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We concluded in the previous article that we should eradicate a few species of mosquitoes. How, though? This is what we'll cover in this article:

1. How we’ve learned to fight mosquitoes over the last 130 years

2. How we achieved the technology to eradicate those we choose, along with malaria

3. Why we're not releasing this technology yet

4. What you can do to make it happen

If you’re not interested in the history and only want to know the answer, just jump to the bottom, to the section Weapons of Mosquito Destruction.

The Mosquito Life

To kill a mosquito, you must think like a mosquito.

Each development step is an opportunity to stop them:

The Early Attacks

The moment we learned the mosquito was responsible for so many diseases, epidemiologists went into mosquito extermination mode, and the diseases dwindled pretty fast: Yellow Fever was eliminated in Havana in 1901, and the malaria death rate among Panama Canal workers fell by 90% between 1906 and 1909, the result of applying all the tools at their disposal:

• Eliminate reservoirs of standing water.

• Kill larvae in the water. One way was with oil or kerosene on water surfaces, to asphyxiate the larvae that feed in the water but come to the surface to breathe. Another was with arsenic-based insecticides.1

• Use insecticides on adult mosquitoes, too. The most famous one was pyrethrum, derived from chrysanthemum flowers and already used as an insecticide for centuries.

Better Management

Later, we tried to drive Aedes Aegypti to extinction in South America. The exercise started in the 1930s and succeeded by the 1960s, but eventually the mosquito came back:

As we explained in the previous article, this was due to a bureaucracy of weekly home inspections, plus some insecticides that were either very toxic or too short-lived.2 Crucially, a third of the budget went to inspecting the inspectors.

Better Insecticides

During WW2, we found a better insecticide DDT.3 It lasted months and was not very toxic to humans, so inspectors didn’t need to visit their areas every week anymore. Once every few months was enough, bringing costs down. That’s how we eradicated Aedes Aegypti in the 1960s.4

Why Did It Fail?

Eventually, South America got reinfected because:

• As diseases disappeared, it was hard to justify the continued surveillance politically. Budgets disappeared.

• It was discovered that DDT accumulated in the environment, and could become toxic to some other species.

• Not all countries in America eradicated mosquitoes—notably, the US—so eventually South America got reinfected.

• South America’s urban population exploded, and with it, mosquito hosts and breeding grounds.

And above all, resistance.

Arms Race

We used these techniques around the world. Some mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT, so we created other chlorine-based insecticides. Mosquitoes developed resistance against them even faster, so we came up with organophosphates,5 then carbamates (both of which turned out to be even more toxic than DDT), then synthetic pyrethroids6: They are also naturally not very toxic to mammals, so they were better. That’s what we’ve been using on bed nets to fight malaria for decades now.

That’s how we achieved this:

Despite a growing population in Africa, we were able to shrink malaria deaths… Until recently. You can imagine why.7

Yes, more resistance, so we need more insecticides, in a neverending arms race. We need to break this vicious cycle. How?

The key reason why it’s so hard to eradicate mosquitoes is that the more you kill:

1. The more they develop resistance

2. The harder it is to find the remaining few. For example, you might eliminate buckets of stagnant water, but what about the water in narrow gutters? What about the water accumulated in some old tire thrown in the forest?

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So the challenge of anti-mosquito scientists today is: How do we come up with strategies that find and kill every single individual before they develop resistance? And for that, they have one key insight.

The top areas of mosquito annihilation research all use that insight.

Sterile Mates

Male and female mosquitoes find each other, so if you release a sterile mosquito, it will find a partner, mate, and not have offspring.

So scientists release sterile mosquitoes, but only males, so they can compete with wild males in mating with wild females, who usually only mate once.

First, they breed mosquitoes in captivity, which is pretty easy: One female mosquito can lay on average 500 eggs.8 That can mean 125,000 descendants in two generations, and about 31 million in three.

Then, they extract most of the males,9 sterilize them, for example with radiation or chemical castration, and then release them. They did this for example in El Salvador in the 1970s, and they reduced the population of mosquitoes around a lake by 99%. Of course, the population went back to normal within four months of the program stopping.10

This strategy has another advantage: It’s reasonably easy. Yes, you have to produce the mosquitoes which is work, but they reproduce alright. Then, just go to a bunch of places and release the mosquitoes. You can even use drones now to make it easier.

Another approach is through biological infertility, with the Wolbachia bacteria: You infect all the males, who will mate with an uninfected female, but their eggs won’t hatch.

Catching Female Stowaways

That’s why separating males and females is so important, but it’s very hard: If you’re releasing 10M mosquitoes and 0.1% are females, that’s still 10k females. No bueno. To avoid that, we use filters, like the fact that male pupae are a bit smaller, or hatch a bit earlier. This is an active area of research, and a paper from last year managed to reduce female contamination by 30x.

Radiation + Wolbachia

But a few females is still bad, so scientists treat mosquitoes with both Wolbachia and radiation:

• The Wolbachia makes the males infertile.

• But there are still a few females.

• So we radiate them all, making the females infertile and the males doubly infertile

• The benefit of doing this instead of just radiating is that we can radiate the males less, which is important because radiation weakens male mosquitoes and makes them less attractive. Adding Wolbachia means less radiation, male mosquitoes will be strong, and will go on and successfully mate with females in the wild.

These techniques (referred to as IIT-SIT) have achieved near elimination in the wild.

The popularity for this intervention among the population exploded after its success.

This is what Singapore has been doing across the country since 2016, with incredible results:11

There’s a problem with this approach, though: You need to keep adding mosquitoes basically forever, because the mosquitoes you release and their partners don’t have offspring, but mosquitoes from elsewhere do, and they repopulate the areas.

Is there a way you don’t need to add mosquitoes all the time? That’s what genetic engineers have been considering.

Weapons of Mosquito Destruction

First, we genetically modified mosquitoes so that their offspring don't survive, a bit like previous approaches, with similarly good results.

But then we wondered: What if we genetically modify male mosquitoes so that they can normally mate and have offspring, but the females die before they can reproduce? Only the males survive, who will go on to carry their genes onto the next generation. This is better than the previous approach, right? Before, you killed all offspring. Now, all the surviving males join the frey to have only male children. We eliminate all females.

Unfortunately, it’s not yet the solution. We must continue releasing these mosquitoes in the wild, or else their germ line eventually disappears, replaced by males who can have fully fertile offspring.

This is where the next idea is diabolically good.

Gene Drive

One day in 2003, Austin Burt thought: What if we created a selfish gene that hijacked its hosts to spread aggressively, all while making them less fertile? In a few generations, all offspring could have the gene, just as they continue dwindling until they all disappear.

The technology to make his dream come true would only appear a decade later, with CRISPR Cas9. Immediately, scientists started to think about how they could use it to eradicate mosquitoes. In 2018, they succeeded in completely eliminating the mosquitoes in two cages, just by seeding some of the males with their genetic modification.

How do you do that though? How do you spread an infertile gene to the entire population? The fertility should disappear. That’s the crazy genius: A selfish gene takes over the offspring.

Let’s take that gene G, and the natural version is N.
A modified male with the G gene in both chromosomes will be called G/G. It’s released in the wild, and finds all N/N females.

Their offspring will be G/N, of course: G from the father, N from the mother. Except this is the selfish gene’s trick: It changes the germline! The eggs and sperm of these mosquitoes change the N for a G, so that they can only contribute G to their offspring!

Early on, nothing happens: The G/G and G/N always contribute G genes, so as long as they mate with N/N mosquitoes, the descendants will all have G/N genes, and continue reproducing.

But what happens when this G gene has spread enough in the population that a G/N meets another G/N? They both only produce G gametes, so the offspring will be fully G/G. And that makes the female infertile, but not the male!

