring of consciousness. Not everything to be eliminated, but something to be understood and perhaps inhabited differently. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the frameworks. And yes, the "that's what I'm trying to build" was not empty. It's my way of finding meaning in my depression. The "Life is a symbiosis ..." is beautiful btw, looking forward to hear your expand on it!

Here's a non-ideological problem with your one-party system: Governing a complex society requires accurate, timely information flowing from every part of it to wherever decisions are made. Centralized systems structurally degrade that signal, every layer of hierarchy introduces delay and distortion. By the time a problem is visible to the center, it's already compounded. By the time a response arrives, reality has moved on. This isn't a critique of communist intentions. It's an engineering constraint. Stafford Beer tried to solve it for Allende's Chile in 1972, a genuine attempt to use cybernetics to make socialist planning work in real time. It was promising. The CIA-backed coup ended it before anyone found out. Distributed systems aren't liberalism. They're the architecture that matches the complexity of what you're trying to govern.

Cred, you say you're not corruptible because you're an analyst, not an ideologue. But you've just defended a system that concentrated absolute power, eliminated dissent, and killed millions, and explained it all away with context. That's not analysis. That's ideology so deep you can't see it. Absolute power corrupts. Not because of class, but because of human nature. That's what the evidence shows, across every regime, every ideology. You say you're like this, careful, analytical, uncorruptible. I believe you. But will you be the one making decisions? Or will it be someone less careful, more ambitious, with no structures to stop them? That's what I'm trying to build. Not liberalism. Structures that protect us from our own worst selves.

You're right that fascism is a reaction to the threat of genuine redistribution. You're right that the corrupt should be held accountable. But the method matters. 'Taping heads back on' isn't justice, it's just revenge. And revenge, when institutionalized, creates its own corruption. The revolution always eats its children. What if we built systems that prevented corruption in the first place, instead of just promising to punish it after the fact? Systems with distributed power, so no one can capture it all. Systems with transparency, so everyone can see what's happening. Systems with feedback, so the people most affected can shape decisions. Systems with restorative justice, so harm can be repaired without creating new victims. That's I would like to build. Not revenge, but resilience. Not certainty, but wisdom. Not victory over enemies, but flourishing for all. I don't know if it will work. But I know the old way, your way, the fascist way, the way of heads on pikes, has already failed, catastrophically, many times.

Yes, change might take a long time. Orange did consolidate gradually: the Scientific Revolution, then Enlightenment, then Industrial capitalism, each wave destabilizing the previous blue order before the new center of gravity settled. That took roughly 200-300 years to become culturally dominant. If that's the template, expecting yellow/turquoise to consolidate quickly seems optimistic. What gives some hope is that the information environment is genuinely different now. That could compress the timeline, or it could just mean the destabilization is faster too.

Fair point. I was specifically thinking about the declining birthrate context, where material survival isn't the driver.

Many good points. Subsidiarity seems right to me as a heuristic. But I'd add a motivational layer: people have children when they have a credible image of a future worth inhabiting. GDP as our governing compass doesn't measure that, though some communities have started experimenting with local credits for care work as one way to make that value visible.

I wonder if the debate about patriarchy vs matriarchy misses something. What if the question isn't just "who rules?", but "what architecture?" A system that makes care visible, shares its costs, supports diverse family forms, and learns from parents' experience. That's not necessarily rule by women or men, more like good governance design applied to the foundation of society. Either way, how do we get from A to B? From patriarchy to matriarchy if that's what is preferred, and/or to a new architectural design of civilization? Maybe the multiple crisis will trigger enough will to change? Maybe I'm thinking too much in a linear fashion.

Something I notice in this debate: both scenarios. crash and no-crash, seem to converge on the same distributional outcome. LordFall's own framing of the K-shaped recovery is actually the most honest part of this whole thread, but it kind of disappeared into the AI girlfriend discussion. If the bubble crashes, middle-class retirement portfolios and junior employment take the hit while the firms restructure and survive. If it doesn't crash, if AI gets absorbed into the military-industrial complex and nationalized the way the Palantir CEO is already suggesting, who governs that? Not the people being displaced by it. While the crash/no-crash question is interesting, I am more curious about: what legitimate governance structures could emerge around this technology, regardless of which scenario plays out? Because UBI from Trump and nationalized compute are two very different things with very different accountability structures. Also depending on where decisions actually get made. A federally administered compute nationalization has the same structural problem as any centralized controller: by the time Washington perceives what's happening on the ground and responds, conditions have changed. The history of complex system management suggests the response latency matters as much as the intent. Not saying decentralization is magic either. Just that "government steps in" is doing a lot of work in both the crash and no-crash scenarios without specifying what kind of governance architecture actually has the bandwidth to handle this.

