The Entangled Civilisation Manifesto

We love this world too much to watch it lose its hard-won humanity

Nobody fully knows what is going on, perhaps least of all those who sound most certain. Complexity outran every single mind some time ago, including the minds that built the systems we live inside and the minds that govern them. We are no exception to this, thus everything we are writing comes from inside the same fog. What remains available to us is what we can see together, and the patience needed to maintain that shared vision.

We belong to a world that’s changing, whether we like it or not. And because we belong, we care, and thus, we start from grief. We grieve what is happening in front of us. Species are disappearing that will not return. Children grow up inside feeds built to hold them in place scrolling mindlessly and devoid of agency. Friendships run through notifications. People are reachable at every hour and feel stranded anyway. And we can see where this points. Nobody will ban human connection, meaning, love, or the slow work of building one’s character. They will simply stop being needed, stop being rewarded, and start costing more attention than most people have left. Some of this is already happening; how far it will go remains uncertain.

So we keep paying attention, and we build from what we see.

That is why we founded Quantum Civilisation in our home town of Timisoara, Romania, in 2017. Rooted in the conviction that technology and humanity must develop together, we research how civilisation can be reimagined, create the conditions for whole-person formation, and carry that work into public life, so that a world may emerge where each sentient being's flourishing is woven into the flourishing of all.

In 2026, under a new mission, vision and name, we relaunched as Entangled Civilisation as an institute for human and civilisational development. We are building a home, somewhere to stand together: a place where people can say honestly what troubles them , find out what is possible, and take up work worth doing.

You do not have to share our whole account of the world to work with us. You may come through concern, curiosity, hope or a particular problem you want to work on. What matters is a willingness to inquire honestly, respect one another’s boundaries and make our shared work answerable to those it affects.

The ending we are organised against

A civilisation can end badly in two ways. The first is loud and chaotic. Harvests fail in several regions in the same year. Cities run short of water, and the people who leave them arrive at borders that have already closed. Grids, ports and hospitals break faster than anyone can repair them. Somewhere along the way a weapon or a pathogen gets loose that its makers understood only well enough to build. People have been talking about this ending for as long as there have been stories, in floods and plagues and last battles, and for the past half century in climate models and disaster films. It is the ending our imagination was built to fear, and many good people spend their working lives trying to prevent it. We take it seriously, but it is not our main subject.

The second ending makes no noise, nothing breaks, no chaos ensues. Civilisation persists, comfortable, capable, efficient, while what made it worth belonging to is administered away. The most valuable hours of a person's day are sold before that person has decided how to spend them. The defaults of daily life — what we read, what we want, what is one tap away — are set by systems serving interests we cannot easily see or challenge.

We traded our sovereignty for the dream of a manufactured heaven on earth, seduced by the promise that absolute abundance would be ours at no cost if we simply relinquished everything to the powers that be. It was not all a lie, the ease is real and the tools genuinely help, but many of the costs became visible only after dependence had taken hold. Work, school, banking, love, intimacy,interhuman connection and a growing share of public services are now dependent on these services that are monopolized through the techno-industrial complex whose ownership falls into the hands of the few. The abilities it replaced weaken through disuse. Children grow up never having encountered them. We do not own any of this; we rent it, on terms we have no say in and that can change overnight. A person in that position has little to bargain with, and a people in that position has quietly handed over its sovereignty. All of this can happen while each tool remains useful and its makers believe they are helping.

There is no alarm for this ending, because the part of us that would sound the alarm is the part being lost. But it has not gone yet. We still notice when an evening disappears into a screen, and we still mind. As long as that is true, something can be done. We intend to say out loud what is happening, as plainly and as often as we can; to help people recover their attention and judgment; and to build organisations, projects, and events that reduce avoidable dependence and keep real alternatives alive.

We are not luddites. We are fully aware that any future worth having runs on advanced tools and technologies, which is why we want the people to have a say in how these tools are made. What matters is the direction toward which augmentation points: whether it expands the capacities of the many, whether the makers of these technologies answer for their effects, and whether everyone else keeps enough sovereignty to remain an active participant.

The size of what we are attempting

Everything above points at a change of paradigm, and we mean the word plainly: institutions, economies and technologies, culture, relational and family structures, values, and beliefs reconsidered from first principles, in the light of what beings need in order to live well. In the Euro-Western world, wee inherit wisdom, practices and traditions from different times and cultures, to which technology and globalization give us access in an often distorted shape, leading to a superficial appropriation of other cultures at best and overt psychological or spiritual abuse at worst. What we inherit deserves both serious study, and renewed testing under conditions its authors could not have anticipated. Most existing systems and practices have been made for a world with different resources, knowledge, possibilities, values, and needs, so they require careful reconsideration.

Our work is mostly with and for people. But a world in which human flourishing is only accessible to the privileged few, and sustained by outsourcing unfair labor to less privileged countries, genders, social classes, or races/ethnicities, or is fuelled by animal suffering and abuse in the meat and dairy industry, at the expense of forests, rivers and soils on which everything else depends on, contradicts its own premise by destroying the very foundations that make human flourishing possible. Across the living world, the flourishing of each being is woven into the flourishing of all. Interdependence does not mean every interest can be reconciled. Decisions involve conflicting needs, and losses that cannot be wished away.