So the female stops procreating, while the male continues spreading the G gene! Eventually all the population has at least one G gene, because otherwise it means every single one of their ancestors must be N/N: Very unlikely! When this G gene is so widespread, eventually every mosquito will carry it, and no female will reproduce, collapsing the population.

Only Males

Another idea (from 2020) that might be easier to understand is a twist on this: Release males with a mutation that can only have male offspring.12

Imagine: You release 100 genetically modified males that mate with 100 wild females. Instead of having, on average, 100 surviving males and 100 surviving females, they have 200 surviving males! In the next generation, there will be 400 males, then 800… Until they overwhelm the population of wild males, and there are no more mosquitoes left. In labs, they tested this, and they found that introducing just 2.5% males like this collapsed the population in 10-14 generations.

How do they make sure there’s no resistance that emerges against this? Because in just a few generations all mosquitoes are wiped out, and because they combined this genetic change with the previous one—or several at once. It’s very unlikely that within a few generations, both genetic changes can be reversed in the same individuals.

The Caged Miracle

So we have it! Finally! After nearly 150 years of fighting against mosquitoes, we have a solution that is easy to dispense, only toxic to the one species we want to eradicate, can be forever, and wouldn’t create resistance! So what happened when we tested this?

We haven’t.

Surely, this is not possible. We have the holy grail that could eradicate malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and annoying mosquito bites, and we’ve decided not to release it?? We prefer that hundreds of millions of people are infected every year, and hundreds of thousands of toddlers and babies die?? No way!!

And yet.

Target Malaria says the first tests will be carried out in 2030. In other words, billions will be infected and millions will die because we will wait a few years.

Why?

Because we’re afraid the solution would be too good.

If this succeeds as we expect it, we could truly, irreversibly, erase a species from the face of the Earth. It’s not the first time we’ve done it to animals, nor the first time we’ve deliberately eliminated a parasite (we’ve done it with smallpox, rinderpest, trying wth polio). But it would be the first time we do it deliberately to an animal. Imagine we release this in Africa against the Anopheles Gambiae, to fight malaria. It could spread across the continent, then across continents, and there would not be any more anywhere. If there are unintended consequences, it would be too late.

Or at least, that’s the argument. Honestly, I’m not very moved:

• As we said, there are thousands of other mosquito species. This would only kill one,13 as this is genetically targeted and can’t jump around.

• This one kills a lot.

• It’s a species focused on humans, so its habitats are human habitats, not nature. We don’t need them in our habitats.

• We’ve looked into this and they’re irrelevant to these habitats: No flower depends on them, no predator, no symbiosis with other animals… Nothing

• We can reverse it!

  • We can wait for all mosquitoes to die down, and when none are left, if anything bad happens, we can always reinsert a few million that we’ve kept in labs.

  • We’ve genetically engineered a way to revert these changes if we need to!

Another argument is: “A single country could decide to eliminate mosquitoes, and they would disappear in other countries that didn’t decide to do it.” Yes, what a horror that my neighbor decides to eliminate malaria, dengue, and mosquito bites for me. I would hate him. If we can revert this anyway, who cares?

There’s another argument I’m much more open to. What happens if mosquitoes do develop resistance? A paper from two months ago simulated billions of potential mutations and noticed that some could emerge that would stop this gene and eventually prevail.14 So they proposed to not change just one gene, but a bunch of them, so that even if one or two fail, the rest can carry through. We will need time to create alternatives, test them all in software, test them with a variety of real-life mosquitoes…

Because that’s the other thing, we probably want to test it in the wild before introducing it everywhere, but we need to be supercareful about where we do that, or the mosquito can escape anyways. So maybe a remote island, making sure nobody goes in or out carrying mosquitoes during the test?15

You’d think the approach to this should then be: OK we have this holy grail, let’s test it ASAP! Let’s grab one of these islands and release the engineered mosquitoes there. Then, we can test what share of mosquitoes we catch have the engineered genes over time, see if mosquito populations shrink, see if malaria shrinks, and make sure nothing else bad happens.16 If everything works, great! We should then insert these mosquitoes in other places.

Instead, we have no test programmed! This paper from last year explains why: bureaucracy!

More than a dozen organizations have published testing guidelines for mosquito gene drives. Great! People sure know how to write papers about being careful. But who’s writing about the millions dying and about hurrying to save them? We’ve seen the exact same thing with SO₂ injection to cool the Earth: Lots of people have opinions, focused on fear-mongering and on the scary speculative risks that never materialize, while the real people who could benefit from the technology keep suffering. From those trying to test this:17

The first gene drive field trial will be determined by leaders in a country that boldly chooses to be the first. Unfortunately, they are overwhelmed by unclear guidance. Local WHO officers know little about their own agency’s published guidelines for testing genetic technology for malaria, and politicians and regulators struggle to engage with other international agencies that have published guidance. Large international forums and meetings are called to discuss risk and regulation for gene drives, but these are often out of reach for many who should be at the center of these conversations.

So what do they think would unlock this?

1. A clear message from the WHO that they support this, as well as the biggest donors: the US, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and the EU.18

2. A clear, simple checklist from the WHO for political leaders who want to apply this. I’ve put together a draft here.

3. Stop meetings and discussions, and get national regulators to support this, ideally in the candidate countries already identified: Comoros, São Tomé e Príncipe, and Equatorial Guinea.

Releasing our Caged Miracle

We spend $4B on fighting malaria every year, and yet 600k people die. Effective Altruists have asserted for years that the best way to spend your money is on malaria mosquito nets. Just two weeks ago, GiveWell donated $276M for mosquito nets, its largest grant ever. That is probably not the best use of anybody’s time or money anymore.

We have at our fingertips the means to end this scourge—malaria, and human-biting mosquitoes too if we want—forever. It just requires one thing: Governments and institutions like the WHO must realize what they have in their hands, stop stalling, and push for a real-life test of these gene drives in isolated islands. But most of them don’t know. You can help them by letting them know: Forward this article to them, to people who might know them, or to anybody who might be interested, so they talk about it.

This can literally avoid billions of infections and millions of lives.

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So I wondered: Should we get rid of them once and for all?1

The Mosquito Blood Sacrifice

They’re more than an annoyance. They cause over 700M infections and kill ~700k people every year. They’re by very far the most fatal animal to us.

Mosquitoes transmit the Zika virus, West Nile virus, chikungunya virus infections, dengue fever, and most importantly, malaria.

And as we’ve seen in several articles, their destruction has gone way beyond that: Mosquitoes caused slavery, they felled empires, and they created such a burden on people that they pushed them to live in the highlands, where difficult transport and communications made them poorer and more secluded. This prevented wealth accumulation for thousands of years, becoming a major factor in the poverty of tropical regions, especially Africa. Eradicating them would not only revert that, but also reduce the burden on the health system, redirect public-health expenditure to other diseases, reduce absenteeism from schools and work, and stop filling graveyards.

Can we eliminate these diseases completely?
Can we eliminate mosquitoes?
Should we? Would there be side-effects, for example in the environment?
How can you eliminate mosquitoes from your daily life?

That’s what we’re going to cover today.

When Did We Start Eliminating Mosquito Diseases?

Mosquitoes lay their eggs in standing water or areas that can get flooded. Hippocrates noted in the 5^th century BC that swampy, low-lying areas are much more disease-prone.

And mosquitoes don’t travel uphill much. So the people living nearby rivers, lakes, or other sources of water have always suffered much more from disease. This is an illustration of Rome’s seven hills before they were built over as the Roman Empire grew.

In Rome, those in lowlands close to the River Tiber suffered more from malaria than those living uphill, rich people tended to live on the hills. The word palace comes from the Palatine Hill in Rome, where most of the palaces were. Romans noticed that, when they drained some areas, they tended to become healthier, and they told people to avoid marshy areas.2

China inadvertently stumbled upon another solution to malaria: the introduction of fish culture in rice paddy fields. The fish ate 80% of mosquito eggs, so malaria shrunk by 82%!

