The New Academy for
Civilisation Alignment
This is a concept site so some of the functional components are just for design purposes (e.g the apply buttons are just are placeholders)
an olive branch & a dove, classical symbols of peace
The Concordia Institute (CI - also collective intelligence) is a proposed meta-organisation oriented towards human coordination/alignment problems and the generative mechanisms of existential risk ('the metacrisis'). As a counter-hegemonic force informed by critical political economy, the research institute serves to formulate a holistic philosophy of civilisational progress and post-AGI society. The initial primary projects of Concordia would be the Coordination Fellowship, the Coordination Forum, and potentially the first Coordination Con(ference) 2026.
* Concordia Institute is a direct parallel and critical response to the Cosmos Institute (pro-market philosophy of AI), the Cascade Institute (the polycrisis), the Roots of Progress Institute (neomodernist philosophy of progress) and Forethought (system-blind macrostrategy research).
Concordia aims to guide the emergence of a new movement for Coordination
Scenario 1
Integrationism
Slow-Moving Catastrophe: The Greatest Depression & The Most Powerful Surveillance
Previous technological revolutions - agricultural, industrial, computational - have often disproportionately advantaged certain groups at the expense of harming others. With the forthcoming AI revolution, this trend needs to be preemptively addressed. Due to the general-purpose nature of AGI, there is a major risk of locking-in and exacerbating existing agentic inequalities and state systems of surveillance.
The Coordination movement exists to ensure that transition to an automated economy and a 'post-AGI society' does not result in major societal disruption, unprecedented mass deprivation and stable totalitarianism - either intentionally on the part of the agents developing AI or inadvertently through a lack of preparedness and coalition-building by civilisational institutions ahead of time.
Scenario 2:
Accelerationism
Sudden Catastrophe: Big Tech Loses Control to a Bigger AI
As we speak there is an ongoing race between nation-states and Big Tech to build superintelligence. Their endgame: to wield the most powerful technology ever created to monopolise the global financial system, acquire total political power and ultimately control the future itself. Given these stakes, these misaligned hyper-agents are willing to take the existential risk that ASI poses threating the continuity of civilisation and all human life: the ultimate catastrophic culmination of privatising the gains and socialising the losses.
This runaway competition is driven by the value misalignment of power and profit-maximising agents converging with coordination failure between genuinely well-intentioned actors. The Coordination movement serves to address these two generative conditions which emergently produce the destructive multi-polar dynamics of the current AI development paradigm.
ACTIVE Programs
We form interdisciplinary research teams to address human coordination and alignment problems. We do this through the Coordination (studies) Fellowship, the substack blog Civilisational Mechanics and the online Concordia events series featuring talks at the intersection of the metacrisis, critical political economy and AI alignment. Our work advances three objectives necessary for changing civilisation's trajectory towards a positive-sum future:
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Coordination: institutional designs that mediate between groups to arrive at pareto-preferred outcomes
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Alignment: goal-directed systems that operationalise collective prosperity instead of externalising harm
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Meta-Utopia: wide-boundary futures that promote sovereignty and variation
Research FIELDS
Our researchers aim to integrate insights from numerous emerging fields at the frontier of contemporary philosophy and social theory.
Principally:
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Critical Systems Existential Risk Studies: a heterodox approach addressing the structural generators of x-risk(s)
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Critical Progress Studies: an alternative conception of progress and civilisation beyond modernity
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Peace and Violence Studies: the mechanism of structural violence and inter-group conflict resolution:
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Civilisation Design & Theory of Transition: the constraints and conditions of a viable world-system
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International Relation & Evo-Game-Theory: the fundamental dynamics of geopolitics & macroeconomics
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Political Philosophy: the meta-level inquiry into the organisation, procedures and pursuits of society
The Coordination (studies) Fellowship 1.0
The Coordination (Studies) Fellowship is an interdisciplinary research incubator and blog-writing intensive dedicated to the philosophy and "physics" of civilisation alignment. While the technical safety project focuses on the engineering problem of aligning AI systems we focus on the broader problem of aligning human CI systems (collective intelligence); including those developing AI.
As competitive pressures force actors into zero-sum races that no one wants but no one can stop, our Fellows work to map the specific incentive landscapes - the "Molochian traps" - that drive this race to the bottom, seeking the leverage points where intervention can shift the global equilibrium toward macrosecurity.
We operate on the premise that AI and the risks it poses is not merely a technological development, but a symptom of the wider sociotechnical misalignment of civilisation and an inflection point requiring the fundamental redesign of human institutions, the world-system and the social contract.
Fellows working to map the structural generators of catastrophic risk—multipolar races and coordination failures—and to prototype new sociotechnical models of governance and political economy required for a viable, macrosecure civilisation.
The purpose of the fellowship is to develop a transitional strategy from our legacy critical systems — prone to competition, conflict and collapse — with resilient architectures that naturally incentivize cooperation and protect against the underclass risk of rapid automation within the existing paradigm.
We view civilization not as a static background condition, but as an evolutionary and designed intelligent system which we are a part of. We are looking for those who believe they can contribute to a "positive-sum" world where our newfound technological power avoids catastrophe and dystopia and realises the empowerment of human sovereignty.
Whether by designing new digital democratic' processes that enhance social epistemology or alternative economic models that decouple survival from labour, the Coordination Fellowship is dedicated to forming the sociotechnical pathways out of the default trajectory and into a stabilized, flourishing future.
Research Agenda: Civilisational Mechanics, Design & Transition
Our research agenda is constituted by three major strands that unify into a new, holistic research field: Coordination Studies.
I. Civilisational Mechanics (Analysis) - Maps
Focus: Analysis and Diagnosis of the Metacrisis. We cannot address what we do not understand. This strand treats civilisation as a complex system to be comprehended, identifying the generative mechanisms of global problems and catastrophic risk.
