indy on rewilding ness
indy johar on rewilding ness
via jon husband fb share:
From Indy Johan’s Substack, a strong essay outlining key issues on a (vast) thread of interest that is deepening quickly for me.
<< Allocating to Future
If I were choosing where to allocate capital over the next decade, one of the most interesting frontiers is the future of being human—not in opposition to machine intelligence, but as its deep complement.
We are entering a period in which prediction and optimisation become ambient. *Machine learning doesn’t just add tools; it increasingly fuses with decisioning—pricing, access, ranking, workflow, compliance, and the allocation of attention.
*aka: cancerous distractions.. intellectness itself as cancerous distraction
That fusion changes the texture of everyday life. Environments stop merely responding and start pre-composing the space of action before we arrive. *Institutions reorganise around what can be measured, audited, and automated.
*oooof.. why nothing to date has gotten to the root of problem
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
People learn, often unconsciously, to become more readable. Legibility is not an aesthetic preference; it is the condition through which access, risk, and resources are allocated. >>
if so.. we need to redefine ‘legibility’.. ie: self-talk as data thru idiosyncratic jargon via tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling
[https://indyjohar.substack.com/p/the-future-of-being-human-a-critical]
noets/quotes from article:
The Future of Being Human: A Critical Complementary Investment Thesis (jan 2026)
Machine-assisted rewilding, pre-legibility zones, and selective legibility
Purpose and method: an invitation to unfurling, not a forecast
This post isn’t written as a prediction. It’s written as an act of category formation. In periods of infrastructural change, *what limits what becomes possible is often not technology, but the absence of legible categories that allow institutions, communities, and investors to recognise what they are seeing and coordinate around it. My aim here is to name a set of emerging categories—pre-legibility zones, opacity commons, selective legibility as a **governance doctrine, and ***machine-assisted rewilding—that are structurally under-articulated and therefore under-built. The wager is simple: ****by giving these categories language, we make them discussable; by making them discussable, we make them governable; by making them governable, we make them investable; and by making them investable, we increase the probability that they can be prototyped into public reality. *****The point is not to forecast the future, but to expand the space of futures that can be made.
*oh my.. rather.. need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening – so we can hear what’s already on each heart as global detox in order to org around legit needs
**oi.. the only ‘gov doctrine’ we need is the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
***there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
****oi.. if all that.. then we’ll just keep perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness.. of part\ial ness.. [again].. for (blank)’s sake..
*****then need to try a legit diff way.. a way/means sans any form of m\a\p
Allocating to Future
If I were choosing where to allocate capital over the next decade, one of the most interesting frontiers is the future of being human—not in opposition to machine intelligence, but as its deep complement.
oooof.. we need to let go of intellect ness.. graeber can’t know law et al
mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh
We are entering a period in which prediction and optimisation become ambient. Machine learning doesn’t just add tools; it increasingly fuses with decisioning—pricing, access, ranking, workflow, compliance, and the allocation of attention. That fusion changes the texture of everyday life. Environments stop merely responding and start pre-composing the space of action before we arrive. Institutions reorganise around what can be measured, audited, and automated. People learn, often unconsciously, to become more readable. Legibility is not an aesthetic preference; it is the condition through which access, risk, and resources are allocated.
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
see notes from this quote above.. ooof
This isn’t a critique of intelligence. In many domains, more intelligence is a public good: safer infrastructure, better medicine, more reliable systems, lower coordination costs, improved accessibility. The issue is what happens when intelligence is embedded into the environment as predictive infrastructure and coupled to extraction and access control. Depth erodes not because prediction exists, but when prediction is fused to incentives that reward capture, scoring, and behavioural steering.
cancerous distractions to what every heart craves/needs..
Legibility has a hidden cost: it compresses what cannot be represented without being diminished.
legible ness.. oooof.. naming the colour et al
This is where precision matters. Agency isn’t merely choice. It is formation: the capacity to form ends, remain partially indeterminate, and be changed by encounter rather than merely updated by feedback. A world that expands menus while narrowing formation produces a kind of freedom that looks abundant but becomes brittle.
all this makes no diff until we are all detoxed.. aka: get out of sea world.. wilde not-us law.. hari rat park law.. et al
So the question isn’t whether machine intelligence grows. It will. The question is: in a world where prediction becomes infrastructure, what becomes scarce?
