Really appreciate the shift from critique to building infrastructure. I came into the TZM Discord over three years ago asking who was building and was told "We only educate" and was so frustrated. Exciting progression since that time, and your intuition about building models that work in the real world is spot on.
I'm working on the cultural transmission side, carrying out open culture science/memetics and behavioural economics experiments. Primarily, we share stories of people already building alternatives (often within market systems).
What's remarkable is people aren't just responding with "hope for humanity" and "this is the kind of movement that changes world history" -- they're actually engaging with these systems themselves, coordinating, and creating their own projects.
Curious how you see cultural coordination working alongside your technical pilots.
One of the good things about the gradual process inherent to this is the cultural acclimation will be a natural and organic unfolding. Those people begin to see the merit of the system and adapt. I talked about this on a recent podcast
Nail on the head. The only way forward is for people to take a defined solution and start making in concrete in real life. No more defering to people "in charge", no more cowering behind "leaders" and not more subservience in exchange for survival and well being. Wish I could convince more around me to give something like this a try. Or even be bothered enough to look into and imagine it, because its really not hard to do. It feels like im insulated by a cult where I live.
Also really like that you called out trade directly in this write up. And offered a system that negates both trade and hierarchies of dominance. Judging from the other comment on here its hard for many to even imagine how that's possible. Which is unfortunate, its really not that difficult to imagine. Whats difficult is putting it into practice. Im hoping this blueprint will help with that. Feedback loops according to public health rather than the blind profit incentive; straightforward and obvious yet somehow elusive to most. Helping others to help instead of coercion into subservience for survival; and straightforward and obvious yet again still somehow elusive to most.
I feel ya, man. It seems so simple to understand a better way forward for people like you and me who are familiar with Peter's work and train of thought. It is so obvious how it could work. Why the masses don't 'get it' is beyond me, but I realize I can't just wish, I have to act. "Be the change you wish to see in the world" means building the foundational pieces of a post-scarcity, post-monetary, cooperative commons based community with others who see that vision, too.
For me, it has taken a while to put key pieces together but I'm glad I found a path, now. I joined a small sustainability advocacy group in my community, about 20 people and through that we have a solid action group. We can meet, democratically, monthly, educate each other, do community outreach and develop projects, with a limited budget, no doubt, but it is a start. We are in development of a resource website, we hosted our first Repair Cafe and will do more and we are open to piloting a Tool Library (which doesn't exist yet in my city of about 50,000 people). We are in contact with the manager of a local food forest and we are ready to contact some supporting mutual aid organizations like a Food Rescue and a Maker Space.
If you notice in the Integral white pages, the beginning stages of any community engaging with Integral is basically seeing how many complimentary services are already started (admittedly disjointed), could be expanded or need be started. The "Proto-Nodes" consist of:
- mutual aid networks
- tool libraries
- repair cafes
- timebanks
- community kitchens
- skill-sharing collectives and workshops
Integral is an infrastructure. That's what all these community services need to succeed. They need a backbone to attach on to to stay strong and stand tall through thick and thin. This is why I fully support Integral, it is exactly what we need.
Not reading endless 'socialist' theory and hoping to get some revolutionary communist party elected that will 'fix everything' - I'm tired of that crap from so-called 'leftists.' I want to build the new out of the shell of the old so everyday people can SEE the difference and 'join' Integral way of living without even joining a membership or a group, they just see the obvious benefit. Now, I can see some level of 'joining' in the early transition stages like paid memberships to the tool library or a cooperative composting and recycling company gets paid contracts for jobs in the community - but then the earnings from those places go into a Cooperative Solidarity Fund, essentially, and help enhance all related institutions to improve efficiency and standard of living with more local food, goods and services for less (or no) money needed.
I have to read more fully and deeply the white pages and I still have some questions about Integral Cooperatives, but I think those questions can be answered.
I also am working on a proposal for 4 key pillars that any community can establish (many already have) that can help hold up this Integral-enhanced evolution to a post-scarcity, post-market egalitarian economic system.
They include: 1) A non-profit sustainability advocacy group; 2) A not-for-profit worker cooperative tool library; 3) A community kitchen with connections to local food commons (i.e. community gardens, greenhouses, food rescues, food forests, backyard gardens, CSA farms, etc.); and 4) A Cooperative Development Team (similar to the model organization, Cooperation Jackson or Cooperation Buffalo, where a small but knowledgeable staff help convert businesses into cooperatives, establish new ones and all work independently but in solidarity with the Just Transition goals). What I like about these 4 pillars is they can start and grow or slowdown and adapt as needed based on the local issues and political pressures.
For example, a tool library can start as just a pilot project shed for shared tools by a group of friends and neighbours that is near a community centre or self-storage locker, basically run with a spreadsheet ledger of check in/check out, but then as the support grows, it can get a formal store front and be public facing and very helpful and well-liked by the community, like the public library, with additional services like hosting skill-sharing workshops, repair cafes, upcycling events, tinkering camps or basic home repairs (mutual aid and timebank-based). And the main tool library will promote decentralized sub-tool libraries in various neighbourhoods to stay strong and diffused. "In case of fire" - for whatever reason - at the main tool library - it would be devastating but not ending the entire tool-sharing ecosystem because people would quickly support the re-establishment of the main hub because they appreciate it so much and they would have various tools from other sources to donate.
I'm open to feedback on this. I want to know from others how strong these 4 pillars appear. I hope I can explain how robust they can be to pressures.
The 4 pillars are great but they need to be connected by a coherent system and as far as work cooperatives go, non profit or not, in order to transition away from the current dilemma the very idea of trade needs to be removed from the system from the beginning. This is what I really like about this write-up as I said in my original comment. In this write-up peter pointed the finger at "market trade" where as before ive only seen him say market economics and trade as separate things. Its the very idea of "Ill scratch your back but only if you scratch mine in return" that needs to get burned into oblivion. So, I really appreciate the idea of non transferable time credits. That is such a good transitional system between what we have and where we need to go. That key phrase "non transferable" is pivotal, and if it wasnt described as such I would be quite furious. That is what separates Integral from any other proposition I am aware of.
Focussing on infrastructure rather than idealism is a great approach Peter.
Just some constructive criticism, I find the title very dry. I think this work would get a lot more exposure if you put more imagination into how it is presented, like you have in the past for work such as "Culture in decline". Simply just a more relevant title than "White paper" would go a long way. Just a thought.
The Integral white paper presents a technically sophisticated architecture for post-monetary economic coordination. I like that its five interdependent systems offer a coherent alternative to market-driven allocation, grounded in cybernetic feedback, open design, and cooperative production. The proposal shares much with my own thinking on parallel system building (found at https://substack.com/home/post/p-178952109): both recognize that revolutionary collapse produces worse outcomes than gradual substitution of functions, that nodes should emerge through demonstrated competence rather than ideological conversion, and that transition requires "earning relevance through performance."
Yet for all its architectural elegance, Integral overlooks a fundamental variable: the degraded substrate upon which these systems must operate.
