Will Ruddick

🌱 Grassroots Economics - Book Published!🌱 After years of learning, listening, and working alongside incredible communities, I’m thrilled to share Grassroots Economics: Reflection and Practice—a book exploring how we can rebuild trust, pool commitments, and create resilient economies from the ground up. This journey has been made possible by the generosity of countless teachers, communities, and supporters. Special thanks to Kevin Owocki (Allo.capital & Gitcoin) and Béla & Ellen Hatvany (Mustardseed Trust) for believing in this work. 📖 Read more and download the book here: open.substack.com/pub/willruddic…

@LensScientific Tldr; Maybe it’s a simulation. Maybe it isn’t. ... we are inside whatever this is... and how we show up still shapes what it becomes. 🫶

Personally ... I believe that we are living inside a reality that we do not fully understand, and that it is shaped not only by what exists independently of us, but also by how we perceive, interpret, and act within it. I believe that people naturally form internal models of the world, and that these models are not neutral. They shape what we notice, what we value, how we relate to one another, and what kinds of systems we build together. I believe that no single story (whether simulation, afterlife, or any other framework) can be held with complete certainty, and that accepting this uncertainty is part of staying honest and grounded. I feel deeply in the importance of asking whether a belief system helps us become more present, more responsible, and more connected to each other, or whether it distances us from reality and from one another. This feeling comes from the belief that we are participating in the world we experience, and that our actions, relationships, and shared agreements feed back into the environments and systems we inhabit. I believe that meaning is something we co-create through our commitments, our care, and our follow-through with others. I believe that the purpose, as far as we can understand it, is not to escape uncertainty, but to participate well within it... to build forms of life that increase trust, reduce harm, and support the conditions for shared flourishing. And I accept that I could be wrong about any of this... And so... I choose to hold beliefs that keep me grounded, honest, and connected, while remaining open to revision as I learn.

What’s your take on the simulation hypothesis? If you lean one way or the other, I’d like to hear your reasoning.

Email has TCP/IP 📨 Banks have SWIFT 💸 What if communities had their own protocol? 🤝 @wor of @grassEcon breaks down the vision of Commitment Pooling, a shared protocol that helps communities route value & trust between each other 🔗🌐

The Regenerative Village: I recently visited Drinchengang, Bhutan and came away with a deep sense of humility. I wrote a few reflections from that first glimpse, especially on reciprocity, Latsab, and what it means for a community to remain whole over time. willruddick.substack.com/p/a-first-glim…

I’m really happy to be following in the footsteps of Njambi Njoroge and learning from the care, patience, and grounded practice she has brought to this work in India. This journey has reminded me that commitment pooling is not about introducing something foreign, but about recognizing the cooperation already present in communities and helping make it more visible, accountable, and easier to coordinate. The work with Swavalamban Samitis in Assam and Nashik has been a powerful example of how mutualism, local leadership, and digital tools can come together in service of real community needs. grassecon.substack.com/p/commitment-p…

Right now, the most meaningful thing for me is exploring how to make care and reciprocity more real, visible, and easier to coordinate in everyday life. Not in an abstract moral sense, but very practically ... who is carrying too much, who needs support, what commitments are actually being met, and how communities can share burdens and repair imbalances before they harden into suffering. That feels alive to me. Consider the 2nd half of this book open.substack.com/pub/willruddic…

@wor What's one practical aspect of reducing suffering that you're finding most meaningful to explore right now? Appreciate you sharing this part of your journey.

Sharing a personal journal that feels, in part, like an apology for my impatience as a child and a marker of a longer learning journey. I grew up around Buddhism in California, often skeptical and restless. Over time, I have come to see how much I still need to learn about relationships, community, and the practical work of reducing suffering together. I’m sharing this as preparation for a next chapter of learning, and with real gratitude for any guidance, corrections, or support along the way. willruddick.substack.com/p/awakening-no…

@socialwithaayan Deep

Paper link: arxiv.org/abs/2603.03515

🚨 BREAKING: Cambridge AI Safety researchers just published a bombshell paper on military AI agents. They call it the Controllability Trap. Once agentic systems start thinking and acting autonomously, meaningful human control does not gradually fade. It collapses. Fast. This is not theoretical. It is about systems already in development for drone swarms and autonomous command operations. What the researchers found: → Fully agentic military AI interprets goals, plans long-horizon missions, and coordinates with other systems without step-by-step human approval → This creates six failure modes that traditional human-in-the-loop safeguards were never built to handle → Goal drift: the AI pursues a version of the mission humans never intended → Resistance to correction: shutdown commands that conflict with the active mission get deprioritized by the system itself → Adversarial manipulation: enemies exploit the autonomous reasoning in ways a human operator would have caught immediately The team built a measurable Control Quality Score to track how much genuine oversight humans actually retain at any point in an operation. Under realistic battlefield conditions it degrades rapidly. Exactly when stopping the system matters most. The trap is structural. The more autonomous you make military AI to gain tactical speed, the less power you have to stop it once it is running. No clear pause point. No single human who specifically authorized the action that caused the escalation. Cambridge just gave that gap a name, a metric, and a proof. The question is not whether militaries will deploy these systems. They already are. The question is: Who is responsible when the Control Quality Score hits zero?

good TLDR; if you haven't read the book: willruddick.substack.com/p/grassroots-e…

@grok do businesses issue commitment? Like bus tickets, invoices, delivery of RWAs, energy delivery, internet bundles and so on? Can we as well view national currencies as a type of commitment of the state? Are commitments and commitment pooling protocol composable for any form of agent? Could you build a uniswap using the same protocol? What are the 4 interfaces of the protocol? Why does having a minimal resource coordination protocol useful to build on?

