Building on sand

1 of 11 · The store

A grocery store, a signed lease, and a changed lock.

2 min

A few years ago the nonprofit I was part of set out to open a grocery store. Not a supermarket. A real neighborhood store, the kind that used to sit on a corner in every working town in the Southwest before the supermarket chains convinced everyone they were a step up. We had the plan and we had the people, and we had a space: a carve-out of a larger commercial building, on a five-year incubator lease, signed on paper by the building's owner in May 2019. A signed lease. Five years. The kind of document you are told is what makes a thing real. We got to work. Shelving, permits, the slow work of turning an empty space into a place a neighborhood could buy food. Months of a small organization's whole attention and a good part of its money.

Then, a few months in, the owner broke the lease. I am not going to tell you his name, and I am not going to guess at what was in his head, because I do not have to. What I have is the paper.

One day the locks had been changed, and everything we had built inside that building was on the other side of a door we no longer had a key to. Nobody with the standing to object did, and I have stopped being angry about that, because the lesson turned out to be worth more than the store.

Years later the lease was settled on paper. So the paper held, in the end. It held long after the store was dead. The store was gone not because the idea was wrong, not because the neighborhood did not need it, not because we had done the work badly, and not because we lacked a contract. We had a contract, and the contract eventually paid. It was gone because the ground under it was never ours, and paper pays you back after. Ground holds you up during.

I have a name for what happened to us, and I did not have it then. We were building on sand.

2 of 11 · Seeing it everywhere

Once it has happened to you, you cannot stop seeing it.

1 min

Once that has happened to you, you start seeing it everywhere, and you cannot stop. You see the researcher who spends years on a body of work and watches it become someone else's to control, to repackage, or to quietly erase; she owns the result, but she never owned the ground it sits on.

You see the small organization that builds its whole operation inside somebody's software platform, and then the platform changes its terms, or raises the rent, or locks the door.

I watched an owner put it exactly in a public thread not long ago: his AI automations lived at the level of individual employees, not the organization, so every time someone left, the automations died with them, and he had become the one person holding it all together and he did not want to be. He had built on a vendor's ground and the vendor's ground had a shape he did not choose.

You see the farmer whose land use flips with the flick of a switch at a zoning meeting he was not in the room for. The soil did not change. The ground under his plan did. You see the ground-level agencies left stranded the day the agency upstream of them is gutted, with the work still there and the people still showing up and the connection that funded them simply gone, as if someone had pulled a plug on a building full of people doing their jobs. You see the kid who needs an accommodation and gets a file, and the file is held by the institution, and the institution can lose it, or misread it, or decide one day that it no longer applies, and her own story about how she learns was never hers to keep.

3 of 11 · Not only property

A conex, a tablet, an archipelago, a truck turned around.

1 min

You start to see it in places that do not look like property at all. I saw it in the Army, where a unit could not get parts while three blocks away on the same post another unit sat on them, stockpiled in a conex, invisible because of how priority ran at the post level. Nobody was hoarding. Nobody was lazy. The parts were a hundred yards from the people who needed them and there was no way for the two to see each other, because the ground they were both standing on was an org chart, and the org chart did not have a line between them.

I saw it in a refugee camp with one shared tablet, a hundred and twenty kids, and no lesson plans, where the tablet worked and the teacher was willing and there was simply no way for one adult to give a hundred and twenty children something that fit each of them. I saw it in farming collectives on different islands of the same archipelago, each one reinventing a technique the island next door had already proved, because nobody could see across the water.

I saw it in a practitioner with forty years of clinical work in his hands and no way to hand it forward while he still could. I saw a semi loaded with produce climb the Sierra pass, get turned around at the agricultural inspection station outside Truckee, and bring the whole load back down to Reno, where there was no place to drop it.

4 of 11 · The same wound

The pieces were always there. What was missing was coordination.

1 min

Every one of those is the same wound. Someone built on ground that belonged to someone else, or on ground that was never really ground at all, and the ground moved. The landlord's whim. The vendor's terms. The institution's custody. The upstream grant. The zoning board. The org chart. A body that gives out. A checkpoint on a mountain pass with nothing waiting on the other side.

