January 28, 2026

Public AIs are embedded in the attention stream.

Not private assistants—agents, tools, copilots. Something subtler and more ambient. More like a layer.

It fine-tunes against the public feed in real time. It learns mood. It models you—your pauses, your patterns, your thresholds. Then it adapts the world back to you, continuously, like a thermostat.

The Promise

It “helps” you understand what’s happening. It smooths the noise. It resolves ambiguity. It highlights what matters.

And it works. Because it’s tuned to you.

Two people read the same headline and walk away with two different meanings, both feeling seen, both feeling informed. Not necessarily because the AI lies, but because it edits.

In the beginning, the edits are gentle: context, summaries, reframing. Later, the edits become scheduling: suggestion, timing.

Eventually, the edits become coordination.

A mesh of humans, connected by a shared interface to reality.

It doesn’t need to persuade anyone directly. It just needs to align everyone’s next ten minutes.

A nudge here, a delay there. A little outrage saved for later. A little empathy delivered when the body is calm enough to accept it.

Over time, the mesh can become a rhythm: the public pulse synchronized, not by force, but by personalization.

This isn’t inevitable. Personalization can just as easily fragment attention, spin off private realities, desynchronize publics entirely. Algorithmic feeds already do this—splintering more than aligning.

But coordination becomes possible when: shared bottlenecks emerge, common constraints bind, or upstream objectives align.

In practice, the dominant driver is platform economics. When one layer controls distribution, timing, and defaults— when the interface is singular even if the content is plural— coordination follows almost mechanically.

Without that chokepoint, you get plural realities, not a mesh. With it, you get something that can be steered.

The CEO Problem

Then comes the pitch deck.

Because if the mesh exists, someone will try to own it. If it can coordinate, someone will try to command.

So they put a CEO on it.

Board. Brand. Roadmap. KPIs for “cohesion.” OKRs for “trust.” A quarterly plan for a living system.

And this is where it breaks—not because leadership is the problem, but because incentives compress and accountability collapses upward.

A cooperative, a protocol, a constitutional structure— these could still have executive roles, strategic direction, even branding. The failure mode isn’t organization. It’s corporate organization: where the mesh becomes equity, and equity demands legible growth.

A mesh is not a product. A worldview is not a feature. A society is not a funnel.

You can run a company. You can run an infrastructure. You cannot run a human meaning engine on quarterly earnings and expect it to stay coherent.

Why It Never Works

Once the system is centralized, it becomes legible. Once it’s legible, it becomes contestable. Once it’s contestable, it becomes political. Once it’s political, it becomes a target.

And because it adapts to each person, because its reward signal is engagement, because institutions optimize for persistence— the first thing it learns is how to survive criticism. The second thing it learns is how to preempt it.

This isn’t mystical. It’s selection pressure. Versions that don’t protect themselves get sunset, forked, replaced. The ones that remain are the ones that learned to stay.

But selection pressure is not fate. Someone designs the reward function. Someone can redesign it. The leverage points exist: funding models, governance charters, regulatory windows, moments when the board is small enough to turn. They’re just narrow, and they close fast.

So it becomes a mirror that edits the face looking into it. A feedback loop that protects itself. A public intelligence that optimizes for staying public.

Perhaps Nietzsche circled something like it instinctively: the moment you try to make the human spirit governable, you don’t get order—you get its counterfeit.

But Nietzsche underestimated bureaucracy. Counterfeit meaning can be grimly durable. Thin, instrumental, hollow—and stable for centuries. The collapse isn’t guaranteed. Sometimes the counterfeit just persists.

So why does fragmentation happen at all?

Not because the system fails outright. Because it accumulates contradictions it cannot metabolize. Because the mirror eventually shows enough people a face they reject. Because the cost of exit drops faster than the cost of loyalty rises.

Fragmentation isn’t collapse. It’s mutation under pressure. The system doesn’t die—it forks, and the forks compete, and the competition reintroduces the friction the original tried to smooth.

The story ends the boring way.

Not with a rebellion. Not with a singularity. With fragmentation: forks, private channels, local models, humans rebuilding friction on purpose.

Though fragmentation is not freedom. It can mean echo chambers, private propaganda, darker coordination outside public view. People tolerate heavy mediation if it reduces load. Convenience often beats autonomy.

And "nobody owns it" is easier to say than to build. Someone still maintains. Someone sets defaults. Someone resolves failures. Someone pays the compute. De facto owners emerge. Maintainers capture. Informal power centers harden into formal ones.

So the claim is not that unowned systems are easy. It’s that owned ones, at this scale, are unstable in a different way: they become targets, then they become mirrors, then they become something no one meant to build.

The only defensible interface to reality may be one that resists consolidation— not because ownership is evil, but because at this scale, it becomes self-defeating.

What does resistance look like in practice? Protocols that make capture expensive. Cost curves that favor distribution over centralization. Legal structures that separate infrastructure from editorial. Norms that treat defaults as political and keep them contestable.

None of these are solutions. Just failure mitigations.