What's missing in our approach to the wicked potentials of our era?

Written June 2025, before UpTrust's current form; the thinking that led here. The series was planned as six parts and four were published; they are collected here, each linking back to its Substack original.

Part I: No villains, only unconsciousness

Jun 6, 2025. Originally published on Substack.

“If you think of yourself as an insurgent battling dark forces, it’s easy to become unduly fixated on the obstacles in your path. But if you truly want to make something new, the act of creation is far more important than the old industries that might not like what you create.”
- Peter Thiel

It’s easy to make social media giants like Facebook the villain of the attention optimization story, but this is missing the deep interconnectivity of everything. Zuck’s hands are tied by the economic system which demands quarterly profits, not because Wall Street but teacher’s unions have retirement plans invested in FB stock; not because America is evil but because hundreds of millions of people bootstrapped through a million tiny decisions to make their lives and the lives of their kids and grandkids better through investing and correctly recognizing the correlation with wealth and well-being increasing together.

loving what is

I see this as the personal-growth equivalent of welcoming what’s here / being with it / loving defenses. After working with thousands of people for fifteen plus years, I can say that in 99% of cases change is far quicker and longer lasting when we come from a place of embracing what is, rather than trying to bully our way past it.

Only when we’re honest and in touch with the truth of what is can we work on changes at a deeper level of identity commitments—because we have to feel what works about what we currently have. What do we lose if the “wanted” change happened? For example, a friend recently got a really bad sinus infection, which meant he couldn’t take part in a painful business negotiation until weeks of recovery. The infection was real, but he was committed to it because it was a solution to another problem: avoiding a painful negotiation.

If this works so well for individual transformation, perhaps it’s relevant to societal transformation as well?

nature doesn’t seem to care about your feelings…

When it comes to big systemic issues I think seeing innocence is hard, because the stories of the those suffering unfair systems are heartbreaking. Nature is violent, along with cuddly. It doesn’t seem to care about our preferences (except that we are nature), but we want it to! And making it a villain means maybe we matter! We’d prefer a loving God, but a judging asshole God seems better than none at all, because then we’re not alone in the universe…

Plus, if fate is indifferent to us, then it seems like we don’t have any control. It’s the same reason I curse the table leg when I stub my toe on it. If we can claim that it’s Trump’s fault (or Biden’s), then our job is clear: vote for the other candidate. (Spoiler: I think both are symptoms, not causes). I have to constantly remind myself not to fall into the temptation of making someone else wrong because making the fuzzy, unknown, dynamic immensity complexity of reality more manageable seems like such a relief.

making villains obscures our flaws, setting us up to become what we hate

But it’s critical that we see unconsciousness rather than villainy, and here’s why: if I think Facebook is evil I usually correspondingly think I’m good, and I can lie to myself about my motivations and make the exact same mistakes they made.

If instead I recognize they were regular people doing what they thought was best for their circumstances, I can see where I might make the same choices and avoid doing that with UpTrust. There are so many almost good features of Facebook that simply got twisted into attention optimization, and for good reason. I’ve heard story after story about this from engineers inside the company. They were trying to ship products fast, no time to think about long-term consequences. They were trying to keep a site for billions of people from failing. They were unconscious.

I know what it’s like to be unconscious. I’m deeply unconscious about so many things right now—the pitch of the notes in the music I’m listening to, the conversations happening in the houses next to mine, the way my computer or the internet works at basically any level—take your infinite pick, and those are just the things I know I don’t know.

I know what it’s like to not think through the second and third order effects. I like to pretend I’m so wise and thoughtful but I simply can’t reason that deeply about everything. Facebook (as an example, but we can use any social media) simply didn’t realize how much power and influence they had, and by the time they did, they were in too deep.

If you’re not willing to admit you’re deeply unconscious, and you’re deeply flawed, you stand no chance of harnessing the wicked potential of wicked problems. Even the best of us can be corrupted, like Frodo with the ring…

A controversial example: US Insurance companies

If UnitedHealth Group goes out of business because people successfully organize together to tank its stock, they’re going to have expended a bunch of energy for basically zero systemic change—other insurers stuck in the exact same system will behave essentially exactly the same way, and no competitor will come along and change the system unless they deeply understand the incentives.

