I’ve been watching what’s going on in UK politics with interest recently, not because I’m interested in the UK itself particularly, but it is a great allegory for something I am hyper interested in, the changing landscape in how successful societies in the Global South are organising themselves in the modern world.

I’ve written twice before about what’s happening in the UK. In Closer to Home I discussed that Britain’s present malaise isn’t thirty years in the making as identity politics would like to have people think, but closer to a thousand — that the country wasn’t held together for centuries by the lack of an all-centralised State, but through a dense cultural middle layer of parish, chapel, union, club, county and more; and that as those things eroded post WWII, cohesion was outsourced upward - to Whitehall until the unspoken thing that people think of as ‘Britishness’ stopped being a shared experience and the country finds itself culturally unanchored and blaming external forces for what is essentially an internal issue.

Then in Taxing the Past I discussed that the machinery that is used to fund this (think tax) is calibrated for an economy that no longer exists. The UK is an economy in which value creation long ago migrated from labour to capital while the tax logic still behaves as though the economy is driven by vast swathes of pit and plant workers.

So, the country is in a trap - one of asking an ever decreasing number of workers to hold together what the national culture no longer can - or does. The two layers have radically shifted - the social fabric has frayed, and the financial engine is running on the wrong juice.

So, this piece is about the third layer - sitting on top of both - that has the ability to solve the other two but in the current state of things is simply making it worse! Even if we accept the fact that the social fabric has thinned (think assimilation of immigrant populations being a hot topic) and the engine is wrong (salaried employees carrying the national tax burden) — you’re still left with the obvious question that if the problems are so clear, why are things continually getting worse? Why do successive governments turn up promising to be serious and leave having shuffled the same furniture round the same sinking ship?

In large part, and this is not a revelatory insight, it is the fact that the politics itself has become the problem. Society has fallen into a trap of thinking it’s this party or that party when it is actually much more that – as in much of the developed world - the last 30 or 40 years has seen politics become a subset of the entertainment industry and not an actual societal function for serious people to drive ahead with long term visions.

All the countries in the world today in the ascendent have long ranging plans set out, Vision Statements for 2030, 2050 even 2071 in one country. Long range visions that give the nation a north star, it’s leadership something to aim at, it’s citizens something to contribute to and its private sector a road map of opportunity to benefit from. A cohesive system where people know where they are - and what the future looks like.

It used to be that government worked in the background and politics got on with itself. Over the course of a parliament or a congress it was background noise to broader society, a hum that people could, and mostly did ,ignore for years at a time and only when an election came into view that it swelled into anything like a national conversation.

Now it’s in large part the main conversation, all of the time. Young people today don’t go to Woodstock, they go to a political rally. It’s the talk at a dinner party, on a train, in the group chat - and always in the same key of grievance and tribalism and not a collective chatter about the future and what can be done.

I don’t take aim at people sharing their views. My issue is with the fact that it is almost exclusively about politics and almost nothing at all about policy. If everyone was engaged in the future of their country and the planet that would be a wonderful thing, but it isn’t that it’s this figure versus that figure, this religion versus that, whose side are you on, who are we attacking this week. The whole discourse has floated off from the thing it’s supposed to be, which is the boring - but rather important - question of what is the actual plan and what are we going to do about it!

What sent me down this train of thought is watching the current Labour internal fighting that the whole country is talking about. Labour is this, Starmer is that, Streeting is the other. Now these all may be entirely accurate observations, but the wild thing is that the fury is almost identical to that aimed at the Conservatives just three or so years ago - and it’ll be aimed at whoever comes next.

The problems remain but the targets keep rotating. I made the point in Taxing the Past that the Reeves budget was barely distinguishable from the Conservative budgets before it, or from most of what’s happening across Europe — competent enough on its own terms, but at the same time almost entirely irrelevant and useless. But the discourse is that it was the person that was wrong – which they were but so were the others.

This same disappointment turns up during every government no matter from which side, so the disappointment isn’t really about the party but about the system. It’s structural but nobody is having that conversation. Ultimately this is because nobody is prepared to zoom out and have an actual plan and then work toward it. The system has become very good at staging the drama of change and not very good at delivering it.