Peter assumes functional participants responding to better incentive structures. He writes that "nodes emerge because people need them, not because they believe in them." But this framing presupposes populations capable of accurately assessing their own needs. What if, as I have argued at https://substack.com/home/post/p-179100128 , the current system has already damaged the very substrate it needs to operate on? Traumatized people—which is to say, nearly all of us after millennia of accumulated wounding—do not engage the world through pure rationality. A traumatized nervous system doesn't seek truth or justice; it seeks safety, even if that "safety" is the familiar hell of the current arrangement.
This is the GIGO problem applied to governance design: garbage in, garbage out. Many participatory models rely on public engagement in deriving solutions, but if the populace has been sufficiently dumbed down and suffers from high levels of systemic dysregulation, you cannot expect wise outcomes regardless of how elegant the deliberation architecture.
Consider Integral's Collaborative Decision System, which employs weighted consensus, objection mapping, and transparent traceability. These mechanisms assume participants capable of regulating their nervous systems and distinguishing principled objection from triggered reactivity. But traumatized people often experience genuine groundedness as threatening—the person not operating from fear looks naive or alien to those who are. Without addressing this, even sophisticated consensus mechanisms will reproduce the dysfunctions they seek to transcend.
I propose that Integral requires a "monastery model" integrated into its proto-nodes: intentional communities focused on nervous system health, daily regulation practices, economic arrangements reducing chronic stress, intergenerational living repairing attachment disruption, and meaningful work providing purpose beyond consumption. Over generations, such communities could produce adults with genuinely different nervous system baselines—capable of the clear thinking Integral's architecture requires. This is something I am exploring in my local community (https://countyfence.org/t/beyond-democracy-my-response/394).
The transition timeline—from proto-nodes through mid-stage growth to late-stage federation—must run parallel to a healing timeline. The white paper acknowledges that transition "entails gradualism as people become acclimated to new values, norms, and practices," but offers no mechanism for how such acclimation occurs when people remain armored against genuine connection.
The research is unambiguous: the primary predictor of longevity is not diet or exercise but whether one feels embraced by a community genuinely invested in one's wellbeing. Integral's cooperative nodes could become such communities, but only if they attend to the quality of human connection alongside the efficiency of material coordination. The FRS monitors ecological impacts and resource throughput—but where is the equivalent feedback system for psychological and relational health within nodes?
Once healing communities reach critical mass—perhaps 35-40% of the population—Integral's participatory mechanisms become viable. Healthier individuals recognize each other and advance at higher rates through deliberation processes, while their regulated presence helps traumatized participants make better discernment choices. Below this threshold, the risk of damaged people designing damaged systems remains too high.
Peter writes that "Integral does not offer help; it offers inclusion." This is precisely right—and precisely incomplete. True inclusion of dysregulated people requires more than access protocols and contribution pathways. The cybernetic organism Integral envisions cannot thrive with traumatized cells. Healing is not peripheral to economic transformation—it is prerequisite.
“Yet for all its architectural elegance, Integral overlooks a fundamental variable: the degraded substrate upon which these systems must operate.”
This is a bizarre and highly opinionated framing. It presumes a pathological baseline for human participation without demonstrating why such a condition uniquely invalidates Integral as opposed to any non-authoritarian social system.
“Peter assumes functional participants responding to better incentive structures. He writes that ‘nodes emerge because people need them, not because they believe in them.’ But this framing presupposes populations capable of accurately assessing their own needs.”
This is straightforward and does not rely on any such presupposition. If people do not perceive utility, the system does not emerge. That is not an assumption—it is an empirical condition. Integral does not depend on idealized psychology; it presents an option. Dismissing people wholesale as too traumatized or deranged to recognize utility is not an argument—it is a speculative veto.
“Consider Integral’s Collaborative Decision System, which employs weighted consensus, objection mapping, and transparent traceability. These mechanisms assume participants capable of regulating their nervous systems and distinguishing principled objection from triggered reactivity.”
This is a misunderstanding of the system’s function. The CDS is fundamentally a variety-attenuation and signal-filtering system. People already engage in structured reasoning, deliberation, and constraint-based decision-making every day across countless institutional contexts. The issue is not human incapacity—it is that such mechanisms have never been unified, formalized, and embedded into economic governance at scale. If people have any motivation to participate in real democracy, these techniques will be learned, adapted, and refined—just as every other civic technology has been.
“I propose that Integral requires a ‘monastery model’ integrated into its proto-nodes…”
This reflects a misunderstanding of scalability and starting conditions. Integral does not require elevated human intention or psychological sophistication to function at the outset. It begins as a simple mutual-aid and coordination structure for basic economic processes—processes that already exist in the real world through tool libraries, mutual aid networks, time banks, credit systems, cooperative production, and direct-democracy software.
Nearly every concern raised here is already empirically addressed by the pre-existence of these systems. If the argument were valid, none of them would have worked in the first place—especially in contrast to market economics, whose incentive structures actively oppose the values being critiqued here.
Peter, thank you for this direct and substantive response. You've identified genuine weaknesses in my framing, and I want to address them honestly while clarifying where I believe the core concern still stands.
On the "Degraded Substrate" Framing:
You're right that my phrasing was imprecise. The degraded substrate problem, in my view, applies to non-authoritarian governance systems in general, not uniquely to Integral. I did not mean to suggest that Integral is peculiarly vulnerable—quite the opposite. My intent was to argue that because Integral is more ambitious than current arrangements, it would benefit from explicitly integrating what current systems ignore entirely. The framing landed as critique when it was meant as addendum. Integral's architecture is sound. The question I was raising is whether proto-nodes might function more effectively if they incorporated explicit healing practices alongside their coordination functions.
Regarding Nodes Emerging Through Perceived Utility
You make a fair point here, and I concede the overreach. You're correct that Integral presents an option and observes empirically whether people find it useful. It does not require idealized psychology. However, I would gently push back on one dimension: the concern isn't that people are "too deranged to recognize utility," but that populations under chronic stress may initially distrust or resist genuine improvements precisely because unfamiliar arrangements trigger threat responses. This is not a "speculative veto"—it's an observable pattern in community organizing work. The good news is that Integral's gradualist approach already addresses this: starting with familiar mutual aid structures and scaling complexity only as trust develops. My original response failed to acknowledge that your transition model already accounts for this dynamic.
On the CDS as Variety-Attenuation System
This is where I most clearly misunderstood your architecture. You're absolutely right that people engage in structured reasoning, deliberation, and constraint-based decision-making across countless contexts daily. The CDS scaffolds and scales these existing capacities rather than presuming their absence.
I was conflating two different problems: the capacity for structured deliberation (which clearly exists) and the capacity for regulated, non-reactive engagement under conditions of disagreement (which varies). The latter concern may be less relevant than I suggested, particularly given that CDS includes objection mapping and iterative refinement specifically designed to metabolize conflict productively. I was solving a problem you had already addressed.
On the Monastery Model and Existing Systems
This is your strongest point, and it requires honest acknowledgment. Tool libraries, time banks, mutual aid networks, and cooperative production already function with real populations—not idealized ones. If my critique were valid as stated, none of these would work. They do work. Point taken.
What I would still maintain, with appropriate humility, is a question of "scale and ambition". These existing systems operate largely within a market context and at modest scale. They demonstrate that people can participate in cooperative coordination. What remains less empirically established is whether the more sophisticated governance mechanisms—CDS deliberation at civilizational scale, genuine post-monetary coordination, the sunset of market logic itself—can emerge without some parallel attention to the relational and psychological capacities that make sustained cooperation possible.