It’s relieving to point the finger at CEO Brian Thompson, but the relief is temporary as it demands disempowerment and makes all the fixes short term rather than systemic. Insurers, hospitals, and patients will all still struggle with inflated list prices, opaque networks, and endless paperwork. Ironically, massive health conglomerates will have to pay CEOs more to counter the risk of murder. Self-organizing systems perpetuate without central planning, and require different strategies to shift.

What villains are you making?

Don’t take my word for it. Pick your favorite hyperobject, see what kind of villains you’re making, and see what happens when you try a different view.

Here are ways to get at the villains you make—pick a wicked problem and try answering these questions in your brain, in the comments section, in conversation, in your journal, with your favorite LLM, or by whatever means works for you:

• Who do you blame?
• Who can’t you forgive?
• Who do you hate/wish didn’t exist?
• What do you think happened that was unconscionable?
• What do you think is the silver bullet?

I’m not even going to talk about owning the projections here; just from a pragmatic point of view what does making a villain give you? What would you lose if you shifted your mindset?

What does making-villains obscure? What solutions become possible when you let that go?

I genuinely would love to see some comments about what comes from this…

Part II: Self-organizing systems & incentive landscapes

Jun 8, 2025. Originally published on Substack.

Once I stop looking for villains—a specific bad actor that generates a problem—I often start to see self-organizing systems as causal. Causes are where change happens.

A classic example of a “self-organizing system” is water going down a drain in the tub, creating a whirlpool.¹² As long as there’s water to feed it, the whirlpool continues, even though no particular H2O molecules remain in the process. Similarly, the perverse incentive landscape of social media continues even when individual influencers step out of the drain, certain companies go out of business, or new companies (TikTok) come into play.

The unique relational interplay of each element together makes the whirlpool a “thing;” this is the kind of “meta-thing” I want to evoke when I say “incentive landscape.” The meta-ness of it can be difficult to see, because people will say “The whirlpool is created by water!” and they’re right. Others will say, “no, it’s gravity!” and they’re also right. But they’re barely right if they’re not looking at the systems level, seeing the interactions. And they’re also wrong, if they claim exclusivity of one cause.

Social Media (and therefore Collective Sense-making) as self-organizing system

The metaphor somewhat breaks when we look at interventions. With whirlpools you can remove just one factor and the system stops, but with many of our wicked problem/potentials, the pieces all reinforce each other, making “removing” one of them almost impossible without addressing all of them, together.

When it comes to social media for example, all of these factors (and more) reinforce each other:

Financial Incentives

• A profit model that makes customers “the product” — our data is sold to advertisers
• VC funding models demanding exponential user growth, short term stock exchange, etc.

Measurement and Optimization (Technical implementation)

• Engagement metrics as primary performance indicators for creators and platforms
• Algorithms that optimize engagement and staying on site (over well-being)

Psychological and Cultural

• Human psychology: Negativity bias, variable reward structures (slot machine), “Keeping up with the Joneses” when the Joneses are 8 billion people
• Cultural shifts, eg: from from “one right way” to “multiple truths simultaneously”

Structural

• Network effects creating winner-take-all platform dominance
• Social graph lock-in & data portability barriers

Therefore we mostly say “incentive landscape” because it shows how this particular self-organizing system is locked in place by mutually reinforcing incentives.

Changing the relationships between things means honoring the benefit of the current systems

If it’s the relationships between things that make a self-organizing a thing, then the key to a better system is designing different relationships, not exchanging the parts.

I think this is why BlueSky, Community Notes, and many others are admirable movement in the right direction that won’t get the job done. They don’t fundamentally change the incentive structure.

The change the relationships, we have to understand what the old relationships are providing, and find new ways to provide that, or something better.

I see an analogy in personal growth³ changing old habits works best when we see that we’re getting something we value from our current struggle.

For example someone might think “I wish I had more money” but without realizing it, they’re committed to the idea that more money = less ethical. I don’t think they’re right, but in their worldview, they’d rather be ethical than monied, so they conveniently find ways to never quite have more money. If they really want more money, they have to let go of the false association (or be willing to be less ethical).