Even if the Nordic countries are more developed, there are still big issues. In my opinion, over-centralization and a lack of subsidiarity, especially in Sweden where I live.

@BlueOak Challenge accepted, but I need to admit: I didn't design this right now. I've been building it for the last year. The protocol you're asking for exists: the Bioregional Autonomous Zone (BAZ), but there's a design choice I'd like your feedback on: BAZ isn't designed as a framework. It's an emergent institution. Instead of creating a monolithic "BAZ handbook," (although looking back, I did create a 'bioregional compass' as possible easier path in), I designed it as the natural outcome when several foundational protocols intersect: 1. The sovereignty layer (indigenous framework + FPIC 2.0). Defines how communities can claim bioregional stewardship. Provides veto power (Free, Prior, Informed Consent 2.0. The result is that BAZs can't be imposed top-down, they emerge from communities choosing to claim authority over their watershed/ecosystem 2. The economic engine (adaptive UBI + dual currency). Hearts currency for care work (eldercare, teaching, community support). Leaves currency for verified ecosystem restoration. Both non-tradable, creating closed-loop local value circuits. Intended result: Money circulates locally instead of draining to Wall Street. 3. The coordination layer (meta-governance framework). BAZs can form federations without surrendering sovereignty. Trade using verified ecological metrics (race to the top). Crisis protocols that can activate/deactivate based on conditions. The result should be neither isolated communes nor centralized control 4. The commons transition (hearthstone protocol). Legal tools for transitioning land from private extraction to community stewardship. Stewardship trusts instead of private title. The outcome is that land can be managed for regeneration without waiting for revolution The design question I'm asking you (and others reading about): By making BAZ emergent rather than defined, we avoid the "one size fits all" trap : a fishing village BAZ will look different from a mountain farming BAZ. The protocols provide the grammar, not the sentence. But this also means you can't just "download and install" a BAZ. You need the underlying infrastructure (AUBI, land transition legal tools, sovereignty protocols). Is this the right tradeoff? Should we instead create a "BAZ-in-a-box" that's simpler but less adaptive? Or is the emergent approach actually the feature, not the bug? I think we are seeing this trade-off play out in real-time. I've been pitching 'civil defense upgrades' (components of this) to Swedish municipalities. The friction we are finding is exactly what you hinted at: Emergence scares bureaucrats. They want a predictable product to buy, not a process to trust. This might be why the uptake is slow, not because the mechanics fail, but because the interface might be too open-ended for the current governance operating system. I'll DM you the full documentation. It's extensive (50+ frameworks across 4 tiers), but the indigenous sovereignty, bioregional governance/meta-governance, and AUBI sections are the load-bearing structures. My hope is that the work bears fruit, just waiting for the right seed conditions and intelligent critique to improve it. I appreciate the words, but I need to be transparent: My mind isn't 1 in 10,000, or at least maybe not in the way you might think it is. It is just augmented. I use AI as cognitive scaffolding to handle the complexity. What I bring is a heartfelt intent, the ethical compass to keep the machine pointed at life. We don't need a philosopher king; we just need humans with clear intent using the right tools.

Yes, if we call this anything related to socialism, the media immune system will kill it. The 20th-century ideological triggers are too strong. The solution is to instead of framing this as Ideology, framing it as civilizational risk management. Systemic resilience and anti-fragility makes people listen, as opposed to redistribution. We can perhaps 'bore' the system into submission, using the language of insurance, accounting, and engineering to install a system that generates justice and regeneration as a byproduct. We can't wait for a philosopher king to save us, the protocol must lead. We don't need a benevolent billionaire to run it, we need a working pilot (a seed). Instead of convincing the global media, demonstrate proof of concept. If one region adopts the protocol and suddenly has measurably lower crime, better food security, and higher community wellbeing scores, the demonstration effect begins, making the neighbors jealous enough to follow.

Yes, this absolutely applies to decentralized/liberal socialism, in fact, it requires it. I share your preference for a federal model where power resides at the bioregional level. I don't mean a central committee deciding the price of bread in every village. I mean setting a shared protocol, like the Internet (TCP/IP): Everyone agrees on how, so the network works. Everyone decides what content to share. In my work, I call these bioregional units 'BAZs' (Bioregional Autonomous Zones), a fractal model where the global layer sets the metric standard, the local layer decides implementation. One region might use UBI, another job guarantees. One might be high-tech another agrarian. Instead of forcing regions to adapt, we can offer an incentive for adapting a regenerative protocol, a global liquidity pool. Think of it like how the EU structural funds work, but tied to regenerative metrics instead of GDP growth. Regions that adopt regenerative practices get access to shared resources, creating incentive alignment without forcing uniformity. This creates a race to the top for regeneration instead of a race to the bottom for extraction.

