# Cognitive Farmsteading > Source: > Published: 2026-07-28 02:11:25+00:00 # Cognitive Farmsteading ### The message of the AI medium is intellectual rural domesticity To a first approximation, intellectual culture has always been synonymous with urban culture. With AI this is starting to change creating, for the first time in human history, an intellectual culture that has more in common with rural culture. A speculative, technology-augmented rural culture to be sure, but still recognizably rural. We are all at the beginning of a vast migration into endless intellectual hinterlands that we didn’t know existed, at least not in any accessible way, until AI opened them up. And in the process, we are becoming not merely intellectual homesteaders, subsisting in sod houses out on the frontier, but farmsteaders — running complex and expansive intellectual operations with automation. As with the settlement of the American West in the 19th century, the railroads may follow, with more industrialized agriculture in its wake, but for now, we’re in for a period of AI-assisted smallholder intellectual culture. In this essay, I want to introduce the overarching concept of cognitive farmsteading as both description and prescription. To my mind it usefully synthesizes several component phenomena such as precommodification and bespokification, and offers some useful structure for thinking about AI use at a higher level of abstraction than tool use. Though AI frames this idea, it is primarily an idea about humans, particularly human collective attention, and the relationship between intellectual production and sociality. ## *** Human intellectual production has historically tracked urban concentration in space and time. The bigger and denser the [people-cloud](https://aeon.co/essays/america-still-has-a-heartland-it-s-just-an-artificial-one), adjusting for economics and cultural openness, the more intellectually productive it is, accounting across all modes — scholarly, popular, political-economic, media, artistic, and even military or athletic. Though smaller cities, like university towns, might be more productive in narrow ways, larger cities tend to be more productive overall. For the intellectually restless, migration to cities from rural environments has been a natural pathway of escape since at least the mid-nineteenth century. The mind can expand even if the body enters something like a geographic prison where spatial horizons close in. It was of course, *possible* to have an intellectual life in rural environments before the internet, but it required wealth and strong postal communication links (think early modern nobility with big personal libraries, or labs in country houses). The default rural experience historically has been one of hard work, precarity, squalor, and crippling intellectual isolation. I’ve lost track of the number of bright and interesting people I’ve met in places like Silicon Valley with a tale to tell of growing up in some suffocating small rural town or village where they had nobody to talk to, and were alone in their taste for books and non-local culture. I’m currently reading about the English enclosure movement and the role it played in making rural life even more miserable than it naturally was, but arguably, urbanization, especially after the 1850s, was driven by the pull of cities at least as much as the push of the countryside. Though early modern and early industrial cities featured even worse squalor and misery along many dimensions (with transient decreases in lifespan and health due to disease and industrial exploitation), on one dimension they won handily — intellectual life. If you had anything like a lively brain, the difference between rural and urban was the difference between death and life. ## *** The urban intellectual life, however, has always come at a price. You trade some originality and independence of thought for the leverage and competitive/collaborative social energy of your chosen milieu. Those without the strength of mind to resist groupthink, status competition, and [the tyrannies of shared subcultural tastes](https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-taste-essay), either become hollowed out intellectual automatons, or retreat periodically to [waldenpond](https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/against-waldenponding) and restore their battered individuality. On the other side of the equation, rural and small-town intellectual culture, such as it has been, has historically exhibited a certain modest capacity for generating outlier intellectual originality and weirdness, and in specialized domains (such as farming and animal husbandry of course, but also other fields that benefit from geographic scale and dispersion), steady innovation. But to a first approximation, as I have said, intellectual life has been synonymous with urban life. I have no illusions about my strength of mind, and while I can’t stand true rural environments, I’ve always maintained