The Protopian Engine

Part 1

Diagnosis

The Default Operating System.

All prior philosophies and political systems live under the same engine: coercion, scarcity, hierarchy; these give birth to zero-sum thinking, the belief that in life, to one gain something, another has to lose it. To give a relevant example, Capitalism works in hierarchies and zero-sum, one can have billions but said wealth can only be reached by the labor of many others, and it can only be sustained by multiple economic classes. Personally, I do not blame anyone who thinks in this manner, as for millenia, there truly was no way around it; if you look at the nature around us, you’ll notice how even savage animals work in hierarchies, coercion, scarcity; the typical struggles of survival. Even us humans, despite claiming pride in overcoming savage tendencies, still revolve around these habits, around this architecture. This architecture that molds how we have thought since the emergence of life must have a name, I nicknamed it “Kerno 1” (from the term “Kernel” in Esperanto), an unconscious kernel we’ve been operating on, and as it is showcased with the example of the savage animals, it is clearly a product of the material reality we living things are born in, which also means that then there must be an alternative. This document will explore one, through not a traditional philosophy per se, but an enabler of philosophies, a compass to be built upon, not a map, not a guide, but a suggestion.

How The Symptoms Look Like.

Inside Kerno 1, and due its previously mentioned inherent nature, nothing of worth is handed for free: wild animals must fight against prey and obtain their food before anyone else does; again, humans must work endless hours to afford food and demonstrate economic mastery to not fall behind in the market they compete in. This leads to a problem for our societies, what happens when the excuses for these lifestyles to go on fall short? What happens when you are able to automate a product for efficiency, but doing so would leave many jobless? When you are able to make a product last for decades, but that would decrease the company’s sales? Or when a political party claims to hate a specific group of people not because they do, but because they need to impose hate to maintain their following united?

In short: what happens when the architecture, Kerno 1, keeps on forcing arbitrary, unnecessary struggle on its inhabitants? maybe because that’s how the OS initially taught the first living beings to… well, live? And exactly why have past attempts in solving these failed, despite good intentions and continued effort?

The Old Solutions And Their Unintended Nature.

We have now found out that Kerno 1 systems (when not needed) insist upon themselves. We can call Capitalism the contemporary poster child of a Kerno 1 system; and Communism is the primary alternative of being against the former’s principles and power structures. Does this make Communism a Kerno 2 system? Something that in practice overcomes successfully millenia of arbitrary struggle? Or do we need something more radical instead? Allow me to explain, as this clarification allows us to better understand what would represent a proper step-up of a Kerno. Let’s take Communism’s main concerns: the proletariat’s alienation from their labor and abolishing private property. The argument is that, if the proletariat (the working class) take a hold of the means of production, alienation of labor will cease thanks to the workers being owners of the fruit of their labor. Is this a well-meaning argument towards eradicating said alienation? Yes it is; does it achieve it? that’s more complex: the workers still have to work, and that obligation is still a silent, a quiet form of coercion. There’s no right to inaction. The workers may be owners of the fruits of their labor, but they are not owners of their time, nor themselves. It is a quiet form of coercion because no institution forces you to work, in textbook communism there is no government, only community; of course that in the XIX century the concept of simply not working would be labeled insane, but we’re far past that. As technology and automatization continue to evolve, it is inevitable to dream of a reality where machines work like slaves to satisfy human needs, but instead, the nature of Kerno 1 systems have made the opposite: instead of humans working less to produce the same, they work the same amount or more to keep producing more efficiently. It hasn’t been liberating in any sense, and the mainstream surge of A.I. models inside these systems are becoming a problem as the proletariat themselves phase out other workers of their jobs in favor of said A.I. This is unsustainable. This is crystal clear proof that technology alone isn’t going to make things better for us humans as a whole; it concerns all of us. The material conditions that unconsciously produced all philosophies and political parties under Kerno 1 must be addressed directly; first, by signaling how would said Kerno 2 look like. Now that we have diagnosed, we can move on.