In my work with Tintra I talk a lot about trying to move away in the Global South from solving problems at the App Layer — the surface where you build the visible thing, the interface, the feature, the bit everyone can see and click on – and move toward the infrastructure layer that sits underneath. Without which you can build all the apps you like but they only make incremental change – when what is required in both the global south and the UK is Infrastructure Layer change – admittedly for very different reasons but the solve is the same.

Almost all of what passes for political debate in Britain now exists at the app layer. An extra few pounds here for a social program, a tax discount there, one percent added over five years to something else, and with each of these nonsensical corner nibblers announced like they’re the turning point in the national story. None of these are strategies. They’re really just symptom management. At best they take the edge off the discomfort of the moment – at worst they are nothing more than a press release - without going anywhere near the architecture that’s producing the discomfort in the first place. And because they’re visible and immediate and easy to argue about, they make perfect fodder for the theatre.

The real trouble is what the theatre is built to reward immediacy measured in news bulletins but hopeless at the thing that matters most, which is slow, unglamorous, generational planning. Nobody wins a week by setting out a coherent view of where the country should be in 2050. There’s no applause for pouring a foundation whose value won’t show up until long after you’ve left office. So, the foundations don’t get poured. We’ve ended up with a politics that governs for the next twenty minutes, because the next twenty minutes is the only thing the machine pays out on – to mix metaphors.

It is a systemic issue caused over generations and compounded by technological and social change – I don’t think the current government are uniquely foolish or venal, and I wrote something similar in an earlier piece on what Sallust said on the Roman decline — his argument was that Rome started to rot not when it became rich but when ambition came loose from purpose beyond itself. The British political class is stuck inside a set of incentives that make being serious more or less electoral suicide and nobody has either the skill or the vision to change that. This is why Trump has been so successful in the US, like it or hate it, he has a vision that if one is so included people can get behind. The same is true of Brexit – it was a story well told. We need the same narrative and vision but with a more cohesive and frankly positive and optimistic vision.

If you stand back far enough you start to see a pattern, I touch on it lately in nearly everything I write. Namely that societies in the ascendent over the arc of history spend their energy and capital building forward — infrastructure, capacity, institutions of a future they’ve bet on and societies that are contracting (socially as much as economically) spend theirs holding positions — servicing debt, defending entitlements, propping up systems built for yesterday’s word.

Offence and defence. Building tomorrow or propping up yesterday. Europe has circa 10% of the world’s people, creates around a quarter of its output and close to 50% of all social spending. Which pretty much amounts to a whole continent’s society optimised for paying for yesterday rather than investing in its future.

Set a country such as a Rwanda next to that, growing at 9% with capital investment north of 25% of GDP or any number of other countries in the world. Looking and feeling like the US in the 50’s or late Victorian Britain and contrast is clear.

Let me be clear looking after the old, the sick and the unlucky is an essential part of the social contract in any decent country. The failure is that the entire discourse is focused on these things, where care as a subset of a broader mission is great, care at the expense of that mission is nihilistic.

What’s missing isn’t really a committee or a strategy document. It’s a story. A north star. A simple, plain answer to the question of what Britain is for over the next fifty years, told in language a person can actually feel. A 2050, a 2071. Imagining what the future of Britain actually looks like and bringing the country along.

The industrial revolution built the country, the UK de-industrialised first which has bought to an end that 250-year period in British history that created the country today. This was inevitable and nothing lasts forever - the issue is that nobody has bothered to figure out and communicate what comes next. Where is Chapter 2. There is just a chancellor at a dispatch box talking about debt like the country is a first-time buyer at a mortgage meeting, citing numbers a thousand Americans could put on their credit cards, while the country is supposed to nod gravely and feel responsible.

The country that gave the world modern western culture writing policy about amounts of money that are trivial to individuals is a breathtaking situation to be in.

Someone needs to set a mission. Narrate that mission to the public. What does the next hundred years look like? Rebuilding the Northwest as an AI hub, the Northeast as something, Wales as something else. A mission everyone can get behind a picture of the country in 2050 or 2070 that a child in Sunderland or Swansea can actually recognise themselves in. this then creates something to aim for. Gives hope, brings the country together behind something. Then immigration can be measured against need rather than xenophobic abstractions, social care can be reduced because there’s another (better) alternative than 50% of under 25’s being on social benefit. Once we solve at the infrastructure layer rather than the application layer all of these lesser issues if not solve at least start to right size.