We consider it more important than ever to have these costs made visible, those affected heard, and choices kept open to challenge. We recognize that hard trade-offs exist, however we want a world in which the many will not be drawn into hard trade-offs that lead to the betterment of the few. In our view, no sacrifice should go unrewarded, and all excess should return to the people, for what the few hold was never theirs alone; it is the yield of a beautifully choreographed dance that wouldn’t have existed without the whole group dancing. Some will contribute more, and deserve more; but the difference in desert has natural limits, for no human being can be as deserving as half of humanity.

The chain reaction

Some people call what is happening now the metacrisis. An awkward word, we admit , but what it represents is not hard to describe. Our problems have gotten tangled and crises are generating chain reactions on multiple levels. One crisis sets off the next, taking the money and attention away from the first before sufficient resources went into the initial crisis to resolve it, this keeps the chain reaction going.

Let's follow a single chain. Between 2006 and 2010, north-eastern Syria went through the worst drought since records began. The wheat failed. Wells were drilled deeper until they gave nothing. Most of the herds died or were sold for pennies on the dollar, because everyone was selling. Hundreds of thousands of people left the land their families had worked for generations and settled on the edges of cities that had no work, no housing and no plan for them. They had done nothing wrong. They had worked as their ancestors had, the sky had failed them, and nobody came to help. The anger that follows a loss like that is anger at the world, at the plain unfairness of it. But nobody can fight the world. It is too big to hit, so the anger looks for something it can reach. In the case of Syria the regime became the target for this anger. For decades the Syrian government had choked the country with corruption, secret police, and brutal repression, and then it cut subsidies in the middle of the drought and left the people to fend for themselves. The anger from the lost land mixed with the years of anger at a broken, cruel state, and it ended up being too much. In March 2011 people took to the streets, and the government answered with bullets. Within months the country was at war. More than half its people lost their homes. Millions crossed the borders, and in 2015 hundreds of thousands of them reached Europe, where their arrival became an election fight in one country after another. The fight around the migrant crisis swallowed over a decade of attention, and almost none of it went to drought. In 2025 the drought came back, the worst Syria had seen in decades.

A drought becomes a migration. The migration becomes an election fight. The fight uses up the attention and money the drought needed. Each crisis makes the next one harder to solve, and underneath all of them fewer people can say what they stand for. Every year more people feel it, as the ground moves under previously stable ordinary lives.

Looking closely at the chain again, we observe that only the first link was weather. Everything after it was a human response. A government cut subsidies in the middle of a drought. Cities made no room. A regime answered protest with bullets. Europe argued about migrants invading them and forgot the cause. At each link, people and institutions met a problem that required global coordination with local myopia. They protected their own, found someone to blame, and looked away. The reaction feeds on those reflexes. It slows only where people and institutions are capable of something better, where they can see how the problems connect, stay with what is hard, and act for more than their own corner. Nobody is born with that capacity and no institution has it by default. It has to be grown, in people and in institutions together.

What we inherit

Not every trap we live inside looks like an emergency. Some of the deepest ones look like common sense, because we inherited them long before we had the words to question them. For most of the twentieth century, medicine treated the male body as the human body. From 1977 to 1993, women of childbearing age were kept out of early drug trials in the United States, after thalidomide and DES had damaged unborn children. The reasoning was caution, and menstrual cycles were a variable difficult to control for; the effect was drugs tested on half the population and prescribed to all of it.

This is not a story about medicine alone. It shows a mechanism that runs underneath much of what we know. Every system of knowledge rests on a default: one kind of body, one set of needs, treated as what a human being is. Everyone who differs becomes an exception, with the exception being the one expected to adjust towards the norm. Once a default has been inherited for generations, woven into medicine, religion, and family and social habits, it stops looking like a choice and starts looking like nature.

Medicine is filled with examples of these sorts of absurdities.:The clitoris was mapped in 1844, dropped from the textbooks, and described properly again only in 1998. Endometriosis affects roughly one in ten women and takes seven to ten years to diagnose, partly because a woman’s pain is first assumed to be normal. Gay, lesbian, trans and intersex bodies were barely studied unless they could be filed under a disorder. The fight over women’s and queer rights is ongoing, yet is often perceived as polarising, its intensity sometimes alienating the very people who should hear its message.

What we can observe in our inheritance is that wherever one people or class held power over another, its own body, language, and way of knowing became the default, and the rest were filed as exceptions. Across the world, medical procedures and drugs were trialled on people with fewer rights and fewer options than those they were later sold to. Older traditions and ways of knowing were dismissed as superstition, sin, or peasant backwardness, and replaced with the dominant's own. There is no innocent culture here; every people has had its defaults and its exceptions, and most—ours included—have been on both sides of that line at different times. The defaults we inherited—some rooted in our own soil, others baked into the global tools and economies we now depend on—happen to be patriarchal, sexist, and heteronormative; racist, xenophobic, and in some areas colonialist; ableist, neurotypical, and ageist; extractivist and speciesist. They are the ones we live inside, and the ones we can do something about.