a cordial tactical distance from the most intense urban intellectual hubs. In some ways, I’m of a somewhat “rural” bent intellectually, and push come to shove, I tend to choose unpolished originality and independence over polish, leverage and social energy. Which is one reason I’ve never really pursued opportunities and invitations to “scale” my thinking/reach in what might be called “urban” ways, such as through book deals, prestigious speaking opportunities, or strong ties to celebrated institutions. Though I’m almost entirely a product of urban environments, intellectually I’m something of a hick, by both inclination and choice. I doubt I’d be able to survive San Francisco, New York, or Boston, or the typical university community as faculty. And I’ve done some of my most rewarding thinking on the edges of really tiny outposts of urbanized intellectual culture. Some of my most productive years (2004-05) were spent in an isolated apartment complex surrounded by farmland and forests outside of Ithaca, NY. But if I hadn’t been attached to Cornell University as a postdoc, with an office on campus and regular interaction with students and peers, I’d probably have spent those years slowly dying. And I spent those years thinking about robots and drones, which required interaction with people around the world, not farming (which, despite the metaphor powering this post and a recent coerced foray into home-gardening, I have little interest in). It is easy to see why population density and intellectual output go together. Even for modes of intellectual production that rest on material rather than social proof (say math, investing, and experimental science), humans have historically needed direct interactions with other humans to drive their thinking. In isolation, the human brain rapidly loses the ability to adequately challenge and surprise itself. And until recently, the only type of matter in the universe capable of challenging and strength-training the human brain was other human brains. A mountain may challenge a mountain climber in specialized ways, but until 2026, only another human mind could truly challenge a human mind in general ways. Now obviously, there is AI, but it is not immediately obvious how the AI fits within the urban-rural intellectual culture dynamic I’ve sketched out above. My claim is, *AI enables a powerful mode of intellectual rural domesticity* — the ability to be highly intellectually productive in “rural” modes, a historically unprecedented condition. And one reason I’ve taken so readily and eagerly to AI is that I already lean that way. ## *** To understand how AI fits within human intellectual activity, it is important to start with the fact that all such activity is deeply social, even if it involves periods of retreat and solitude. So we must start with the essential sociality of intellectual production. As I argued in [The Crucible Effect](https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/07/21/the-crucible-effect-and-the-scarcity-of-collective-attention/) (2009), the scarce commodity in creative production of any sort is *collective attention*. We’ve historically made meaning with ideas by attending to interesting things together with other human minds. And this has been true to such a degree that for the vast majority who dabble in any kind of thought at all, intellectual identity is not distinguishable from social identity, and intellectual production is inseparable from social intercourse. And this is as true of introverts as extroverts. For a lot of people, the jury is still out, but the case is clear for me at least — artificial minds are just as capable of participating in the patterns of collective attention that humans need to think at their best. You can construct crucibles and trigger the crucible effects with AI replacing human peers to a significant degree. It doesn’t quite happen out of the box. Like devoted dogs, LLMs naturally attend to *you* attending to something, not to the *something* itself. But this is relatively trivial to fix so that you and the LLM are attending to the same thing together, and in usefully independent and uncorrelated ways. You don’t need elaborately theatrical and performative system prompts to school your artificial collaborator in Right Think. You just need some minor discipline to head off sycophancy and over-eager affirmation and transform it into useful outward-directed artificial curiosity distinct from your own. And in this mode, you can strength-train your brain with AI just as well as with other humans, and often far better. But the consequences of this capability are complicated. Because we need peer minds to think with, intellectual identity is a kind of *relational* identity, similar to sexual identity, with the full range of attendant anxieties and accompanying social performances and displays. AI is forcing a recognition that the phrase “idea sex” is more deeply descriptive than we’ve ever realized. Recent culture warring around