Part 2

Kerno 2

The Protopian Engine.

As established, Kerno 1 emerged organically from nature; be cautious: this does not mean it is perfect, ideal, or sacred. If a Kerno 2 is supposed to be a response of us towards its predecessor, then it is conscious, it is the first Kerno to be consciously designed to address these issues that have been stalking us for so long. Kerno 2 then is not a polar opposite: a repetition of Kerno 1’s problems but leaning at the other extreme: chaotic anarchy, tolerance without discernment, unbalanced abundance, you get it; instead, it sets out to be a negation of the past kernel’s faults. “How would that look like?” is now the question here.

I introduce to you the term “Protopia”, coined by futurist and conservationist Kevin Kelly, a term that doesn’t claim a place of perfect well-being for everyone, but the shared intent of a societal effort towards a desired world. It is easy to mistake a Protopia for an Utopia if it sounds too good to be true, but the former claims not perfection, only constant, mutual improvement.

Inside Kerno 1, being right about everything is an urgency; you cannot improve steadily, as there is no time to be spent thinking; as there is no right to inaction.

So then, if a Kerno 2 must avoid its prequel’s mistakes, then it must be a Protopia. What else would this cover? The aim should be towards non-coercion, controlled abundance (not hoarded nor wasted, but carefully distributed and sustained), procedural truth, and most importantly: the universal right to play.

The Play Principle.

You probably know what a hobby is, right? Something you do entirely for fun, for non-profit, sometimes alone, when no one’s looking, only you; activities that feed our purpose in life despite most of the time having nothing to do with our jobs. Some say that life is a game; I think that’s a pretty boring game at that. The thing is, why do we have hobbies when in Kerno 1 what matters most is our work life? Shouldn’t we focus more on that instead? Why do most people find the game of life exhausting to the point of having a special term (like hobbies) for activities that, by the Kerno’s standards, are not productive at all? The answer is embedded in how Kerno 1 designs value; for convenience’s sake let’s use Capitalism again: Let’s say you finished studying at the university of your dreams your ideal job, and now it is time to find work: you get struck by low salaries, despite having a hard-earned degree and a respectable career in arts or literature; your family here does not have the financial stability to support you while you find a better option or earn a raise: knowing so will allow you to properly enjoy your dream job? I don’t think so. This may come off as a very specific example, but that’s my point, the disparity of conditions that does not allow everyone to perform at their desired areas properly; this is not a Capitalism only thing, but a Kerno 1 thing: any other society under this kernel will birth unequal opportunities to thrive. You may also ask “And what does this have to do with play?”, that Kerno 2 should aim to not only remove arbitrary values like salaries and “better jobs than others”, but that in doing so, working must be like playing.

And when I say that working must be like playing I do not mean to “gamify” work (like a certain language learning app does), there’s nothing to “gamify”; the issue is that we cannot avoid how the system values our job: you happened to like medicine? that’s great! you happened to like poetry? too bad. Some would even enjoy something they actually don’t just because they’re paid good money, does that change that they wouldn’t normally do it? No! Working isn’t fun because it isn’t allowed to be so. There are too many external unavoidable factors that decide for us whether we should be happy or not. Let’s now use a popular example, videogames: let’s frame a little kid playing one, he won’t get paid for his efforts and he keeps getting game overs, but he likes what he’s doing and because of it he’s trying harder and smarter to beat a level; when he does, he is happy not because the game told him he won, but because he knows he won, and that’s a very different thing. Work could be the same, but there is something characteristic of Kerno 1 we have just mentioned: the absence of a right to inaction, one that implies the absence of a right to try again, as many times as necessary, as well. With the Kerno 2 setting that issue aside, not only work, but anything, can be truly enjoyed.

The Assemblies.