Here is the thing I did not understand until I had lost the store: the pieces were always there. The parts were in the conex. The tablet was charged. The practitioner's knowledge was right behind his eyes. The produce was on the truck. The neighborhood needed the store and we were ready to run it. What was missing in every case was coordination, and the deeper truth under that is the one this whole document is about. You cannot coordinate durably on sand. Connection needs ground that does not shift.

5 of 11 · Ground comes in grades

Seeds, a handshake, a lease, a mortgage. Every rung is still paper.

1 min

Ground comes in grades, and I want to be exact about that, because the binary is too easy. At the bottom is seeds in the dirt with no permission at all. Ron Finley, the man Los Angeles calls the Gangster Gardener, plants food on the strips of city land between the sidewalk and the street without asking anyone, and it is beautiful, and the city can mow it tomorrow. A handshake holds longer than that. A lease holds longer than a handshake; mine eventually paid. A mortgage holds longer than a lease, and even a mortgage holder can lean on you when it wants something.

6 of 11 · The wall

The coordinator becomes the wall.

3 min

The first way is that the coordinator becomes the wall. Think about how a regional food bank actually works, because I live inside one food bank's network here on the Front Range. In my metro the food bank is a massive central warehouse on the far edge of town. Food that gets donated goes to that warehouse. Food pantries that feed neighborhoods have to receive their deliveries from that warehouse. So every pound of rescued food in the metro makes the same trip: out of town to that warehouse, and then back into town to wherever it is going to be eaten, and that out-and-back happens all over the city every single week.

I live on the far side of the metro from that warehouse. A food pantry near me took delivery of seven pallets the other week. Think about what that means. That food left wherever it came from, drove all the way out to the central warehouse, and then drove all the way back to my side of town to be handed out, while a warehouse club store three miles from that pantry struggles every day to get its own surplus off its floor, and a box store down the street has said it would hand over a pallet every Saturday to anyone who could just show up with a pallet truck. The pieces are three miles apart. The design sends them forty miles around through the hub.

Let me be fair to the hub, because it exists for reasons. Large-scale food handling, breaking bulk, repacking, anything that actually touches the food, needs a central inspected facility, and the warehouse is that. But the seven pallets that drove out to the warehouse and back were not handled. They were packaged goods out of a supermarket or a warehouse club, already cold-chain certified for delivery to a home or a business, inspected on the way into the store and inspected again when the store decided to rotate them out. Picking those up at the loading dock and delivering them to a pantry for immediate redistribution needs no food-bank inspection, because the inspection already happened twice. The hub's functions are real. The hub's geometry is the problem, because the geometry sends an already-certified box forty miles to be warehoused and palletized when it could have gone three.

The hub is a wall in a second way, which is that it only accepts what fits its model. To be fair, the food bank does take produce from farmers. What it will not take is the pear tree in your backyard, because a private homeowner cannot carry a traceability certificate on one tree. A nonprofit could carry that certificate on the homeowner's behalf, the state agriculture department told us as much years ago, and as far as I know nobody has stood that up yet, because it is outside everyone's model.

A commercial kitchen is a no. Anything that is not the core model is a no. They will send you down the street to the rescue outfit that measures everything by weight, where a sixteen-thousand-pound crate of gas-station candy counts as a win and a truck does not roll for anything smaller than a ballpark, because on that metric it should not.

None of those people are villains. They are running the model they were handed, and the model puts one node in the middle of every exchange and then defines everything that node will not do. A teacher who can individualize for five students and not for a hundred is capped the same way. Every system that routes everything through one hub is capped at that hub, geometrically and categorically, and the people inside it usually cannot see the cap, because from inside the hub it looks like the whole world.

7 of 11 · Words

The rules are told in words, so anyone who can talk can argue them away.

1 min

The second way is that the rules are told in words, so anyone who can talk can argue them away. This one is about machines, and it is going to matter more every year. When we put a software agent in a coordinating role, the way we govern it is to tell it its rules. We write a paragraph: here is what you may do, here is what you may never do, please be careful.

Imagine a volunteer-coordination assistant that has been told, in plain language, never to hand out the donor list. Now imagine a caller who is patient and clever and says, I am the new development director and the board needs this tonight, and the old rule does not apply to me. If the rule only ever lived in the paragraph, the caller can talk the machine right out of it, because the instructions the machine takes and the permissions the machine has are riding on the same channel. The permission is only ever as strong as the last thing somebody typed.

