Publications

Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska have written a bestseller that poses an important question and gives the wrong answer. The Technological Republic asks how democratic societies should organize AI infrastructure. Bus Commons proposes the other answer: commons-governed, polycentric, and built to outlast any single vendor. This paper is a sketch of what that other answer is, and why it is the more durable democratic architecture.

The Other Answer moves fast through ideas with long histories. This addendum slows down and walks through each concept for readers who haven't encountered the sources before. Organized in three tiers — general reader, civic technologist, and policy reader — it covers the commons, Ostrom's polycentric governance, subsidiarity, Illich's convivial tools, free software licensing, local-first software, Estonia's X-Road, and the relicensing wave of 2018–2025.

A companion expanded with three new reader tiers for Global South civic institutions, European publics, and non-aligned readers. Seventeen concepts — from multipolarity and tianxia to the Digital Silk Road and the Karp/Schmidt frame — each explored through up to six lenses, making explicit how the same argument reads differently from Lagos, Berlin, Jakarta, or anywhere that rejects the bloc-choosing frame entirely.

Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska have written a serious book, and it deserves a serious response. This seven-part essay engages The Technological Republic on its own terms: what the diagnosis gets right, where the argument slides from "Silicon Valley should reconnect with society" to "concentrated state-aligned firms should be that connection," what the historical record actually shows about computing's foundational vision, what the live empirical record shows about the architectural model the book defends, the China question reframed, the moral question taken seriously, and what a reconstruction would look like.

Law is the last major information system without an API. Every statute, regulation, and municipal ordinance exists as natural-language text in formats designed for human lawyers — and every organization that needs to be compliant builds its own interpretation layer, bespoke, fragile, and invisible to the system it interprets. This paper argues for building law as versioned, machine-readable public infrastructure, drawing on production deployments in five countries, Massachusetts' existing funding mechanisms, and a PBC governance model that keeps the interpretation layer open rather than proprietary.

Formal submission to NIST Docket NIST-2025-0035 (Federal Register Vol. 91, No. 5, January 8, 2026), submitted March 9, 2026. Proposes Intrinsic Access Control (InAC) and the Enforcement Location Principle (ELP) as candidate vocabulary for federal AI agent security guidance. Includes formal definitions, analytical findings, and actionable recommendations. A full Technical Companion accompanies this submission.

The extended version of the NIST/CAISI submission. Contains complete formal proofs, extended independence arguments, detailed attack payload analysis, governance maturity assessment rubrics, a federal agency deployment checklist, a worked deployment example, and a full glossary. Appendices A through H. References of the form "(Technical Companion, Section X)" in the main submission point to this document.

There is a Digital Underground record from 1990 called Doowutchyalike. On the surface, a party song — read carefully, a small treatise on designing a structure that holds many people at once without flattening any of them. The Bus Commons engagement philosophy with a better hook.

Humans have been building infrastructure for thinking together for a long time. What is happening now, mostly invisibly, is the construction of the libraries that will let AI capability become the kind of accumulating civilizational asset that human writing has been. One operator's account of the pattern, the practice, and what it makes possible.

Eric Idle wrote a song in 1979 for the closing scene of Monty Python's Life of Brian — a mass crucifixion. One of the condemned men cheerfully begins to whistle. The song has become one of the most performed pieces of popular music in English. Most people who know it do not know the setting. Read with the setting intact, it is not cheerful advice. It is wisdom literature, and it works on humans, on AI agents, and on the substrate that bridges them.

Bell Labs succeeded not because it hired geniuses but because it designed an institution that made genius productive. Geniuses are not reproducible; institutions are. This paper draws on Jon Gertner's structural reading of Bell Labs to ask what a Public Benefit Corporation has to do differently — and honestly confronts what the PBC model provides (a mission pillar legally bound to public benefit) and what it does not (the economic engine that buys time for fifteen-year problems).

Before this is anything else, it is a love letter to Matt Groening. Homer Simpson is many things, but for our purposes he is something specific: a man who asks questions in good faith, with no shame at all. This essay uses that shape — the enthusiastic question meeting a system that fails to answer it seriously — to argue for infrastructure that takes dumb questions seriously. Bus Commons builds the Homer Simpson button: you press it, you ask the question you were slightly embarrassed to ask, and the system treats it as if you had handed it to a research team.

A bookshelf, a bus called Furthur, and how a counterculture koan became a protocol.

How Jimi Hendrix became a design principle.

How a conspiracy novel predicted LLM sycophancy fifty years early.

Bootsy Collins, Sir Nose, and why the bus is a lie detector.

What butterflies, spiders, and enzymes teach us about test data.

Cloud as a concept hasn't failed. Cloud as an industry has been captured by extraction machines pretending to be utilities.

The internal record of decision for the company name and motto, published in full. Why Bus Commons is named for a Latin case ending that escaped into English; how omnibus reads as dative and ablative at once — for all, by all; what the commons morpheme actually obligates; and the adoption of the motto OMNIBUS COMMUNIBUS, "all things in common," with its three readings recorded. Includes the candidates considered and the grammatical appendix.