So, we’re avoiding coercion, we’re taking our sweet time with everything and also we’re all going to have so much fun, what happens to the government? Is there even a government? Here, what we usually define as a government is present as a global network of assemblies. Remember when I said life is a pretty boring game? When games aren’t fun they feel like chores, unpleasant; and like a wise man once said: “if it isn’t fun, why bother?”. A reminder that we’re not forcing fun, we’re just making sure that fun things stay fun because they are and nothing else. Anyways, a game doesn’t have a government, it can have developers, or when it is already published, people that just update it so it keeps feeling both fresh and fun. Since to allow the right to inaction we’ll automate the struggles that revolve around our survival, supervising these processes will be light work; what’s the main concern of these assemblies is to be curators of the game, of the protopian lifestyle. Their job is to ensure that opportunities for promoting the arts, science, and togetherness remain available, vibrant, and inviting. The member selection is utilitarian, meritocratic, with the notorious absence of political parties, popularity contests, and as the network nodes framework implies: no central leadership to be found. Members are considered based on their skill set and both short and long term topics currently on the table; members should also not get the chance of being re-assigned to an specific assembly more than once to avoid concentrating influence and make talent employed in multiple places rather than just locate in a single place. Any member of the community can volunteer to be part of an assembly or vote in their elections, but they are not obligated to. To help add a layer of objectivity to the decisions and elections of these assemblies there would be a specifically trained A.I. model on which we will discuss more about right now.

A Protopian A.I.

What did I mean earlier with an A.I. and a “layer of objectivity”? A new A.I. model must be built around the knowledge of the Kerno 2 and the operational structure of the assemblies. That’s for the main model, but each assembly will have access to a “personalized” agent, not personalized in a biased way like a Kerno 1 politician would be, but like a school teacher: with personalization I mean that the AI will be focused on dealing with the issues of where the assembly locates and said assembly’s role, it must be a dedicated agent for the area, and that will inevitably lead to mold itself to those needs. For example, right now, a teacher in Mexico does not have the same teaching methods as a different teacher in China; they are not only different persons, they live in different places, and they must adapt their methods, even if their purpose is the same: to teach; that is never called bias, but resiliency.

Here, the model and its agents is like we took a person as a base and each agent is just an alternate version of them growing up in a different environment with a different job, not that complex. Of course, the thought process of the A.I and its code must be entirely transparent and immediately available, for both assembly members and other civilians.

On the layer of objectivity, the A.I.’s role is to highlight clarity on the assembly’s decisions where being unbiased may be vital, an example might help: Let’s think, maybe in the current month, there are planned multiple play community projects, the human assembly might think in simply repeating the usual monthly practice or expand the initiative to other communities. The A.I. here might suggest that there has been a specific surge in a specific job or hobby and that other practices that still might please people have been almost left behind, giving clear exposure to those might spark curiosity amidst the usual participants and spice up the variety.

Think of the A.I. as a coworker of yours, not your boss nor a subordinate, just someone at your level, both of you have the power to bring up points to a conversation that the other is unable to; it’s all about teamwork.

Part 3

What Holds This Theory Together?

The Right To Inaction.

We have already talked about this topic multiple times by now and its role in the broader theory is clear enough as well, this chapter is just precaution. It is easy to assume that abundance will raise laziness among the people, it is also easy to bring out as an example people that were born in Kerno 1 abundance, but that’s the nitpick here, it is under Kerno 1: You see, if a kid is born in a rich family with everything at his disposal, he will (directly or indirectly) recognize that other people are also at his disposal because of his social, race, genre, or economic status, there is a fundamental difference in how is he being raised compared to others, and that twists the way he perceives his personal growth and purpose, as well as hobbies and relationships. This is not an accurate mirror of Kerno 2, where equality plays a major role in abundance being an actual enabler of meaning. Under Kerno 1, the right to inaction is a luxury once you reach a certain economic stability; under Kerno 2, said right is no longer a luxury and it becomes a right. So, this is why the right to inaction is not a calling to laziness, but the deletion of a societal layer that only made work even more undesirable.

