There is a world behind the world.
You feel it when the plan falls apart—not from incompetence, but from irrelevance. When the map no longer matches the terrain. When the protocol you so carefully built begins to collapse under the shifting weight of history.
That is the domain of the Ekumen Exchange.
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Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, the Ekumen Exchange is not a conference, nor a commission. It is a peer-to-peer ritual of inter-world communication, modeled after the fictional ansible-linked confederation of civilizations that maintained contact not through command and control, but through shared meaning in the face of radical difference and vast distances.
We live now in a similar condition—only our distances are not physical but epistemic. Between disciplines. Between generations. Between institutions. Between stories of what this moment even is.
This is the Great Weirding, as Venkat Rao calls it. A time when the world no longer behaves according to the “normal” rules of cause and effect. When trends don’t trend. When predictions fall flat. When systems optimized for efficiency begin to crack—not because they were poorly made, but because they were designed for a world that no longer exists.
The Ekumen Exchange is our answer to that world.
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It is a protocol for sensemaking.
A gathering of stewards—not experts, not strategists, not startup saviors. But public sector wayfinders. Civic artists. Technologists and water utility leaders. People at the edges, doing the hard work of knowing not-knowing. Of moving through uncertainty not with a blueprint, but a feel for the wind.
We meet not to plan the future, but to wrestle with it. To share scars, not slides. To surface detectable signals of movement in a world where most maps fail. It is not about consensus. It is about contact.
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There are already pilot murmurs underway—conversations with water data leaders and civic protocolists. Experiments in legislative sabbaticals, in decentralized civic onboarding, in climate resilience that looks more like mutual aid than master plans. Some of this threads into the CA Water Data Summit. Others weave through the Refugia and Forge protocols. The point is not to scale. The point is to see each other across the abyss.
We don’t do monthly meetings or rigid schedules. The Exchange flows more like an underground river—emerging when conditions are right. Connecting far-flung nodes who’ve learned the hard way that uncertainty is not the exception, but the terrain.
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So if you find yourself muttering “none of this makes sense,” not with despair but with the strange thrill of an explorer entering the jungle with no trail behind them—that might be your invitation.
To step into the Ekumen.
To begin, again, not with a plan, but with a question.
Endnote: On the Great Weirding
The Great Weirding is a term coined by Venkatesh Rao to describe a post-2016 era in which established models of prediction, causality, and institutional authority break down. It marks the collapse of “legibility”—where even experts no longer agree on what’s happening, let alone what to do. Traditional notions of progress and planning fail under conditions of “deep uncertainty,” not because humans have lost their touch, but because the complexity and speed of global feedback loops now exceed our cognitive and institutional grasp. Rather than doubling down on brittle efficiency, Rao argues for new forms of resilient, improvisational, and weird-friendly thinking. You can read more in his essays like “The Internet of Beefs,” “The Calculus of Grit,” and the foundational Breaking Smart series. Or of course the aptly titled "Great Weirding" series on his Contraptions newsletter.
Seeding the Second Foundation Series
Do you follow Ben Hunt or his Epsilon Theory blog? I find a lot of similar trends between what you and he are writing, especially in regards to Second foundation ideas and principles.
Epistemic indeed