The Power of Collaborative Capital
Hope is not naivety. It's the more radical position, and the beginning of the case for building the alternative.
Something has been concentrating for a long time, and it is starting to move faster.
Capital, certainly, but underneath it something less countable: the ability to decide what gets built, who owns it, and whose knowledge, trust, and labour even register as real. The economy that runs on counting only money has always had this problem.
What’s changed is the speed at which the same forces now concentrating capital are learning to concentrate intelligence too, and the two together compound in a direction that, for almost everybody, asked directly, would say they don’t want.
This is not a moment for pretending that isn’t happening. It is also not a moment for despair about it, which is its own kind of surrender, dressed up as clear-eyedness.
I’m not interested in adding another voice to the despair.
Those of you who know me will know roughly how I work, and the sort of things I’ve spent my working life building, backing, structuring, and, more than once, getting wrong on the way to getting right. I’ll tell that story properly in tomorrow’s post.
What matters here is where it has all led: for a while now I’ve been distilling everything I’ve learned about how value really gets made, and who ends up owning it, into a single idea. I’ve started calling it Collaborative Capital.
It is, at its heart, a more hopeful account of how an economy could work, and a more demanding one, because it asks to be built rather than simply believed.
That’s the whole argument this series is going to make, stated as plainly as it can be before the case for it: hope is not naivety, and building the alternative is more radical, harder, and more possible, than continuing only to describe what’s wrong with the one we have.
What I’m going to do, one week at a time
So here is what I’m going to do, over the coming weeks, one piece at a time.
First, the diagnosis, held deliberately short and honest: how the default operating system of capital actually works, why it concentrates, and why AI is about to make it concentrate faster.
Then the heart of it: a different way of counting what creates value, taken slowly, one form of capital at a time, because it’s the part most worth getting right. Then the question of where something built on trust between strangers can actually stand, and why I think a small country at the bottom of the world is unusually suited to hold it. Then an honest reckoning of how large the opportunity really is.
And then, once the argument is on the table, I’m going to show you something. We have written a story, positive rather than fearful, about what this looks like lived through.
After that, the argument stops being an argument: I’ll tell you about the first few solutions we’re actually launching, and then I’ll open the door to everyone who wants to help build the rest.
What I’m asking of you
I’m not asking you to agree with all of this, or any particular part of it, to keep reading. I’m asking only for the possibility that the world’s current way of counting what matters is not, in fact, the only one available. If that possibility is worth entertaining, so is everything that follows.
Tomorrow, before the argument goes any further: who is making this case, and what a Welshman in Auckland thinks he’s doing making it.
If you had a magic wand ✨
There’s a question I ask in almost every meeting: if you had a magic wand, and there were three things you needed right now, what would they be? It gets to where someone actually is faster than anything else I know.
So I’m going to answer it myself, in public, at the end of every piece in this series. Mine, to begin:
Ten readers who think the premise is wrong, and will tell me exactly why.
Introductions to people building hopeful, buildable alternatives, not just sharper critiques of what’s broken.
A better answer than the one I’ve got to “isn’t hope just naivety?”
Now you. What are your three?
Send me a message with them, and tell me if there’s anything I can help with. I read every reply, and I answer.