This isn't an argument that Integral cannot work. It's a suggestion that Integral's proto-nodes might prove more resilient, more capable of retaining participants, and more effective at scaling if they incorporated practices that actively build trust, regulate collective nervous systems, and repair the attachment disruptions that market atomization produces. Not as prerequisite, but as integrated feature.
Reframing my Contribution
I attempted to present my concerns as complementary but, reviewing them now, they read more adversarially then how I had intended. Your architecture addresses coordination, allocation, feedback, and governance. What I was attempting to add—somewhat clumsily—was a suggestion that the quality of human connection within nodes might deserve explicit attention alongside the efficiency of material coordination.
Attending to relational health would strengthen Integral's nodes. What I can say is that the longevity research suggests community belonging matters profoundly for human wellbeing, and that if Integral's FRS monitors ecological throughput and production efficiency, there might be value in equivalent feedback mechanisms for social cohesion within nodes.
That's the question I was trying to raise. I raised it poorly, and I appreciate your patience in pointing that out.
Human do what it can ( "You can do it,...you can dream it too" said the propaganda ;) Apart from health there s also the veracity. The definition of a democracy for ex has been "changed". To elect is to renounce to vote , Representative should be randomly drawn. A journalist is supposed to be the "sentinel" of the citizen. Money should be created by public bank ( no interest). etc... The good news is that it's fast ( about on week) to be assimilated. It takes way longer (depending of stress level) to understand "that we are all one". Confusing Physics (Newton, Einstein) tends to make believe that life is a goal (it's a mean) and limited (it's eternal). (cf Frank n Leon R. Hatem 1955 https://youtu.be/_y3cWioQf_k?si=qnXPuL-dpXyXYybj or Maria Strømme 2025 ) Patience be with Physics ( 80 years to whisper the truth).
PROBLEM: your website can't self-verify it's content.
When your centralized website or its APIs are compromised, users can be tricked into signing malicious transactions while believing they are interacting with your trusted system; this same single point-of-failure exists everywhere (bitcoin,substack,cloudflare). what is solution?
I'm familiar with many of the concepts already. thank you for the care you spent putting this together!
The closest match I could find to “self-verifying code” appears to be your proposal to place core code on GitHub, which I assume would be eventually executed on centrally controlled server infrastructure. This is a problem. Those initial environment-building decisions made by early contributors are critical, and they will shape the viability of any long-term Integral-style collaborative development effort, as I am sure you understand .
Community-motivated software development is desirable; however, security mechanisms that kick-in only after the harm has occurred do not scale well in adversarial environments. In contrast, a decentralized, scam-resistant execution model grounded in participant consensus is the approach I'd like to see here.
Most community open-source projects are coordinated through a single canonical repository and identity (often GitHub). That works when the project tolerates soft authority and post-hoc correction. But Integral’s design goals explicitly reject single-presenter authority, even unintentionally for the expediency of convenience.
Once a canonical repo or website is socially established, it becomes an authority by inertia. Even if alternatives exist later, most users will continue to trust the original presenter. That authority cannot be undone retroactively without social fracture.
That’s why I think the execution and verification layer has to be treated as part of the initial conditions, not something bolted on after the community forms. Otherwise the first hosting and identity choices quietly define authority in ways that contradict the architecture.
If this is not a concern, if not your primary concern as it should, then please consider me to help in any advisory capacity available.
see 11.10. Also, Github is a starting point. When the system finally gets underway, it will exist in a holographic server structure that needs to be developed.
We all want a "a decentralized, scam-resistant execution model grounded in participant consensus is the approach I'd like to see here."
I am well aware of the sensitive nature of this aspect and do not support centralized servers and so on. But there's no money, and we have to start somewhere. Just because things begin on GitHub does not necessarily mean that is where it ends up.
Broadly, the integral system should be utterly distributed and impenetrable on multiple levels, and if the intentions can manifest the proper design, I think this is very possible
yes, I think there is always the chicken/egg problem with design (centralized vs decentralized). The hand-over moment is tricky (see Aave DAO recently)
My first point is the initial dependency on centralized solutions leads to more of the same; for the same reasons.
(witnessed as a programmer. 45+ years)
My second point, consensus reached through the validation of participation requires the processing and storage of its code and data to be real-time and persistent. Seems to me this leads to centrally owned servers to run that code.
..but what I read in 10.11 is the need for server-class machines maintained by EACH participant of the Integral system? A Peer-to-peer (i think Napster - a permissionless and non-persistent connected network) that requires persistent data storage (possibly achieved by enormous redundancy of off/online participants) of core software critical to real-time cooperation between members becomes an expensive equipment problem (imagine determining a consensus with only a portion of that data available). Waiting for mass adoption of Holographic tech only begs the need for a more accessible solution to start. Please correct me, i may not fully understand your vision.
What do you think about the need for persistent real-time peer-to-peer data? on a blockchain?
thank you for your time and responding to my thoughts.
This is amazing, Peter. The best gift for the holidays that I could receive: reading the Integral white pages. I'm loving it already, the detail I've read so far.
One question popped up that I don't know if I fully understand, maybe an example would help. It is about the Integral Cooperatives. They interact with the market economy while operating internally under Integral principles.
I get that they are there to funnel funds into the Integral 'commons' or public coffers for more upgrades of infrastructure, automation, efficiency, tools and whatever is needed. It says, IC is not a profit-seeking enterprise - good, great place to be for the future of a post-scarcity, post-market economy - but what type of institutions could they look like, in real life?
Are we talking not-for-profit worker cooperatives with a few paid staff like at a tool library or composting/recycling collective? Or a community kitchen that presents to the public very much like a hometown restaurant with soups and sandwiches and stuff like that but is run by a combination of paid kitchen staff but also mutual aid timebankers who help deliver goods, clean up, do simple repairs, and so on, but the time-bankers get a free meal at this community kitchen each week, and the food is locally sourced as much as possible, but non-Integral timebankers can just go there as a friendly meal place and paid a reasonable amount? So it is kind of like an ongoing farmer's market food stop or bake sale fundraiser?
I'm just trying to figure out if there is a difference between Integral Cooperatives which are supposed to have no owners (not even co-owners?) and no wage hierarchy (but still some equal wages for workers?) and a typical Worker Cooperative you might find in the Basque region of Spain with Mondragon or Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland or Cooperation Jackson worker cooperatives that are building the solidarity economy in the community and trying to provide livable wages for some and economic justice through more community-owned entities.
The co-ops are not like what you see today. No one is paid $. There are interfacing mechanisms that bridge to the external market world when needed but internally, it is all ITCs. There is no other overlap and the stronger Integral becomes, the less it needs to interface. I will be talking more about this complex issue.
Ok, thanks for clarifying it more. I'll be interested to see it explained further.
These co-ops running on ITCs are the foundation of the moneyless post-scarcity economy that could/should follow "The Great Transition" (as you put it in Interreflections) where goods and services are organized by cybernetics and labor-for-income is made obsolete because of ITCs providing a irreducible minimum for all with locally produced and distributed abundance.