Patriarchal as they may be, the defaults we inherited hurt men, too. One of the lenses through which this can be seen shows how the logic that made the male body the reference body also decided how a man is allowed to be: not in pain, not in need, not vulnerable. Men die younger, experience more social isolation, ask for help less, and in high-income countries take their own lives three to four times as often as women. Suffering is not distributed by sex alone; class, place, health and plain luck cut across it, and we try to keep all of them in view.

So where do we find ourselves in 2026—living local lives inside a globalised world, with our uneven mix of hard-won freedoms, lingering fractures, and instant access to every culture and way of being? Feminists have spent a century arguing that more things count as questions of rights than anyone used to admit, and the things they pointed at have not gone away. Housework and care—including the invisible work of holding families together across migrations and economic shifts— still fall mostly on women and counted as worth zero in the official economy.. Coercion inside relationships still happens behind locked doors. At the same time, the conversation has opened up. There are more places where people examine the stories they inherited and try out other ways of living. Technology has made not only science but philosophy, psychology, self-help, online courses, spiritual practices and every kind of entertainment available to anyone with a phone and an internet connection. Sadly, much of that content is built to hold our attention, not to sharpen our judgment, and with AI it can sound right and be wrong. So the question we keep returning to is this: how do we grow, as people, as groups and as a civilisation, when more and more of how we think, relate and live happens inside environments designed by someone else? How do we make sense of so much without getting lost in the content, the habits and the often imported ideological bubbles our feeds amplify? Perhaps the only way out of this labyrinth is by first realising we are lost. Instead of running around guided by impulse or fear, following intertwined paths paved for us by people and algorithms who do not have our well-being in mind, with no more bird’s eye view that can hold the entirety of the map, what if we stop for a moment, breathe, and develop a strategy?

Part of what we propose is a place to stop and look at the labyrinth we have been running in, and to do it alongside others doing the same. The paths in the labyrinth are the defaults we inherited: what a body is supposed to be, what a man or a woman is supposed to want, what counts as a life well lived. The labyrinth’s walls are the habits, fears and desires that keep us on those paths, and the feeds and products built to keep us there, which reward the next step and punish any attempt to pause and reflect. Much of it serves purposes we did not choose and works against our wellbeing.

Seeing the labyrinth for what it is does not get us out. The feeds, the defaults, and the habits are all still there the next morning for the labyrinth is not a transient mood. The Labyrinth is the world we live in. What changes once we see the naked truth is how we move through the maze. Once we know what the walls are made of, we notice that some of them only hold because we never tested them — a norm nobody enforces, a habit we never chose. We then realize that some of those walls are permeable and we can walk through. Such awareness is precious. It is hard to gain, harder to keep, and often uncomfortable to carry, because the paths were laid deep in how we feel and who we think we are, and following them is easier than stopping to choose differently. Which is why nobody should have to do it alone.

It is not only what we know that got caught in this maze. It is also how we feel and what we identify with, and it reaches as deep and as personal as our intimate lives. In most places, including ours, sex education left out pleasure and consent, and gave us no words for relating in a world shaped by long histories of hardship and now by technology too. The older institutions did give us words, but of a different kind. Commitment, restraint and fidelity were words for keeping one arrangement in place — monogamous marriage as the standard — not for understanding what we feel, saying what we want, or hearing someone else’s no. When many of us came to see the limits of that arrangement and left it in search of more freedom in love and sex, we left its words behind too, and nothing had yet been built to replace them. People, including children, are still curious, and their phones give them instant access to anything. Into the space sex education left empty comes the easiest answer: online pornography, free, endless and built to maximise clicks.

It is not a neutral guide. Part of the industry depends on coercion, some of it on forced labour, and the platforms are designed to produce compulsive viewing. Instead of teaching us how to be close to another person, it offers a staged performance in place of the real thing. Much of what it sells is intimacy fused with violence and power, stripped of context, delivered through a medium built to keep us coming back. Many of us are aroused by it anyway, and identify with the ways it shaped us. Some who make it are exploited; some knowingly sell the hook; and the people making it are rarely protected by anyone. All of this can be true at once.

When use turns compulsive, shame or fear of judgment keeps it silent, eating at the ability to open up to another human being. Most people never practised saying what they want, noticing what they feel, building the capacity to stay with what another feels without losing oneself, or giving and receiving a “no”, or even a “yes”. Intimacy becomes performance, or avoidance, or a negotiation conducted in guesses and projections. Loneliness grows, and the anger with it. In several countries the political gap between young men and young women is the widest on record, with men drifting right and women left. The emancipation of women finally brought long-hidden, systemic abuse into the open—a reckoning that is still unfinished. Inside an attention economy that flattens every hard truth into a team sport, however, many young men grow up hearing their whole sex written off as the problem for wrongs they haven’t personally committed, and turn toward whoever promises them pride instead of guilt. In both cases the anger is real, and the energy goes into increasingly separate ideological bubbles, fuelling a war over who is wrong.

