Architecting Reality

11-01-2025

The best way to predict the future is to build it

A handful of engineers can now build attention algorithms that shape political and cultural discourse more effectively than any government. A team of two can create economic systems where millions transact daily and generate millions of dollars of profit per day less than one year after launch. A single engineer can rug model weights and cause people to commit suicide.

A small number of people don’t just participate in the world, they construct the rules the rest of us have to live inside. This is world building.

In a recent talk, Bruno Macaes succinctly enumerates the world building meta-game:

“There’s no greater power in the world than to build the landscape or the system within which others have to operate…A superpower encodes the game, a normal power plays the game.”

The distinction is not left/right or establishment/anti-establishment. It’s about world builders and world players. World builders and players used to be part of government-controlled institutions and organizations, but this is no longer true.

Macaes accurately notices that the stratification between players and builders is increasingly dominated by teams developing powerful technologies without explicit government control. He is able to parlay his knowledge to read and predict cultural signals. In a 2020 piece, he draws a sharp East–West contrast rooted in linguistic and epistemic norms:

“‘Do you know why the Chinese are so naturally good at deep learning? Because the black box has been part of Chinese society and Chinese culture since the very beginning. Zen meditation, yes, but not only. Chinese medicine. There is an input, some herb or infusion. You have no idea how it works, but it does. All you can do to get a different result is enter a different input.’”

Macaes’s framework, while provocative, reads like an oversimplified Grand Unified Theory that assumes a starting point and ending point, dismissing the middle as irrelevant path-dependency. This isn’t a unique indictment of Macaes; rather, it’s a more general academic and journalistic critique of caring about the messiness of reality. Traditional geopolitics operated through legible channels via sovereign states, formal treaties, and clear hierarchies. The new paradigm operates through institutional bypass and digital leverage, which remain opaque without deep immersion in frontier digital culture.

The shift from world player to builder isn’t new. History is filled with individuals who demonstrated competence, transcended their initial roles, and reshaped systems. What is unprecedented is the velocity and scale of this transformation.

The long traditions about spending your entire life under tutelage to gain social and financial capital, then using that capital to reshape the rules have been compressed to a fraction of a year. Now, one can reshape the rules and receive downstream social and financial capital as a side effect within months. People are no longer gaining power to change the rules, they are changing the rules to gain power.

I’ve been thinking more about the central theme of this blog. If you were to ask me yesterday, I would have spewed some ambiguous platitudes about applied philosophy, modern culture, and rationalism.

If I were to describe this blog today, I would describe the blog with different ambiguous platitudes such as examining the market structure of world players and world builders in a digital-first reality.

The irony is not lost on me. Blogging itself is almost perfectly anti-correlated with world-building success. The most productive builders are too busy architecting reality to write about it, even pseudonymously. The career advice of posting more and building your brand only applies to short-form posts, not full-time blogs. Yet here I am, choosing the slowest, least viral medium in our attention economy.

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