So, like the co-op greenhouse example? Worked on by Integral voluntary contributors to build an automated fresh food greenhouse for a community kitchen also worked on by Integral contributors using ITCs - as they have capacity for, in and around their paid day jobs in the current system.
So, these co-ops are basically the ultimate form of a mutual aid network cooperative commons arrangement? Taking all the pro-bono, voluntary, mutual aid work that people already do (amazingly, in limited time in a capitalist-dominated society) like childcare, eldercare, medical care, repair work, maintenance, education, IT support, construction, transportation and sharing things (tools, equipment, appliances, etc.), gardening, crisis response and ecosystem restoration and giving them ITCs instead of money to free people from debt while taking care of essential needs.
It is a parallel economy built around mutual aid reciprocity in the form of ITC's, but the ITC's also connect with economic calculation. As expressed in the paper, while there could be exceptions for emergencies and extremely needed administration – creative development does not have any reciprocal ITC element. Nor does democratic decision processes. ITCs only come to life during the COS work (which not only includes the mutual aid elements you support, but also can be expanded to far more complex production) and are extinguished upon exchange for the fruits of collective production. But it is really situation dependent. Certain areas will evolve to a point where ITCs will not be needed to acquire certain things like for example - produce. That will be fairly easy to begin to make free quickly. And keep in mind the transitional nature of this project actually protects it in many unique ways because of its gradual development. What the COS cooperatives produce is only accessible by people utilizing the system once again. This allows a very measured scaling to occur. But you are essentially correct in what you have stated. It's just very important for people to realize that the move toward post scarcity is built-in. And the more the system develops the less ITC's will be needed in maturing domains.
Strong architecture here, but Integral appears to reduce credit primarily to individual activity records. That leaves out community level currency, housing as a first-class allocation domain, and meaningful recognition of knowledge and coordination labor?
Expert weighting replaces markets, but without a decentralized, competitive mechanism for discovery, allocation risks re-centralizing through expertise or politics.
Given the overlaps with earlier credit-as-access frameworks you’ve engaged with, this feels very close to Creditism, but in a thinner form: post-market coordination without full credit across both individuals and communities.
I love the level of detail in the white paper. You've made public a lot of the pieces I've been discussing with so many others this past decade. Would be interested in comparing approaches, especially as we’re both approaching real world deployment.
Doesn't sound to me like you've read the paper. But if you did let me try to clarify where I think some wires are getting crossed, because a few of the things you’re flagging are actually intentional design constraints rather than gaps.
First, on credit: Integral doesn’t treat credits as a generalized coordination layer, and that’s very much on purpose. ITCs are narrowly scoped to one role—non-transferable recognition of contribution that establishes standing inside a cooperative provisioning system. They’re not meant to function as community currency, an allocation mechanism, or a pricing proxy. The moment credits start doing all of that, you’re basically recreating money under a different name, which is exactly what Integral is trying to avoid.
Related to that, housing isn’t missing or underdeveloped—it’s just deliberately removed from credit logic altogether. Housing, infrastructure, and other non-fungible provisioning domains are governed through CDS rules and COS capacity planning, not “earned” through credits. Credits can establish participation legitimacy, but they don’t determine who gets what kind of housing, where, or when. Those decisions are collective and constraint-driven, because housing behaves more like social infrastructure than a distributable good.
On knowledge and coordination labor: those are actually elevated, not marginalized. Design work, facilitation, systems maintenance, mediation—those forms of labor increase system viability and are explicitly weighted as such. The mistake is assuming that because credits are time-based, non-manual labor collapses into flat accounting. In practice, weighting, historical performance, and feedback loops make coordination and design labor highly legible over time, without turning them into scarce commodities.
The concern about expert weighting re-centralizing power is understandable, but I think it confuses influence with authority. Weighting in Integral is domain-specific, transparent, time-decaying, and constantly audited through feedback. It doesn’t grant command power, agenda control, or resource ownership. Experts can’t override constraints or accumulate cross-domain dominance. In contrast, markets actually reward centralization; Integral tries to cap influence precisely where markets amplify it.
On the discovery point: Integral intentionally avoids competitive discovery because competition isn’t really how discovery works in complex systems—it’s how dominance emerges under scarcity signaling. Integral relies instead on design iteration, performance feedback, and constraint modeling, which is how engineering, science, and ecology actually learn over time. That’s a different discovery logic, not an absence of one.
As for the Creditism comparison, I sorta get why it looks similar from a distance, but the divergence is structural. Credits in Integral don’t circulate, don’t aggregate, decay over time, and don’t mediate allocation like money. Coordination is fragmented across governance, design, execution, recognition, and feedback so no single layer can become a market substitute.
"On the discovery point: Integral intentionally avoids competitive discovery because competition isn’t really how discovery works in complex systems—it’s how dominance emerges under scarcity signaling. Integral relies instead on design iteration, performance feedback, and constraint modeling, which is how engineering, science, and ecology actually learn over time. That’s a different discovery logic, not an absence of one."
I have not read the entire white paper yet, but I do appreciate this clarification. It helps and I see more clearly now where the constraints are intentional rather than omissions. I figured that would be the case here. I agree that letting a single credit layer sprawl into generalized coordination is how money quietly sneaks back in through the side door.
The key distinction I’d make is that Creditism isn’t about credits doing everything, but about where scarcity arbitration lives. In our framing, unconditional and community-level credit sit below coordination, not above it — as access guarantees and choice bandwidths rather than signaling or pricing mechanisms. That’s why housing, commons, and collective agency end up treated differently, not earned or optimized through contribution metrics.
From a distance the systems rhyme, but the divergence isn’t aesthetic — it’s about whether access is a prerequisite for participation or an outcome of it. That nuance is hard to convey in a working document or a website, and I suspect that’s where some wires crossed. This is, after all, some complex systems level thinking we're doing.
Either way, the overlap is real, and I think a direct conversation would be far more productive than a comment thread. Happy to continue off-platform if you are.
I’m for transparency, but I just want to be mindful about not turning Peter’s platform into a venue for promoting my own work or litigating entire system architectures in a comment thread.
My aim here isn’t to obscure anything, but to explore potential collaboration with Peter toward advancing what are, in many ways, closely aligned projects. We share core assumptions: that life sits at the center of the economic universe, not trade, and that human activity — broadly defined — is the true source of value.
Where we differ is in how access, credit, and coordination flows are structured. That design space deserves careful treatment, and if it’s productive, it’s something I’d absolutely expect to make public in a more appropriate format than comments.
As I launch the Common Planet substack and youtube podcast next month I will for sure be inviting Peter on as one of our early guests, and I'm also available to go on his show if he's open to that. I love talking about economic alternatives and look forward to making and having these discussions public for the first time.
Really appreciate the shift from critique to building infrastructure. I came into the TZM Discord over three years ago asking who was building and was told "We only educate" and was so frustrated. Exciting progression since that time, and your intuition about building models that work in the real world is spot on.
I'm working on the cultural transmission side, carrying out open culture science/memetics and behavioural economics experiments. Primarily, we share stories of people already building alternatives (often within market systems).
What's remarkable is people aren't just responding with "hope for humanity" and "this is the kind of movement that changes world history" -- they're actually engaging with these systems themselves, coordinating, and creating their own projects.