detection of AI (including on Substack, in the wake of the Pangram integration) exhibits uncanny parallels to the gender identity culture wars of the last decade. The title of the Substack announcement post for the feature, [Against Claudefishing](https://open.substack.com/pub/post/p/against-claudefishing?r=1cjha&utm_medium=ios) (a reference to the predatory sexual practice of catfishing) suggests that the authorities on this platform are not entirely unaware of the parallels, or averse to pandering to the underlying anxieties. The emerging consensus among the AI hostile that AI use in writing should be “declared” bears more than a passing resemblance to socially conservative gender-declaration norms in dating. I have no particularly strong opinions on either the gender or AI version of this culture-warring pattern, perhaps because I don’t have a strongly relationship-based identity at all. With gender and sexual identity, I’m of the view that while navigating fluid, undeclared-identity dating milieus might involve some awkwardness, there’s nothing particularly threatening about it. And the potential for awkwardness is nothing that a spot of schooling in good manners can’t solve gracefully. With AI writing, I personally don’t even experience any kind of awkwardness or discomfort. While I occasionally find generated writing inadequate, it doesn’t offend me. It took me quite a bit of observation and reflection to understand why a few people genuinely do find the very idea of generated writing offensive, regardless of its adequacy or quality (and contrary to my initial assumption, aren’t just pretending). It appears I’m some sort of outlier on this front, in not finding AI-generated writing offensive. But I bear no ill-will towards those who do. ## *** I use AI, declare AI use, and segregate AI-assisted writing, but not out of any concern for “relationship honesty” or the sensitivities of those offended by it. I declare AI use to set different, more experimental expectations, and catalyze more interesting conversations with fellow experimenters. And yes, to cut out tedious discussions with easily offended people. I’m entirely fine with people *not* declaring AI use, and do not care about detecting AI use, either myself by cultivating a refined “AIdar” (gAIdar?) or with complex inquisitorial tools. I can detect it unassisted as well as most I suppose, and AI text presumably gets past me sometimes and I don’t know it. I genuinely don’t care. But clearly others do. I’ve on occasion shared generated AI articles to which people have responded “this is AI generated” like it is a) something I couldn’t figure out b) consequential in some way that I ought to do something about. My term for this is [ad botinem](https://substack.com/@contraptions/note/c-130947511), and my general policy is to ignore such comments and mute people who persist. I don’t process AI writing differently when I *do* know it is generated. AI-detection tooling is important when deepfakes are used for deliberate fraud or disinformation, but as an inquisitorial instrument of moral policing, it creates a kind of morality theater at best. As weaponry for witch-hunting, it seems mostly harmless. I suspect the vast majority of readers and writers will join me in not caring within a few years, especially as AIs continue to improve. They will assume, entirely correctly, that almost everything they read (or ask their AIs to summarize) is produced with AI assistance, either in the research, or in the writing, or both. I suspect sentiment might even flip, with unassisted writing being scrutinized for AI-fixable human failures. The ongoing spasm of pearl-clutching will likely end life as a quaint affectation, with its own rationalizations and justifications, like [writing longhand with a fountain pen today](https://open.substack.com/pub/nealstephenson/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your?r=1cjha&utm_medium=ios). I expect to write both with and without AI for the rest of my life, just as I still use paper notebooks and whiteboards, alongside every sort of digital too. Or still do arithmetic in my head or on paper, even if I mostly use calculators or code. At some point, I expect to stop declaring my AI use. Nothing much will change as a result of this particular moral panic. What *will* change though, is the nature of collective attention, and the kinds of minds we use to create crucible effects to drive our own thinking. We will do more and more of our intellectual production in collaboration with AIs, and require fewer and fewer of the affordances of “urban” intellectual milieus to do so. And with the humans we retain in our intellectual lives, we will build different relationships, significantly mediated by AI (early example — communicating with vibe-coding collaborators through Github pull requests produced and consumed by agents on either end). We will, in other words, embrace the message of the medium, and lean into cognitive farmsteading. ## *** A good