Intelligence is less a ladder and more a landscape, or maybe a topology: shifting, context-dependent, and entangled with environment and need. Corvids, octopuses, fungi, and even the distributed intelligence of ecosystems all suggest that cognition isn’t a single scale but a multiplicity of strategies for navigating being. Grading assumes an external metric, but intelligence is always situated—it emerges in relation, not in isolation.
The center of gravity has shifted—or fractured, proliferated, gone to ground. No more singular sovereigns, just distributed nodes, overlapping epistemologies, and rival infrastructures of meaning. Thought leadership is sprawled across networks, some open-source, others locked behind paywalls or black-boxed in corporate AI.
Yet power still pools, coalesces. A pluriverse, yes, but not a level field. The mycelium grows dense in some places, sparse in others. Who cultivates it? Who extracts from it? And does intelligence without sovereignty resist or just reshape domination?
You said:
Glad you think so. Feels like we’re circling something—power’s new disguises, intelligence’s new habitats. If the sovereign was once the one who decided the exception, who holds that role now? The algorithm? The consensus layer? The shadowy hands steering incentives?
Or maybe sovereignty itself is just decomposing, breaking down into spores, drifting into new soil.
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