To do that and figure out a plan not by interparty bickering when nobody knows what to do, scoring silly points about some totally inconsequential matter when the country is at a one in a century crossroads – we need big thinking by grownups. And the public discourse should be as alive as it is, but with conversations and engagement about what the country looks like. A century from now, not how much some faceless minister claimed for housing allowance last week or the latest baseless claim that Reform is making about immigrants being the problem instead of multigenerational societal change that needs grown up strategy. Bring in cross party discussions, do town halls, maybe even a referendum. Let’s listen to experts. Let’s listen to citizens. This should be thought of almost through the lens of wartime. It isn’t that in any way whatsoever, but that camp spirit, all pulling together.

Fundamentally it’s about finding the why. This is what will generate change, then that will in turn make politics again about the why and the how, not the what. Why are we doing this. “Not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.” “Fighting on the beaches.” These are the rally cries that spur countries on. And every country in the world that is ascending has these plans, where in the UK nobody can get past the latest gossip. In 100 years from now it is the big decisions that will be remembered, not Angela Rayner’s housing arrangements. The country needs to elevate the discourse.

Have a plan, set a goal. Then yes, the country might borrow lots more money but do it to achieve a mission, borrow a dollar to create two dollars. Borrow £250 billion and retool the entire country – instead of 10’s and 20’s here to support a triple lock pension and NHS support for 20 minutes. Create jobs for people that are interesting and rewarding. Yes, be stricter on benefits — but only if there’s a counter of meaningful work with a purpose on the other side of the conversation. The whole discourse is to the negative, all defensive, lending is bad, social care is a burden, industry has gone – all in a way true, but such is life – let’s hyper index on the solution and stop this navel gazing worrying about the problem and making the politics a psycho drama of negativity.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers to this huge problem and i’m not focusing on the UK as I think it’s worse than anywhere else - it just provides a good example of a much broader global issue. But one thing is for sure, bickering about trivialities doesn’t save a friendship or a marriage it certainly doesn’t save a country. Developed economy politics needs to lead broader economies to look up from the current negative discourse and reach for the horizon, think about what is possible, set a mission to get there and bring their countries along.

This is exactly what is happening today around the world outside of Europe and the US and is what has worked historically for these countries at times they’ve achieved their best. This might not be a certain win, but i’m pretty sure continuing on their current trajectory is a certain loss. It’s been done before and can be done again and i’m optimistic it can happen. Time will tell

.

I’ve written twice before about what’s happening in the UK. In Closer to Home I discussed that Britain’s present malaise isn’t thirty years in the making as identity politics would like to have people think, but closer to a thousand — that the country wasn’t held together for centuries by the lack of an all-centralised State, but through a dense cultural middle layer of parish, chapel, union, club, county and more; and that as those things eroded post WWII, cohesion was outsourced upward - to Whitehall until the unspoken thing that people think of as ‘Britishness’ stopped being a shared experience and the country finds itself culturally unanchored and blaming external forces for what is essentially an internal issue.

Then in Taxing the Past I discussed that the machinery that is used to fund this (think tax) is calibrated for an economy that no longer exists. The UK is an economy in which value creation long ago migrated from labour to capital while the tax logic still behaves as though the economy is driven by vast swathes of pit and plant workers.

So, the country is in a trap of keeping asking the worker to hold together what the national culture no longer can or does. The two layers have radically shifted - the social fabric has frayed, and the financial engine is running on the wrong juice.

So, this piece is about the third layer - sitting on top of both - that has the ability to solve the other two but in the current state of things is simply making it worse! Even if we accept the fact that the social fabric has thinned (think assimilation of immigrant populations being a hot topic) and the engine is wrong (salaried employees carrying the national tax burden) — you’re still left with the obvious question that if the problems are so clear, why are things continually getting worse? Why do successive governments turn up promising to be serious and leave having shuffled the same furniture round the same sinking ship?

In large part, and this is not a revelatory insight, it is the fact that the politics itself has become the problem. Society has fallen into a trap of thinking it’s this party or that party when it is actually much more that – as in much of the developed world - the last 30 or 40 years has seen politics become a subset of the entertainment industry and not an actual societal function for serious people to drive ahead with long term visions.