way to understand the idea of cognitive farmsteading is to consider the physical counterpart under comparable science-fictional transformations. Asimov’s robot murder mysteries for instance, which are set against the backdrop of the end of the first wave of space colonization, led by the Spacers, and the beginnings of the second. In the books, the Spacer wave, heavily reliant on robots, has led to a condition where the fifty Spacer worlds are extremely sparsely populated (by extremely long-lived and rich humans) and stagnant. Earth, on the other hand, is a densely overpopulated and hyper-urbanized planet populated by poor and short-lived humans. Individual Spacers live on highly automated manor-like exurban estates, worked by serf-like robots. Human-to-human relations are distant and highly virtual. In the most extreme case, on the planet Solara (the last-colonized of the Spacer worlds), individual humans live on vast estates with tens of thousands of robots. They barely ever see each other in person, and are terrified of sexual intimacy. In the original Spacer novels, featuring the Earth-based detective Lije Bailey and his Spacer robot partner Daneel, the Spacer worlds are set up as a kind of ambiguous utopian dystopia, sliding into lifelessness, while Earth is the reverse, a sort of dystopian utopia, with liveness flowing through it despite the privations. While Bailey merely harbors a slight initial suspicion of Spacers and robots that he quickly overcomes, a significant fraction of Earth (including Bailey’s wife and his boss) are reactionary anti-technologists, part of a movement called the Medievalists. A good deal of the first novel, *Caves of Steel, *is about Bailey doing a delicate balancing act between the Spacers and their robots, and the Medievalists, as he investigates the murder. The plot turns on the tension between the two sides. (I strongly suspect Frank Herbert stole the idea of the Butlerian Jihad, like many other of his best ideas, from Asimov’s less refined originals). Through the three novels in which they appear together, Bailey and Daneel push each other to their best, and both evolve into a sort of synthesis of Spacer and Earth sensibilities. Each is a cognitive weight-training partner for the other, and their collectively deployed attention solves tricky mysteries. The novels, as part of their background, tell the tale of the second wave of human space exploration, originating in the densely populated and urbanized (“caves of steel”) Earth. This is the wave that actually leads to humanity spreading through the galaxy — in a densely urbanized human-centered way. This second wave, notably, features a taboo against both robotics and human longevity technology. Curiously though, by the end of the grand arc of Asimov’s fictional universe, the plot returns to the Spacer milieu (in *Foundation and Earth*), where Solara still exists, as the last surviving Spacer world, down to a last couple of hermaphrodite inhabitants on a robotically automated planet. The grand narrative ends on a note of ambiguous redemption for Spacer culture, and a question-mark tacked on to the human-centric story (which has wound its way through the Foundation saga). The last Spacer ends up poised to play a significant role in the future along with Daneel, and we are left wondering whether the whole humanist saga (which comprises the bulk of the Empire and Foundation novels) was in fact the B-plot all along. And perhaps even more significantly — the true protagonist of Asimov’s entire body of work is R. Daneel, a robot created by Spacers, and directly modeled on an important Spacer scientist. R. Daneel stewards humanity through tens of thousands of years through the series, while recursively self-improving himself into a god-like being. As is revealed in the final books Asimov wrote, Daneel and another Spacer-built robot, R. Giskard, were in fact responsible for the human-centered arc, through their catalysis of psychohistory. Not only do the robots lay the groundwork for psychohistory, and help Hari Seldon centuries later, they precipitate events in the last robot novel (*Robots and Empire*) that force humans on Earth to begin a second wave of migration to the stars, learning from the mistakes that left Spacer culture stagnant after its initial gains. It is worth noting that though they influence the agenda, it is *not *the Medievalists who lead the charge, but pragmatists on Earth (such as Lije Bailey’s son). They reject the Spacer way (extreme longevity, unsociability, and robots), but aren’t anti-technology. They just come up with a different strategy that works better. If you read Asimov in a shallow and incomplete way, you might be tempted to conclude that the Spacers represent a casual B-plot morality tale and evolutionary dead end. They’re not. Both directly, and through Daneel and Giskard, they are at the heart of the story, anchoring one end of a real bit of epic narrative tension, with the Medievalists anchoring the other