It’s worth breaking this analogy down to make it more clear, because applying this understanding to our whole-system design is a crucial part of why UpTrust thinks it can succeed in our crazy ambitious mission where so many other attempts have failed:

In personal growth: Person wants X (more money) but has unconscious commitment to Y (being ethical) and false belief that X and Y are incompatible. So they self-sabotage getting X to maintain Y.

In social media: We want X (better connection online) but there are things we value about the current system Y (ego-gratification via money, power, influence, and entertainment; and belonging) and we may have false beliefs about whether X and Y can coexist.

The structure is:

1. Surface desire (more money / better connection online via better social media)
2. Unconscious “competing” commitment to something valuable (ethics / current benefits like making money from content, finding belonging, etc.)
3. (A) False belief that you can't have both or (B) outdated belief that the unconscious commitment is more valuable
4. Solution: either provide the valuable thing in a new way, or challenge the false belief, or update value-structure (or occasionally surface a deeper value)

If the analogy holds, for Social media:

• Surface: better platforms
• Competing commitment: creator income, belonging, news access
• Belief issue: "current platforms are only way to get these benefits" (false) OR "these benefits matter more than systemic harm" (potentially outdated)
• Solutions: provide benefits in reformed systems, challenge necessity beliefs, OR update values to weight collective wellbeing higher

…to change social media we have to see what’s working about the current social media incentive structure, and either provide something equivalent, better or change the worldview about what’s true (deconstruct false associations). Here are some things people get from the current system, that have to be included, improved or transformed:

Social media example:

• Surface: better platforms
• Competing commitments: belonging and connection, meaning generation in the face of pluralistic overload (ironically), investor returns, ad income, creator income
• Belief issue: "current platforms are only way to get these benefits" (false) OR "these benefits matter more than systemic harm" (potentially outdated)
• Solutions: provide benefits in reformed systems, challenge necessity beliefs, OR update values to weight collective wellbeing higher

UpTrust gets to take advantage of all the solutions—providing better connections, better meaning (especially in the most controversial and confusing conversations of our current age, thanks to algorithmic innovations), better conversions for ads (because they come from a trusted source) and a better experience for creators (because they don’t feel they have to sacrifice their ethics for income). We get to challenge the idea that humans default to our base nature (which Whole Foods, Chipotle / Sweet Greens, Patagonia, and the popularity of places other than Las Vegas have done before us), or that our desire for attention and competition can’t be prosocial (people compete for trust scores, incentivizing trusted content). And we get to tap into a network of humans who already value collective wellbeing but have de-platformed themselves.

Part III: Integration of vision and practical in every decision

Jun 9, 2025. Originally published on Substack.

I’m making the claim that one of the necessary but insufficient components of dancing with metaproblems is grounded vision informing every decision. This one is probably the most obvious to say, but hardest to do.

We’ve all seen so many visionaries with great ideas struggle to execute. Almost every community living situation I’ve ever seen falls into this category: “yes!” to living together, but who pays the property taxes and fixes the well? We’ve also seen tons of execution that lacks vision. My favorite example of this is Apple’s AirTags. One of the most innovative and well-funded companies in the world shocked us with its announcement that it finally solved the deep human need to… not lose stuff?

Constraints as design parameters

Vision operates in possibility space while execution operates in constraint space. Most people treat constraints as obstacles to overcome rather than design parameters that inform what wants to be created. This would be like a musician treating notes of a scale as a barrier to their songwriting, rather than building blocks.

Taylor Swift as an example of upstream integration

But I mean it when I say it’s hard. Visionary thinkers, writers and philosophers are often terrible CEOs. I think this is one reason why we’re all so enamored with Taylor Swift.¹ She’s an artist and an incredible business woman! I’m sure she has a world-class team, but she doesn't toggle between "artist mode" and "business mode.” The integration happens upstream. Her creative decisions and commercial calculations are one. Maybe her dating life is too?