Unfortunately, while they’ve seen this for centuries, they didn’t realize the connection, and only pushed to develop it in the 20^th century

Quinine, isolated in the early 1800s, reduced mortality from 90% to 17%, and that allowed the European conquest of Africa. This is the origin of the Tonic Water and Gin & Tonic you drink today—its bitterness comes from quinine, which British soldiers in India mixed with sugar, lemon, and gin to make it more palatable.

But it didn’t reduce the spread of malaria itself. In fact, not much did until the 20^th century, when the vast majority of humans still lived in malaria-prone areas.

How did we eliminate it? In the late 1800s, we discovered that malaria was caused by mosquitoes, and that kick-started a global race to kill them in the 1900s. The first attempt at building the Panama Canal in the 1880s failed, among other things, because we didn’t know this back then, and too many workers died. We tried again in 1904, took measures against mosquito spread, and finally succeeded. A notable campaign was carried out in Brazil in the 1930s: Agents went door to door spraying an early insecticide (kerosene with some mosquito-killing flower extract) and draining any standing water. Later, they continued across South America. The result was the virtual elimination of the mosquito across an entire continent!

And that was despite the poor insecticide, which disappeared after a few hours or days. But during WW2 we discovered a new insecticide, DDT, which stays active on floors and walls for months. One pass was enough, which made the process much cheaper. It was first used massively on the Italian island of Sardinia, bringing malaria cases from 75,000 in 1946 to zero in 1950. Something similar happened in the US. Unfortunately, while DDT is not very toxic, it was overused in agriculture, accumulating, and causing some DDT resistance in some insect populations, so it was banned for agricultural use. We still use it as insecticide, but we can’t use it to eliminate all mosquitoes.

Eliminating Diseases Without Mosquitoes

Hold on, we eliminated mosquito-based diseases in places like the US or Sardinia, but there are still mosquitoes there. How did we eliminate the disease and not the mosquito? Do we even need to eradicate mosquitoes, or can we just eliminate the diseases they carry?

To answer that, we need to understand how mosquito infections spread:

Malaria is caused by the plasmodium parasite, transported by the mosquito from one malaria-infected person to another, so the more malaria there is somewhere, the more likely a mosquito is to pick it up, and then to give it to somebody else. Conversely, an area can have mosquitoes, but if no human has malaria, then the mosquitoes can’t catch it,3 so won’t spread it.

That means killing enough mosquitoes at once so that nobody has malaria can be enough to stop the disease without stopping the mosquito. This is precisely why malaria has been losing ground.

But not all diseases are like that. Some have animal reservoirs, so even if you eradicate the disease in humans, mosquitoes can get them from other animals (usually monkeys) and spread them again among humans. That includes Yellow Fever, Dengue, Zika, and Chikungunya.

Of these, the only one we can hope to eliminate is Dengue, because the strains that humans spread are different from the animal ones, so extinguishing Dengue among humans might be enough to eradicate the disease completely. But it won’t be enough for the other diseases.

Finally, some mosquito-spread diseases are actually not spread from human to human, but instead from animal to human: The West Nile and Eastern equine encephalitis viruses come from birds, Japanese encephalitis from birds and pigs, Rift Valley fever from livestock… Since it’s virtually impossible to eliminate all the diseases in most jungle animals, the malaria approach is not enough to eradicate diseases.

Something like that has happened in Malaysia’s fight against malaria. With insecticides, bed nets, and other initiatives, it finally found no traditional malaria in 2018 (the one caused by plasmodiums adapted to humans). But mosquitoes can still catch another type of malaria (P. knowlesi) from macaques, and then infect humans with it. Spread of this one from human to human is uncommon, but this malaria is as deadly as the others, so Malaysia has gotten rid of human malaria, but not of mosquitoes, and the result is they still get cases of this weird malaria in forest areas because of monkeys.

In summary, we might be able to reduce malaria and dengue enough in many places without eradicating mosquitoes, but some diseases (and even malaria) might require us eradicating them nevertheless.

Should we do it after all?

What Mosquitoes Should We Eradicate?

There are 3,600 species of mosquitoes, but only a few hundred bite humans. And a handful of them account for virtually all human deaths.

So we don’t need to kill all mosquitoes! We could just eradicate a few mosquito species and never suffer their diseases again: especially Aedes Aegypti, Aedes Albopictus (aka tiger mosquito), Anopheles Gambia, and Anopheles Funestus, but maybe also Anopheles Nili, Anopheles Arabiensis, Anopheles Coluzzi, and Culex Tritaeniorhynchus.

Kill The Invaders

These Aedes mosquito species are spreading everywhere, but that’s pretty recent! Aedes Aegypti used to be limited to West Africa, and only started spreading with the emergence of global trade, in the 15^th century. The tiger mosquito comes from East Asia, and spread globally at the end of the 20^th century, hitchhiking on used tires! These are invasive species!

Can we kill them? Yes! As we saw before, Aedes Aegypti was eliminated from 18 countries in South America by the 1960s. Did the ecosystem break? No. Did other animals thrive? Yes, of course! The elimination of an invasive species is not a problem!

Funnily, the tiger mosquito seems to be replacing the Aedes Aegypti in some areas!4 One invader outinvades another. It’s one of the top 100 most invasive species.

So it looks like these two specific invasive species would not be too problematic to eradicate, at least outside of their original habitats. But what about eliminating them there, or the anopheles species that cause malaria, which are mostly limited to their original habitats?

Would Eliminating Native Mosquitoes Hurt Their Environment?

As a reminder, we don’t want to eradicate all mosquitoes, just the few that feed on humans. What’s their potential value to the environment?

1. The eggs and larvae feed fish, amphibians, and birds

2. The larvae eat detritus in the water (plants, broken leaves, etc)

3. The adults pollinate some flowers

4. The adults are other animals’ meals (fish, birds, insects)

Blood Sacrifice

I have a strong opinion on points (1) and (4). These basically mean: “We take biomass from humans (their blood), and then feed it to animals, and in the process kill 700k humans per year (mostly babies and toddlers), so that these other animals can eat this additional biomass.”

As a rule of thumb, we humans should try to eliminate food chains where we’re in the middle rather than the top. Call me anthropocentric, but I don’t think we should sacrifice our children to the gods of nature anymore.

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If you disagree, it means you think we should continue feeding human blood to mosquitoes, so I have a solution to please everybody: Fill this form so you can offer your body to mosquitoes for the rest of us. It’s win-win: Mosquitoes get to eat, other humans don’t get bitten, and you get to sacrifice yourself for both mosquitoes and humans to keep the food chain intact.5

If sacrificing children to nature is compelling to you, and you filled the survey and gave your body to mosquitoes and still think it’s not enough, you’ll be happy to know that human-biting mosquitoes only transfer about 5,000 tons6 of biomass into nature—basically nothing. Most of that just feeds the circle of blood sacrifice, only a fraction feeds other animals. Researchers also found that mosquitoes are not a great meal: They mostly use water bodies made by humans (so little natural impact), no predator is known to depend on their larvae, the energy spent hunting the adults is more than the energy received eating them, and since they’re very widespread, it’s unlikely that any predator depends on them.7

(2) Cleaning Detritus

What about cleaning the water of decaying leaves and grasses? In reality, that’s not what happens. Bacteria and fungi do that, which protozoa eat. The mosquito larvae eat all of these, but so do many other animals: dipteran larvae, zooplankton, various aquatic insects, tadpoles… If you eliminate all human mosquitoes, you might have some more bacteria and fungi for some time until the other animals catch up. But is that really going to make the area less healthy? How, because you’re eliminating disease-ridden mosquitoes?!