All the countries in the world today in the ascendent have long ranging plans set out, Vision Statements for 2030, 2050 even 2071 in one country. Long range visions that give the nation a north star, it’s leadership something to aim at, it’s citizens something to contribute to and its private sector a road map of opportunity to benefit from. A cohesive system where people know where they are - and what the future looks like.

It used to be that government worked in the background and politics got on with itself. Over the course of a parliament or a congress it was background noise to broader society, a hum that people could, and mostly did ,ignore for years at a time and only when an election came into view that it swelled into anything like a national conversation.

Now it’s in large part the main conversation, all of the time. Young people today don’t go to Woodstock, they go to a political rally. It’s a dinner party, on the train, in the group chat, every day, and always in the same key of grievance and tribalism.

I don’t take aim at people sharing their views. My issue is with the fact that it is almost exclusively about politics and almost nothing at all about policy. If everyone was engaged in the future of their country and the planet that would be a wonderful thing, but it isn’t that it’s this figure versus that figure, this religion versus that, whose side are you on, who are we attacking this week. The whole discourse has floated off from the thing it’s supposed to be, which is the boring - but rather important - question of what is the actual plan and what are we going to do about it!

What sent me down this train of thought is watching the current Labour internal fighting that the whole country is talking about. Labour is this, Starmer is that, Streeting is the other. Now these all may be entirely accurate observations, but the wild thing is that the fury is almost identical to that aimed at the Conservatives just three or so years ago - and it’ll be aimed at whoever comes next.

The problems remain but the targets keep rotating. I made the point in Taxing the Past that the Reeves budget was barely distinguishable from the Conservative budgets before it, or from most of what’s happening across Europe — competent enough on its own terms, but at the same time almost entirely irrelevant and useless. But the discourse is that it was the person that was wrong – which they were but so were the others.

This same disappointment turns up during every government no matter from which side, so the disappointment isn’t really about the party but about the system. It’s structural but nobody is having that conversation. Ultimately this is because nobody is prepared to zoom out and have an actual plan and then work toward it. The system has become very good at staging the drama of change and not very good at delivering it.

In my work with Tintra I talk a lot about trying to move away in the Global South from solving problems at the App Layer — the surface where you build the visible thing, the interface, the feature, the bit everyone can see and click on – and move toward the infrastructure layer that sits underneath. Without which you can build all the apps you like but they only make incremental change – when what is required in both the global south and the UK is Infrastructure Layer change – admittedly for very different reasons but the solve is the same.

Almost all of what passes for political debate in Britain now exists at the app layer. An extra few pounds here for a social program, a tax discount there, one percent added over five years to something else, and with each of these nonsensical corner nibblers announced like they’re the turning point in the national story. None of these are strategies. They’re really just symptom management. At best they take the edge off the discomfort of the moment – at worst they are nothing more than a press release - without going anywhere near the architecture that’s producing the discomfort in the first place. And because they’re visible and immediate and easy to argue about, they make perfect fodder for the theatre.

The real trouble is what the theatre is built to reward immediacy measured in news bulletins but hopeless at the thing that matters most, which is slow, unglamorous, generational planning. Nobody wins a week by setting out a coherent view of where the country should be in 2050. There’s no applause for pouring a foundation whose value won’t show up until long after you’ve left office. So, the foundations don’t get poured. We’ve ended up with a politics that governs for the next twenty minutes, because the next twenty minutes is the only thing the machine pays out on – to mix metaphors.

It is a systemic issue caused over generations and compounded by technological and social change – I don’t think the current government are uniquely foolish or venal, and I wrote something similar in an earlier piece on what Sallust said on the Roman decline — his argument was that Rome started to rot not when it became rich but when ambition came loose from purpose beyond itself. The British political class is stuck inside a set of incentives that make being serious more or less electoral suicide and nobody has either the skill or the vision to change that. This is why Trump has been so successful in the US, like it or hate it, he has a vision that if one is so included people can get behind. The same is true of Brexit – it was a story well told. We need the same narrative and vision but with a more cohesive and frankly positive and optimistic vision.

If you stand back far enough you start to see a pattern, I touch on it lately in nearly everything I write. Namely that societies in the ascendent over the arc of history spend their energy and capital building forward — infrastructure, capacity, institutions of a future they’ve bet on and societies that are contracting (socially as much as economically) spend theirs holding positions — servicing debt, defending entitlements, propping up systems built for yesterday’s word.

