I'm in Northern Spain traveling with my family after a wedding in Portugal. So the sci fi vision of a Mondragon Accord feels more real.

I carry a recurring daydream, a vision that haunts me like a gentle ghost at the edge of waking life. It’s the dream of making the Mondragón Accord real—not as fiction, but as a compass and a constitution for our shared planetary future.

In the real world, Mondragón is a cooperative federation founded in the Basque Country. A living experiment in economic democracy, Mondragón is owned by its workers. It comprises everything from factories to a bank, a university, and a grocery store chain—all collectively governed. In the ashes of war and under the shadow of dictatorship, it grew into one of the most remarkable post-capitalist structures to actually function at scale.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and other works like The Ministry for the Future, the Mondragón Accord becomes something more mythic. It is invoked as a protocol for organizing collective life at planetary scale. Not just a single institution but a meta-protocol—a generator of governance itself. A means for birthing the kinds of agreements, institutions, and rituals that can hold the weight of ecological reality and human dignity together.

It is this meta-protocol I dream of. Not just a new order, but a way of ordering—a way of midwifing coherence from chaos.

California, too, is a recurring character in this dream. The state that has always been a stage for the world to rehearse its future. The home of Jerry Brown, whose planetary realism and wild pragmatism dared to bridge the sacred and the systemic. He once warned that “you can’t be a progressive unless you’re a realist.” He studied Zen and funded satellites. He knew that dreams need spreadsheets.

That’s the spirit we need now.

Across California, I see threads waiting to be woven into this larger tapestry. The Climate Adaptation Master Plan at Met. The California Data Collaborative’s quiet revolution in infrastructure transparency. The Patchwork Protocols that emerged at Edge and the Ember League forming in our hearts. These are all glimmers of the Second Foundation—soft protocols for a harder age.

The Mondragón Accord is a name for the next step. It names the need for a shared grammar of planetary governance. Not a universal language, but a protocol for translation, iteration, and durable trust. A way to accelerate order—to generate and stabilize the agreements we’ll need to survive, and maybe even thrive, together on this pale blue dot.

So this is my invitation: Let us prototype the Accord, here and now, in the crucible of the real. Not as abstraction but as living protocol. Let's iterate together what planetary realism feels like. What trust at scale tastes like. What Mondragón might mean when spoken in a California tongue, tempered by fire and drought and dream.

The Second Foundation is not a place.
It is a rhythm. A rhyme. A riddle of what might be.
Let’s learn to play the game.

Dreaming the Mondragón Accord into Being: A Dispatch from the Second Foundation