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The Structural Generators: mapping the "Metacrisis"—specifically the political economy, cultural psychology and evolutionary game-theory that drives the AI race.
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Existential Risk Scenarios: investigating the "Integrationist" (centralised control) and "Accelerationist" (decentralised destruction) scenarios not as future accidents, but as ongoing systemic catastrophes of of techno-capitalist modernity.
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The Intelligence Curse: analyzing how competitive pressures for efficiency and speed erode human agency, creating a fragile world-system ill-equipped for the societal shock of AGI.
II. Civilisational Design (Constraints) - Blueprints
Focus: Blue Skies Social Science for "Civilisation X". We move from critique to construction. This strand is a pro-social "Manhattan Project" for social science (what Fuller called 'livingry'), tasked with formulating the blueprints for a post-AGI society ("Civilisation X") that is robust, sovereign, and aligned. Civilisation Design is the interdisciplinary research project of formulating the principles and protocols of an aligned viable world-system; involving ‘blue skies social science’ or ‘utopian social theory’ concerned with imagining alternative societies and exploring speculative futures.
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The Post-AGI Social Contract: Designing economic models and governance protocols that decouple human survival from labor and prevent the externalization of harm.
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Meta-Utopian Architectures: Conceptualizing wide-boundary futures that maximize "pareto-preferred outcomes," ensuring collective prosperity while preserving variance and freedom.
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Institutional Invention: Prototyping the "social software"—from digital deliberative democracy to regenerative economics—required to operationalise a future-proof world.
III. Civilisational Transition (Strategy) - Implementations
Focus: Theory of World-Systems Change & Green Grass Societal Experimentation. We bridge the gap between the present equilibrium and the target state. This strand focuses on the strategy of navigation and the practicalities of implementation.
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The Theory of Transition: Developing a macro-strategic framework for shifting the global system from blind evolutionary adaptation to conscious civilisational steering.
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Green Grass Experimentation: Identifying real-world opportunities to build parallel institutions and opt-in governance layers that can co-exist alongside and eventually outcompete legacy systems, compensating for the existing systems trajectory of collapse. Here the Integral Collective by Peter Joseph is the principal starting basis.
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Navigation Strategy: operationalising the "Third Attractor" (autopoetic alignment)—the narrow path through the geopolitical bottleneck that avoids both totalitarian lockdown and chaotic disintegration.
The Fellow Profile|
You are likely a "full-stack" interdisciplinary theorist capable of bridging the gap between abstract philosophy and concrete institutional design; or someone capable of collaborating as part of a team with the collective intelligence to achieve this as a whole. You are dissatisfied with merely observing the decline and destruction of civilisation and wish to direct your mind towards the creation of a new viable system.
Outcomes
Fellows will contribute to the foundational canon of the Coordination movement. Deliverables include:
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The Canon: Foundational essays for the Concordia Institute Substack and the Coordination Forum.
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The Design: Whitepapers detailing specific components of Civilisation X.
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The Network: Active participation in the formation of the field of Coordination Studies.
Coordination Forum
Coordination Forum is envisioned as the fourth major forum in the space – joining LessWrong, Effective Altruism, AI Alignment and also Progress & FAST. (Farmed Animal Strategic Team). Beyond the existing (narrower) focuses of rationality, cause-prioritisation, technical AI safety, (techno-capitalist) progress studies and animal advocacy.
Whilst the logical parallel to the AI Alignment Forum would be an AI Governance Forum, Coordination (Forum) as a frame extends beyond the governance of AI to the governance of humans and society. In this way, CF was conceptualised as a hub for ‘fundamental research into…"ecosystem alignment" and ‘the alignment of an entire civilization of interacting human and artificial components’ as proposed in the conclusion of Gradual Disempowerment (2025).
Coordination Forum is a new digital space for a cluster of advanced, interdisciplinary research areas broadly oriented around human agency, artificial intelligence and the future of civilisation:
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Macrostrategy, Metacrisis, Megamachine, Metamodernism
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Multi-Scale, Multi-Agent, Multi-Principal Alignment
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Complex Systems Theory
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Systemic Catastrophic Risk
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Gradual Disempowerment & the Intelligence Curse
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Collective Action Problems, Mechanism Design & Incentive Structures
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Game Theory, International Relations, Behavioral Economics
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Competitive Pressures, Military-Economic Adaptationism & Great Power Conflict
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The Vulnerable World, The Narrow Corridor & The Third Attractor
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Institutional Design and Decision-Making
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AI for Democracy (Democratic Accelerationism), AI for Epistemics & Human Reasoning, AI for Human Cooperation
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Web 3.0, Collective Intelligence & Digital Deliberative Democracy
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Cyborgism & Human Enhancement
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Egregores, Memetic Warfare & Cognitive Security
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Sociotechnical AI Governance
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Economics of Transformative AI (TAI)
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Post-AGI Equilibria, Post-AGI Social Contract, Post-AGI Political Economy
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Civilisation Design, Game B, Cause X
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Regenerative Economics, Post-scarcity, Post-work
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Meta-Utopia, Existential Hope & Trajectory Change
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Longtermism, Space Governance & the Long Reflection
The forum is designed as a coordination mechanism and epistemic technology for an emerging research network around these topics: to collaborate on addressing fundamental problems and launching big-picture projects. The forum aims to facilitate long-form discussions, the sharing of ideas and the formation of a common conceptual (adaptive) system for a new meta-discipline focused on civilisation design and alignment.
Concordia after the Roman Goddess of 'harmony', 'unity' and 'peace'
Contribute to Concordia
For one-time or recurring donations, please click the link below. To discuss larger contributions or other donation methods, reach out to us.
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