end (reactionaries of various sorts keep recurring in Asimov’s plots). While his output was prodigious, Asimov was not, it must be admitted, particularly gifted in a literary sense. You could probably train an AI today on his works to produce reasonable and satisfying Asimov pastiches. His underlying ideas though, are often underrated, and their subtleties missed by the more snobby literary science fiction writers and readers of later decades. The analogy to our times is almost too on-the-nose, which says something about Asimov’s prescience, and why he deserves his stature in science fiction. We are *already* at the Medievalist-Spacer fork in the road in relation to disembodied AI, and are rapidly barreling towards it with actual robots that are going to be in many ways more capable than Asimov’s positronic-brained ones. We can already create Spacer worlds for our minds if we so choose, and will soon be able to create physical approximations. ## *** In case the analogy isn’t obvious, the pre-AI internet is our “Caves of Steel” disembodied digital Earth. The looming AI internet, in at least one important retail manifestation, is already starting to look like Spacer worlds. The degenerate case is already here. Many lonely, friendless people have retreated to solipsistic worlds with AIs as their only friends. Cognitive farmsteading, the way I’m proposing the concept, lies somewhere between the first and second wave of space colonization in Asimov’s world. The most AI-positive corners of the cozyweb, like a few discords and slacks I participate in a lot, are already cheery little villages with mixed human/AI populations. This is an early version of cognitive farmsteading, featuring simple AI bots actively constructed and empowered to participate alongside humans. I myself have built and deployed three such bots. This sort of thing is spiritually the antithesis of AI-hostile inquisitorial tooling of the sort that has cropped up on Substack. In this analogy, obviously, places like Substack, which are institutionalizing AI-hostile defaults, are like Medievalist strongholds in Asimov’s novels. The old internet (RIP) could be regarded as cognitive urbanization on steroids. In its heyday you could find your intellectual milieu at whatever scale you wanted, online. Even with the [cozyweb turn](https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-extended-internet-universe) and the [evolution from dark forest to dead forest](https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/dead-forest-theory), the internet largely retained its hyper-urban character. Even without the AI bots, my Discord communities are more intense intellectual crucibles than the various university campuses in which I spent over a decade of my life (universities are surprisingly intellectually isolating places; they’re better than villages and provincial small towns where nobody reads, but not by as much as you’d think). A year and some months into reading, writing and thinking with AI in the loop by default, I’m come to the conclusion that the hard part is not getting AI to do what I want. The hard part is getting humans I like to think with to play new kinds of collective attention games together. ## *** One of the early signs that collective attention isn’t going to be the same in the future due to a *human *problem is the [precommodification](https://summerlightning.substack.com/p/llms-pre-commodify-ideas) effect. Increasingly, humans stumble upon the same insights at the same time, so there is no meaningful gradient for new ideas to flow along. To the extent the urban mode of intellectual production rests on people being able to compete to be first to an idea, and participating in competitive activities where being first is important, urban intellectual culture is already broken. I spent two decades writing in public with first-to-insight ideas as my stock-in-trade. Being early to spot something happening, and giving it a roughly right characterization and evocative name, was basically what I did across hundreds of blog posts and newsletters. And it worked because lots of other people were on my heels in each case, and lots *more *people had unconsciously recognized, but not named or characterized, the thing I was point out. Being consistently just *slightly* ahead of a mass of properly primed subconscious collective attention is valuable, and can pay the bills if you do it right. This particular game drove most urban intellectual culture for centuries, and on steroids, was what drove internet writing for decades. This game is largely over now. It has been reduced to an easier training activity you do with AI in the loop, as the price of participation in the stranger games with stranger rules that are emerging. I no longer even bother posting about ideas I suspect are precommodified. Today, chances are, for anything worth thinking about, everybody capable of thinking about it is already doing so with AI in the loop, developing similar understandings, down