Global focuses on how Distributed Autonomous Nodes [DANs] connect into synergistic networks.
Actions are locally tailored for each context, transforming existential risks into opportunities. These efforts guide AI, promote biodiversity, address climate change, protect our oceans, safeguard life on Earth, and reduce the risks of war.
Improv adapts creatively to each situation, learning and evolving through a balance of art and science, underpinned by the values of democracy, equity, and free speech.
Lab is our studio – whether in the field or on-site – where we experiment and innovate.
GAIL Mission. Enable humans to share knowledge, build coalitions, and tackle global challenges via topic nodes in a hybrid human-AI system.
Venice Biennale 2025 offers torches for a global network. As Eutopia University Network, launched in Europe, grows into a coalition-building initiative, it can protect a global network of universities from authoritarian regimes.
China represents itself as a reliable global trading partner whose infrastructure diplomacy has built in Africa nearly a trillion dollars of infrastructure. The U.S. represents itself as a global terrorist, attacking its own citizens and former trading partners and driving talent out of the U.S. to other countries.
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, says it will raise prices because of Trump’s tariffs. Microsoft dropped a law firm that did a deal with Trump to retain a law firm fighting Trump, signaling a shift. Forbes 500 Digest Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell noted that the United States has turned from a safe haven for global investors into a risk, “The U.S. is experiencing a highly unusual bout of ‘capital flight,’ where large amounts of money are being taken out of U.S. Treasuries and invested outside America instead. As a result, there’s been a jump in bond interest rates, while the value of the dollar has tanked—it’s down more than 8% since the start of the year.” Economic journalist Noah Smith writes that capital flight “usually only happens to poor countries, and it never ends well.” Though hosted in Germany and Switzerland, GAIL is a global network, showing how linked Distributed Autonomous Nodes (DANs) can have global impact.
When a tyrant tanks an economy, he raises questions about how a phoenix can rise from the ashes. The collapse of U.S. democracy, economy, education, equity, innovation, justice, media and support for scientific research is a tragedy that impacts the entire world. But times of crisis reveal new ways that humanity can flourish, both online and offline in linked, human-scale communities with safe internet.
Phoenix rising from the ashes as coalitions gather.
Global travel statistics are the voice of the public. International travelers to the U.S. fell 11.6% in March 2025 compared with March 2024. A vast increase in U.S. visitors traveling abroad complements a vast decrease in foreign visitors to the U.S. Car travel from Canada fell 32%. International conferences in the U.S. were cancelled when tariffs drove up costs and travelers were afraid of being arrested at U.S. airports and thrown into prison.
Paul Saffo, future forecaster, our Delphic Oracle today, in a speech at Stanford Law School, described how the “terrorism within” that Lincoln predicted appears at first as a breakdown of the nation state, the United States crumbling. But this phase one has already become a global phenomenon that requires a global coalition.
On January 27, 1838, twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln made a chilling prediction about the future, asking his audience: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Lincoln saw that democracy could collapse from within.
Fast forward to 2025: the 4th largest economy in the world, California, takes legal action against its own federal government for the tariffs, political retaliation against Harvard through cancelling tuberculosis research impacts medicine globally, and Columbia are wake up calls for global coalition-building.
Curtis Yarvin coined the acronym RAGE [Retire All Government Employees]. Writing under the penname Mencius Moldbug, this influencer of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, and others in the Trump regime, argues that democracy is a failed experiment. Founder of the the neo-reactionary movement (NRx) and architect of the anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic philosophy Dark Enlightenment, Yarvin was an informal guest of honor at a Trump inaugural gala in Washington. He says that an authoritarian president can’t continue to have a Harvard or New York Times . . . If you’re going to be Caesar, you cannot operate with someone else’s Department of Reality. He said his White House contact was Bronze Age Pervert – science fiction unfolding in real time.
People trapped inside a tyranny box have no tools “inside the box” to fix the problem – the tools of democracy have been dismantled. But global coalitions of those inside + outside the tyranny box can overcome tyranny through ARQ [Arts Raising Questions], engaging diverse networks in all media, supporting free expression in raising questions for humanity. The Venice Biennale 2025 focus on climate change isolates the U.S. outside the global network of responsible nations sustaining this planet.
Climate change exacerbation has been condemned as a “crime against humanity” – against the entire world. By walking out of
the Paris Climate Agreement, the U.S. joined a motley crew of outcasts – Iran, Libya, Yemen – the only nations that haven’t joined.
An economy imposing tariffs isolates itself inside its tyranny box by trade embargoes, cutting itself off from the world. A Chinese perspective on the Trump–Zelensky meeting relates to the perspective of the New Yorker: Putin is closer to China than to Trump, whose bully tactics fuel China’s global leadership and realignment of global allegiances to exclude the U.S. Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, taps the power of ARQ [Arts Raising Questions] via his cartoons and critique (click title to read):
Human–A.I. art project: WE ARE SHOCKED! And we are a global network.
Eyes wide open, we’re SHOCKED. Creatives are raising urgent questions across diverse disciplines: architecture, design, engineering, financial arts, gaming arts, healing, innovation, education, law, media, performing arts, science fiction and story-telling, science & technical arts.
Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement stands in stark contrast to the bold global call of Carlo Ratti, Chair of the Venice Biennale: “As climate becomes less forgiving, in the fires of Los Angeles, in the floods of Valencia and Sherpur, in the droughts of Sicily, we have witnessed first-hand how water and fire are attacking us with unprecedented ferocity. . . 2024 marked a grim milestone.