Transcend and include: must win the old game

Truly (r)evolutionary ideas must win at the old game. This is Kuhn’s classic claim: new paradigms must be superior in the established and novel domains. Take burning wood/charcoal/dung indoors for cooking for example, which contributes 2-5% of CO2 emissions. The new way of cooking has to be actually better for everyday use in that person’s context. Maybe its solar cookstoves with USB ports to charge phones that allow users to take payments, and as a result justify being able to hire a technician to fix the inevitable breakdowns, and whose taxes maintain the roads that technician drives in on.

For social media, we’ve got to design something better at connecting people, discovering stuff we care about, and accessing information than current platforms, while simultaneously solving addiction and misinformation problems.

Current "solutions"—digital detoxes, time limits, fact-checking overlays—fail because they don’t address the needs that drive people to social media. Evolutionary platforms need to be either more engaging, more informative, and more socially satisfying than existing platforms while eliminating the psychological manipulation and epistemic pollution. This is why there’s a graveyard of alternative social media apps, and current well-meaning alternatives like Mastodon have tiny adoption. They aren’t transcending and including. Or it’s got to provide something new and non-threatening.

As a start: integrating vision/practical into culture and systems

Like Taylor Swift’s integration of music and business, a successful new platform must embed the vision-practical integration in decision making at every possible step. I don’t know the best way to do this, but I have some preliminary thoughts for a way that seems to work:

(1) Building an organizational culture around it: reaffirming it in every meeting and discussion of decisions, rewarding this awareness and commitment whenever anyone brings it up, curbing the alternative (just profit maximization, for example, or just vision commitment without pragmatics), hiring only people deeply mission-committed, and firing when there’s not alignment (or otherwise incentivizing leaving).

(2) Building it into the incentive structure of the platform. Attention optimization algorithms, for example, are practical but not visionary. Algorithmic choice and federated servers have visionary elements, but are impractical.

Eg: whole foods, chipotle, patagonia, alphaschool

I wish I could say more about some specific “do X, Y, Z” but I think that comes naturally from the awareness that the vision must be grounded. And I think it’s something everyone trying to tackle one of these problems needs to stay aware of as they go.

My favorite go-to examples of this are Whole Foods (versus a vegan food co-op or traditional supermarket, for example), Chipotle (versus Mr. Natural or McDonald’s, for example), and Patagonia. We’ve got to straddle what is with what wants to be, as where we come from when considering everything. It may be visionary to imagine bike infrastructure like Amsterdam in every American city so everyone can ride a bike to work to reduce emissions, but it’s impractical and doesn’t meet people’s mindsets, American culture or the geography of US cities where they’re at. Despite all their problems, the battery powered scooters in all the major US metropolises found this integration point—fun, freedom oriented, last mile. Self-driving taxis will likely be a part of the solution for similar reasons.

Structural barriers become incentive moats

One nice property of this balance being hard to do is that structural barriers can be transformed into incentive moats. When a company’s entire business model is focused on a different incentive structure, it’s pretty hard for them to eat you. This can be true for social systems as well. Alpha School in Austin, TX has been using AI to transform education, an area famously stuck in weird incentive loops (seat time, compliance, teaching to the middle, getting funding). Students spend only two hours daily on academics using AI tutors, giving time for the vision of education for autonomy and creativity over test-taking, but still rank in the top 1-2% nationally on standardized assessments, demonstrating the practicality. They aim to make it cheaper than public school—again grounding the vision (transforming education) into the practical (making it affordable).

Synthesis: “Orange-Green” Integration

We need an (Orange-green) integration of vision and pragmatics that evolves us: Vision without systems thinking produces beautiful failures. Systems thinking without vision produces efficient meaninglessness. Recognizing that both need each other—that the vision is implemented because of the constraints (not in spite of them), and the practical only matters because of the vision, will help us continuously combine long-term consequence modeling with immediate value delivery.

Part IV: Addressing the “Whole Developmental Stack”

Jun 13, 2025. Originally published on Substack.

This one was hard for me to write, and I apologize for it’s length, but I need to get it out so I can move on…

The essence of what I want to say here is that to transform wicked problems into potentials, we have to design solutions that appeal to the whole developmental stack—we have to¹ understand what’s good for me, we, and all of us. And to do that we’ve got to be able to understand those drives inside of ourselves.