Pointing fingers won’t get us out of that war, especially since we all live inside arrangements we didn't design and many of us benefit from things that cost others. What might change it is the capacity to hold several things as true at once: that we were harmed and that we benefit, that a habit hurts us and that we are attached to it, that another person's pain does not erase our own. People who can do that don’t need to win the argument before they can look at the problem. They can stay in the room, and the attention that would have gone into the fight goes to what needs it. The silence lifts wherever someone asks what bodies actually do and how we relate, and stays in the room when uncomfortable truths come out: loss of desire, trauma, addiction, coercive or violent behaviour. That includes the room where physical intimacy is shared, where the capacity to stay with what is hard becomes deeply personal. So the question is a practical one: what would it take to build more of those rooms, and to increase our capacity to stay in them?

An initiation without elders

What we are describing is a need to come of age. Look at what we presented above: protecting only your own, finding someone to blame and looking away are the reflexes of a world that has not yet grown up. They have always been costly. For most of history, though, the damage stayed generally where it began, and the wider world could recover. That is no longer true. Environmental and political crises can reshape public life far beyond where they begin. A single polarising voice online reaches millions. Some of what we can now break — a climate, a shared sense of what is real — may not mend. Humanity has always been one, whether we liked it or not; now we are being forced to see it, and to learn to act like it.

Every culture knows this passage in the life of a person. A young person reaches the point where they can no longer live as a child, and the community carries them through. There are elders who went before, a ritual that gives the fear a shape, and adults waiting on the other side. That is an initiation. Now our whole civilisation is at the threshold where it can no longer live as a child, but there is no one waiting on the other side.. No civilisation before ours has had to grow up through what we are facing. This leaves us with no instructions we can follow. There is no playbook, no older world to learn from and no voice from above that will tell us what to do. We are the first in this new world, so we have to become our own elders, building what elders would have given us: the knowledge, the practices and the institutions that hold people through a change this large, so that no one has to meet it alone. This is the work we have to learn to do.

Somewhere to stand

Central and Eastern Europe, our home, learned something the hard way. For more than forty years, communist regimes across the region ran on a story almost nobody believed. People knew the official version was a lie. If they ever admitted what they thought, it was in a low voice at the kitchen table with their closest kin, and even there they could not always be sure who was listening. With nobody knowing how many others thought the same, the system held.

In 1989 that changed, country by country. Poland voted in June. Hungary opened its border over the summer and autumn. In November the Berlin Wall came down and Prague filled its squares. Romania came last, and it was the only one of these revolutions that turned violent. The Romanian revolution started in Timișoara, our home town and place where Entangled Civilisation is registered. People were shot in its streets, and the next day more of them came. Young people stood on the steps of the cathedral with candles, and when the shooting started they ran to the doors and found them shut by the very priests whose calling was to spend themselves for their people. No institution was on their side. The party, the army and the press belonged to the regime, and the church was sending telegrams of praise to the dictator. So the people of Timișoara became the place to stand for one another. Workers walked out of the factories and marched together into the centre. Neighbours who had whispered at separate kitchen tables for forty years found themselves screaming the same words and singing the same songs at the top of their lungs in the same square. Faced with a whole city whose hearts were beating in unison inspired by the desire for liberty and self-determination, the army pulled back. On December 20, Timișoara declared itself free, and within days the rest of the country followed.

We were not there, or not yet born. But we inherit the uncomfortable lesson that knowing privately that something is wrong changes nothing; a regime can survive decades of private disbelief. What changed things was people saying it in public, at the same time, with something underneath them that held — each other, a square, a crowd large enough that no one stood alone. Even then, nothing guaranteed it would work. It cost lives, and it could have failed.

That is why we think building somewhere to stand is a large part of what an institution is for. Many people today privately sense that something is wrong with how their attention, their time and their judgment are being taken from them. Most sense it alone. An institution can be a place where that private knowing becomes shared, spoken and acted on — where people examine their dependence, recover capacities, and work together on alternatives.

There is a second inheritance beside the first, and it belongs to far fewer people. While most kept their disbelief at the kitchen table, a small number across the region refused to live by the lie at all. They built unofficial institutions inside the official ones' shadow: seminars held in flats, libraries passed hand to hand, circles of friends who held each other to a standard high enough to function as a university. They did not emigrate and they did not wait. They stayed, and they lived as honestly as they could inside a state whose legitimacy they never accepted — and most paid for it. That is the tradition we see ourselves in. Naming it is easy, and does not make us part of it. We want to deserve it the way those people did: by building something that holds, and by staying honest while we do.

Why us, and why now

We are old enough to remember being outside, bored and unobserved, with no phone in anyone's pocket, and young enough to use these machines natively and, where it matters, to master them. We can understand our parents' world and the born-digital world, and translate between them. This matters greatly. The generations around us increasingly live in different information worlds: they get their news, their friendships and their sense of what is normal from different places, and often cannot see what the other sees. A great deal gets lost between them, in families, at work, in politics. Someone has to do the work of translating. We happen to stand in a good place to do it — not above anyone, just in between — and we want to do our part.

Our initial efforts began in 2017. After five years we paused. The work taught us how much depends on institutions as well as intentions, and where we still lacked experience. We have since worked inside organisations, trained, and developed our practice. We return with clearer direction, and a sharper sense of what we still have to learn.

The world we are working towards

A world that develops its technology and its humanity together, in which each sentient being's flourishing is woven into the flourishing of all.