Offence and defence. Building tomorrow or propping up yesterday. Europe has circa 10% of the world’s people, creates around a quarter of its output and close to 50% of all social spending. Which pretty much amounts to a whole continent’s society optimised for paying for yesterday rather than investing in its future.

Set a country such as a Rwanda next to that, growing at 9% with capital investment north of 25% of GDP or any number of other countries in the world. Looking and feeling like the US in the 50’s or late Victorian Britain and contrast is clear.

Let me be clear looking after the old, the sick and the unlucky is an essential part of the social contract in any decent country. The failure is that the entire discourse is focused on these things, where care as a subset of a broader mission is great, care at the expense of that mission is nihilistic.

What’s missing isn’t really a committee or a strategy document. It’s a story. A north star. A simple, plain answer to the question of what Britain is for over the next fifty years, told in language a person can actually feel. A 2050, a 2071. Imagining what the future of Britain actually looks like and bringing the country along.

The industrial revolution built the country, the UK de-industrialised first which has bought to an end that 250-year period in British history that created the country today. This was inevitable and nothing lasts forever - the issue is that nobody has bothered to figure out and communicate what comes next. Where is Chapter 2. There is just a chancellor at a dispatch box talking about debt like the country is a first-time buyer at a mortgage meeting, citing numbers a thousand Americans could put on their credit cards, while the country is supposed to nod gravely and feel responsible.

The country that gave the world modern western culture writing policy about amounts of money that are trivial to individuals is a breathtaking situation to be in.

Someone needs to set a mission. Narrate that mission to the public. What does the next hundred years look like? Rebuilding the Northwest as an AI hub, the Northeast as something, Wales as something else. A mission everyone can get behind a picture of the country in 2050 or 2070 that a child in Sunderland or Swansea can actually recognise themselves in. this then creates something to aim for. Gives hope, brings the country together behind something. Then immigration can be measured against need rather than xenophobic abstractions, social care can be reduced because there’s another (better) alternative than 50% of under 25’s being on social benefit. Once we solve at the infrastructure layer rather than the application layer all of these lesser issues if not solve at least start to right size.

To do that and figure out a plan not by interparty bickering when nobody knows what to do, scoring silly points about some totally inconsequential matter when the country is at a one in a century crossroads – we need big thinking by grownups. And the public discourse should be as alive as it is, but with conversations and engagement about what the country looks like. A century from now, not how much some faceless minister claimed for housing allowance last week or the latest baseless claim that Reform is making about immigrants being the problem instead of multigenerational societal change that needs grown up strategy. Bring in cross party discussions, do town halls, maybe even a referendum. Let’s listen to experts. Let’s listen to citizens. This should be thought of almost through the lens of wartime. It isn’t that in any way whatsoever, but that camp spirit, all pulling together.

Fundamentally it’s about finding the why. This is what will generate change, then that will in turn make politics again about the why and the how, not the what. Why are we doing this. “Not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.” “Fighting on the beaches.” These are the rally cries that spur countries on. And every country in the world that is ascending has these plans, where in the UK nobody can get past the latest gossip. In 100 years from now it is the big decisions that will be remembered, not Angela Rayner’s housing arrangements. The country needs to elevate the discourse.

Have a plan, set a goal. Then yes, the country might borrow lots more money but do it to achieve a mission, borrow a dollar to create two dollars. Borrow £250 billion and retool the entire country – instead of 10’s and 20’s here to support a triple lock pension and NHS support for 20 minutes. Create jobs for people that are interesting and rewarding. Yes, be stricter on benefits — but only if there’s a counter of meaningful work with a purpose on the other side of the conversation. The whole discourse is to the negative, all defensive, lending is bad, social care is a burden, industry has gone – all in a way true, but such is life – let’s hyper index on the solution and stop this navel gazing worrying about the problem and making the politics a psycho drama of negativity.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but one thing is for sure, bickering about trivialities doesn’t save a friendship or a marriage it certainly doesn’t save a country. UK politics needs to lead the broader country to look up from the current negative discourse and reach for the horizon, think about what is possible, set a mission to get there and bring the country along. This is not my view this is exactly what is happening today around the world outside of Europe and the US and is what has happened in those regions at the times they have been at their best.