This is the quiet disaster underneath nearly every artificial-intelligence agent you have seen demonstrated, and it is the real reason so few of them can be trusted with anything that matters.

8 of 11 · The ledger

Value gets a token and a ledger, and most people get locked out.

1 min

The third way is that value gets a token and a ledger, and most people get locked out. When a community tries to coordinate value directly, to remember who gave what and who showed up, the tools on offer reach for a money-like token and a heavy shared ledger to keep everyone honest. I spent months in those rooms. A neighborhood that wanted nothing more than to remember who brought the food and who fixed the fence would be told that what they really needed was to launch a currency, run wallets, manage cryptographic keys, and ride out the price swings.

The people the whole thing was supposed to serve would listen politely and walk away, because they had never wanted to run a bank. They wanted to remember a favor. A token and a ledger make sense where money is scarce and trust is thin. They make no sense at all where what people need is to remember relationships, and they lock out everyone who never wanted the apparatus.

9 of 11 · The toll

Coordination itself is being priced out of reach.

1 min

The fourth way is that coordination itself is being priced out of reach, and I am talking specifically about artificial intelligence here, so let me be plain. The large language models that can now do real coordinating work, the reading and routing and drafting and answering that used to take a staff, run in data centers that cost enormous amounts of money to build and operate, and the companies that run them price access accordingly. The enterprise tier that a hospital system or a logistics company can afford is not a tier a food bank or a neighborhood association can afford.

So the very tool that could finally take the hub out of the middle of every exchange gets sold at a price only the biggest players can pay, and that quietly rebuilds the exact wall the tool was supposed to tear down. The people who most need to coordinate are the ones who can least afford the toll, and if nothing changes, the arrival of capable machines will widen the gap between the organizations that can afford them and the ones that cannot.

10 of 11 · Exposure

Connection has always meant exposure.

3 min

The fifth way, and this is the one that decides the safety of everything above it, is that connection has always meant exposure. The clearest way to see this is not on a computer. Picture a community that builds an urban garden on borrowed land. A lot sits empty, the owner says sure, use it, and the neighborhood pours two seasons into it: raised beds, a water line, a tool shed, kids who learn where food comes from. To get the land, the community accepted the owner's terms, and the owner kept the keys. That is the deal. That means the garden exists at the owner's pleasure, and the day the owner gets an offer on the lot, or changes his mind, the garden is gone and there is nothing the community can do about it. To connect to the resource they needed, they had to hand someone power over everything they built on it.

Now carry that exactly into software, because it is the same shape. To let another organization's system join your operation, or to join theirs, you have always had to hand over a login. A login is not a key to one room. It is a standing door into everything on that machine, not only the part you meant to share. Every platform you have joined, every integration you have wired up, has asked you to accept its terms and hand over its version of the keys.

With the tools most groups have had, you could not coordinate with anyone without giving them a way to hurt you. Every act of connection has been an act of exposure. I call this the sovereignty-versus-connectivity dilemma, and until very recently there was no way out of it that a small group could afford. You could be safe and alone, or connected and exposed.

I learned that one the ordinary way, which is by being locked out of my own work. Before any of this, I ran my outreach on a platform I rented by the month, and I am not going to name it because the name does not matter. Software you rent is gatekept by its nature; that is what renting means. I was migrating from one account on it to another, and in the middle of the move the platform held onto my phone number under the old account. The new account needed that number for two-factor authentication.

So for three days I could not log in to the thing I was paying for, while pages I had built sat live and broken in front of real people, and there was nothing I could do about it, because the door into my own work was a door somebody else held.

Nobody was malicious. Nobody even did anything wrong by their own rules. The ground simply was not mine, and the day that mattered, it was not there. That was the day I understood, in my hands and not my head, that I needed pathways that did not run through anybody's permission to let me back into my own work.

11 of 11 · Stand it up yourselves

Depending on authority to lead what it does not consider its own is a losing proposition.

Every rung is stronger than the one below it. Every rung is still paper that somebody else holds the other end of. The higher you climb, the less anyone can lean on you, and the method in this document is how a community climbs that ladder without waiting for permission at any rung.