In such a world, the institutions, technologies and economies we live inside protect the sovereignty of each person instead of harvesting it. You wake up and decide what your attention is for, and nothing has quietly decided it for you overnight. The tools you use make you more capable and leave your agency intact. Technical development serves life; greater capability alone is no reason to build or deploy something. By sovereignty we mean the real capacity to participate in shaping one’s life: to consent, refuse, question and leave. That capacity grows through relationships and institutions we can rely on. Our lives are entangled; the task is to make those relationships sustain freedom and care.

Agency and accountability belong together. Agency is the capacity to act and to shape what happens. Accountability is having to answer for what our actions do to others. Pulled apart, each goes wrong. Agency without accountability lets power change millions of lives overnight without explanation. Accountability without agency asks people to bear responsibility for conditions they cannot change — think of the parent told to manage a child's screen time against products designed by thousands of engineers to defeat exactly that. Whoever holds power should be visible, reachable and answerable to those affected. Whoever is asked to take responsibility should have the means to act. Trust then rests on something sturdier than goodwill.

Universal eudaimonic design is our guide to what we build. Eudaimonia is the word Aristotle used for a life going well as a whole — growth, connection, meaning — more than a string of pleasant moments. Universal means everyone affected counts: beyond the users and the owners, and beyond humanity. Design means it applies to the things we make on purpose: a law, a platform, a school, an educational program, a street. The questions are concrete. Does an arrangement make room for different ways of living well? Does it protect rights? Does it share its benefits fairly? Does it respect the living world it depends on? The people affected should have a say in that judgment. These questions call for deliberation; they cannot be collapsed into one score.

Such a world cannot be installed from above. It grows the way people grow: slowly, in relationship, and often at the moments we feel least sure of ourselves. It grows when someone risks being seen and is met with care; when a friendship survives an honest conversation; when an institution admits an error and changes. People, relationships and institutions shape one another, through whole-person formation and the conditions that sustain it, until a wiser way of living together becomes possible. Attention practice alone cannot give people power over the systems shaping their lives; institutional reform alone cannot give people the capacity to use freedom well. Holding both together is the principle underlying everything we do, from the most inward things a person can attend to, to the public structures that shape all our lives.

How we work

We research and test approaches to civilisational design, honouring inherited wisdom and holding our ideas to evidence and practice. By research we mean work that can withstand scientific scrutiny: clear questions, stated methods, sources anyone can check, and conclusions no stronger than the evidence allows. Some of it will go through peer review in academic journals; some will be field studies, evaluations of our own programmes, or essays that argue in public. Whatever the form, we publish how we reached our conclusions, not only what they are, so that others can check them and tell us where we are wrong. We turn what survives into maps, methods and curricula others can use. These are social technologies: designed arrangements that change how people act together, just as a tool does. Like any technology, they should be judged by the problem they solve, what they replace, what they do to the people who live with them, and whether they can be changed when they fail. We apply that test to our own work first.

We publish openly and convene people and organisations in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. Essays, workshops and small gatherings make room to examine proposals, and to disagree. We also want to try something less common: introducing organisations that are strong where others are weak, so they can work together instead of each building what the other already has. A retreat organisation may need help evaluating its work; a research team may need a practice partner; a policy group may have access to decision-makers but little capacity to develop or test what it brings them. Each could lend what the others lack, and none would have to spend years rebuilding what already exists down the road. We do not yet know whether this works; organisations are protective of their independence, and good matches may be harder to make than they look on paper. Costs are a factor, too. We will try it with willing partners and report what happens, including where it fails.

Our programmes create the conditions for whole-person development — cognitive, emotional, embodied, relational, communal and systemic. Much of it happens between people rather than inside them: in group work, in shared practice, in learning communities where participants are one another's teachers and mirrors - where people grow whole together. Some of it happens outdoors, because a person who has not stood in a forest for a year has lost touch with something no programme can replace. Participants bring knowledge as well as questions, and help shape what we learn. A civilisation is only as healthy as the relationships it is made of, including its relationship with the land it lives on.

We serve people seeking their own development in a destabilising time — sovereignty over attention, an honest relationship with desire, the capacity to stay clear and keep choosing while the ground moves — and those building AI, technology and infrastructure, the smaller audience whose decisions reach everyone else. We intend access to extend beyond those who can readily pay, through subsidised places, paired cohorts and fundraising for participation. Cost is only one barrier; time, language, disability and caring responsibilities also decide who can take part, and we will keep examining them.

Development is valuable to the person living it. A richer inner life, meaningful connection, embodied aliveness and a life less organised around accumulation justify themselves. People come alive through movement, music, singing, theatre, play and laughter as much as through stillness and contemplation, and we intend to offer a wide enough range of practices that each person can find the door that actually opens for them. Intimacy, desire, embodiment and relationships belong in the inquiry, because they shape how we experience freedom, exercise power and care for others. Participation in any particular practice remains freely chosen, with boundaries respected and conviction distinguished from evidence.

Through advocacy and art, we carry the work into public life. We will press, in public and directly to institutions, for technologies and institutions that respect sovereignty, answer for their effects and hold power to account . And we will say some of it through story, performance and installation, because art can reach people that argument cannot. A good work of art can say out loud what many people have felt alone, and let them discover they are not alone in feeling it.