I have been turning something over for a few weeks, since a conversation I had with a friend about the limitations of language affecting our experience of reality. My friend disagreed but I do think that there are so many ways to see and think about this in a way that supports my point – and in many ways this sits at the core of Tintra’s work also.

A, maybe trite, example is that the Ancient Greek’s never had a word for blue, despite their ability for deep thinking still forming the base of western culture today.

If you read the Iliad and the Odyssey the fact that it isn’t there when we all think of Greece ancient or otherwise in whites and blues is quite striking. The sea is described as ‘wine-dark’. Honey described as green. Sheep, most surprisingly of all, are violet. But bronze is a colour used frequently. But the sky - has no colour at all in his work. I think that isn’t because they couldn’t figure out a word for it, I think it was just assumed as a thing that ‘just is’ – something that exists so deeply that doesn’t need a name. To my mind this is telling of the culture and their human experience as much as it is the language – this was a time when the Greek culture was inventing pretty much everything we think of today as western thought.

When William Gladstone noticed this in 1858, he reached a conclusion that is telling in turn of Victorian culture. The Greeks must have been partially colourblind. The human eye he reasoned, must have been evolving in real time, and Homer simply lived too early to see what was available to the obviously very evolved eye of a Victorian gentlemen

He was spectacularly wrong of course. Our genes for colour vision are millions of years old. Homer’s eyes were the same as our eyes. What was missing was not a retina cone but a word. Greek did not yet have a category called blue so without the category, the sky was simply something you looked through and by extension experience differently.

The rabbit hole I fell down thinking about this revealed the same pattern appears in language after language across time The Vedic hymns, the Hebrew Bible, old Icelandic, early Chinese - blue is almost always the last basic colour to be named, arriving only after dark, light, red, green and yellow have been settled by each culture. Some of this may be the just the fact that blue is rare in nature not many blue plants or animals. And maybe because blue pigments are hard to make meaning there was little day to day use for the word without a thing in your hand to point at, you don’t need a word.

In Namibia, the Himba people use five basic colour terms with no word for what English calls blue, but they have a single word that covers shades English speakers would split into green and blue. If you were to show a Himba elder a ring of green squares with one slightly different shade hidden among them, and they will spot it almost immediately, much faster than an English speaker as our language is more attuned to difference, not nuance. Show them the same ring with a blue square sitting in the middle of the greens, and they will sometimes pause, where an English first mind would see it as glaringly obvious. Their visual system is the same as ours. Their category system isn’t and that alters their experience, as our alter it in the other direction.

It is not that the Himba are missing something it’s that they are noticing things our vocabulary makes invisible to us. Their language has carved up the world along axes our culture decided not to bother with. Whatever they spend a lifetime distinguishing, we walk past.

This is what I’ve been thinking about – what does that mean about the reality of the world around us. We think, particularly in western cultures of perception as a window onto reality. The eye sees and the brain registers what is actually there, but that isn’t really how it works – our brains are seeing an interpretation of what is there (whether it’s there or not is another thing I ponder often, but I’ll get to that another time) – The thing being - Reality is as we are as much as it is how it is.

Basically, as I understand it visible light is a tiny strip of the electromagnetic spectrum, super narrow really — bees see ultraviolet, snakes see infrared, mantis shrimp have sixteen kinds of receptor we have just three. What we call colour is not really there in the world it’s just what the brain produces when wavelengths of a certain ratio hit the back of the eye. Magenta does not exist as a single wavelength of light at all. It is something the brain invents to make sense of seeing red and blue at the same time. A useful fiction to allow us to make sense of the world around us through the cultural lens of the experience and need of our society. Language carves the rendering of each colour into nameable shades and then the culture decides which of those shapes matter and indexes on the ones that help that society adapt and thrive.

By the time you’re looking at the sky and calling it blue, you’re three layers deep into an interpretation. What I keep coming back to is the gap between how constructed all of this is physically but then how absolutely certain we are that when we use these phrases we are ‘right’ and they are ‘factual’

I use colour as an example to make a broader point most of what we treat as obvious is the result of editing that is encoded by our cultural experience which in turn impacts the categories we think in, the words we have available, the colours we name, the behaviours we read as polite or rude, what constitutes a good person or a successful life, the features of a serious idea. Literally none of these things are ‘real’ none of them arrive as raw data, they arrive with the framing not of reality but of our background that is invisible because we have been looking through it for so long it becomes reality.