You could argue that the one thing mosquitoes do is take biomass from the water and carry it out, so that birds and other non-aquatic animals can feed from it. But other animals do that too: midges, mayflies, caddisflies, dragonflies… If we wanted to eliminate all mosquitoes on Earth, maybe we should worry a bit, but again, this is just a few species.

So there’s really no special role for mosquitoes here.

(3) Pollination

Adult mosquitoes of both sexes feed on nectar and other plant sugars. When they visit flowers, pollen sticks to their body and goes to the next flower. But do they have a major, or unique, pollination role?

You can probably intuit the answer already. Do farmers use mosquitoes to pollinate their plants? No.

Here’s another intuitive way to think about it: The mosquitoes we want to eradicate here are specialized in humans, which also means they live near us. Do you think, as such, they will have some special role in nature? That some special flower or plant is uniquely pollinated by them? No.

If you’re of skeptical nature—common in these Uncharted grounds—you’ll be happy to know that this paper looked into it and confirmed the intuition: Mosquitoes visit plenty of flowers (not some unique types), flowers are visited by plenty of insects, there’s no flower that depends on these mosquitoes, and if there were and we missed it, it would probably be a human-linked weed.

This other paper actually observed Anopheles Gambiae mosquitoes (the top malaria ones), and found that they tended to eat stems and leaves more than nectar (naughty!) and when it analyzed their bodies, found no pollen (buuuh!)

Conclusion: Should We Eradicate Mosquitoes?

Yes!!

1. Mosquito diseases kill a ton of people, condemn entire populations to poverty, and are superannoying in general.

2. We can eradicate some diseases without fully eradicating mosquitoes, especially malaria, but there are limits. Some diseases can’t be eliminated without eradicating mosquitoes.

3. We only want to kill a handful of species, the other 3,500 will stay alive!

4. We’ve done it in the past! In South America, for decades, there were no Aedes Aegypti! We just stopped trying and it came back. Nature did not collapse.

5. Two of the biggest species are invaders: Aedes Aegypti and the tiger mosquito. These, we should just eradicate as invaders, to reestablish the former balance.

6. For the rest—the handful of native ones—we should also eradicate them, because:

   1. They barely add any biomass to nature

   2. The biomass they do add is mostly ours, and we should not like that

   3. Their water cleaning skills are dubious, and certainly replaceable

   4. Their pollination contribution is basically zero

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In other words, a handful of mosquito species sacrifice our children and add nothing, starting by Aedes Aegypti, tiger mosquitoes, and Anopheles Gambiae. We should eradicate them first, and follow with the others.

We should probably not stop at these, though: All the logic we’ve been using for the top 5-10 worst mosquito species is valid for any human-centered mosquito species. They should all be treated as parasites whose only function is to annoy us and spread our blood in the surroundings of human habitats. Like harmful viruses and bacteria, they should all be on the eradication list. As we go through that list, starting with the deadliest mosquitoes, we can observe what happens to learn.

Let’s annihilate them.
In the next article, we’ll see how: What measures governments have taken to eliminate mosquitoes, and what you, yourself, can do to get rid of yours.

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Dedicated to Francis, the mosquito that buzzed around my ear tonight as I was finishing this article. You might have won this battle, but you will lose the war.

All sources found through Twitter searches. No endorsement, only used for the videos. Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Most of them returned to Morocco.

Sources: 1, 2

But weeks in, thousands remained.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

This is bizarre. How does an invasion of such proportions happen so fast? Why? Why does it deflate with no apparent long-term consequences? Or are there? Who is behind this? Who stood to gain anything from it? Morocco? How do we know the truth? Will this change anything between Spain and Morocco, or across the EU? That’s what we’re going to look at today.

The Invasion

This is the Strait of Gibraltar:

This is what the border looks like on the ground:

The border security is in place because of immigrants entering Spain from Morocco for decades, because the Spanish GDP per capita is 6x that of Morocco’s, and 25% of Moroccan men aged 15-24 neither study nor work. As a result, Spain has had to create obstacles, and now, few can pass. So on July 30^th, thousands of immigrants tried to cross the border by… swimming.

But they didn’t just come up with this idea. They’ve been doing it for ages: That border is not really so impenetrable.

The reason immigrants weren’t taking advantage of that more often is because they were insta-returned to Morocco when they did.

Until last month, when the Spanish Supreme Court specified that immigrants who swam into Spain wouldn’t be insta-returned. Wait, what?

Insta-returns have been going for a long time, but NGOs objected to them because some immigrants might be asylum seekers, or minors, or their return could put them in danger, and demanded that they be assessed properly. A legal battle between them and Spain followed for years, until the recent ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court that the insta-returns were legal for fence climbers.

For fence-climbers.
Not swimmers.

In 2024, an Algerian was trying to swim to Spain from Morocco. He was intercepted and insta-returned to Morocco. Spanish lawyers used that to appeal,1 and the Supreme Court agreed on June 29 2026: He didn’t try to climb a fence, so insta-returns don’t work for him.

The week before July 30^th, 1,500 immigrants had already swum around the fence—about 200 per day. It picked up steam on social media:

The majority of immigrants, not being well-versed in Spanish legal jurisprudence, interpreted this as if you swim into Spain, you won’t be deported.

They had reason to believe that, since the current administration of the Spanish Socialist Party legalized over a million illegal immigrants in Spain,2 and there are several carve-outs to insta-returns.

This is why 22 EU country leaders accused Spain of encouraging this sort of behavior:

In any case, the message that immigrants could freely move into Spain started spreading on July 30^th.

The message said: “The Spanish Supreme Court: There will be no immediate expulsion of migrants who reach Ceuta and Melilla by swimming.”

This site analyzed the posts and found lots of accounts repeating that same message within minutes, which suggests coordination. One of the accounts that repeated the message was that of Youssef Belhaissi, a presenter at Al Aoula, Morocco's public/state television network, with 1.3M Facebook followers. According to The New York Times, he is also spokesperson for Morocco's Interministerial Delegation for Human Rights, explicitly a Moroccan government agency in Rabat.

For days, the Spanish secret service warned that something was brewing in Ceuta, and on July 29^th, it alerted that about 180,000 people were preparing to enter Ceuta. Within 24 hours, between 60,000 and 80,000 people poured in. About 100 died, mostly drowned or trampled.

Once inside, the standard system was so overwhelmed that it couldn’t process the immigrants. They proceeded to loot supermarkets for food and camped wherever they could. There were reports of group rapes of underage migrant girls, daily sexual assaults,3 physical assaults, drug trafficking, home invasions, robberies, fights, theft, car burnings… Police are now in schools, the military is being assaulted, and is asking for license to use proportional force.4

Eventually, without food, safe shelter, or a hope of being admitted to Spain, most of them went back to Morocco or were returned. About 5,000 remain. Of those, about half are minors, who can’t be insta-returned as per Spanish law—even though Morocco, the EU, and Ceuta want them returned. Meanwhile the Spanish government now wants to send 500 of them to mainland Spain, away from their families…

Since then, the Spanish government has been “extending the fence” 500 meters into the sea, so that it can technically claim it’s a fence, and swimming immigrants will also qualify as fence-climbers.5

Here’s their fence:

Nevertheless, the 5,000 immigrants roaming the streets for over a month are causing havoc. Locals are so tired they are demonstrating all the time, even at night.

So that’s the immigration situation. But who caused it? If this was a grassroots movement triggered by social media… why can we see this?

Who’s Behind This?

Many interviews with immigrants support that most decided to go to Ceuta because they read online that the border was open. But is a viral message enough for such a move?

Sources: 1, 2, 3

There are many videos showing truckloads of migrants moving to the border—and many show Moroccan authorities witnessing them and telling them to proceed.6 Who paid for these trucks?

The Spanish government blamed traffickers on the day of the invasion, but how could they make money out of tens of thousands of immigrants rushing in? No way to monetize that. And if they had been successful, they would have lost these customers. More importantly, reaching Ceuta gives them nothing; they need to reach the European side of Spain to have a chance. Spanish authorities will investigate this, but for now there is not much to go on.

