The last few years, I’ve felt a resurgence of my identity as a tech builder & entrepreneur. I've loved getting back into creating, envisioning what we can build with technology, and rediscovering the flow of just building shit. But the nature of building itself is changing rapidly. As I explored in a previous post, Building with Words, AI is fundamentally altering the process.
This last year at ATLAS gave me a fantastic opportunity to dive deep – into building, into a community of builders, and into this changing landscape. AI allows us to iterate at an incredible pace. We can prototype ideas in minutes compared to weeks, enabling a much more rapid and generative dialogue around understanding what it is we're actually trying to create. This shift lowers the barrier to entry and changes the dynamics of creation.
The biggest value is increasingly in understanding what needs to be built. Because prototypes are so easy to generate, development and design become much more interdependent. Developers can participate more directly in the design process, using words to explore visual ideas and rapidly refine concepts based on tangible outputs. Designers with a clear vision can leverage AI to bring it to life faster than ever. Whether we've focused on breadth or depth in our building skills, AI empowers us to be more effective.
Beyond Innovation for Innovators: What Are We Building For?
So, with these powerful new capabilities, what should we be building? And why?
It seems clear that a new wave of technology is needed – one that deeply prioritizes our agency and our connectedness. We need tools that bring our focus back to where we actually are, strengthening our immediate connections with family, neighborhoods and our local community, while also acknowledging our shared home on this earth. We need to support the unique tapestry of cultures while discovering the common threads that can sustain us all.
But does our existing technological infrastructure, with its massive platforms and entrenched protocols, effectively support this vision? Or is it, in some ways, holding us back? Why haven't we seen more innovation focused on these deeper human needs, despite the constant buzz around disruption?
I suspect part of the issue lies in the context from which much of today's dominant tech emerges. Innovation hubs like the San Francisco Bay Area, which understandably value innovation highly, often produce technology geared towards helping innovators innovate more effectively. While valuable, this "hyper-innovation" focus can sometimes overshadow the development of solutions for the everyday challenges faced by diverse communities. The result can be a technology landscape that excels at accelerating itself but is less adept at fostering widespread, grounded well-being.
Furthermore, there's a tendency in tech culture – prevalent far beyond SF – to drift from solving real problems towards building tech primarily to get rich. When control and profit become the main drivers, it shapes what gets built and how it's designed to scale, often favoring generalized, top-down solutions.
The Cosmo-Local Opportunity: Global Knowledge, Local Action
What if we could harness the new efficiencies of AI to pursue a different path? This is where the concept of Cosmo-Localism becomes incredibly relevant. As explored by thinkers like
in his writing on the Cosmo-Local Plan, the idea is simple yet powerful: share knowledge, designs, and best practices globally ('cosmo'), but adapt and implement solutions tailored to the unique context and needs of local communities ('local').Instead of trying to build one-size-fits-all platforms imposed from the top down, we empower change to emerge from the grassroots. We build technology that is local-first, designed for a specific community and adapted to their needs.
This approach, which might have seemed inefficient before, is now increasingly feasible. AI drastically reduces the effort needed to build and adapt software. Combined with composable software architectures – building specific tools from smaller, reusable, universal parts – we can create hyper-specific software without reinventing the wheel every time. We can finally move beyond overgeneralizing and build tools that truly serve specific groups of people effectively.
Ideas emerging from the Web3 space often echo this desire for user agency, ownership, and decentralized control. While the practical implementations have sometimes been fragmented, the underlying philosophy aligns well with empowering individuals and communities, suggesting a shared yearning for alternatives to centralized platforms.
Nurturing Local Innovation Ecosystems
The vision, then, is a network of cosmo-local innovation hubs. Imagine localities leveraging AI and composable tools to build solutions for their specific challenges – be it food security, civic engagement, local economies, or ecological regeneration. These hubs wouldn't operate in isolation. They'd be networked, sharing what works, what doesn't, and the underlying patterns and code, enabling each community to learn from others while building uniquely for themselves.
As we network, share, and discover common needs across localities, we can identify unifying patterns and develop shared protocols that enable interconnection at broader scales – but this emerges organically from the bottom up, rather than being imposed from the top down.
This is the work we're actively engaged in with Woven Web here in Boulder, as discussed in Growing Technology: Boulder and Beyond. We're nurturing a culture of inclusive, open-source innovation deeply rooted in tending to our local community's needs. We're building relationships regionally and globally with others doing similar work. Soon, I'll write more about Boulder.Builders, a community platform we're developing to support this local builder culture and bridge connections for collective problem-solving.
San Francisco and other established hubs have generated tremendous technological momentum. Much of this innovation can be immediately useful for emerging local hubs. By adopting and adapting these tools for locally-rooted purposes, new hubs can create feedback loops, demonstrating socially and ecologically regenerative applications of technology that can, in turn, enrich and potentially reorient the innovation culture in those original centers.
Let's Build Together
The most important direction technology can go is towards empowering users, enhancing agency, and strengthening local communities within a connected world. AI and composable design make this more possible than ever. We have the chance to move beyond simply building tech faster, and start building tech better – more aligned with genuine human and ecological thriving.
If you're in Boulder and want to be part of building this future here, let's connect. If you're elsewhere and inspired by the vision of a network of cosmo-local innovation hubs, please reach out. This is a collective endeavor, and we are truly in this together.