? need to go deeper man.. you’re just moving the deck chairs in sea world if still assuming prediction et al.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law et al
Not computation. Not data. Not optimisation capacity.
The scarce asset is irreducible human capacity: attention that can settle without being continuously extracted; relationships that can form without immediate accounting; uncertainty that can remain unresolved without collapsing into anxiety; learning that is not only credentialing; meaning that can take time; and the ability to become—without being prematurely named, scored, or fixed.
not just scarce.. it’s dead.. the death all of us.. because none of us are free if one of us is chained.. et al
again.. legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
This is where the “nearly forgotten future” comes into view.
Not nostalgia. Not anti-technology retreat. Not a romantic nature aesthetic. A different kind of longing: for depth, for thickness, for environments *where the human does not have to perform legibility to be allowed to exist. The nearly forgotten future is not a memory project; it is the reappearance of degrees of freedom that prediction regimes tend to suppress—**degrees of freedom required for renewal.
*spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
**the degree has to be 100%.. has to be all of us for the dance to dance..
*That longing is not automatically good—people also yearn for certainty, for authority, for relief from complexity. So it matters to name the specific direction at stake here: not a yearning for tighter scripts, but for depth—**contact with what exceeds scripts.
*rather.. whales in sea world.. we have no idea what legit free people are like.. ie: black science of people/whales law et al
**ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
but for that we have to be brave enough to try/see the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
The festival signal—and why it’s not enough
You could argue the future is already being allocated—quietly but materially—toward experiences that attempt to restore what a predicted, transactional world compresses. The growth of festivals, retreats, and wellbeing environments is not marginal. It is a demand signal.
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
otherwise we’ll keep perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness.. of part\ial ness.. [again].. for (blank)’s sake..
So the argument is not “we need more festivals.” The argument is: the demand is real, but the form is inadequate. We need to radicalise this category—from event to infrastructure; from product to commons; from escape to agency-capacity; from luxury to baseline.
Rewilding as infrastructure, not aesthetic
Call these “rewilding environments” if you like, but rewilding here is not mud and trees as lifestyle branding. *Rewilding is irreducibility as a condition: the deliberate protection of what should not be fully captured—slow trust, non-transactional relationship, unharvested attention, unscored meaning, real encounter.
rather.. the condition we need is the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness..
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
yes to the list.. except for slow trust.. if it’s not unconditional from the get go.. it’s not trust.. just a version of judgment..
and to get there.. we need tech to do the thing we can’t seem to do.. ie: nonjudgmental expo labeling.. for a global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake
Crucially, this cannot remain positional. If thickness becomes a purchasable experience, it becomes a pressure valve for those who can afford it, while the baseline world continues to harden. The next phase has to be public, civic, and distributed: environments and practices embedded in ordinary life, not reserved for annual pilgrimage. Depth has to become locally available, culturally normal, and economically accessible.
rather.. we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8b today.. via a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8b today.. in an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8b legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8b today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8b today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8b legit free
findings from on the ground ness:
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to facil the seeming chaos of 8b legit free people
This is not a lifestyle claim. It is a functional claim. Thickness is a civilizational substrate: *it supports trust formation, legitimacy, non-violent conflict metabolism, creativity and recombination, and the **ability of communities to renew themselves without coercion. Thin societies become governable only through force or manipulation; thick societies can metabolise difference.
**for that.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
Pre-legibility zones and opacity commons
We need a new class of spaces whose primary function is to *protect pre-legible life: life before it is categorised, scored, monetised, or fixed into a profile.
*perhaps rather.. just to let go .. and try the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
otherwise.. not getting to the root of problem.. ‘protect’ ness just becomes another form of people telling other people what to do
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
otherwise we’ll keep perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness.. of part\ial ness.. [again].. for (blank)’s sake..
Call these pre-legibility zones or opacity commons—public and semi-public environments designed so that capture is not default and identity performance is not the price of entry. They are spaces of unscored presence: places where you can be anonymous or pseudonymous; where the social world can be messy without being mined; where learning and expression can happen without becoming content; where encounter can occur without becoming data.
we have the means to go even deeper than this.. (ie: blank slate sans thinking/assuming messy vs orderly; learning vs living; et al)
*These are not “no rules” spaces. Their governance is explicit. They are bounded worlds in which the right to remain partially unknown is treated not as suspicious, but as **a civic affordance—a precondition of formation. The aim is not invisibility; it is the possibility of becoming without premature capture.