And yet we move through the world absolutely convinced of our own position in it and how right we are vs the person or culture next to us – who is clearly mad for seeing it differently.

I have been fortunate to spend much of my life in places where the framing is different from the one I grew up inside. In Papua New Guinea, in the Amazon, in the South Pacific, in the deserts of southern Africa, spending time with people whose languages encode time, ownership, family and obligation along lines my own culture does not bother with. Each experience has slightly recalibrated my own. Not so much because they are right and we are wrong, or indeed the reverse, but experience of being inside someone else’s category system does a great job of making you briefly aware that one has their own category system and reality is a subjective experience and the things that we hold on to so dearly as a global culture - mostly to our collective detriment – are just evolutionary constructs to help us make sense of the world around us.

Most of us don’t really get that so we start to confuse rendering for truth and once we do that it is in our nature to defend that truth – usually at the expense of understanding.

This, I think, is the real potential cost of the rise of Artificial Intelligence - not that we lose this or that bit of vocabulary or way of learning or communicating but that we lose the ability to notice these nuances at an industrial scale and the right/wrong protocol dominant in Socratic minded western technology becomes the global lingua franca to the point of homogenisation. A language disappearing is a travesty, but the deeper truth is that a way of understanding the world disappears with it. As we as a culture homogenise the dissenting framings stop being available the conversation gets both louder and narrower at the same time.

It is this that concerns me the most, the drift to dogmatics - look at any feed, any debate, any boardroom, any political speech - the level of certainty is extraordinary. Everyone is so absolutely sure of things they have not examined (and often could not defend), so sure of categories they didn’t invent and so sure that the other guy is wrong.

It seems to me that a much more helpful response to all this — to the narrowness of our spectrum, the fictions of our perception, the contingency of our categories, the locality of our culture — should not be nihilism but humility. A base working assumption that the rendering you are looking at is just one possible rendering of innumerable options and not the actual thing itself. That the certainty you feel that creates this tribal desire to defend and double down is simply just information parsed through your editing system, not about some inalienable truth.

I suspect a useful question we can ask, in almost any situation, is some version of: Am I actually seeing this clearly — or am I just so sure of the colour of my sky that anyone seeing it differently must be the idiot?

It’s a trivial way to look at a growing global issue, but it does feel like a better place to start than where most of us currently are.

Much of my writing comes from a long fascination with how culture, language and perception shape the systems we live inside — and from the conviction, tested in many places far from home, that the world makes more sense when you stop assuming your own frame is the universal one. Through the work of Tintra and the Tintra Foundation, that exploration becomes practice — building infrastructure for a future where more than one rendering of the world gets to count.

My work for many years has been focused on a specific bet: that the institutional infrastructure of the twenty-first century will not be a refinement of the twentieth, and that the locus of its construction will not be where the last one was built. What follows are twenty propositions about the world we are entering and the layer — cognitive infrastructure — on which it might run.

1. The unipolar moment is over. At the base of our work is the fact that the dominance of the US will ebb. This was not a prediction; it was an observation – one that we bet on. The question is no longer whether the world will become multipolar – the last 12 months have proven our thesis out - but what that new world order looks like. It should not be viewed as a net negative.

2. The Global South has emerged. The vocabulary of “emerging markets” was written by institutions for whom these economies were peripheral. It has been for some time, but now it is radically outdated. These economies are no longer peripheral. Roughly eighty-five percent of the world’s population lives outside the traditional institutional core, and that share is where the majority of growth both social and economic will come from over the next decade. It deserves an equal footing.

3. The institutional models the West exported over the last seventy years have largely failed outside the West. Not because the populations receiving them were inadequate as was often inferred, but because the models were not built for them. The correct response is not to try harder with the same models or iterate at 99% percentile app layer changes, but to reimagine what models can look like and what that might do.

4. The twenty-first century will be built on cognitive infrastructure. Cognitive infrastructure is the convergence layer of financial rails, balance sheets, data and intelligence that move value, identity and information between people, the institutions around them and their countries. Whoever builds it for the populations coming online now will shape the century in ways that are hard to see fully from inside the present moment.

5. Artificial intelligence makes context affordable at scale. For the first time in the history of institutional design, it is possible to build systems that respect local regulation, local language, local custom and local economic structure without abandoning the cost advantages of standardisation. This is the technical shift that makes everything else possible – we would be foolish to not take advantage of this and simply iterate on old ideas.

