2026-07-09 –, P2P Portal
Research on the transition from bacterial to nucleated life reveals a universal pattern: as systems grow complex enough, the sensemaking layer stops being overhead and becomes the majority of the organism. This talk argues that the same inversion is now underway in the economy, and that the DWeb ecosystem is constructing the infrastructure through which we can reward meaningful work and prevent model collapse at civilizational scale.
Most people working at the frontier of anything genuinely important right now share a specific, uncomfortable experience: the sense that the work that matters most — the work that is irreducibly contextual, relational, and hard to explain — is invisible to institutional incentive structures. Researchers who follow genuinely novel threads get penalized by metrics optimized for legible consensus. Builders who prioritize trust and care over throughput lose funding rounds to faster-moving competitors. Artists, educators, and community organizers watch their contributions get classified as "externalities" by the very systems their work keeps alive. Meanwhile, the recommendation algorithms that were supposed to connect us to what we need have collapsed the information landscape into a low-dimensional tube that preferentially surfaces outrage and anxiety, gradually narrowing the adjacent possible available to each of us and eroding the cognitive diversity that any healthy collective intelligence depends on.
Michael Garfield is a writer and artist focused on transdisciplinary research into the evolutionary history and future of intelligence. He is a co-founder at Atlas Research Group — which builds high-dimensional sensemaking tools on sovereign, commons-oriented infrastructure — and the award-winning host of Humans on the Loop. He has worked with the Santa Fe Institute, Long Now Foundation, Mozilla, and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.