Curious how you see cultural coordination working alongside your technical pilots.
One of the good things about the gradual process inherent to this is the cultural acclimation will be a natural and organic unfolding. Those people begin to see the merit of the system and adapt. I talked about this on a recent podcast
Nail on the head. The only way forward is for people to take a defined solution and start making in concrete in real life. No more defering to people "in charge", no more cowering behind "leaders" and not more subservience in exchange for survival and well being. Wish I could convince more around me to give something like this a try. Or even be bothered enough to look into and imagine it, because its really not hard to do. It feels like im insulated by a cult where I live.
Also really like that you called out trade directly in this write up. And offered a system that negates both trade and hierarchies of dominance. Judging from the other comment on here its hard for many to even imagine how that's possible. Which is unfortunate, its really not that difficult to imagine. Whats difficult is putting it into practice. Im hoping this blueprint will help with that. Feedback loops according to public health rather than the blind profit incentive; straightforward and obvious yet somehow elusive to most. Helping others to help instead of coercion into subservience for survival; and straightforward and obvious yet again still somehow elusive to most.
Anyways, looking forward to reading white paper.
I feel ya, man. It seems so simple to understand a better way forward for people like you and me who are familiar with Peter's work and train of thought. It is so obvious how it could work. Why the masses don't 'get it' is beyond me, but I realize I can't just wish, I have to act. "Be the change you wish to see in the world" means building the foundational pieces of a post-scarcity, post-monetary, cooperative commons based community with others who see that vision, too.
For me, it has taken a while to put key pieces together but I'm glad I found a path, now. I joined a small sustainability advocacy group in my community, about 20 people and through that we have a solid action group. We can meet, democratically, monthly, educate each other, do community outreach and develop projects, with a limited budget, no doubt, but it is a start. We are in development of a resource website, we hosted our first Repair Cafe and will do more and we are open to piloting a Tool Library (which doesn't exist yet in my city of about 50,000 people). We are in contact with the manager of a local food forest and we are ready to contact some supporting mutual aid organizations like a Food Rescue and a Maker Space.
If you notice in the Integral white pages, the beginning stages of any community engaging with Integral is basically seeing how many complimentary services are already started (admittedly disjointed), could be expanded or need be started. The "Proto-Nodes" consist of:
- mutual aid networks
- tool libraries
- repair cafes
- timebanks
- community kitchens
- skill-sharing collectives and workshops
Integral is an infrastructure. That's what all these community services need to succeed. They need a backbone to attach on to to stay strong and stand tall through thick and thin. This is why I fully support Integral, it is exactly what we need.
Not reading endless 'socialist' theory and hoping to get some revolutionary communist party elected that will 'fix everything' - I'm tired of that crap from so-called 'leftists.' I want to build the new out of the shell of the old so everyday people can SEE the difference and 'join' Integral way of living without even joining a membership or a group, they just see the obvious benefit. Now, I can see some level of 'joining' in the early transition stages like paid memberships to the tool library or a cooperative composting and recycling company gets paid contracts for jobs in the community - but then the earnings from those places go into a Cooperative Solidarity Fund, essentially, and help enhance all related institutions to improve efficiency and standard of living with more local food, goods and services for less (or no) money needed.
I have to read more fully and deeply the white pages and I still have some questions about Integral Cooperatives, but I think those questions can be answered.
I also am working on a proposal for 4 key pillars that any community can establish (many already have) that can help hold up this Integral-enhanced evolution to a post-scarcity, post-market egalitarian economic system.
They include: 1) A non-profit sustainability advocacy group; 2) A not-for-profit worker cooperative tool library; 3) A community kitchen with connections to local food commons (i.e. community gardens, greenhouses, food rescues, food forests, backyard gardens, CSA farms, etc.); and 4) A Cooperative Development Team (similar to the model organization, Cooperation Jackson or Cooperation Buffalo, where a small but knowledgeable staff help convert businesses into cooperatives, establish new ones and all work independently but in solidarity with the Just Transition goals). What I like about these 4 pillars is they can start and grow or slowdown and adapt as needed based on the local issues and political pressures.
For example, a tool library can start as just a pilot project shed for shared tools by a group of friends and neighbours that is near a community centre or self-storage locker, basically run with a spreadsheet ledger of check in/check out, but then as the support grows, it can get a formal store front and be public facing and very helpful and well-liked by the community, like the public library, with additional services like hosting skill-sharing workshops, repair cafes, upcycling events, tinkering camps or basic home repairs (mutual aid and timebank-based). And the main tool library will promote decentralized sub-tool libraries in various neighbourhoods to stay strong and diffused. "In case of fire" - for whatever reason - at the main tool library - it would be devastating but not ending the entire tool-sharing ecosystem because people would quickly support the re-establishment of the main hub because they appreciate it so much and they would have various tools from other sources to donate.
I'm open to feedback on this. I want to know from others how strong these 4 pillars appear. I hope I can explain how robust they can be to pressures.
The 4 pillars are great but they need to be connected by a coherent system and as far as work cooperatives go, non profit or not, in order to transition away from the current dilemma the very idea of trade needs to be removed from the system from the beginning. This is what I really like about this write-up as I said in my original comment. In this write-up peter pointed the finger at "market trade" where as before ive only seen him say market economics and trade as separate things. Its the very idea of "Ill scratch your back but only if you scratch mine in return" that needs to get burned into oblivion. So, I really appreciate the idea of non transferable time credits. That is such a good transitional system between what we have and where we need to go. That key phrase "non transferable" is pivotal, and if it wasnt described as such I would be quite furious. That is what separates Integral from any other proposition I am aware of.
READ the full document, please.
There are other things that separate it from what I can see but this is my favorite. I still have not read the white paper
Focussing on infrastructure rather than idealism is a great approach Peter.
Just some constructive criticism, I find the title very dry. I think this work would get a lot more exposure if you put more imagination into how it is presented, like you have in the past for work such as "Culture in decline". Simply just a more relevant title than "White paper" would go a long way. Just a thought.
It's just the beginning.
The Integral white paper presents a technically sophisticated architecture for post-monetary economic coordination. I like that its five interdependent systems offer a coherent alternative to market-driven allocation, grounded in cybernetic feedback, open design, and cooperative production. The proposal shares much with my own thinking on parallel system building (found at https://substack.com/home/post/p-178952109): both recognize that revolutionary collapse produces worse outcomes than gradual substitution of functions, that nodes should emerge through demonstrated competence rather than ideological conversion, and that transition requires "earning relevance through performance."
Yet for all its architectural elegance, Integral overlooks a fundamental variable: the degraded substrate upon which these systems must operate.
Peter assumes functional participants responding to better incentive structures. He writes that "nodes emerge because people need them, not because they believe in them." But this framing presupposes populations capable of accurately assessing their own needs. What if, as I have argued at https://substack.com/home/post/p-179100128 , the current system has already damaged the very substrate it needs to operate on? Traumatized people—which is to say, nearly all of us after millennia of accumulated wounding—do not engage the world through pure rationality. A traumatized nervous system doesn't seek truth or justice; it seeks safety, even if that "safety" is the familiar hell of the current arrangement.