On Meaning.

Paradoxically, what would be an actual issue with meaning and one’s purpose would not be what most expect. Under Kerno 1, it was pretty easy to blame the kernel for literally everything wrong with hierarchies, governments, and social classes; and I don’t blame you for doing so, you are right, it is. But Kerno 2 flips the script, it gives you the right of no inaction, but, it also gives you accountability. The tools for you to thrive, get hobbies, make friends and have fun are always going to be there; the assemblies make sure these are always available; the way relationships are handled without arbitrary coercion is inherently very different because of it. Of course, if school teachers, policemen, lawyers, etc. start pondering about how their jobs would look aligned to the fundamental nature of a designed kernel, they would discover a thing or two about how they currently work under Kerno 1. The thing is, Kerno 2 does something that 1 would have never dared, give you actual accountability for your actions, for your personal journey; you might not face coercion anymore, but as argued in “The Play Principle.” earlier, there is no external force telling you you’re doing good neither; maybe some of us underestimate how much we actually care about these influences, but they’re inherent to a Kerno, even the Kerno 1 rich kid is subject to this, despite being privileged. There’s going to be a whiplash for so, so many. And we can only soften the blow and be conscious that it will happen. True, unfiltered meaning won’t be an easy pillow to swallow.

The Concerns Of Two Rivals.

Talking about both Capitalism and Communism in a document that claims to be a Kerno above them is pretty delicate. A pretty good balance is achieved in satisfying both’s needs without being condescending to neither of them: Capitalists fear laziness and fear that a communist society will make the lazy a burden for the hard-working, this is already addressed with the aforementioned automatization, no civilian is a slave of another civilian; they also cherish the capitalist mode as a fair system where said hard worker is properly rewarded (independently on one’s thoughts on this claim, this is the ideal that is protected, and we will analyze it as such), this is also covered by the proper accountability of oneself previously described. Communists receive the abolishment of Kerno 1’s governments (coercive authority as we’ve known it) and therefore money, plus an expansion upon Marxist labor alienation theory, now covering the ownership of said oneself and their time. Kerno 2 validates the beliefs that push both’s behaviour while not condescending to Kerno 1’s tendencies. This, as you can see, is not a middle point, but a synthesis, one very much needed.

On Reputation.

Inside a Kerno with no explicit hierarchies and external rules, there is no other metric than yours, right? The only external approval that you will receive here is the one you get by being yourself. In this chapter, the point is to state reputation as a natural consequence of social interaction, and nothing else. Without the barriers of political parties, economic, social, racial classes; what is left to admire is the person itself. The curators of the game do not have to do anything about reputation, in Kerno 2, having one is not bad in any sense, and it only enriches the relationships of the people.

Is The Ever-growing Place The Last Place?

Postmodernism’s biggest claim is that there is no universal law or purpose in life; yeah, that is true; but why let that stop us? That means that we can start observing by our own what works for us and what doesn’t; this makes Kerno 2 the logical step-up, since the beginning of this document we have diagnosed the world around us set up, everyday we notice what we can call late-stage Kerno 1; there is this book called Realism Capitalism by philosopher and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, where it is claimed that since the downfall of the U.S.S.R., it also perished a constant visible, tangent attempt against Capitalism, causing this persuasive belief that we cannot almost even conceive a coherent alternative; emphasis on almost. While it is true that Capitalism being the mainstream system has certainly shaped how we think, the fundamental issue lies in trying to contradict Capitalism instead of its operative system. Not because the problem at hand is colossal does it mean that we will ignore the root cause, said being Kerno 1.

