Essays on Change
Understanding the world is part of changing it.
Scientific ideas for building effective social change.
Coming 2027
20–30,000 words. 18 × 11 cm, ~96 pages.
The Social FabricEl tejido social
Cooperation science helps describe what the social fabric actually is and why it's breaking. Understanding how the four fundamental cooperation systems (reciprocity, social norms, markets and hierarchies) grow and fail brings new perspectives on social crises and how to address them.
The Close EconomyLa economía cercana
Before states and markets, emotions were the first economic system. Studying how they sustain cooperation in small groups but cannot scale clarifies what it takes to cooperate at scale today, and why our emotions clash with modern societies.
The Discourse MythEl mito discursivista
Changes in discourse are correlated with social change, but rarely drive it on their own. Evidence on human behavior and belief formation suggests that ideas often rationalize pre-existing motives, which raises practical and design challenges for anyone trying to change the world.
Network StruggleLa lucha de redes
Empires, states, companies and platforms have followed specific patterns of expansion and competition since the dawn of history. These underlying patterns help us understand and address cycles of freedom and oppression, power concentration and social loss.
Bureaucracy TheoryTeoría de burocracias
Cooperation science helps explain why large-scale socialist revolutions converged on rigid hierarchies. A scientific explanation of this phenomenon shows the open problems and design challenges yet to be solved for democratic social change.
The Scalability of EvilLa escalabilidad del mal
Scientists have studied how subtle local interactions create emergent problems such as group segregation or extreme power concentration. Addressing large-scale symptoms directly has given poor results, but well-designed local solutions can amplify themselves and scale too.
Introduction to CapurneticsIntroducción a la capurnética
Classic cybernetics framed control as top-down steering, while neural networks and genetic algorithms succeed by shaping local interactions and letting solutions emerge. This suggests a paradigm shift for change and control: from "governor" to "gardener."
Economic SystemsLos sistemas económicos
We speak of economic systems intuitively and without a clear-cut definition. However, our current knowledge of human behavior, cooperation science and system design may help us build a definition that is useful in practice.