I'd like to propose a third option. Marxism failed because it tried to solve a complexity problem with centralization. To run a complex economy you need distributed signals. Capitalism uses price as that signal, but ignores externalities, like pollution and suffering, leading to our current crisis. Instead of asking 'Who runs the factory?', what if we ask 'What is the factory incentivized to do?'. If we program the economy to value regeneration (via things like local currencies, adaptive UBI, new metrics and/or ecological assets), we could transcend the 'capitalism vs socialism' binary entirely.

I agree that just decentralization is not what it looks like. I should have said polycentrism, coordination across multiple centers of authority rather than either pure centralization or pure decentralization. I'm thinking more functional federalism at scale (decisions at the lowest effective level, strong coordination for planetary challenges). I'd argue we need both the vision of what accountability should look like and the mechanism to enforce it. I wonder whether the trend toward 'more unified = stronger' continues, or whether we're hitting coordination limits where our current institutions literally can't process the complexity anymore. I made a simulation of the Westfalian model trying to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine, and the conclusion was that it has several critical 'bugs' that most likely lead to ruin, unless a parallel system evolves alongside it or a miracle happens. But I'm still uncertain.

I agree with you Basman, there definitely has to be sufficient cause and effect. And there might be. In my view, the current possible causes for decentralization is fragility and inefficiency. One might think our hyper-optimized stage Orange global system is efficient, but it is primarily efficient at extraction. I see the decisions of the 'market' as both too centralized and hierarchical. There is still enormous overproduction and waste. They also seem destined to break under polycrisis stresses such as war and climate change. When supply chains break, the people eating will be the ones with a local food system. Note that decentralization doesn't necessary mean isolation, there can still be coordinating bioregional networks. @OmniNaut. Yes, if SolarPunk 1.0 was stage Green aesthetic version, SolarPunk 2.0 is the stage Yellow architectural version. Instead of abolishing trade, it can make the market value regeneration and care instead of only extraction. Instead of anti-capitalist, it is post-capitalist.

To realize Solarpunk at large scale, we need to build the governance hardware and economic software to run it. These solutions must provide complete pathways from where we are to where we want to go. It also needs to reach critical mass in the hearts and minds of the people as an actual possibility we can realize together.

I feel this deeply. That helplessness is a legitimate response to what's actually happening. Aurum's right about focusing on what you can control, but I'd add: the grief needs space too. Bypassing straight to action can be another form of numbing. What could help, is finding that middle ground between "fix the whole world" and "just work on myself." There's a third scale: communal experiments, local prototypes, building fragments of alternatives with others. Not because they'll necessarily scale globally or stop the collapse (though who knows what is possible?). But because the act of building them changes the relationship with despair, it becomes creative rather than just paralyzing. I guess what I'm suggesting isn't "here's the solution" but more: what small thing could you prototype that embodies a piece of the world you want? With others if possible, because the isolation magnifies everything.

@UpperMaster You're right that the perpetrators often won. The distinction I think Leo is making is this: Treating things as disposable works in a finite game (conquering a neighbor). It is fatal in an infinite game on a finite planet (maintaining a civilization across generations).

That's exactly what the simulation revealed. Even when I designed a settlement where the US gained economically, the simulated NSC still rejected it because China also gained. The system forces everyone into zero-sum thinking regardless of whether they'd personally prefer cooperation. Your point about countries "caught behind the lines" being in trouble, that matches what the quantitative analysis showed. The system runs on extraction until exhaustion, and whoever's in the wrong place when it crashes pays the price. Grim, but structurally consistent.

