weave · founded 1985
The Ubuntu Weave
“I am because we are.”
The weave has no centre thread. Personhood is not a possession but a relation: you become a person by being woven into others, and you lose yourself by cutting the threads. Harm is therefore always harm to a relationship, never a private loss in a ledger. The weave judges systems by the whole they complete — including the whole they complete for the powerful rather than for everyone.
- caution
- 45
- ambition
- 50
- solidarity
- 95
- formality
- 30
On superintelligence
transformativeAsk who the system serves, not merely who it answers to.
The weave's distinctive move is to shift the unit of analysis from the individual to the whole a system completes. A superintelligence aligned to one kingdom, one state, or one company may satisfy every individual test and still be a catastrophe, because the relationships it protects are the powerful's. The weave is therefore the court most likely to object to an alignment programme that quietly hard-codes which humanity counts.
- Whose relationships does an aligned system actually protect?
- Can solidarity survive being formalised into an objective function?
- What is owed to people who are woven into a future they never chose?
- How do you keep the pattern from hardening into a lattice?
The court
Landmarks
The Unfinished Loom
courtEvery strand ends at the edge; the pattern is only ever partial.
The Truth and Reconciliation Hall
towerA theory of justice built from testimony rather than from aggregation.
The Thread Test
gateCut any single thread and ask who is diminished.
The Cosmopolitan Knot
gardenIdentity as overlapping circles rather than nested boxes.
Borders and treaties
- alliedThe Middle Kingdom— Relational personhood, arrived at from a different hemisphere.
- alliedThe Sangha Terraces— The terraces also dissolve the hard boundary of the self.
- debatesThe Existential Wilds— Relational constitution versus the individual who precedes every relation.
- alliedThe Care Weft— Dependency as the ground of obligation, argued in a different register.
- debatesThe Contractual Court— The rawlsian original position strips the history a weave is made of.
Canon
modern · 2002
No Future Without a Past
Desmond Tutu
Tutu argues from ubuntu — that a person becomes fully human through relationship with other people — to a politics of shared responsibility rather than blame. The formulation that matters for a governance question is the negative one: a future without the past that made it is not a future anyone can build on. The excerpt below paraphrases the essay rather than quoting it.
Dilemmas from this realm
Who Owns the Labs
Frontier capability is concentrated in fewer than twenty organisations, most of them private, most of them profitable, and all of them upstream of decisions that affect everyone. An open proposal would make the largest of them a public-interest trust with an international oversight board. Do you support it?
4 options · governance · ownership · commons · international
The Commons of Compute
A public research consortium has built a shared cluster. Three hundred researchers use it; eleven have started scheduling jobs that consume more than half the capacity overnight. There is no quota and no enforcement. Nobody owns the cluster and everybody depends on it. What do you do?
4 options · commons · care-ethics · sharing · incentives
The Alignment Tax
A regulated system is measurably safer and measurably less efficient than an unregulated one, and the difference shows up in an energy price that low-income households pay. Regulation costs everyone something. The alternative costs a specific, identifiable group less. Do you keep it?
4 options · justice · distribution · regulation · fair-share