to similar metaphors and neologisms. While useful to the individual, it does make it harder and more pointless, to talk to other humans about your thinking in the usual ways. Everybody already thinks the same thoughts in the same ways, and the race is over before it begins. A great many thoughts are now common knowledge at birth (a phenomenon some determined deists are interpreting luridly as evidence of AIs becoming “hyper-persuasive”). So you have to find new ways to talk to people. Equally, there is a precommodification of curiosities too. It is harder to think up truly original *questions. *LLMs act not just like index funds of past knowledge, but as index funds of present curiosities. If you explore an unformed curiosity about some contemporary matter with an AI, chances are, others are doing so too, and will converge on similarly framed curiosities. The situation is similar on the reading front. It is increasingly easier and more valuable to have AIs summarize a great deal of reading material for you, reserving raw reading bandwidth only where there is either pleasure on offer, or value to close-reading original texts. If an author offers neither, and also locks down the text, I typically skip it. With memory turned on, LLMs don’t just summarize texts adequately, they make all the obvious connections to everything else you’ve been thinking about. AI can act in precognitive ways in relation to your own thinking. For those used to intellectual identity as a live social identity, this condition represents a bleak dead end. A Spacer polity of the mind, where we can all consume and produce vastly more ideas (the equivalent of living vastly longer like Spacers perhaps), but have less need for each other. But if AI undermines existing intellectual culture with some irresistible affordances, it also creates a basis for new intellectual cultures with others. ## *** The idea of cognitive farmsteading rests on three specific affordances of AI — *automation, bespokification, and pensievification. *And these affordances are orchestrated in ways that reveal that not only is AI a technology of intellectual ruralism, it is a a technology of intellectual rural *domesticity. * Ie, at the retail user level, it is much more of a highly customizable “home” technology, like handyman services, or kitchen cabinets, than a “work” technology. Of the three**, automation** is the most obvious one — AI allows you to set up entire complex intellectual farmsteads, with a dizzying variety of automations and scaled operations. If you enjoyed tools like IFTTT and Zapier, you’re probably going nuts with AI automation right now. For example, I’m finally making use of big black hole of PDFs accumulated over 20 years, and lugged from laptop to laptop (like some of my physical moving boxes that I’ve lugged unopened from apartment to apartment for a decade). With AI, I’ve been able to set up a little automation where my personal librarian sends me a random PDF everyday on Telegram, and I give it feedback to guide future choices. An entire area of highly personal and idiosyncratic memory has come alive. Another example: I just read a book with a lot of untranslated French passages. I had Claude Code translate all of the French bits and produce a document that I read alongside the book. Third example. I now routinely consume *and *produce all sorts of specialized material, well beyond my own training and intellectual abilities. Having an AI read papers you can’t read yourself, and work with your ideas to build on top of the ideas in those papers, is now a routine matter. What is rural about this is that modern farms are *also *highly automated and leveraged for the few humans who remain and work on them. **Bespokification **is also pretty obvious — AI allows you to create n=1 products customized to your needs, creating a virtuous cycle where your thinking can get increasingly idiosyncratic and better adapted to your circumstances. This is perhaps easiest to see if you use agentic coding to create actual apps and other software tools for yourself, like a farmer improvising equipment, but it is visible even in advanced patterns of pure chatbot-level AI use. My wife, for instance, has been using purely chat-based AI for 3 years now to guide her experimentation with bespoke skincare products, which she makes mostly for herself and friends and family (it is worth noting that as late as the 1890s, rural households made things like soap for themselves, before consumerization turned those essentials into purchasable products). More revealingly, she (and to a lesser extent, I) has also been using it extensively to parse and make sense of what would otherwise be an overwhelming amount of complexity in managing renovations and customizations of the old house we bought this year. Home improvement is necessarily a game of bespoke solutions to relatively idiosyncratic problems. It is not an accident that AI and home improvement go together like peanut butter and jelly. AI