This is the GIGO problem applied to governance design: garbage in, garbage out. Many participatory models rely on public engagement in deriving solutions, but if the populace has been sufficiently dumbed down and suffers from high levels of systemic dysregulation, you cannot expect wise outcomes regardless of how elegant the deliberation architecture.
Consider Integral's Collaborative Decision System, which employs weighted consensus, objection mapping, and transparent traceability. These mechanisms assume participants capable of regulating their nervous systems and distinguishing principled objection from triggered reactivity. But traumatized people often experience genuine groundedness as threatening—the person not operating from fear looks naive or alien to those who are. Without addressing this, even sophisticated consensus mechanisms will reproduce the dysfunctions they seek to transcend.
I propose that Integral requires a "monastery model" integrated into its proto-nodes: intentional communities focused on nervous system health, daily regulation practices, economic arrangements reducing chronic stress, intergenerational living repairing attachment disruption, and meaningful work providing purpose beyond consumption. Over generations, such communities could produce adults with genuinely different nervous system baselines—capable of the clear thinking Integral's architecture requires. This is something I am exploring in my local community (https://countyfence.org/t/beyond-democracy-my-response/394).
The transition timeline—from proto-nodes through mid-stage growth to late-stage federation—must run parallel to a healing timeline. The white paper acknowledges that transition "entails gradualism as people become acclimated to new values, norms, and practices," but offers no mechanism for how such acclimation occurs when people remain armored against genuine connection.
The research is unambiguous: the primary predictor of longevity is not diet or exercise but whether one feels embraced by a community genuinely invested in one's wellbeing. Integral's cooperative nodes could become such communities, but only if they attend to the quality of human connection alongside the efficiency of material coordination. The FRS monitors ecological impacts and resource throughput—but where is the equivalent feedback system for psychological and relational health within nodes?
Once healing communities reach critical mass—perhaps 35-40% of the population—Integral's participatory mechanisms become viable. Healthier individuals recognize each other and advance at higher rates through deliberation processes, while their regulated presence helps traumatized participants make better discernment choices. Below this threshold, the risk of damaged people designing damaged systems remains too high.
Peter writes that "Integral does not offer help; it offers inclusion." This is precisely right—and precisely incomplete. True inclusion of dysregulated people requires more than access protocols and contribution pathways. The cybernetic organism Integral envisions cannot thrive with traumatized cells. Healing is not peripheral to economic transformation—it is prerequisite.
“Yet for all its architectural elegance, Integral overlooks a fundamental variable: the degraded substrate upon which these systems must operate.”
This is a bizarre and highly opinionated framing. It presumes a pathological baseline for human participation without demonstrating why such a condition uniquely invalidates Integral as opposed to any non-authoritarian social system.
“Peter assumes functional participants responding to better incentive structures. He writes that ‘nodes emerge because people need them, not because they believe in them.’ But this framing presupposes populations capable of accurately assessing their own needs.”
This is straightforward and does not rely on any such presupposition. If people do not perceive utility, the system does not emerge. That is not an assumption—it is an empirical condition. Integral does not depend on idealized psychology; it presents an option. Dismissing people wholesale as too traumatized or deranged to recognize utility is not an argument—it is a speculative veto.
“Consider Integral’s Collaborative Decision System, which employs weighted consensus, objection mapping, and transparent traceability. These mechanisms assume participants capable of regulating their nervous systems and distinguishing principled objection from triggered reactivity.”
This is a misunderstanding of the system’s function. The CDS is fundamentally a variety-attenuation and signal-filtering system. People already engage in structured reasoning, deliberation, and constraint-based decision-making every day across countless institutional contexts. The issue is not human incapacity—it is that such mechanisms have never been unified, formalized, and embedded into economic governance at scale. If people have any motivation to participate in real democracy, these techniques will be learned, adapted, and refined—just as every other civic technology has been.
“I propose that Integral requires a ‘monastery model’ integrated into its proto-nodes…”
This reflects a misunderstanding of scalability and starting conditions. Integral does not require elevated human intention or psychological sophistication to function at the outset. It begins as a simple mutual-aid and coordination structure for basic economic processes—processes that already exist in the real world through tool libraries, mutual aid networks, time banks, credit systems, cooperative production, and direct-democracy software.
Nearly every concern raised here is already empirically addressed by the pre-existence of these systems. If the argument were valid, none of them would have worked in the first place—especially in contrast to market economics, whose incentive structures actively oppose the values being critiqued here.
Peter, thank you for this direct and substantive response. You've identified genuine weaknesses in my framing, and I want to address them honestly while clarifying where I believe the core concern still stands.
On the "Degraded Substrate" Framing:
You're right that my phrasing was imprecise. The degraded substrate problem, in my view, applies to non-authoritarian governance systems in general, not uniquely to Integral. I did not mean to suggest that Integral is peculiarly vulnerable—quite the opposite. My intent was to argue that because Integral is more ambitious than current arrangements, it would benefit from explicitly integrating what current systems ignore entirely. The framing landed as critique when it was meant as addendum. Integral's architecture is sound. The question I was raising is whether proto-nodes might function more effectively if they incorporated explicit healing practices alongside their coordination functions.
Regarding Nodes Emerging Through Perceived Utility
You make a fair point here, and I concede the overreach. You're correct that Integral presents an option and observes empirically whether people find it useful. It does not require idealized psychology. However, I would gently push back on one dimension: the concern isn't that people are "too deranged to recognize utility," but that populations under chronic stress may initially distrust or resist genuine improvements precisely because unfamiliar arrangements trigger threat responses. This is not a "speculative veto"—it's an observable pattern in community organizing work. The good news is that Integral's gradualist approach already addresses this: starting with familiar mutual aid structures and scaling complexity only as trust develops. My original response failed to acknowledge that your transition model already accounts for this dynamic.
On the CDS as Variety-Attenuation System
This is where I most clearly misunderstood your architecture. You're absolutely right that people engage in structured reasoning, deliberation, and constraint-based decision-making across countless contexts daily. The CDS scaffolds and scales these existing capacities rather than presuming their absence.
I was conflating two different problems: the capacity for structured deliberation (which clearly exists) and the capacity for regulated, non-reactive engagement under conditions of disagreement (which varies). The latter concern may be less relevant than I suggested, particularly given that CDS includes objection mapping and iterative refinement specifically designed to metabolize conflict productively. I was solving a problem you had already addressed.
On the Monastery Model and Existing Systems
This is your strongest point, and it requires honest acknowledgment. Tool libraries, time banks, mutual aid networks, and cooperative production already function with real populations—not idealized ones. If my critique were valid as stated, none of these would work. They do work. Point taken.
What I would still maintain, with appropriate humility, is a question of "scale and ambition". These existing systems operate largely within a market context and at modest scale. They demonstrate that people can participate in cooperative coordination. What remains less empirically established is whether the more sophisticated governance mechanisms—CDS deliberation at civilizational scale, genuine post-monetary coordination, the sunset of market logic itself—can emerge without some parallel attention to the relational and psychological capacities that make sustained cooperation possible.
This isn't an argument that Integral cannot work. It's a suggestion that Integral's proto-nodes might prove more resilient, more capable of retaining participants, and more effective at scaling if they incorporated practices that actively build trust, regulate collective nervous systems, and repair the attachment disruptions that market atomization produces. Not as prerequisite, but as integrated feature.