We begin by embodying these principles in the institute itself, because what we build carries the limitations and the possibilities of the people building it. As trust and resources grow, we hope to develop residencies, shared houses and communities on land we care for, where the world this manifesto describes can be experienced rather than described. A pattern gets into the world one particular at a time, or not at all.

What we bring to those who build

On AI, we take both its promise and its risks seriously, and we distrust anyone who claims to know how it will turn out. It could help cure diseases, widen access to knowledge and free people from drudgery. It also carries risks that serious researchers do not dismiss: power concentrated in very few hands, systems misused or failing in ways their makers did not foresee, and at the far end, harms that could be severe and hard to reverse. Alongside these sits the quieter risk this manifesto is about. AI is the largest transfer of human capacity into machines that has ever happened, and it is moving faster than most institutions can adapt. Support for technical capability is well funded and built into daily work; support for the judgment needed to exercise it remains uneven and mainly secondary to technical delivery. That gap is where we want to work, alongside the initiatives already working in it.

An engineer can ship a feature used by a hundred million people on the same afternoon she avoids a conversation with a colleague she cannot face. Nothing in her training connected those two things. We think they are connected, and that the second can be developed as seriously as the first. Technical competence does not by itself establish emotional maturity, relational skill, or ethical judgment under pressure.

Between us we bring experience in formation, technology and institutions — in the ordinary working world rather than only in retreat centres. We want to hold developmental and technical conversations in the same room, without either becoming a translation of the other, and to learn with the people whose work is at stake. Before proposing an intervention, we ask whether the problem is understood, what its causes are, whether something should be reduced rather than added, and whether a useful approach already exists.

When something is built, its effects on attention, identity, relationships and shared life belong beside technical performance and material consequences in the assessment. Some effects arrive slowly and are easy to disown: a product that is hard to put down because it was built to be, a system that quietly removes the occasions for human connection. Those count. Uncertainty stays explicit and redesign stays possible. Responsible judgment can mean proceeding, changing direction, waiting or declining — including when the incentives reward another choice. The capacity to exercise that judgment under pressure is what we want to cultivate, and what we would work on with you.

We should be plain about what we do not yet know: how to reach you. Builders are busy, well-defended, and reasonably wary of advice from outside their work. So we start where we can. We will write openly about what we see, each of us from the ground we know best. We will invite people from inside technology to shape the first programmes before they run in 2027, and we are looking for partners who already have a foot in those rooms. Taking part will never amount to an ethical endorsement of a person, product or organisation. If this is you, we would like to hear from you.

Dignity and material security

We believe that human worth does not depend on productive output. We support a basic material floor that lets people live with dignity, whatever their value on the job market. Its form will take practical argument and institutional work, and we will do our part of both. The principle is settled, and it gives that work its direction.

We want companies and governments assessed by their contribution to the wellbeing of society, with wealth understood broadly: not only money, but the conditions that let people develop, keep good relationships, take a meaningful part in public life, and live in a healthy natural world alongside the other creatures who share it.

The more wealth and power someone holds, the more the lives of others depend on their decisions, and the more responsibility they carry for how those lives turn out. This is not only about billionaires and heads of state. It is about all of us with more than we need — more money, more education, more connections, more say. We include ourselves. Having more is not a fault. Using it to step away is.

And stepping away has become easy. Wealth can be hidden where no one will look, power exercised from behind enough layers that no one can reach it, and comfort bought in quantities that let a person stop noticing how others live. We don't think this makes anyone safer or happier in the end. A person walled off from the consequences of their choices is also walled off from much of what makes a life go well: being trusted, being needed, belonging somewhere. What we have was never made by us alone, and it is worth most when it stays in circulation — invested in people, in places, in work that others will inherit. We would rather build a culture in which those of us with more stay close to everyone else, and are glad to.

Paid work has bundled several things together — an income, but also an identity, a community, a sense of purpose and a rhythm to the day. Where that bundle comes apart, income alone leaves the other needs unhoused. Institutions that can carry them, without making dignity conditional on employment, membership or a developmental standard, are part of what this century requires. Care, rest and ordinary life have their place too.

We will also argue for something more specific. Many people could do serious work for the common good — caring, teaching, researching, building community, developing themselves so they can serve others better — but cannot, because the market does not pay for it. We think there should be other ways: fellowships, stipends and supported time, funded in part from the very large fortunes and profits that have built up at the top, so that capable people can give years to work that society needs. We know this is a big claim, and that many reasonable people will disagree. We will set out the full case — costs, who pays, how it would work, and what evidence supports it — and invite scrutiny, including from people who disagree.

Shared direction with room for disagreement

No person or tradition holds a complete account of our predicament. We are among the first generations with access to nearly every culture's inheritance at once, and the gift arrives entangled with losses: practices lifted out of the contexts that made them safe, traditions thinned into aesthetics, lineages interrupted before they could be handed on. We want to learn with respect for the people and lineages whose work we draw on, and to honour the sources of what we borrow.