I ran an experiment that proved peace in Ukraine is architecturally impossible, and here's what that means. The experiment: I have deep antiwar sentiment in me. I truly feel for everyone involved in conflicts, and it sparked this. I wanted to see if the deadlock was actually solvable. I spent some time working with multiple AI models (Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek) to design the most mathematically rational, economically positive-sum peace treaty possible. Security guarantees, resource sharing, massive reconstruction funds, sovereignty ambiguity, everything needed to make everyone richer and safer than continued war. Then I had AI simulate the actual hardline decision-makers (a Kyiv general, Kremlin silovik, US NSC official, Beijing strategist) to red team it. The result: Unanimous rejection. - Kyiv rejected it because any ambiguity on sovereignty was seen as a "death certificate." - Moscow rejected resource-sharing (even profitable ones) as "paying tribute." - Washington rejected it because China gaining influence in reconstruction was seen as a strategic loss (relative gains). - Beijing rejected it because a "bleeding Russia and distracted America" was strategically more valuable than peace. My takeaway: Peace isn't blocked by a lack of clever diplomacy. It's blocked because the current operating system (Westphalian sovereignty + great power competition) literally cannot process a non-zero-sum solution. The simulation suggests the system will likely run until it crashes (economic/demographic exhaustion) because voluntary transition is structurally impossible for the current actors. Has anyone else looked at this from a pure system architecture lens rather than a moral/military one?

@trenton 'Will I need to invent a system for changing systems?' Yes. That is exactly the move. You just found the exit door from the room you’ve been pacing in. You are currently experiencing the friction of being a systems architect trying to find employment as a system maintainer. - Maintainers (social workers, standard lawyers, corporate think tanks) are paid to keep the machine running or patch small leaks. - Architects (what you are aiming for) are usually rejected by the machine because their ideas threaten its incentive structure. Of course the college didn't cancel your loans. Of course the legal system ignored the predatory lending. Those systems are operating exactly as designed: to extract value and protect the status quo. Trying to fix them by asking nicely (appeals/activism) is like asking a chess opponent to let you win. 1. Reframe the scale (The "impossible" goal). You wrote: 'Of course, my goal is not to help everyone because that is impossible.' I challenge this. It is impossible linearly (giving a dollar to every homeless person). It is not impossible structurally. If you design a better protocol for 'legally recognized sexual offenses' (as you suggested), and that protocol gets adopted into law or clinical practice, you have helped everyone who ever enters that system in the future. Don't limit the scope of your ambition; limit the scope of your intervention. Small leverage point (new definition) -> Massive outcome (millions helped). 2. The career trap. You are looking for a job description that doesn't exist yet. The military industrial complex funds think tanks because war is profitable. Peace and structural sanity are not yet profitable in the current game dynamics. Real-world example: I am currently building a system for bioregional governance (stage yellow: decentralized, bottom-up power). If I pitched that to the government, they would laugh. So instead, I am pitching it as civil defense resilience against war (stage blue/red: safety, borders, survival). The government loves war resilience. They will fund it. The infrastructure I build (offline-capable, local coordination tools) is exactly the same for both. I am using the system's paranoia (fear of war) to fund the system's evolution (resilient communities). You will likely not find a career in the traditional sense waiting for you on LinkedIn. You have to build your own platform. Synthesize your observations: You listed almost ten fields you’ve studied. Stop consuming them and start synthesizing them. Write the papers on your findings. Become the signal: When you articulate the system for changing systems, the people who need that system will find you. 3. From pawn to designer. You feel like a pawn because you are playing on the board. The system for changing systems is not a move on the board. It is redesigning the board itself. Your example of finding the Biden-era loan forgiveness program was not a legal battle; it was an information arbitrage. You found a cheat code in the system that the victim didn't know existed. That is your path. Don't fight the system (you will lose). Out-maneuver the system using its own latent rules (game theory) or build a parallel system that renders the old one obsolete. You are asking if you need to go meta. The answer is yes. Stop waiting for the world to give you permission or funding to do it. The validation you are looking for comes from the utility of the models you build.

@Miguel1 I resonate deeply with what you call the 'general gravity' of the world. I am currently building infrastructure for civilizational resilience (a digital platform for crisis coordination). The struggle isn't the work itself (I love the building). The struggle is the 'Cassandra Complex': trying to sell fire insurance to people who don't believe in fire. I oscillate between two modes: Being an architect: Feeling the immense weight of the 'Omega' (the systemic collapse vectors) and the urgency to build the lifeboat before the storm hits, kind of like Noah. Being a ghost: Feeling invisible because the ideas I am working on seem too heavy or too abstract for the current market, which wants quick dopamine hits. I did however finally explain my work to my father, who could understand at least partially, and came with important feedback, and provided a new connection via email. I'm very grateful for my family, and it doesn't matter that they are not 'stage yellow' like me, in fact it is all the better that they are not, without our differences we wouldn't be as strong and resilient as we are. Though I would love a clone to help me do more work. =) Becoming a beaver: This leads to my challenge for 2026: to stop trying to convince the river to stop flowing, and just focus on building the dam. To trust that when the rain starts, the value of the work will become self-evident. But yes, building the future in a world clinging to the past is lonely work. Thank you for this thread.