No Kings: Friends Everywhere
This essay is in two parts and is delivered with the hope of making a complex idea, the Ground State Configuration (GSC) Model, both accessible and actionable. The title, “No Kings,” is a nod to a personal ‘decoherence event’ that set me on a new path, an exit from a reality where mistrust, misinformation, and centralized power seemed to be the only futures on offer.
This essay, in effect, is a ‘how-to’ guide. It’s for anyone who wants to dive into a vision for a future we can start building today, a future of “No Kings and Friends Everywhere”, founded on a constructive and optimistic understanding of our role in the universe.
Part 1: The Intractable Present — Accountability and Agency in Knowledge Operations
As a model for computational physics, the Ground State Configuration (GSC) model introduces a radical and powerful concept of time, which can be termed “Presentism.” This isn’t the simple philosophical idea that only the present is real. It’s a far more active and consequential principle. In the GSC model, the present moment is the computational “biting edge” of reality, where the entire accumulated past , the “sculptured history”, is not a passive record but an active, physical force shaping what comes next.
Think of reality as an ongoing computation. The “software” is the set of rules and information (like physical laws and historical data), and the “hardware” is the physical substrate on which those rules operate (like matter and energy). In GSC Presentism, both the hardware and software of the past are embedded in and actively influence the present.
Here’s how to unlock this thinking:
- The Fine-Tuned Laws of Physics: These are the universe’s oldest software, a sculptured history from the Big Bang that is still actively running in the present.
- The Force of Gravity: The Earth’s mass, accumulated over billions of years, is not a historical fact. It is part of the present’s hardware, actively holding you in your chair right now.
- Life on Earth: The homeostatic balance of our biosphere is a complex software routine, sculpted by eons of evolution, that is physically present and active in the air we breathe.
- A Nagging Thought: Consider the thought, “Did I turn off the stove?” Your personal history and learned patterns (the software) manifest as a physical pattern of neural activity in your brain (the hardware). This thought from the past is physically active in the present, with the power to make you turn the car around and alter your future.
This brings us to the intractable accountability for those of us in knowledge operations. When we create a system, a policy, or a dataset, we are not just producing a static artifact. We are writing a piece of our organization’s, or even society’s, “sculptured history.”
- A biased dataset used to train an AI model is not a historical error sitting in an archive. It becomes part of the active “software” of the present, physically embedded in the model’s weights. It will exert a continuous entropic force, pulling future decisions towards unfair outcomes.
- A poorly designed information architecture becomes part of the “hardware,” making it harder and more costly for future knowledge workers to build coherent and valuable systems upon it.
The GSC model’s Presentism is therefore both a warning and a source of empowerment. It warns that our work has a permanence and an active influence far beyond its initial deployment. But it also empowers us by revealing that the “software” of our reality is, in principle, readable. By understanding the history embedded in our systems, we gain the agency to consciously and purposefully sculpt a more coherent, informationally rich, and verifiably honest future.
Part 2: The Open Future — How to Construct “No Kings and Friends Everywhere”
If the past is an active force and the present is where we have agency, then the future is an open potential we can choose to build. Part 1 was about understanding our accountability. Part 2 is about how to act on it optimistically and constructively. This is how we begin to build a “No Kings and Friends Everywhere” world.
1. Practice Verifiable Honesty
The most fundamental act of a constructive knowledge worker is to create systems and data that are honest and testable. In a world of misinformation, building pockets of reliable, machine-readable truth is a revolutionary act. This means designing data models, APIs, and policies that are declarative — they state what they are and what they do without ambiguity. This creates a solid foundation, reducing the “computational cost” for others to build upon our work because they don’t have to waste energy second-guessing its integrity.
2. Become a Constructor of Coherence
Our modern information environment is overwhelmingly noisy. A key role for us is to act as “constructors of coherence.” This means building systems that strengthen shared understanding and reduce fragmentation. It’s about more than just organizing data; it’s about designing platforms that foster trust and enable positive-sum collaboration. Every time we choose an open standard over a proprietary one, or design a process that is transparent over one that is opaque, we are actively sculpting a history that makes future collaboration easier and more likely.
3. Embrace Your Role as a Sculptor
Recognize that every line of code, every database schema, and every policy document is an act of sculpting the future. This mindset shifts knowledge work from a series of disconnected tasks to a conscious and deliberate practice of world-building. We are not merely managing information; we are architecting the “hardware” and “software” that will shape the decisions and capabilities of people who come after us. This carries immense responsibility but also offers profound purpose.
4. Build for “Friends Everywhere”
The “No Kings” philosophy is about moving away from centralized, opaque, and controlling information structures. The “Friends Everywhere” alternative is to build open, interoperable, and empowering systems. It is the ethos of the open-source and open-data movements applied to all knowledge operations. When you build a system, ask yourself: Does this hoard power or distribute it? Does it create a dependency on a single “king,” or does it foster a network of capable “friends”? By choosing the latter, we build resilience, encourage innovation, and create the foundations for a more equitable and intelligent collective reality.
Who, Then, Is a Knowledge Worker?
So, who is a knowledge worker? The term often conjures images of someone in an office managing data or writing policy. But the GSC Model invites us to adopt a far more profound and universal definition. If the present is the computational edge of reality, and every element within it is an active participant, then everything is engaged in the work of knowledge.
A rock is a knowledge worker. Its “knowledge” is its geological history, its crystalline structure, and its mass exerting gravitational force — all actively shaping the present moment. A tree is a knowledge worker, executing the complex software of its genetic code and contributing to the coherence of its ecosystem. A child at play, a distant star, a viral meme, and a cat curled up on a chair — each is a constructor, processing information and contributing to the emergent fabric of what comes next. They are all employed in the grand project of reality’s unfolding, as surely as any candlestick maker or hedge fund banker.
This perspective doesn’t dilute our human responsibility; it magnifies it. We are the component of this universal system that has become conscious of the work. We are the knowledge workers who can reflect on the process and choose the direction of our constructions.
The future is not something that happens to us. It is something we build with every decision we make in the intractable, all-powerful present, alongside every other constructor in the universe. The goal of “No Kings” is to build systems that recognize and honor this universal collaboration, fostering a reality of “Friends Everywhere” where every worker — from the quark to the policy analyst — can contribute to a more coherent and informationally rich whole.
This is an emergent construct of the Objective Observer Initiative, published by the starl3n persona.