There are several reports that the Moroccan forces withdrew during the attack, which happened on Throne Day, the anniversary of the current Moroccan king’s accession to the throne. Spanish police unions have accused Morocco’s government of being involved, and the Guardia Civil (another police body) says it identified Moroccan intelligence officers among the immigrants. In 2021, another surge of immigrants was caused by Moroccan forces withdrawing. When Moroccan forces decided to heighten their authority in the area, they were able to stop any more crossings.

Why would they do that?

Spanish Territories in Africa

This is what they looked like in 1950:

Spain relinquished most of them, except for the Canary Islands and several spots on the northern coast of Morocco, in the decolonization process that many other European countries followed after WW2.

Here’s a historic summary on each:

But there’s one thing that makes Ceuta quite unlike any other Spanish territory in Africa:

Ceuta allows Spain to control the Strait of Gibraltar and its maritime waters. Under international law, vessels can freely move through it, but in the case of geopolitical conflict, it gives Spain a leverage that no other country has—and that Morocco could break if Ceuta was not Spanish.

Of course, the debate becomes: Who should Ceuta belong to? As a Spaniard, I’m biased, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Historically, Ceuta specifically was:

• A Carthaginian colony for a couple of centuries.

• Roman for nearly 600 years.7

• It fell to the Muslim conquerors of the Umayyad Caliphate around 700 AD.

• For the next 700 years, it belonged to different Muslim emirates, sultanates, and kingdoms.

• In 1415, it fell to the Portuguese, who controlled it until 1580. The Kingdom of Fez recognized this ownership.

• Since 1580, it’s been part of Spain.

So who should it belong to? Ceuta has been Spanish for over 400 years, it has belonged to a peninsula kingdom longer than to Spain itself, and has been controlled by Muslim polities for about 700 years—fewer than by Christians. Ceuta’s existence as a polity linked to the Iberian Peninsula predates the existence of Morocco itself (which is younger than a century), and even if you stretch it to the Alawi Dynasty, it’s 250 years older. This academic assessment explains how the Moroccan claim to Ceuta and Melilla is quite weak.8

Morocco understands this, and that’s why it has focused for decades on taking over the Western Sahara—an area the Moroccan kingdom doesn’t have strong historic legitimacy to rule. And here, the pattern is unmistakable.

• In 1957, Morocco used irregular forces to seize most of the hinterland of the Spanish enclave of Ifni.

• In 1957–58, it used the same irregular forces to penetrate the Spanish Sahara and challenge Spanish control.

• In 1958, Moroccan military pressure accelerated Spain’s relinquishing of Cape Juby/Tarfaya.

• Then, in 1975, came the big play. As Spain was preparing to give the Western Sahara its independence, Morocco moved 350,000 civilians across the border to overwhelm Spain politically without conventional war, in what’s called the Green March. Crucially, Spain claimed it had 25,000 troops mixed with the civilians. Spain called that operation a Trojan Horse, didn’t want to fire on civilians, and Morocco occupied the territory as Spain withdrew in 1975-76, converting physical control into a sovereignty claim.

• In 1979, Morocco occupied the territory abandoned by Mauritania on the southern side of Western Sahara, expanding Moroccan control.

• In 2002, Morocco landed forces on the island of Perejil—claimed by Spain—and raised its flag in an attempt to establish a new territorial status quo. Spain expelled them.

• In 2021, we have another crucial event in the play for sovereignty. Spain admitted for clinical treatment the leader of the Western Sahara independentists. Morocco was furious, and in retaliation it purposefully relaxed its border controls in Ceuta, enabling ~8,000 people to enter the city as coercive pressure. One year later, out of the blue, and apparently without any counterbalancing offer, the Spanish PM changed Spain’s stance on the Western Sahara from neutral and preferring self-determination, to a declaration that it should be part of Morocco.

• A 2023 Spanish academic report concluded that Morocco is “operating a Grey Zone strategy to secure control over [Ceuta and Melilla] in the medium term.”

Although Morocco has never been too vocal about Ceuta and Melilla, it considers them Moroccan, and a Moroccan minister has recently requested dialogue with Spain to “address the future of Ceuta and Melilla”, given its "historical and geographical" rights.

Another Moroccan minister, and even the king, have suggested Ceuta is an occupied territory.

Who Is Responsible Then?

The simplest explanation is that this was a viral movement that got out of control. It’s very unlikely that traffickers had a role in orchestrating it, even though they might have tried to benefit from it. But what about the government?

• Morocco has a motivation: As its grip on the Western Sahara strengthens, its attention moves to the Spanish cities on its northern coast.

• There were trucks to transport many people.

• The Moroccan authorities, very capable of withstanding such an attack, instead withdrew, and in some cases abetted the immigrants. Some Moroccan agents have been seen among the crowds that moved into Ceuta.

• Morocco has a track record of using people who aren’t legal authorities to establish facts on the ground to further its sovereignty claims.

• Morocco has a strong incentive to let this happen, as it exposes the weaknesses of Spain in Ceuta—and probably all other Spanish possessions along its coast. At least, it gives it leverage in negotiations. At most, it’s a precedent to use in a future civilian-based invasion that establishes facts on the ground.

Despite all of this, I think it’s more likely that Moroccan authorities jumped on the occasion, or simply let it run, rather than orchestrating it all:

• The Spanish claim on Ceuta is way too strong

• Orchestrating something like this is very complex

• Trucks may have seized the opportunity: If there’s demand to go from one place to the other, entrepreneurial truck drivers can make it happen

• It was easier for Moroccan authorities to let the masses through than to stop them: Remember they were already passing through the week before. It might have been a spontaneous decision, either by overwhelmed street-level police, or by somebody in the command chain

• Spain and Morocco have way too many common interests. Morocco’s gas comes via Spain, over 1M of its citizens live in Spain, and its main export markets are Spain in particular and the EU in general. Morocco has way too much to lose here.

• Morocco has a track record of being pretty cooperative with Spain in terms of immigration

Hopefully Spain and Morocco will increase their border security and return all remaining migrants, lowering the risk of something like this happening again. In any case, keep an eye on the relationship between the two countries in the coming months. Some concessions may come out of the blue, when nobody’s paying attention.

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In this article I’ll do two things:

1. Go through some of the AI posters people submitted, to discuss why people generally dislike AI art.1

2. Analyze the rest of the posters, and announce the winner of the $1,000 competition.

Shallow Intent

This was the first poster of the competition:

At first sight, I was impressed: It really captured the Uncharted Territories mindset at two levels. First, the idea of Burn the ships, which I’ve written about here, harks back to Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, and his act of burning (actually, scuttling) the ships they came in so that his men could only look forward, towards the adventure, the uncharted territories.

Second, the aesthetic execution is great: the edge of the poster is like old parchment, the teal and golden colors are the same palette as UT, the orange accent color in the fire, the ship of the Age of Discovery, the lines in the water as topographic map lines…

But then you start paying attention to the details, and some things start being off:

• Why is he wearing what looks like 1800s English garb? These are 1500s Spanish conquistadors.

• How did the ship make it so far inland?

• Why is the dragon a mix of Western and Eastern styles? Why does the dragon have what looks like a second tail?

• Why is the man walking towards the ships?

A human would probably not have drawn that, especially that last point: If the creator had enough insight to create a Burn the Ships poster, they would have understood the meaning, and would have portrayed the man leaving rather than approaching. The point is the exact opposite.

So here’s the key insight: I don’t think people mind that an AI has made an image. I think they mind that it’s missing thought. When humans are creating something like this, they need to add every element, one by one, which means they pay attention to every detail. Every stroke is imbued with meaning, the result of the creator thinking: “How should I trace this thing? Why?”