Reframing my Contribution
I attempted to present my concerns as complementary but, reviewing them now, they read more adversarially then how I had intended. Your architecture addresses coordination, allocation, feedback, and governance. What I was attempting to add—somewhat clumsily—was a suggestion that the quality of human connection within nodes might deserve explicit attention alongside the efficiency of material coordination.
Attending to relational health would strengthen Integral's nodes. What I can say is that the longevity research suggests community belonging matters profoundly for human wellbeing, and that if Integral's FRS monitors ecological throughput and production efficiency, there might be value in equivalent feedback mechanisms for social cohesion within nodes.
That's the question I was trying to raise. I raised it poorly, and I appreciate your patience in pointing that out.
Human do what it can ( "You can do it,...you can dream it too" said the propaganda ;) Apart from health there s also the veracity. The definition of a democracy for ex has been "changed". To elect is to renounce to vote , Representative should be randomly drawn. A journalist is supposed to be the "sentinel" of the citizen. Money should be created by public bank ( no interest). etc... The good news is that it's fast ( about on week) to be assimilated. It takes way longer (depending of stress level) to understand "that we are all one". Confusing Physics (Newton, Einstein) tends to make believe that life is a goal (it's a mean) and limited (it's eternal). (cf Frank n Leon R. Hatem 1955 https://youtu.be/_y3cWioQf_k?si=qnXPuL-dpXyXYybj or Maria Strømme 2025 ) Patience be with Physics ( 80 years to whisper the truth).
PROBLEM: your website can't self-verify it's content.
When your centralized website or its APIs are compromised, users can be tricked into signing malicious transactions while believing they are interacting with your trusted system; this same single point-of-failure exists everywhere (bitcoin,substack,cloudflare). what is solution?
This is addressed in the paper.
I read much of your paper over last few days.
I'm familiar with many of the concepts already. thank you for the care you spent putting this together!
The closest match I could find to “self-verifying code” appears to be your proposal to place core code on GitHub, which I assume would be eventually executed on centrally controlled server infrastructure. This is a problem. Those initial environment-building decisions made by early contributors are critical, and they will shape the viability of any long-term Integral-style collaborative development effort, as I am sure you understand .
Community-motivated software development is desirable; however, security mechanisms that kick-in only after the harm has occurred do not scale well in adversarial environments. In contrast, a decentralized, scam-resistant execution model grounded in participant consensus is the approach I'd like to see here.
Most community open-source projects are coordinated through a single canonical repository and identity (often GitHub). That works when the project tolerates soft authority and post-hoc correction. But Integral’s design goals explicitly reject single-presenter authority, even unintentionally for the expediency of convenience.
Once a canonical repo or website is socially established, it becomes an authority by inertia. Even if alternatives exist later, most users will continue to trust the original presenter. That authority cannot be undone retroactively without social fracture.
That’s why I think the execution and verification layer has to be treated as part of the initial conditions, not something bolted on after the community forms. Otherwise the first hosting and identity choices quietly define authority in ways that contradict the architecture.
If this is not a concern, if not your primary concern as it should, then please consider me to help in any advisory capacity available.
see 11.10. Also, Github is a starting point. When the system finally gets underway, it will exist in a holographic server structure that needs to be developed.
We all want a "a decentralized, scam-resistant execution model grounded in participant consensus is the approach I'd like to see here."
I am well aware of the sensitive nature of this aspect and do not support centralized servers and so on. But there's no money, and we have to start somewhere. Just because things begin on GitHub does not necessarily mean that is where it ends up.
Broadly, the integral system should be utterly distributed and impenetrable on multiple levels, and if the intentions can manifest the proper design, I think this is very possible
yes, I think there is always the chicken/egg problem with design (centralized vs decentralized). The hand-over moment is tricky (see Aave DAO recently)
My first point is the initial dependency on centralized solutions leads to more of the same; for the same reasons.
(witnessed as a programmer. 45+ years)
My second point, consensus reached through the validation of participation requires the processing and storage of its code and data to be real-time and persistent. Seems to me this leads to centrally owned servers to run that code.
..but what I read in 10.11 is the need for server-class machines maintained by EACH participant of the Integral system? A Peer-to-peer (i think Napster - a permissionless and non-persistent connected network) that requires persistent data storage (possibly achieved by enormous redundancy of off/online participants) of core software critical to real-time cooperation between members becomes an expensive equipment problem (imagine determining a consensus with only a portion of that data available). Waiting for mass adoption of Holographic tech only begs the need for a more accessible solution to start. Please correct me, i may not fully understand your vision.
What do you think about the need for persistent real-time peer-to-peer data? on a blockchain?
thank you for your time and responding to my thoughts.
I'm thinking more Holochain or similar proxy. Blockchain is too heavy.
This is amazing, Peter. The best gift for the holidays that I could receive: reading the Integral white pages. I'm loving it already, the detail I've read so far.
One question popped up that I don't know if I fully understand, maybe an example would help. It is about the Integral Cooperatives. They interact with the market economy while operating internally under Integral principles.
I get that they are there to funnel funds into the Integral 'commons' or public coffers for more upgrades of infrastructure, automation, efficiency, tools and whatever is needed. It says, IC is not a profit-seeking enterprise - good, great place to be for the future of a post-scarcity, post-market economy - but what type of institutions could they look like, in real life?
Are we talking not-for-profit worker cooperatives with a few paid staff like at a tool library or composting/recycling collective? Or a community kitchen that presents to the public very much like a hometown restaurant with soups and sandwiches and stuff like that but is run by a combination of paid kitchen staff but also mutual aid timebankers who help deliver goods, clean up, do simple repairs, and so on, but the time-bankers get a free meal at this community kitchen each week, and the food is locally sourced as much as possible, but non-Integral timebankers can just go there as a friendly meal place and paid a reasonable amount? So it is kind of like an ongoing farmer's market food stop or bake sale fundraiser?
I'm just trying to figure out if there is a difference between Integral Cooperatives which are supposed to have no owners (not even co-owners?) and no wage hierarchy (but still some equal wages for workers?) and a typical Worker Cooperative you might find in the Basque region of Spain with Mondragon or Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland or Cooperation Jackson worker cooperatives that are building the solidarity economy in the community and trying to provide livable wages for some and economic justice through more community-owned entities.
The co-ops are not like what you see today. No one is paid $. There are interfacing mechanisms that bridge to the external market world when needed but internally, it is all ITCs. There is no other overlap and the stronger Integral becomes, the less it needs to interface. I will be talking more about this complex issue.
Ok, thanks for clarifying it more. I'll be interested to see it explained further.
These co-ops running on ITCs are the foundation of the moneyless post-scarcity economy that could/should follow "The Great Transition" (as you put it in Interreflections) where goods and services are organized by cybernetics and labor-for-income is made obsolete because of ITCs providing a irreducible minimum for all with locally produced and distributed abundance.
So, like the co-op greenhouse example? Worked on by Integral voluntary contributors to build an automated fresh food greenhouse for a community kitchen also worked on by Integral contributors using ITCs - as they have capacity for, in and around their paid day jobs in the current system.
