Global arises when local Distributed Autonomous Nodes [DANs] join into synergistic networks.
Actions are locally tailored for each context, guiding AI, promoting biodiversity, addressing climate change, protecting our oceans, safeguarding life on Earth, and reducing risks of war.
Improv is how each community adapts creatively to local demands, learning and evolving through a balance of art and science preserving democracy, equity, and free speech.
Lab is our studio, wherever we experiment and innovate.
Lab is our studio – whether in the field or on-site – where we experiment and innovate.
GAIL, hosted in Germany and Switzerland, is a global online network of linked DANs (Distributed Autonomous Nodes).
GAIL Mission. Enable human users to share knowledge and grow coalitions via topic nodes in a hybrid human-AI system.
As a new U.S. President took office, the Venice Biennale 2025 engaged a global network. Eutopia (European Universities Transforming into an Open Inclusive Academy) worked on transnational ecosystems to seamlessly integrate education, research, and innovation.
China represented itself as a reliable global trading partner whose “infrastructure diplomacy” built in Africa nearly a trillion dollars of infrastructure. Meanwhile, the U.S. began to represent itself as a global terrorist, attacking its own citizens and former trading partners, driving talent from the U.S. to other countries.
Microsoft dropped a law firm that did a deal with Trump to retain a law firm fighting Trump, signaling a shift. By June 2025, many big companies had dropped law firms doing deals with Trump and hired law firms fighting Trump.
Forbes 500 Digest Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell noted that the United States had transformed from a safe haven for global investors into a risk: The U.S. saw a highly unusual bout of ‘capital flight’ – large amounts of money were taken out of U.S. Treasuries and invested outside America instead, causing a jump in bond interest rates, while the value of the dollar tanked—it was down more than 8% six months after Trump took office. Economic journalist Noah Smith wrote that capital flight “usually only happens to poor countries; it never ends well.” Moody’s joined S&P Global and Fitch Ratings in downgrading the U.S. government’s debt rating, signaling doubt as to whether Washington could repay its debts.
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 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 became a public voice – vast increase in U.S. visitors abroad and vast decrease in foreign visitors to the U.S. Car travel from Canada fell 32%. International travelers to the U.S. fell 11.6% in March 2025 from March 2024.
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. Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, began raising prices because of Trump’s tariffs.
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.
Im 2025 California, the 4th largest economy in the world, took legal action against its own federal government for the tariffs. Trump’s political retaliation against Harvard by cancelling tuberculosis research impacted medicine globally. His crackdown on Columbia was a wake up call for global coalition-building.
Paul Saffo, future forecaster, today’s Delphic Oracle, described in a speech at Stanford Law School how the “terrorism within” that Lincoln predicted would appear first as a breakdown of the nation state, the United States crumbling. Phase one of the U.S. rupture provoked a striking response from U.S. citizens and a seismic sweep in November 3, 2026 elections.
MAGAVERSE favorite Curtis Yarvin (left) disappeared, after having grabbed the limelight briefly by arguing that democracy is a failed experiment. Yarvin was an informal guest of honor at a Trump inaugural gala in Washington. Influencer of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, and others in the Trump regime, Yarvin advised that an authoritarian president can’t continue to have a Harvard or New York Times . . . If you’re going to be Caesar, you can’t operate with someone else’s Department of Reality. RAGE [Retire All Government Employees] came from him. His neo-reactionary movement (NRx) called for anti-egalitarian (pro slavery), anti-democratic Dark Enlightenment. He’s invisible now.
The tactic of a Tyranny Box – that those “inside the box” should feel powerless and afraid as the tools of democracy were dismantled – didn’t work. The Venice Biennale 2025 focus on climate change isolated the U.S. outside the global network of responsible nations sustaining our Earth. Climate change exacerbation was condemned as a “crime against humanity.” Most U.S. citizens maintained their views despite government denial of climate change. Trump handed clean energy leadership to China. By walking out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the U.S. joined a motley crew of outcasts – Iran, Libya, Yemen – the only nations that didn’t join.
The U.S. was isolated as an economy imposing tariffs. Trade embargoes cut it off from the world. A Chinese perspective on the Trump–Zelensky meeting echoed the perspective of the New Yorker: Putin is closer to China than to Trump, whose bully tactics fuel China’s global leadership and the realignment of global allegiances to exclude the U.S. Trump’s October 2026 claim that Russia was doing the U.S. a huge favor by selling us diesel concealed a scandal. Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, whose outstanding cartoonist skills are exemplars of ARQ [Arts Raising Questions] posed two serious questions:
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: art, architecture, design, engineering, financial arts, gaming arts, healing, innovation, education, law, media, music, 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.
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. When anonymity is needed, a 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 and also 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 on 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, censorship, and tactics such as untraceable crimes, tech glitches, and warfare.
2) Implement fair taxation on corporations and on billionaires – The California Billionaires’ Tax (Proposition 40) did surprisingly well given that billionaires spent $379 million fighting the tax, funneling their millions to a PAC deceptively called “Build a Better California.” Prop 40 supporters had less than 10% of that funding.
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.” Tom Steyer has already shown that leadership. 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 science and art, shaping societies, as described in this FOOD SECURITY Forum.
Investment in food production essential, not just for survival, but to safeguard 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. With promises broken, as the price of food in the U.S. continued to rise, they lost in 2026. Canadians got even over the tariffs and annexation threats. The cost of voting for “cheaper food” had cascading implications for the entire planet. To confront the urgent task of restoring ecosystems we’ve damaged, producing nourishing, sustainable food can build alliances. When soybean farmers had zero orders from their former largest buyer, China, Trump had to back-pedal.
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, we need all eyes on our world and 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.
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.
We value your thoughts on neXt forum content resources.