*right there.. dang.. big red flag..
why not ‘no rules’… that’s the thing we’ve not yet tried.. and so we keep perpetuating myth of tragedy and lord.. and keep spending our days trying to come up with nicer/kinder ‘rules’ so that it doesn’t seem like people are telling other people what to do
**cancerous distractions man
In practice, this category can include anonymity-friendly civic rooms distributed across a city—walk-in or bookable environments for thinking, writing, making, and meeting without being routed through institutional identity systems. It can include non-recorded assembly halls where speech is not automatically turned into permanent artefact, and where collective sense-making can occur without quote-mining and performative signalling. It can include “undo spaces” where people can try on ideas, selves, projects, and relationships before they are legible to reputation markets.
above paragraph is great ie of those nicer/kinder ‘rules’ so that it doesn’t seem like people are telling other people what to do
It can also include neighbourhood writing stacks: not content pipelines, but ecosystems for expression—quiet rooms, editing tables, small presses, zines and pamphlets, reading circles, salons, rehearsal rooms—forms of culture not structurally shaped by platform incentives. And it includes semi-private and private pre-legible environments, not because privacy is retreat, but because privacy is a condition of becoming. There are modes of human formation that require being unobserved, unjudged, and unscored. *A society that cannot host that will slowly lose its capacity for renewal.
this para too.. ooof
*pearson unconditional law et al
Selective legibility: the governance doctrine
Pre-legibility zones do not abolish legibility; they reintroduce selective legibility—purpose-limited, consentful, and proportionate. They are designed against ambient capture, not against accountability.
dang. accountable ness as cancerous distraction
don’t we ever wonder why nothing to date has gotten to the root of problem?
again.. mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh
Selective legibility means: the default is non-extractive presence, but there are bounded pathways for safety and correction. You can be anonymous or pseudonymous by default, yet the space is governed by charters and norms; harm is not tolerated, and corrigibility exists without turning daily life into audit. This matters because micro-communication depends on safety from performance, and safety from capture—it is hard to negotiate trust, repair, and misunderstanding when every cue is potentially recorded, reputationally weaponised, or algorithmically interpreted.
another paragraph that is a great ie of those nicer/kinder ‘rules’ so that it doesn’t seem like people are telling other people what to do
A practical doctrine has a few principles.
First, opacity by default: participation does not require continuous identity performance or data surrender.
Second, proportional accountability: accountability is event-triggered and governed by due process, not by continuous monitoring.
Third, consentful revelation: identity can be revealed when necessary, but not as the baseline condition of belonging.
Fourth, reversible disclosure: people are not permanently fixed to a single legible profile; the system minimises irreversible capture.
Fifth, community rule with steward institutions: governance is explicit and held by stewards accountable to a charter, rather than outsourced to opaque platforms or permanent surveillance.
Selective legibility is the middle path between two failures: total capture, which corrodes formation and agency, and romantic opacity, which can shelter harm. The aim is not to disappear. The aim is to make life livable: to allow becoming, while being held.
ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
Machine-assisted rewilding
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..
ie: whatever (legit rewilding) for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
otherwise we’ll keep perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness.. of part\ial ness.. [again].. for (blank)’s sake..
Rewilding cannot be framed as a flight from machines. *It has to include machine-assisted pathways. The point is not to “go analogue.” The point is to restore conditions under which humans remain more than predictable units in a throughput system. Done properly, machine intelligence can become part of the infrastructure that protects those conditions.
*rather.. we need machine assisted listening.. again.. tech to do the thing we can’t seem to do: nonjudgmental expo labeling.. to facil the seeming chaos of global detox.. for (blank)’s sake
Most machine intelligence today is coupled to extraction: capture attention, predict behaviour, optimise engagement, route decisions, reduce uncertainty by shaping the environment. But there is another coupling available: machines that actively create space for irreducibility—systems that reduce capture rather than increase it, that preserve unpriced time, that protect attention as a right, that enable encounter without turning it into data.
ie: a nother way.. and .. we’re missing it
Stewardship coupling is not a moral property of technology; it is an institutional property produced by rights regimes, ownership models, and incentive design. The same core technologies can serve either regime. The difference is not technical. It is structural.