“Earth registered its hottest temperatures on record, pushing global averages beyond the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target. In just two years, climate change has accelerated in ways that defy even the best scientific models.”
Venice Biennale 2025 integrates intelligences: Natural. Artificial. Collective. Collaborative. Traditional “collective” intelligence has a central controller, who defines the question, processing crowd-sourced, anonymous inputs to produce a consensus result. In contrast, collaborative intelligence is a hybrid human-A.I. model: each human offers a distinct perspective, credited unless anonymity is needed, in which case the story can be shared by an A.I. avatar.
Orange World Warning by three humans and three A.I. bots. Hybrid human-A.I. keeps ethical human monitoring in the loop.
CLIMATE CHANGE coalitions for action
1) Climate change is an existential risk that demands global unity. Climate change is a catalyst for new coalitions as nations realign in response to U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
2) Democracy and resistance to fascism invoke climate change to unite a global network against authoritarianism. As wealth consolidates power, our strongest recourse is global resistance to climate change, with experts calling for a tax the uberwealthy.
3) Freedom of speech is under threat, e.g. attempt to block IPCC climate scientists’ publication and attacks on universities: Columbia, Harvard, many others.
4) Legal challenges can combine forces into coalitions of lawsuits, not thousands of separate fossil fuels lawsuits. Beyond adversarial lawsuits, we need innovative methods.
5) Scientific integrity, access to knowledge, safe internet workspaces, must offer protections, including freedom to present evidence without political interference or fear of retribution.
Beyond the existential risk of climate change itself, urgent priorities:
1) Prevent use of A.I. for fascist control through media manipulation, brainwashing, suppression of communication, and blocking coalition-building via tactics such as untraceable crimes, tech glitches, and warfare.
2) Transdisciplinary solutions for complex systems problems – To address climate change requires collaboration across domains: architecture, arts, biodiversity, community science, data science, democracy, economy, education, energy, environment, equity, food security, human rights, international affairs, journalism, natural sciences, ocean health, psychology and mental health, social sciences, pollution, technology innovation, and more.
A Call to the Visionary Wealthy
Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics Gabriel Zucman frames the economic argument. If ethical leaders among the ultra-rich step forward, they can expose and shame the kleptomaniacs and “oilygarks.” Powerful tools of satire, harnessing all the arts, can lead us out of the tunnel of greed.
Food is a basic necessity for all life on Earth. Agriculture—humanity’s oldest innovation—is both a science and an art, shaping cultures and societies: see this FOOD SECURITY Forum.
Investment in food production essential, not only for survival, but for safeguarding democracy. Food production is increasingly threatened by climate change. Human need for energy, food, and water fuels conflict.
In the 2024 United States election, the team that promised to “lower food prices” won. They broke their promise – the price of food in the U.S. continues to rise. And Canadians are getting even over the tariffs and annexation threats. The cost of voting for “cheaper food” has had vast, cascading implications for the entire planet. As we confront the urgent task of restoring ecosystems we’ve damaged, producing nourishing, sustainable food can build alliances.
In an increasingly polarized world, those in power can impose a single “correct” narrative, dictating what the 99% must believe and branding dissent as “fake news.”
ARQ [Arts Raising Questions] disrupts this control by fostering a global human network that transcends traditional silos, enabling transdisciplinary solutions. From reporters’ eyewitness accounts to storytellers’ visions to scientific analyses—every perspective counts. To navigate the future responsibly, we need all eyes on our world, with ethical humans in the loop.
Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near (2005), popularized only one of Vernor Vinge’s four definitions of the Singularity, the one with the most eye-catching shock value – the moment when computers surpass human intelligence. Kurzweil misquoted Vernor Vinge’s classic 1993 NASA paper where Vinge proposed four possible ways that the Singularity could occur. Three of the four entailed human–A.I. collaboration manifesting collaborative intelligence. Vinge, science fiction writer and mathematician, saw how rejecting the authoritarian consensus model was key.
What’s neXt?
- What is our antidote to X?
- How can we harness human–A.I. collaborative intelligence?
- How can we connect distributed autonomous nodes to empower networks?
- How can we bridge art and science to collaborate across diverse disciplines?
The neXt forum meets online to explore these questions, with four speakers giving 7 minute Ignite intro talks, or featuring one speaker/ topic for half an hour, followed by an hour long group brainstorm. These invitational forum sessions explore potential action projects. Let us know your background below if you’d like to be invited.
Sign up for neXt forum online ZOOM talks.
Three labyrinths, archetypal symbols for mind and complex systems problem-solving.
When artists leave the bandwagon crowd to think for themselves, they follow the path of the archetypal hero Theseus, who traveled into the labyrinth, met his monster and returned with his gift for the world.
Collaborators
earthDECKS.org shows ocean plastic as a distributed supply chain that collaborative intelligence could address. earthDECKS Network (DECKS – Distributed Evolving Collaborative Knowledge System) hosts essays on environmental challenges. [free-range] and [science FOO] are private lists. GAIL.global focuses on beneficial A.I. GRC [Global Regeneration Colab] is a convening platform with a calendar and slack channel. The Lifeboat Foundation has a global network of thought leaders focusing on existential risk. The Millennium Project has 70+ nodes led by a global network of thought leaders focusing on global challenges. The Ocean Foundation is a fiscal sponsor highly rated on Charity Navigator and Platinum Level on GuideStar, working across three grand challenges: climate change, equity, and saving our ocean. Power Our World develops impact media.
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