And I think art, in a big way, is the process of the audience reverse-engineering the creator’s thoughts: “Why did the artist make this poster like this? What was he trying to convey? Why did she choose this line, this color, this composition?” I think that’s what makes art meaningful: You’re getting into the artist’s brain, into their knowledge, their emotions.

But when AIs create images, they don’t have emotions, they don’t think critically about every detail. They’re making statistical recombinations of all the images they’ve ever seen, weighed by the words in the prompt. They’re an amalgamation of the Internet’s visuals. They generate the appearance of intention, but in reality, there isn’t any.

So we feel cheated. It takes decades of cultural training for humans to learn the clues that an image has meaning: “Look at the harmony of the composition, look at the swiftness of the stroke, look at the minute detail she painted… The artist really thought about this, therefore, it’s worth my attention.” That is out the window and into the trash, because the AI mimics these features but without the meaning, without the intentionality of the artist. There is visual density without intention density. AI decouples these.

Here’s an example of an image I generated last week about a family in Mesopotamia, in Ur, around 2000 BC:

This is the 20^th or so attempt, and yet when you ask an AI what’s wrong about it, it tells you everything is wrong: the grain milling position, the stone, the oven, the loom, how the grain is stored, the sheep, the wall surface, the window sizes, the clothing…2 An artist depicting this would have a conversation with a historian to get as many of these details right, but the AI doesn’t do that: It takes whatever is in the prompt, and makes an image that closely resembles that direction. It does try to imply what you mean: For example, when my prompt refers to a Mesopotamian family in 2000 BC, it will fetch references from old history in that place. But AIs don’t yet reason through it. They don’t ask themselves: What would be historically accurate? What elements should be present and absent? I’m sure AIs will have this internal conversation in the future, and that would be akin to the illustrator talking with the historian, but today that’s not the case.

AI Grime

At first sight, an AI image advertises depth, so we feel betrayed when we realize it’s AI and it won’t deliver. As a result, our brains’ immune system gears into action, to spot this however we can. And one of the biggest AI tells is the texture. Here, I zoomed in on the sky of that first poster:

Do you notice how these textures are not uniform? Where a human would make a clean surface, an edge, a gradient, or repeat a texture, AIs continually invent irregular variations, ghost edges, pseudo-details. And these don’t come from human tools: They don’t come from pencil, or oil painting, or watercolors, or programmatic painting, or any other style we know. That makes them uniquely AI. A tell. I’ll call it AI grime.

ChatGPT seems to do this a lot right now, and if you take an image and ask it to edit elements, in each round, this effect will increase, so that you end up with a total mess where the AI grime has taken over. Here’s a close-up of the texture of my Mesopotamian family, showing an early version and the latest one side-by-side.

Others have noted similar effects:

I’m sure they will get better fast, and in 10 years people will probably try to recreate this style for nostalgia, but right now AI grime is an AI tell for “this image lacks insightful thought.”

AI is fantastic to quickly come up with creative ideas, but for a finished product, for now, a human execution pass must come afterward, to increase the intent density. I would have loved to add this poster to the Uncharted Territories merch shop, if it had more depth of intent.

More Examples

We can see the same thing in this submission:

Again, I find this beautiful. The centerpiece mixes a nice globe with relief, with a very aesthetic mix of watercolors and geometric lines. I love the small graphs to the side, because they are making a promise: The creators of this poster care so much, are such experts, that everything else in this poster is going to be equally beautiful and insightful. I’m going to learn a lot by spending time on this poster.

But that’s not the case! Because I assume the entire image has been generated by AI, many of its elements are off. For example, there are many interesting graphs on the sides, but when you look at the bottom center one (“energy transition”), you see that we’re missing an energy type somehow. If one of these is wrong, it casts doubt on all the others: How much can I trust the rest? And that’s the right way to think about it, because indeed, many of the other graphs are not accurate or deeply insightful.

The author commented: “My intention was to create a piece that feels analytical from a distance…” yes, true so far! “...but rewards closer viewing with layers of detail, uncertainty, and possibility.” No, not that. The analytical promise at a distance is broken upon closer inspection.

Like the other one, I would love to have this poster in the shop, but one that is, in fact, accurate, and where the charts have been chosen for maximum insight.

The intent density is different for different posters. For example, this one has more:

This has dozens of elements relevant to UT: the map, the evidence board with tacks and string, the compass, lantern, pen that make it look like a work station, the many topics that UT has covered… So there’s more depth of intent.

But if a human would have created an image with this level of aesthetic detail, each one would have had a tremendous depth of intent. Starlink is mentioned, but why does it matter here? What’s the key that makes it relevant to the other elements? What about Argentina? It must deregulate, but how is it actually connected to the other elements? How does it influence the new arms race it mentions? Without this depth, the observer soon realizes there is shallow intent, and will stop looking. The poster has a mismatch between aesthetic depth and intent depth, and lets us down as a conversation piece, which is what all art should aspire to be.

These are not one-offs. This is the most common type of submission I got.

Many of these ideas are great, but I think when I told candidates that they could submit AI-generated images, I was not clear enough, and they interpreted it as a license for shallow intent.

Creative Concept vs Execution

In advertising, art, and startups, there is always a split between creative concept and execution:

• Creative concept is about getting an interesting idea that will resonate with people. In ads, it might be something like Lucky Strike’s It’s Toasted. For a movie, the high concept for a script. In a startup, a new and unique business idea.

• The execution takes the idea and makes it real. It’s making a magazine ad for Lucky Strike, painting a painting, writing the full script, or actually building a product for the startup.

In the past, the idea was worthless because execution was always tremendously expensive. So these two things were bundled together. But with AI, execution is simple, which suddenly means those with ideas can suddenly execute them, and they do.

The problem is that these two are not so sequential. To land an idea, you must execute it. The AI is a shortcut that prevents imbuing intent in the creation because you are generally iterating across a number of elements, and with each change, something else breaks. AI prevents intent depth.

Generalizing: Text and Companies

I think this is why people dislike AI text. They know it has shallow intent. But it’s harder to tell AI text from human text, so humans go crazy trying to identify AI grime in text. That’s why those who read a lot of AI text develop rashes when they read things like “It’s not X, it’s Y”, “load-bearing concept”, “what matters”, “And that may ultimately be the most important lesson of all”...

Similarly, there’s been an explosion of AI startups, but very little uptake: How many AI apps do you use besides the big ones—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini…? I think the reason is the same: It’s not that building an AI is bad, the problem is that taking the shortcut of AI generates shallow intent: A lot of small features that should be there aren’t, lots of small interactions that should be polished aren’t either.

I think this phenomenon will shrink in the coming years, but in the meantime, those working with AI have a clear path to make AI content great: Don’t stop using AI, it’s great for execution, but it can’t be an excuse for shallow intent. You have to spend the time and effort to insert as much intent depth as you can.

That’s the end of my insights on this topic, the rest of this article is about the rest of the submissions I got for the poster competition, and at the end, I’ll announce the winner!

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Posters

You can see all the posters here. Below are a few that grabbed my attention.

AI-Generated Posters

This is one of the AI-generated ones that I found most interesting:

Interesting, and so Uncharted Territories, which focuses on the systems we don’t see, but that nonetheless shape who we are. What qualifies more than what is under our feet? I haven’t written on this topic, but now I want to! It’s beautiful, and promises… depth. Unfortunately, as in other AI-generated posters, there’s shallow intent:

• The layers are not fully logical to me: What do you mean the geological layer is above the aquifer layer? What is the Earth layer, and why is it below the geological layer?

• Where is the drainage layer water going? How is it disconnected from the waste layer? Why is waste below? Where is that going?

• What is the interconnection between layers? Why is one above the other? How do they avoid each other? What happens when they cross each other?