This is a categorical claim: if these “wicked potentials” didn’t require a new developmental capacity, we’d have already solved resolved them with our existing frameworks and tools. Without addressing the motivations of multiple developmental levels simultaneously, we can’t get the job done.

This is partly why there are no villains: the people standing up current systems are mostly operating from worldviews that cannot see the me, we, and all of us distinction.² In the same way a genius-IQ child can’t take the perspective of the other until they can, genius, open-hearted adults cannot apprehend hyperobjects until they hit a certain developmental capacity.³

Eg: Highly capable people have thrown enormous amounts of resources into climate change, nuclear disarmament, systemic inequality, with little progress. While it’s possible that their persistence indicates something out of our control like generational change, I believe it more likely indicates that we’re missing something.⁴ I hope this writing will help that “something” emerge more in me and all of you, dear readers.

Me, We, All of Us

1. Motivation

We have to hit multiple motivations to get different people to do stuff. This seems intuitive: you don’t get a horse to work harder by offering daycare at the office.

But it can’t be that intuitive, because I think we’re basically always screwing this up and assuming people are “rational self-interested beings,” like us (“rational” describes you when you’re scrolling on instagram and a hypertargeted ad gives you the perfect way to keep avoiding the painful feeling that drove you to your phone in the first place, right?) Climate Change advocacy screws this up—almost all messages sound “all of us” world-centric alarms (eg: species survival, Gaia). A more effective intervention holds multiple perspectives simultaneously rather than polarizing these levels against each other, eg: “Me”: saving money through nuclear, “We”: energy independence, and “all of us” preserving the Earth for the next seven generations.

But this demands a willingness to deeply understand views different from ours. Which demands a perspective taking capacity that can both admit our own egocentricity and stand outside of it. I’ve never met anyone who can do that well who hasn’t deeply engaged their own shadow work—admitting, befriending, and delimiting the entire developmental stack inside themselves. Their desire and ambition for money, power, fame, influence; their ethnocentric belonging; their worldcentric winning, admiration, legacy, etc. So while I can’t quite identity the causal mechanism,⁵ observation shows that facilitating these wicked problems into potentials always goes hand in hand with getting intimate with the whole developmental stack inside of our selves.

1. Self-knowledge, blindspots, and system design

You know how when a guy tries really hard to repress being gay he ends up driving himself crazy and doing a bunch of a crazy shit? Well, when you repress wanting to be powerful or liked or rich or whatever, you drive yourself nuts and do a bunch of crazy shit.

We’ve got to “know ourselves” as our pal Socrates used to say, and we’ve got to be able to admit that we’re walking contradictions with massive unfixable blindspots, so we can guardrail around them, fess up to our mistakes, hire people who counter-balance us, build cultures of feedback, and generally undermine the ego’s ability to project a false sense of stability and demand that others lie to themselves and each other to preserve it.

If we think we’re better than that—more spiritual, more developed, more righteous or more woke, the “me” and “We” motivations will sneak through and drive our efforts into the ground, by collapsing the multi-perspectival multi-stakeholder-ness required for these wicked potentials to blossom into goodness rather than civilizational collapse.

This is classic Freudian psychology—like Oedipus with his tragic fate, whatever we push away is going to leak out in ways we don’t endorse. Eg: Let’s say I’m trying to solve nuclear disarmament, but I’m unwilling to admit that I care about going down in history… (me motivation) I’m more likely to unconsciously overlook solutions that don’t give me credit, than if I’m familiar with that drive for credit in me, and recognize it when it shows up.⁶

Here are some of the specific expressions of different developmental levels that I think need embracing

Here are some examples. As this is getting long, I’m just picking a few to illustrate the point.⁷ Hopefully you can generate a bunch more that you see, for your favorite wicked potential!

“Me” Egocentric

• Conscious power: Consciously using power means yoking to higher purpose—endosymbiotic ethics where individual and collective good align. Unconscious use of power leads to more corruption.⁸ Working effectively with egocentric actors and incumbent power structures requires finding ways the bigger mission can align with their worldviews, not dismissing them.⁹ Idealists who can’t recognize, use, or limit power get beaten by those who can. This is an unfortunate trope of social activists—unable to admit that they want the power, they seek to remove power from others, and end up categorically ineffective.