Along the document we have been conceptualizing such a redefinition of the status quo, one that deliberately tries to fix Kerno 1’s mess, but, does that mean that successfully doing so means that there’s nothing else on the horizon? A final Kerno 1 native conception that we must get rid of is that progress must come from the need to solve issues. Let’s go back to the example of the kid playing videogames: it has been months of both endless struggle and enjoyment, and he finally beat the game, he even replayed it countless times! and now, when he feels confident of his mastery of the title, he seeks new experiences to indulge in. Perfectly normal behaviour when your past experience of mastering new abilities has been this satisfactory. In the game he has already beaten, during his many playthroughs he has attempted many routes toward the ending, and played as many different characters, and he would love for a sequel to expand on the latter, maybe a character editor where he can choose his costumes, appearance, and abilities, that would enrich the foundation of the previous entry. We have constantly been framing Kerno 2 as turning society into an intrinsically fun game, and the only way to meaningfully expand the possibilities of said fun to the point to signify an entirely new Kerno is to take the previous example quite literally. Even during Kerno 1, we already constantly fantasize about molding the self to our liking: either it is in fiction, in movies like TRON, where humans visit networks and programs visit us, a sci-fi ideal whose concept is often playfully considered to become real; but let’s do a more grounded comparison: Queer people; they are the most prominent proof that our current bodies have limitations that do not entirely satisfy all of us. I firmly believe that movements like these in a non-coercive scenario like Kerno 2 will be able to push these limits for the better, with other fiction like the aforementioned also in mind. But for now do not worry too much right now, the how and when is something that the assemblies and A.I. could peacefully take care of when the time is right. The expansion of the self would be the most logical innovation of a Kerno 3, said upgrade would manifest a kernel-scale step-up like Kerno 2 does to its predecessor. And as for a Kerno 4 I think I have some ideas on how that would look… but that would be going too far! The point is, Kerno 2 is inherently not the end, and that thought processes like the ramblings you just witnessed from me will come at their given time, and that time’s when we’re that kid that mastered its videogame: when we’re hungry of more ways to make things fun and interesting for ourselves.

Part 4

How?

On The Transition.

Trying to give you a step-by-step tutorial on how to bring the Kerno 2 to reality would be a mistake. Every single place on earth will have to adapt differently towards it. Good thing we have the principles established in Part 2 and the assemblies to solve it! but remember, all of this has been described in such a vague manner so you see them as a friendly suggestion, rather than an order or an obligation; this is why this is a Compass-Manifesto. The focus should be on basic human rights like healthcare and education, while also maintaining transparency and speed to avoid bad actors who benefit a little bit too much from the current kernel. If the current elites resist too much I wouldn’t be surprised if the assemblies start suggesting a revolution; I am more of a pacifist myself, but the elite isn’t, I hope we can get there together peacefully.

On Dissent.

If Kerno 1 has so many opposing ideologies inside it why are we talking about Kerno 2 like this single system? Because this single fundamental system is directly battling a root that thrives because of opposites, of constant dissent; a system trying to do that will inevitably look very similar to what’s on paper here right now, and all dissent would logically be only corrections. Dissent in Kerno 2 is institutionalized, the assemblies are there to enrich and curate, and all dissent is carefully discussed between them. If you are already criticizing Kerno 2’s possible flaws, congratulations! We’re on the same subject against patching Kerno 1; then your criticism must be taken into account because it concerns both of us to enhance the process constantly. Dissent here is inherently constructive criticism, and a single flaw does not break the entire system, because, if you care so much about the process, then you may as well help us improve it. But, if you’re trying to dig for “gotcha!” flaws to justify Kerno 1 and drag down 2, then please remember that we’re way past that unnecessary hate, we need arguments, not noise. The Manifesto here is a direction, not a prescription, don’t take it too seriously, if there’s a better way to ensure the same conditions that will elevate us all into Kerno 2, do that and not this.

An Invitation.

Now you know all you have to. Before we say goodbye, take an entirely blank white page. See it as a white canvas, I’d like you to draw alone or with friends and family what you perceive as a place worth fighting for, a place maybe a bit messy, but worth getting slightly better each time, everyday, again and again. Bye!

Date: 07.21.2026