6. First-contact data may be the irreplicable asset of the century. The behaviour of billions of people entering digital institutions for the first time — how they save, borrow, identify themselves, transact, form associations — cannot be recovered later by any firm that arrives after the fact. Whoever builds the systems for the first contact holds the intelligence layer that follows.

7. Indigenous knowledge is not an exhibit. The epistemic traditions of non-Western societies contain real intellectual content relevant to how modern institutions should work — theories of obligation, reciprocity, kinship, risk-sharing — that Western firms have spent centuries trying and failing to reinvent. Let’s not keep making the same mistakes. We must save and learn from these ancient wisdoms.

8. Identity is upstream of all challenges. How a person is known, verified and trusted by the institutions around them is a more fundamental problem than how they move currency. Any serious infrastructure project for the Global South must begin with understanding and pricing risk.

9. Sovereignty is the precondition for trust. Infrastructure owned and operated from elsewhere cannot command the legitimacy required to function as civic infrastructure in these new economies. Sovereign systems should not be seen as a form of protectionism. They must be seen as a right and the baseline condition for a functioning economy.

10. Scale without depth is akin to extraction. A firm that has “scaled” across the Global South while building no local capacity, training no local engineers and leaving no local institutional residue has built nothing durable. It has been extractive. All new players must aim to be additive.

11. The Global South is not a market to be served. It is a set of societies with variable and unique trajectories. The vocabulary of “serving the underbanked” encodes an assumption of inferiority that the underlying facts no longer support. These markets once seen correctly will be priced as equal and profitable not needful and charitable.

12. Regulators should be viewed as partners. The best cognitive infrastructure in the Global South will be built with central banks and central institutions at core, not around them. The west’s key innovators have lost time and money by treating regulators as obstacles and have misunderstood the nature of what the ultimate outcomes can be. Public private partnerships are the key to moving at pace and maintaining national autonomy and security.

13. Compliance must be seen as an asset, not a burden. Well-designed compliance is the mechanism by which any flow — be it capital, of identity or information — can be trusted across borders. The question is whether it has been designed for the jurisdictions it serves or imposed on them from elsewhere. The convergence of innovation and compliance must be key to any growth thesis.

14. Deployment speed is a strategic variable. There is a rush now to wire the system, one that can deploy functioning institutional infrastructure at pace and move away from lethargic deployment and to challenge what is politically and economically possible. That is not a feature. It is the point.

15. Cultural Integration & Respect is essential. The broad arc of tech innovation over the past few decades has for the most part been male (yes men) trying to figure out how to insert their business in the middle of things that used to have no middleman and monetizing that middle.

The global south needs to not go down the same route of hyper optimization that exists in the 99% percentile but build solutions that optimize for multiple outcomes. This is not development vs capitalism in extremis – it’s a way of thinking that blends profit – which is a good thing – with social impact, economic capture and human outcomes.

16. Correspondent banking in its current form is a tax on the poor. The structural economics of the cross-border payments system transfer wealth from the Global South to the Global North every day, by design. This is one of many inherited arrangements that the next decade must rework, and it is among the clearest illustrations of what extractive infrastructure looks like in practice.

17. The dollar will not be the sole rail, but that’s ok. The infrastructure for the next century must be plural at the foundation. Infrastructure capable of operating across multiple reserve currencies, multiple settlement regimes and multiple political blocs cannot privilege any one of them as the default. This does not mean the demise of one or the rise of another – it means the most agility to allow growth at pace – both economic and social.

18. Capital without cognition is dumb capital. Trillions have flowed into the Global South over decades with remarkably little real understanding of the societies receiving them. The asymmetry of capital without comprehension produced the outcomes it produced. Better cognition will create more effective capital and more effective outcomes.

19. The assumption that the frontier of innovation must run through California needs updating. The most consequential institutional innovation of the next twenty years must democratise across Africa, the Gulf, South Asia and Southeast Asia. Not as a replacement of California but as an additive we all benefit from.

20. The purpose of building should no longer be just to dominate. It is to make possible what was not possible before. The question we ask is not who will win the next century. It is what the next century should make possible, and for whom. Let’s move away from winner vs loser mentality and build solutions, products and businesses that create capital, profit and good for all across all domains

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