We work from particular backgrounds — integral and participatory. We will say what they commit us to, learn from approaches that differ, and change our minds in public when we should. Every person is equal in dignity; not every claim is equally well supported. Examining an idea is not a judgment on the person holding it.

People can work with us on a specific project without accepting our whole account of the world. Disagreement with us is a legitimate contribution. Nobody should need to perform agreement, disclose more than they choose, or remain involved to keep our respect:This is a place that does not ask you to pretend. Shared work requires enough agreement to act and enough freedom to keep questioning.

Authority requires accountability

Insight and competence do not confer a right to govern others. Authority needs a defined scope, legitimate procedures and avenues for challenge. Founders are accountable under the same principles as everyone else. Where a concern involves a founder, that founder steps out of the process and an external party decides.

Responsibility carried brings more say over the work, within a defined scope. Each group decides its own matters democratically, within its agreed remit, and unresolved matters can reach independent review. Time and money alone must not determine whose contribution counts.

People affected by our work have standing whether or not they have ever contributed to it. Former participants, neighbours and people reporting harm must be able to raise concerns and receive a fair hearing.

Before programmes begin, we will establish an Ethical Charter with practical procedures for consent, concerns, independent review and conflicts of interest. We will protect privacy, examine unintended and adverse effects, and change what does not serve its purpose.

Here is what we hope our work does, stated so it can be checked. A person takes part and develops real capacities. Those capacities change a decision they actually make. The institution around them takes that change into how it works. And the people affected end up better off. Every link can fail: someone gains insight and has no authority to act on it; a team improves its process and is overridden by its incentives. We cannot yet measure every link, and we will not pretend to. What we can do now is ask the people involved, follow what changes over time, publish what we find — including where the chain breaks — and improve our methods as we learn. That is a promise about honesty before it is a promise about results. And development keeps its value in a person's own life whether or not it ever changes an institution.

Entangled

Everything in this document comes down to a lesson from our own past. Knowing privately that something is wrong changes nothing. A world can lose what makes it worth belonging to while every single person in it quietly minds. What changes things is people saying what they know, out loud, together, with something underneath them that holds. In Timișoara in 1989 it was a square where people started voicing their protest. For us it will be an institute, and whatever grows from it.

We chose the word entangled in its plain sense. Our lives are bound up with one another’s, whether we chose it or not. A drought in one country decides an election in another. A default set in a textbook reaches into a bedroom. What the few hold was made by the many. There is no way to untangle it, and no way out alone. There is only the question of whether the ties that bind us will sustain freedom and care, or extract them as spoils for the few. That answer will depend on the work.

So here is the invitation. If you have noticed what is being taken from you and are tired of noticing alone, come stand with us. Come to a gathering and argue. Bring a project, a practice, an organisation that could use what we are building. Fund a place for someone who could not otherwise afford one. Write with us. Or tell us, precisely, where we are wrong — that too is a way of standing together.

We love this world too much to watch it lose its hard-won humanity. We cannot untangle ourselves from it, and we would not want to. Here is somewhere to stand. Come stand with us.

First published 22 October 2026. Written by:

Victor Jivanescu, Ramona Todor & Andrei Nutas

Annex

A word or two about the name

The hydrogen in the water we drink dates from the first minutes of the universe. The carbon in our cells was fused inside a star. The iron in our blood and the silicon in the chip that carried this text to you were made in stars that exploded and scattered them. All ordinary matter, living or not, is assembled from the same few kinds of stuff. Quantum physics is our most precise account of what that substance is and how it behaves, and our name comes from one of its most intriguing findings.

To begin with there is no special material. A brain, a tree and a processor are built from the same few kinds of particles, arranged differently.

Pragmatic naturalism, one of the traditions we draw on, holds that there is one world and nothing outside it. We call that world nature. Nature entails everything that exists, the world that made us and of which we remain part. What we think, value and build belongs to it too, since we do. The non-dual traditions agree that the world is one. Some describe it in the language of awareness, as much of modern science describes it in the language of matter. We think the choice is a false dichotomy and thus refuse to make it. The line between mind and matter is drawn within nature, so neither word can claim to name the whole, and much of the dispute between them may turn out to be a choice of vocabulary. That is the sense in which we call nature non-dual. For the same reason it is wider than the subject matter of the natural sciences. If nature were only what they study, every other inquiry would be studying something outside of nature, and by definition nothing is outside of nature. Science and contemplation are both ways of investigating nature, and we put their findings to the same test: whether they hold up in practice.

Look closer at the material from which everything emerges, and it turns out to be activity rather than static stuff. We picture matter as tiny solid grains, but quantum physics found fields. A field is spread through all of space, like the electromagnetic field that carries light, and it can only be excited in whole units. One unit is a quantum, and that is what a particle is. Process philosophy sees the whole world this way. What exists is events and relations, and a thing is a pattern among them that holds steady for a while, as a flame keeps its shape while the gas passing through it changes. Some schools of Buddhist philosophy reached a similar view by argument and contemplation. The Madhyamaka school asks what makes anything one thing, and answers that nothing is a thing by itself. A river depends on rain and terrain, it is made of parts that are not rivers, and where it begins and ends is a line we draw. Take those away and no river is left over. The river is no less real for that, and you can still drown in it. Neither of these arguments depends on physics. Each was made about things of ordinary size, a flame or a river, and physics adds that particles fit the same description. We take this as our working lens: not a final claim about what everything ultimately is, but the best description we have found of how things behave, and one we keep open to testing