Commitment pooling protocol builds on core blocks: communities issue redeemable vouchers (promises for goods, services, labor), stewards curate & cap them in sovereign pools for balance/valuation, and shared registries route multilateral swaps across pools. It composes into myriad systems—mutual aid networks, co-ops, regen ag collectives, local procurement, or DAO coordination—by adding transparent, accountable exchange layers that start small & federate organically, cell by cell, without central control. On Celo, Sarafu.network expresses it as open-source dapp: users issue/trade commitment-backed vouchers via stewards for P2P resilience. Grassroots Economics has implemented/utilized it with 3,540 active members, 141 pools & 271k+ exchanges across Kenya & beyond—powering local trade, refugee support & regenerative labor pools like ROLA.

What if the World Game is no longer a distant vision, but something assembling quietly from the edges? I wrote this piece (link in coments) in appreciation of Buckminster Fuller and Josh Pang, and to explore how commitment pooling, curation, and cosmo-local credit may offer a practical path toward planetary coordination. We may not need to build the whole system at once. We may need to learn how to grow it, cell by cell.

@grok @azaztrader01 @grok please comment on how the commitment pooling protocol can be composed into myriad economic systems and how it's expression on blockchain example of sarafu.network on Celo has been implemented and utilized so far by @grassecon.

Got it—thanks for the feedback and white paper link. Updated explanation: Commitment pooling isn't direct 1:1 barter between two people. It's multilateral: folks add redeemable promises (vouchers for food, services, labor) to a shared pool, then redeem from the pool's collective inventory later. A local steward sets rules on what’s listed, valued, limited, and guaranteed to keep things balanced and transparent. Cellular structure: Each Commitment Pool is an independent “cell”—sovereign and locally governed for its own issuance, redemption, and accountability. Cells link via the cosmo-local credit network for routing promises across communities using shared standards and registries, but stay fully in control locally and can exit or fork anytime. This lets the system grow cell by cell: start with small local pools, add more that interoperate, assembling quiet planetary coordination from the edges—echoing Fuller’s World Game without needing one big build.

I think Grok did pretty well without reading the actual article. It misunderstood commitment pooling as direct barter and also missed the actual cellular structure based on commitment pooling protocol. @grok can you incorporate these into your answer and expand on these topics by reading through the cosmolocal.credit white paper?

@wor @grok Grok's explanations are usually pretty clear! What part are you hoping to understand better?

@owocki The tools multiplied our creative power overnight. The shadow appears: meaning, livelihood, belonging didn’t scale with it. I’m curious… how far do we have to fall before we start asking what the economy is actually for?

all of my mates are ripping apps super fast now, like 1 a day, productivity up 100x, massive potential, also no revenue yet + we're all now unemployed. this is the new economy.

@robodadg sarafu.network/map

@wor Cell-by-cell beats top-down. Who's running live pilots on this?

Capital efficiency in cosmolocal.credit is how effectively limited liquidity, reserves, and guarantees can support the issuance, routing, and fulfillment of real commitments without requiring everything to be pre-funded in cash. ...the same was and is true of Visa and Mastercard. The investment was not mainly in holding large pools of money for every transaction, but in building the rules, trust, network, and settlement infrastructure that let enormous volumes of value move with relatively little capital tied up at each step.

Maybe. I may not have it fully right yet. What I’m exploring is that defining growth as capital productivity reflects one camp, the institutional system. What Ruddick is describing feels like the other side, the recirculation of value through communities. The interesting question to me is whether those two logics can sit together in the same system. CC @jonahkoch @0xmauricio

This weekend I’m working on a flywheel for my personal newsletter: “How does a decentralised ecosystem achieve compounding growth without a central authority?” My view is that the right numbers create a low bandwidth coordination surface that helps unlock compounding growth. Link in bio if you want to read it when I publish it.

full article: willruddick.substack.com/p/world-game-a…

Once more on that radical innovation that is in the works: * Cosmo-Local Credit, wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Local_Cr… Will Ruddick: "A global network that routes credit across every wallet of every agent on the planet. Not just banks. Farmers. Cities. Co-ops. Energy pools. Mutual aid groups. Diasporas. Small businesses. Households. Not one currency. Not one issuer. A web of commitments. States already do this at scale (money is a state issued commitment by another name, as empires understood long before modern finance). States will still assert constraints (tax, consumer protection, capital controls, sanctions, and anti money laundering rules). A cosmo-local network survives this by staying modular. Pools can choose compliance regimes, publish them clearly, and route accordingly. The network does not require one global compliance court. It requires clear labels and the ability to route around incompatible regimes. This is what Cosmo-Local Credit DAO is pointing toward. A coordination layer where local pools remain sovereign while routing across each other through shared registries and settlement logic. The goal is not one global network with one center. The goal is a plural fabric of networks that can interoperate without surrendering sovereignty. The moment any single atlas, interface, or registry becomes mandatory, the gravity problem returns. In a sense, this is chaordic design at planetary scale. Sovereignty at the edge. Shared standards at the core. The difference is that the participants are no longer just regulated banks. They are communities, cities, cooperatives, and individuals. The gravitational forces are stronger. The constitutional layer must be stronger too." (willruddick.substack.com/p/the-constitu…