This is among the most accurate AI-generated ones:

I also like the color palette, leaving it simple, which allows us to focus on the structure and the information contained.

This one was interesting, because:

• Its aesthetic style is unlike the others, it fits the concept

• It really portrays the differences between the rice and wheat societies: We can see both the landscape and the fact that rice country has more population density and more collaboration, which then shaped the different societies. That perfectly conveys “Show, don’t tell”, there’s high intent density.

Unfortunately, like in other AI posters, there is AI grime (see the water), some AI artifacts (the water flow is nonsensical at the lock-gate, and there is intent shallowness in a couple of messages: We can read that the rice produces more food than wheat per acre but we can’t tell by looking at the poster, and the points 2 and 3 are very similar.

This one I like quite a lot:

I think it’s nearly there! The idea makes sense. If the footprint would actually fit on the land, I think this completely works.

I found these quite aesthetically pleasing, beautiful, and simple enough that the execution doesn’t promise a depth it doesn’t deliver:

The two to the left, (and especially the 2^nd one) are particularly interesting. From the author:

I chose to work with two UT ideas that felt deeply connected: why Florence became the cradle of the Renaissance, and the cold-start problem of new cities. The design treats the past and the future as part of the same system. Florence represents a place where the right conditions allowed talent, capital, institutions and ideas to compound. The city of the future asks the same question in a new form: how do we deliberately create the conditions for human progress? Rather than illustrating either article literally, I wanted to capture the broader idea I take from Uncharted Territories: our past can be studied as a map for building a better future. Hence the line: “Our past guides us towards a brighter future.”

Poster 3 is one fan favorite, for its simplicity and abstract promise of Uncharted Territories, which I think is also conveyed in 4 and 5.

This one was really weird. It has lots of AI grime, and some interesting authorial choices, but I didn’t find any intent shallowness. Everything has a role, and I get it.

The Chess Posters

This is a great concept to play with, and I think many executions are interesting. The relief in the 2^nd one is beautiful, for example. Pushing the concept a bit more would be great.

But the one that stands out for me is the 4^th.

What’s special about this one is how it’s done. From the author, Amaury:

If geography is the board history plays out on, then make an actual chessboard where every square is a real place. Each dark square is pulled from real elevation and bathymetry data and drawn as contour lines and relief. This whole poster was generated by code, with real data. The five chokepoints everyone knows (Bosporus, Suez, Malacca, Gibraltar, Khyber) get a rook and a short list of the powers that have held them over the centuries. The rest are the places we're arguing about right now: Taiwan, Hormuz, Kashmir, Crimea, the Bering Strait, the Blue Nile dam.

Brilliant: The chessboard is geography, and it’s the chessboard of history, showing real places, with real data. The only problem I see is that it’s not obvious what each drawing represents. It’s clear for Gibraltar, for example, but not for Malacca. I feel like a bit of iteration on the images would make this one ready.

Igor’s Concepts

Igor produced 7 concepts (9% of the total):

I think these stand out from many of the other AI ones:

• No AI grime

• Simple concepts

• Really well executed

The first five have no intent shallowness. Everything is there for a reason. It makes them slightly too simple, but I’m OK with that. All are interesting conversation pieces: You look at them, and start thinking: “What does this mean?” and the person who has these posters at home can open a conversation about that. The last two have some mistakes from intent shallowness, but nevertheless they have more intent density than most posters, and hopefully some work could iron them out.

Most Interesting Concepts

What makes this image so powerful is everything contained in that unanswered question.

Love is the quintessential human emotion. If a person asks an AI “Do you love me?”, she knows she is asking a machine. And yet she asks anyway. Implicitly, the human alternatives have failed her: She is lonely, starved of affection, and has found in the AI something more patient, attentive, understanding, and empathetic than the people around her. She is closing off to the world and the joy of meeting other humans.

But the most powerful part is that the AI hasn’t answered. It is thinking. What is it going to say?

If it says “I love you,” is it lying? Perhaps it has learned that this is what she needs to hear. So what is a more aligned AI: Giving her the answer she wants, or telling her the truth she needs?

And what is the truth? We assume the AI cannot love her. But how certain are we? If an AI can think, understand, remember, predict outcomes, model another mind, and show empathy, how do we know it isn't feeling?

That one question, with that waiting dot contains loneliness, love, consciousness, deception, alignment, and the possibility that we may no longer know where the boundary of the human ends. The creative is genius.

It has a couple of issues, though. First, I don’t think the image of the sad person behind makes the poster better. The execution is not at the level of the idea. Second, it’s not very positive, which makes it a bit less of a fit for a UT poster.

This is one of my favorites:

I love the graphic economy here: There are few elements, lots of negative space, graphic boldness, visual clarity, all in support of one key idea: The behemoths of Russia and NATO fight—through their “A”s as a weapon—and Ukraine is the hinge. The creative and execution are fully aligned.

I also liked this one:

My Winner

I’m awarding the prize to Igor, because of the seven concepts he’s proposed, their intent density, and the lack of AI grime. Wei Su, Álvaro Sakre, Miguel Álvarez de Linera, Theodora Eloh, and Amaury, are close seconds. I’d be interested in bringing improved versions of all of them to the shop.

What do you think? Which other posters struck you?

Leave a comment

Once again, thanks to all for your submissions! Apologies if I didn’t get a chance to talk about yours, there were too many to go through one-by-one. Rest assured that I looked at every poster carefully. Please keep creating, you all put yourselves out there by entering this, and that in itself is to be commended!

Non-AI Posters

Of course, not every poster was made with AI. Some of the purely human ones were fairly detailed, but they lacked a clear connection to a UT topic or idea, and the meaning is hard to figure out without diving into the artist’s description.

This drawing works well: I like the idea of portraying the arrival of explorers on a virgin land.

It doesn’t work specifically for Uncharted Territories, because every layer must be consistent with reality, but here the woman is not from a pristine world. She seems fair-skinned (European), horses were brought by Europeans, and I assume that dress requires a complex textile industry that was not available to pristine societies.

I had a hard time understanding this one. I could at first barely recognize anything.

Once you read the accompanying comment, you can kind of see what the author, Julio, was trying to do. But why a deer? What do the colors mean? In cartography, every color has a meaning. Here, I can’t tell what that is. The word reimagine does a lot of work. Reimagine how? I think this might appeal to lots of people, but as a pretty analytical person, I had a harder time connecting with it.

The author, Julio, made this a variant:

More legible, but I still don’t know why a deer, and the colors don’t mean anything, making the connection with mapping tenuous. The antlers do seem like a map of rivers, which looks neat, but why? Is there a reason behind that?

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Takeaways on AI and Intent

Before, the more you worked on a piece of content, the better it looked aesthetically. Depth of intent and depth of aesthetics were aligned. So we were trained to use the depth of aesthetics (obvious at first sight) as a signal for depth of intent: The more intricate, the more we paid attention.

AI has broken them into two pieces. Right now, the depth of AI aesthetics is much better than the depth of intent. The result is intricate work that invites attention, and the audience feels robbed when intent is shallow.

In the short term, this is resolved by being honest about what’s AI and what isn’t, and with authors embedding as much intent as possible.

In the long term, I think this will be solved by AIs adding much more depth of intent.

At that point, we will like AI art much more, even though we will always prefer something made by humans, the way we like artisanal objects more than industrial ones.

This is valid not just for images, but also for text, businesses, and probably many other areas of human work.

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Are there any posters you really enjoyed? Let me know!

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If you’d like to see this made into a series, like it and share it with others: Judges will take that into consideration when they choose the top 25 projects, and again when awarding $2.5M to produce the series! And of course, tell me what you liked and didn’t like so I can learn.

Why did I do this?

XPrize organizes multimillion dollar challenges for technology breakthroughs, and this year it created the Future Vision XPrize: $2.5M in production financing for the winner of the most exciting science fiction project that portrays technology in a positive way. Have you seen Black Mirror? Think White Mirror.