is an unstoppable source of bespokification of consumption. The home is an insatiable sink of bespoke consumption. The rural home, with its greater distance from urban amenities, and higher need for autonomy, doubly so. This is why I say: *AI is a domestic technology. *We use it in ways that reflect the idiosyncratic needs of n=1-4 users, the way we use various technologies and services to customize homes. As a technology of *intellectual *rural domesticity, AI drives us to heavily customize the ideas we consume and produce for our own needs, with a great deal of DIYery. While this can and does fuel lots of wild, solipsistic crackpottery, it *also *allows the pursuit of original ideas with the kind of leverage that would have required a great deal of compromise with other humans in urban centers. The third attribute, **pensievification**, named for the fictional pensieve in Harry Potter (a device that lets you externalize and share raw memories with others), is perhaps the least obvious “rural domesticity” affordance of AI. The simplest form, sharing an incomplete chat, is already well-known. More complex forms of pensievification are emerging every week. This is like trading excess produce from your farm with neighbors. Not only can you surround your brain and life with bespoke, customized automations, you can *share *their outputs with others. You can go from n=1 or n=family to n=few. This is where a new kind of collective culture is emerging; one that is surprisingly more intimate *because *of AI use. Pensievification allows a kind of raw, vulnerable sharing of work-in-progress artifacts that both calls for higher trust, and engenders it. I’m genuinely surprised by the degree to which others are using AI tools I’ve built, and I’m using tools others have built. And often, these are just barely skinned with enough of a robust UI for people other than the creator to use. What happens when you lean into all three? You get a very different sort of intellectual culture than the kind that has dominated much of history. ## *** At the aggregate level, we’re trading the biases of cognitive urbanism for the variance of cognitive ruralism. At the individual level, we’re becoming more solipsistic in our individual thinking, and more intimate in our shared thinking. But we’re also becoming better adapted to the local conditions of our own intellectual lives, just as farms must be adapted to local topography. Social solipsism is enabling more material realism. Our intellectual products are becoming more home-made and home-consumed. They’re being shared in more raw forms with more trusted people who share a greater degree of context with us. We’re trading industrially organized competitive urban intellectual production on a global scale for a sort of communitarian mutualism. We’re trading polished and packaged intellectual outputs designed to propagate around the world as a cash crop for rougher ones designed to serve the intellectual needs of smaller groups, often outside of the cash economy. As these dynamics strengthen, the general tendency of AI will be to drive *divergence, *not convergence. The index-fund-like convergence at the level of basic thinking, and the precommodification effects at the level of public language, give way to a redshifting universe of thought, as islands of knowledge begin to retreat from each other at an accelerating place. That they may all eventually vanish past each other’s lightspeed horizons may not matter if they have nothing much of value to say to each other. It no longer matters if dozens of people come up with the same idea or neologism at the same time, in conversation with the same foundation models. Those parallel rediscoveries are going to shape the trajectories of small, local milieus in highly context-dependent and path-dependent ways. When rediscoveries and reinventions of useful ideas become so cheap that they’re not worth transporting over long distances, they can be be better adapted for local use. Interestingly, something like this logic applies to biofuels — agricultural waste feedstock is not worth converting to fuel that is transported long distances, but *is *worth utilizing *in situ*. Is all this good or bad? I don’t know, and I kinda don’t care. What matters for me is that it is *interesting. *More interesting than medievalism at least. In the long run, perhaps cognitive farmsteading will lead to the sort of stagnation Asimov’s Spacer worlds experienced. Or perhaps, it will become a culture that remains communal enough to resemble the second migration wave (though I do hope we take the robots with us). But either way, it is clear that pre-AI digital caves of steel are *already *unlivable, and increasingly medievalist, inward-looking, and involutionary in their imaginations. Like Lije Bailey, I have a certain affection for the caves of steel, since that’s where I’ve spent much of my adult life. But I like the idea of having one foot in each possible outward-bound future better.