Machine-assisted rewilding can look like tools that help communities create and maintain pre-legibility zones—spaces where participation isn’t scored and presence isn’t monetised. It can mean systems that reduce the administrative burden of running shared institutions so more time is spent in relationship and less in compliance. It can mean privacy-preserving coordination that enables trust and accountability without continuous audit. It can mean cultural and civic infrastructures that support gathering, meaning, learning, and coherence without collapsing into ideology or performance.
It can also mean an anti-optimisation layer: systems that introduce friction where extraction would otherwise be automatic; that detect when environments are becoming too capturing; that enforce norms of non-instrumental interaction; that protect the right to opacity and the right not to be continuously translated into signal.
What, then, is the investable terrain?
Seen clearly, the future of being human is not the opposite of machine intelligence. It is the necessary complement to it: the set of institutions, environments, and practices that ensure prediction does not become total formatting; that ensure optimisation does not flatten the conditions of meaning; that ensure intelligence does not reduce life to what can be scored.
This complement is structurally underinvested—not because investors are wrong to fund intelligence, but because the market systematically funds what is legible, measurable, and monetisable with short feedback loops, while underfunding what behaves like public goods, generates multi-capital returns, carries longer time constants, involves liability ambiguity, and requires governance overhead. The underinvestment is not moral; it’s structural.
hari rat park law et al
if we really believe it’s structural.. we also need to realize that all the data we have on people.. all the assumptions we carry on ie: myth of tragedy and lord.. are non legit.. they are myth.. and so again.. (and again and again and again),,
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
So if I were investing here, I wouldn’t ask only “what will people buy?” I would ask: *what infrastructures will societies need in order to remain agentic and coherent under pervasive prediction? What ownership forms prevent depth from becoming a luxury status game? What financing models support public-access thickness without extracting it? What institutional designs make spaces corrigible without making them surveilled?
*deeper man.. rather ie: what infras would make all these (ie: prediction, ownership, status, financing, institutional ness, corrigability ness, … ) irrelevant s
The nearly forgotten future is not behind us. It is ahead of us: a future in which we recover suppressed degrees of freedom—the freedom to become, to relate without constant accounting, to think without being funnelled, to encounter without capture.
And the reason it is investable is simple. In a world where legibility becomes default, thickness becomes scarce—and scarce conditions become the basis of durable value.
Closing: the adjacent possible, not the destination
Everything I’m naming here should be read as the weak adjacent possible: the next available footholds from the centre of the now. Pre-legibility zones, opacity commons, selective legibility, machine-assisted rewilding—these are not endpoints. They are not the goals. They are scaffolds, transitional forms, and early civic prototypes that can be built without requiring us to already know what the fullest futures will be.
Because the real goals are almost certainly beyond what we can currently perceive.
In periods of infrastructural transition, the most consequential work is rarely the confident projection of a destination. It is the careful expansion of what can be tried, what can be held, what can be learned from—without foreclosing the deeper possibilities that only become visible once the ground shifts. Category formation, then, is not an act of prediction; it is an act of making room. It increases the surface area of the future.
aka: a sabbatical ish transition
So the invitation here is not “build this exact thing.” The invitation is to begin unfurling: *to prototype the conditions that allow thicker forms of life to re-enter the everyday; to create spaces where micro-communication can return; to defend the right to opacity as a civic affordance; to design selective legibility as a livable doctrine rather than an abstract principle; to explore machine-assisted stewardship as an institutional stance rather than a moral aspiration.
*did that.. here: on the ground ness et al.. wish you could hear me..
And there is a quieter, more intimate claim beneath the institutional language.
Deep rewilding is not only something we do “out there” in landscapes or in civic systems. It is also a practice of being at home in this moment—of re-entering presence without performance, of restoring contact with what is not optimised, of allowing the self to remain unfinished without rushing to resolution. If the machine-shaped world is steadily pulling life toward legibility, then the first act of resistance is not rejection but re-grounding: rebuilding the capacity to inhabit time, to be with others without transactionalising them, to let meaning form slowly, to recover the felt sense of aliveness that prediction tends to thin.
From that place—more grounded, more present, more unknowable futures, more at home—the adjacent possibles become visible. And once they are visible, they can be built.
That is what this post is for: not to name the future we will reach, but to widen the corridor of futures we can still make.
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be you. 