So, these co-ops are basically the ultimate form of a mutual aid network cooperative commons arrangement? Taking all the pro-bono, voluntary, mutual aid work that people already do (amazingly, in limited time in a capitalist-dominated society) like childcare, eldercare, medical care, repair work, maintenance, education, IT support, construction, transportation and sharing things (tools, equipment, appliances, etc.), gardening, crisis response and ecosystem restoration and giving them ITCs instead of money to free people from debt while taking care of essential needs.
It is a parallel economy built around mutual aid reciprocity in the form of ITC's, but the ITC's also connect with economic calculation. As expressed in the paper, while there could be exceptions for emergencies and extremely needed administration – creative development does not have any reciprocal ITC element. Nor does democratic decision processes. ITCs only come to life during the COS work (which not only includes the mutual aid elements you support, but also can be expanded to far more complex production) and are extinguished upon exchange for the fruits of collective production. But it is really situation dependent. Certain areas will evolve to a point where ITCs will not be needed to acquire certain things like for example - produce. That will be fairly easy to begin to make free quickly. And keep in mind the transitional nature of this project actually protects it in many unique ways because of its gradual development. What the COS cooperatives produce is only accessible by people utilizing the system once again. This allows a very measured scaling to occur. But you are essentially correct in what you have stated. It's just very important for people to realize that the move toward post scarcity is built-in. And the more the system develops the less ITC's will be needed in maturing domains.
Strong architecture here, but Integral appears to reduce credit primarily to individual activity records. That leaves out community level currency, housing as a first-class allocation domain, and meaningful recognition of knowledge and coordination labor?
Expert weighting replaces markets, but without a decentralized, competitive mechanism for discovery, allocation risks re-centralizing through expertise or politics.
Given the overlaps with earlier credit-as-access frameworks you’ve engaged with, this feels very close to Creditism, but in a thinner form: post-market coordination without full credit across both individuals and communities.
I love the level of detail in the white paper. You've made public a lot of the pieces I've been discussing with so many others this past decade. Would be interested in comparing approaches, especially as we’re both approaching real world deployment.
Doesn't sound to me like you've read the paper. But if you did let me try to clarify where I think some wires are getting crossed, because a few of the things you’re flagging are actually intentional design constraints rather than gaps.
First, on credit: Integral doesn’t treat credits as a generalized coordination layer, and that’s very much on purpose. ITCs are narrowly scoped to one role—non-transferable recognition of contribution that establishes standing inside a cooperative provisioning system. They’re not meant to function as community currency, an allocation mechanism, or a pricing proxy. The moment credits start doing all of that, you’re basically recreating money under a different name, which is exactly what Integral is trying to avoid.
Related to that, housing isn’t missing or underdeveloped—it’s just deliberately removed from credit logic altogether. Housing, infrastructure, and other non-fungible provisioning domains are governed through CDS rules and COS capacity planning, not “earned” through credits. Credits can establish participation legitimacy, but they don’t determine who gets what kind of housing, where, or when. Those decisions are collective and constraint-driven, because housing behaves more like social infrastructure than a distributable good.
On knowledge and coordination labor: those are actually elevated, not marginalized. Design work, facilitation, systems maintenance, mediation—those forms of labor increase system viability and are explicitly weighted as such. The mistake is assuming that because credits are time-based, non-manual labor collapses into flat accounting. In practice, weighting, historical performance, and feedback loops make coordination and design labor highly legible over time, without turning them into scarce commodities.
The concern about expert weighting re-centralizing power is understandable, but I think it confuses influence with authority. Weighting in Integral is domain-specific, transparent, time-decaying, and constantly audited through feedback. It doesn’t grant command power, agenda control, or resource ownership. Experts can’t override constraints or accumulate cross-domain dominance. In contrast, markets actually reward centralization; Integral tries to cap influence precisely where markets amplify it.
On the discovery point: Integral intentionally avoids competitive discovery because competition isn’t really how discovery works in complex systems—it’s how dominance emerges under scarcity signaling. Integral relies instead on design iteration, performance feedback, and constraint modeling, which is how engineering, science, and ecology actually learn over time. That’s a different discovery logic, not an absence of one.
As for the Creditism comparison, I sorta get why it looks similar from a distance, but the divergence is structural. Credits in Integral don’t circulate, don’t aggregate, decay over time, and don’t mediate allocation like money. Coordination is fragmented across governance, design, execution, recognition, and feedback so no single layer can become a market substitute.
i agree
"On the discovery point: Integral intentionally avoids competitive discovery because competition isn’t really how discovery works in complex systems—it’s how dominance emerges under scarcity signaling. Integral relies instead on design iteration, performance feedback, and constraint modeling, which is how engineering, science, and ecology actually learn over time. That’s a different discovery logic, not an absence of one."
"non-transferable recognition of contribution that establishes standing inside a cooperative provisioning system" = TRUST ?
I have not read the entire white paper yet, but I do appreciate this clarification. It helps and I see more clearly now where the constraints are intentional rather than omissions. I figured that would be the case here. I agree that letting a single credit layer sprawl into generalized coordination is how money quietly sneaks back in through the side door.
The key distinction I’d make is that Creditism isn’t about credits doing everything, but about where scarcity arbitration lives. In our framing, unconditional and community-level credit sit below coordination, not above it — as access guarantees and choice bandwidths rather than signaling or pricing mechanisms. That’s why housing, commons, and collective agency end up treated differently, not earned or optimized through contribution metrics.
From a distance the systems rhyme, but the divergence isn’t aesthetic — it’s about whether access is a prerequisite for participation or an outcome of it. That nuance is hard to convey in a working document or a website, and I suspect that’s where some wires crossed. This is, after all, some complex systems level thinking we're doing.
Either way, the overlap is real, and I think a direct conversation would be far more productive than a comment thread. Happy to continue off-platform if you are.
no, please....... stay on-platform so we all can learn. full-disclosure is at the heart of any true decentralized effort !
I’m for transparency, but I just want to be mindful about not turning Peter’s platform into a venue for promoting my own work or litigating entire system architectures in a comment thread.
My aim here isn’t to obscure anything, but to explore potential collaboration with Peter toward advancing what are, in many ways, closely aligned projects. We share core assumptions: that life sits at the center of the economic universe, not trade, and that human activity — broadly defined — is the true source of value.
Where we differ is in how access, credit, and coordination flows are structured. That design space deserves careful treatment, and if it’s productive, it’s something I’d absolutely expect to make public in a more appropriate format than comments.
thank you for explaining something that deserves explaining!
but seems contrary to your writings.
"venue for promoting"
- we are all familiar with your work.
- humans make decisions best by differentiating.
- if not HERE; where?
- illusion of secrets is dangerous to all good ideas.
==> you should not deny us the understanding of your underbelly
"explore potential collaboration" - in secret?
- decentralization is a bus; not a two-seat sports car
"if it’s productive"
- if ???
- the "exploring" is the value to community!
We cannot build a better world by asking institutions to be better.
We must build institutions where hiding secrets is impossible.
Please reconsider. Please have an open full-disclosure discussion.
As I launch the Common Planet substack and youtube podcast next month I will for sure be inviting Peter on as one of our early guests, and I'm also available to go on his show if he's open to that. I love talking about economic alternatives and look forward to making and having these discussions public for the first time.