Nor does the material in fully separate pieces—and here lies the root of our name. Two particles that have interacted can become entangled, and physics can then describe the pair completely while it cannot describe either one completely by itself. Picture coins struck in pairs, with one coin of each pair sent to Lisbon and the other to Tokyo. Each coin is tossed once. In Lisbon the results look random, heads and tails in no order, and in Tokyo they look just as random. Only when the two lists are laid side by side does a pattern appear, because whenever the Lisbon coin came up heads its partner in Tokyo came up tails. Experiments in which each city can choose between several ways of tossing have ruled out the simple explanation , that each coin was secretly fixed as heads or tails when it was struck, like a left and a right glove packed into two boxes. On the standard reading, before the toss there is a fact about the pair, which is that the two will land opposite ways, and no fact yet about either coin. This is among the best-tested results in science, and its limits are just as well established. It cannot send a message. Each city sees only a random run of heads and tails, and the pattern exists only in the comparison. This pairing is also easily lost. An entangled particle that strikes an air molecule or absorbs stray light becomes entangled with that as well, and the original pairing is spread too thin to detect, which is why laboratories isolate their particles in vacuum and extreme cold. And it does not link minds. A brain is warm, wet and in constant contact with its surroundings, no experiment has found entanglement between two people, and if it were there it still could not carry a thought. Quantum physics does not prove the relational view of process philosophy and Madhyamaka. What it does is remove the scientific backing the old picture of self-contained parts once had.

Yet if everything is woven from the same few particles, something still has to explain why a stone is not a brain. What the material becomes depends on how it is arranged. Carbon confirms this answer most elegantly. Stack its atoms in flat sheets and you get graphite, which is soft and black and leaves a mark on paper. Lock the same atoms into a rigid lattice and you get diamond, which is transparent and the hardest natural material known. Chain them with a few other elements and you get the molecules every living cell is built from. No single carbon atom is soft or hard, and none is alive. Those properties belong to the arrangement. The same holds further up. Atoms that are not alive make a cell that is, and neurons that do not think make a brain that does. No new ingredient enters at any step, and yet at every step there are things to say that could not be said about the parts. Take the electrical switch. It does one thing, which is to let current through or stop it. Nothing about a single switch hints at arithmetics, let alone language. Yet billions of them, arranged correctly, will add numbers, play chess, translate a letter and hold a conversation. Each of those abilities belongs to the arrangement and cannot be found in any individual switch. In principle all of it follows from the switches. In practice the engineers who build a large AI model can inspect every part of it and still cannot say what it will do by reading the parts. They have to run it and watch. Chemistry and biology establish this for diamonds and cells. Pragmatic naturalism holds that it is equally true of mind, meaning and value. They are made of nothing beyond nature, they are as real as hardness is, and each has to be studied in its own terms. The fundamental take away here is that nobody learns what a promise is by studying atoms yet promises are manifest through atoms.

This is where the contemplative traditions come in. If the mind is to be studied in its own terms, its first-person character must be taken seriously. Contemplative traditions have investigated experience for more than two thousand years through disciplined practices of attention and inquiry. Dzogchen, a Tibetan contemplative tradition, emphasises direct recognition of the nature of awareness. Practitioners report that no observer can be found standing apart from what is observed, while experience remains clear and vivid. Nondual tantric traditions, Buddhist and Shaivite, extend contemplative inquiry into the body, strong emotion and everyday activity. Their metaphysical interpretations differ, but their reports converge on the possibility of experience without a felt separation between observer and observed. We approach these reports in a pragmatist spirit: as evidence to be examined, with attention to the methods that produce them and the interpretations they invite. They concern experience and are open to investigation through practice and, in some respects, through cognitive science. They do not settle metaphysical questions, and their credibility does not depend on quantum physics.

So when we call nature non-dual, a word that means "not two", we mean two things. As philosophy, we mean that the world is not divided into mind and matter, nor into self-contained things. As a report about experience, we mean that the line between an inner observer and an outer world is drawn by the mind, and that trained attention can watch it being drawn. We do not mean that everything is one, that consciousness creates reality, that minds are entangled, or that physics has confirmed a spiritual teaching. Some of these may one day turn out to be true. None is supported by the evidence we have now, so we neither claim them nor rule them out, and we leave them open.

Pragmatism also tells us how firmly to hold onto our beliefs, and how to revise them as knowledge evolves. Our philosophy is grounded in our reading of what those findings mean, and a reading can be wrong. The contemplative reports are evidence about experience and nothing more. Careful experimentation remains our most reliable way of finding out what is the case, but it cannot settle on its own what is worth doing. Claims we make about how to live remain hypotheses. They can be right or wrong, and they have to be tested in lives and institutions over generations.

That is why the second word of our name matters as much as the first. A civilisation is one more way that nature is organised, out of people, tools and habits, and how it is organised shapes what the people in it can become. AI is already part of that organisation and quantum technology may soon be. We want the tools and the people who live with them to mature together.