Eg: UpTrust avoids direct confrontation by building its own ecosystem where new incentive structures can evolve free from corruption, then uses that leverage to influence broader systems. Our mechanics are such that bot-rings and sybil attacks isolate themselves and have no effect on the broader network.

• Including black markets: Black markets are inevitable, better to "own" these and design protocols so it’s easier to be prosocial than to game the systems. This is essentially the idea behind police having a monopoly on violence, with strict rules governing use and oversight processes (when it works right).
  

“We” Ethnocentric

• Belonging / Us v Them: If we aren’t consciously creating ethnocentric tribes with characteristics we endorse, they’ll form randomly, and some will encode “destroy other tribes” into their memetic DNA.
• Policies and regulation

Eg: Nuclear disarmament: current approaches tend to ignore national interests (world-centric only) or get stuck in security competition (ethnocentric only). I don’t know the answer, but I know it’s got to honor both.

“All of us” Worldcentric

• The value of working hard balanced with living a good life, embracing pluralism and diversity, etc.
• Money & status must be loved (and boundaried): Similar to power, people who aren’t able to recognize their own desire for money and status will be (a) letting those motivations run them unconsciously, and (b) unable to use this motivation strategically, in pursuit of the larger endosymbiotic mission (what’s good for the individual is good for the whole, and vice versa). Money and status can be seen as neutral; if they’re not then people push away helpful resources or get corrupted by unconscious profit-optimization forces. Just being aware of this helps, but it’s just a start; we’ll eventually want Long Term Stock Exchanges and other such systemic creations to support this awareness.

Eg: BrightGreens attempts to value living systems—rather than considering the value of a tree as a commodity when it’s dead, for example, these digital tokens represent value that farmers have created by restoring and enhancing ecosystem vitality, prove the provenance of the work. Who knows if it will work, but it’s a move in the right direction: making financial well-being and ecological well-being into one things, rather than having to choose one against the other.

Kosmocentric (Teal+)

• Synthesis — “yes, and…”
• No false dichotomies (technical and cultural, central and decentralized)
• Multi-perspectival: Embrace imperfection while hitting all four quadrants
• Embracing uncertainty
• Embracing imperfection in all four quadrants (mindset, behavior, culture and systems). The point here is that the energy cost of perfection isn’t included in modeling the pareto frontier, so we have to be willing to go hard toward an ideal but also admit that we’ll never make it.
• Takes time, patience/faith

Eg: AI Safety Coordination failures: Individual actors optimizing locally while preventing collective optimization is precisely the multi-perspective holding problem. Each actor can see their rational choice but can't hold the systemic view simultaneously with their local concerns.

Why can’t we just be purists?

Dialectical synthesis and the implications of needing to “win the old game":

True evolutionary solutions can't position themselves as pure antithesis because that makes them irrelevant to existing systems. Expecting principles-driven organizations to reject all conventional business methods creates the exact failure mode of beautiful visions that can't engage with existing power structures and therefore never achieve systemic influence. They must demonstrate superiority within current measurement frameworks while simultaneously shifting the underlying organizing logic. Our VC funding approach exemplifies this; Conscious Capitalism and impact investing are in the same boat.

Synthesis “transcends and includes:” incorporates previous capacities in addition to going beyond them. This means strategies like power accumulation, competitive positioning, & profit focus can appear identical from the outside but operate from a different internal logic and value structure—systems awareness, multiple perspectives, long-term consequence modeling.

A critical distinction: do these strategies use practical constraints as design principles to enact the deeper vision? Or do the constraints dominate the vision (via addiction or allergy)?

Limitations and next steps

When does an organization have sufficient market power or unique positioning to resist external capture? When do VC incentives, regulatory frameworks, or competitive pressures override internal developmental work regardless of awareness?

Frankly, I don’t know. This framework focuses on developing the capacity to see differently, not mapping the full range of application. I believe these ways of seeing are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the wicked problems we face as a species.

These are great empirical questions, but I don’t know if they’re answerable theoretically; at least not yet. UpTrust represents one datapoint—and we have yet to succeed at scale. More experiments will reveal where the approach works versus where it fails, and what its limitations and mistakes inevitably are.