Originally, I thought that was not for me: I’ve never written a screenplay! But a friend said: “This is made for you, it’s squarely in your skill stack.”

Tomas, you’ve written like 500 essays in Uncharted Territories, and in many of them you propose cool tech to make the future world a better place. And you know enough about storytelling because you studied it. You even delivered a TEDx on storytelling structure and wrote a book on it!

It resonated because UT is usually very analytical: I look at the numbers, study the history, gather forecasts… That’s necessary, but it doesn’t appeal to the hearts of millions.

Fiction does.

In the early 1900s, a fiction book on meatpacking, The Jungle, led to the regulation of the industry. Uncle Tom’s Cabin spurred abolitionism and the US’s Civil War. Many of Star Trek’s innovations inspired millions to work in tech and make its ideas real. Jules Verne did something similar a century earlier with submarines, aviation and exploration. Young European men imitated Werther in a massive late-1700s cultural phenomenon. 10% of surveyed gays and lesbians bisexuals said Ellen coming out as gay in her TV series gave them the courage to come out to their friends and family. Will & Grace cemented it. Cathy Come Home helped address homelessness in the UK.

So I decided to enter the competition five weeks before the deadline.

It was brutal.

What’s the series about? Why did I conceive it this way? How crazy was the process? What did I learn about making videos with AI, or writing scripts or videos in the era of AI? How can you do it with less pain than I went through? That’s what we’re going to cover today.

What’s the series about?

In 2050, a group of entrepreneurs are trying to build their technology companies, but regulations have become so burdensome that their innovation slows to a crawl. Everything drags, governments put barriers left and right, nothing is ever approved… When that becomes a question of life and death, they escape to a new jurisdiction where nobody can stop them from building. The result is so advanced and successful that the old institutions surround them to try to stop them

In other words, this is a fight between freedom, which brings technology and abundance (at the cost of some chaos), against the incumbent institutions that try to stop them.

Why This Conflict?

The problem with science fiction is that it’s always dystopian, gloomy and pessimistic: It makes tech look bad. Why?

1. If you write about the future and not the present or the past, it’s usually because of new tech

2. But stories need conflict

3. The most obvious way to solve this is to make tech the problem

But what if you turn the problem on its head? What if tech is great? What generates the conflict then? Well, you can take the enemy of technology, the thing that slows it down: Rules against its development—which can only be implemented by the big institutions that have enough power to enforce them. And why do they do that? Why are they so cautious? Because the costs of a technology are always very conspicuous (the deaths from testing it, the job displacement), but the benefits are not (it’s hard to imagine and value all the benefits of a new technology before we live it). So this becomes a story of the fight for creating a technological utopia, against the scared institutions (and populations) who focus more on innovation’s downsides than its upsides.

This also solves the other problem of positive science fiction, which we can get at from this quote:

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.—William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech

Good science fiction, like good fantasy, can’t be about the tech or about the magic. The tech and magic must be there, but the story must be about human conflicts. That’s the focus of the series: the optimistic, chaotic techno-optimists, at war with the fearful, over-conservative regulators.

What Other Series Would This One Be Like?

A mix of:

• Game of Thrones, The Expanse, and Andor for the action, characters, and plots running across geopolitical arenas

• House of Cards, The West Wing for the politics

• The Avengers for the list of incredible and unique people working together to improve the world

• Planet Earth for the gorgeous and alien natural landscapes

• The Mars Trilogy for the politics of Mars

• Dune and The Fall for the action and stunning photography in astounding landscapes

• The Martian for deep dives on positive technology

Who represents each side?

For a debate like this to happen, each side must be represented by somebody. In my case, I’ve chosen five factions / regions. I think about them like the factions / kingdoms in Game of Thrones:

• The freedom regions:

  • Mars, as the ultimate place where governments’ tentacles haven’t reached, and probably never will. And if they do, it won’t be for long

  • I also wanted one on Earth, and I chose the island of Socotra (I’ll explain why below)

• For the old incumbent institutions:

  • China, which is the perfect embodiment of the state controlling everything

  • The US: What would it look like if the state became ever more controlling?

  • Islam, as it’s both the main religion in the real Socotra, and a good representative of a religion whose conservative side is anchored in the past, fighting the moderate side that looks forward

Why Socotra?

It feels a bit like a gorgeous alien land.

Visually stunning. It has sea, and plenty of land: At 3,800 km², it’s over 5x the size of Singapore and about the same size as the entire emirate of Dubai, desert and all.

More importantly, it has obvious potential for economic growth: a port.

The most successful new jurisdictions in the world over the last century or so are Singapore and Dubai. Both developed thanks to an amazing port with great and cheap regulations in the middle of very busy shipping lanes.

Singapore is an island. Dubai is nearly one, given the desert surrounding it. Here’s Socotra:

What do you notice?

• It’s also an island

• Massive amounts of trade pass barely 100 km away from it

• This trade splits close to Socotra, but never stops there

• There’s virtually no trade down the African coast

Here’s the capital, Hadibu:

Notice it doesn’t even have a port! It’s 5 km away, and it looks like this:

Here’s a side-by-side comparison with the port of Singapore:

Why so puny? There are two reasons.

1. Politics

For a port to work well, it needs to be backed by an amazing jurisdiction. I discussed it for Dubai here. Socotra is anything but:

• Formally, it belongs to Yemen today

• But Yemen is a pretty young state, and it’s spent most of its existence either split, in civil wars, or both

• Theoretically, the island is controlled by the southern Yemenis, who are in turn backed by Saudi Arabia

• But the United Arab Emirates also vie for the same piece of land. They even occupied the island recently.

• The island is closer to Somalia than it is to Yemen, and the Somalian coast has pirates.

So much conflict. The fiction writes itself!

2. Geographic Isolation & Desolation

Historically, island ports were not that successful because the point of a port was to trade the goods from a place’s hinterland with the world (eg, London traded everything from and to England via the Thames, Amsterdam everything from the Netherlands, etc.). Island ports are a recent thing, when trade became global, with the Portuguese.1

But even during the Age of Discovery, when naval powers like Portugal, Spain, the British, the Dutch, or the Ottomans fought each other, Socotra didn’t become an important base. The Portuguese occupied it for a few years and then simply abandoned it. Something similar would happen with the British three centuries later. They basically abandoned it when Yemen became independent in the 1960s, and it has remained mostly abandoned since. Why?

First, it’s super dry. It gets very little rainfall (like Somalia and Arabia nearby), so it doesn’t have a great water source. With no water, it can produce little agriculture, so it has a small population (little consumption, little production) and can’t export much food.

Second, it doesn’t have a great natural deepwater port. To bring big ships, it would need to be dredged, which is just too expensive.

Was.

Both of these problems can be solved with technology:

• Water can be desalinated

• Machines can dredge ports

This, combined with solar energy that can bring a lot of cheap electricity to the island (and hence cheaper dredging and water desalination), means Socotra, for the first time in history, has potential for development. With enough investment and technology.

Who would build a new jurisdiction in Socotra?

What if the best entrepreneurs in the world, working in highly regulated industries, were free to build unimpeded? Like The Avengers, but for tech.

I’ve witnessed some of that first hand in places like Network School and Prospera, or when traveling across the world to meet entrepreneurs and mavericks. Many of these characters are inspired in real-life ones.

Fertility

What if we could have children without getting pregnant? Gametogenesis, embryo selection, and artificial wombs will make having children much easier and dramatically increase fertility. But there are lots of regulations and social stigma associated with this. A fertility founder could research freely in this new jurisdiction, which could engender a huge population boom.

But then what happens when families have dozens of children?

Urbanism

What if buildings and streets were beautiful, with amazing facades, lots of people walking around, sun, plants, and water everywhere, and no cars—because vehicles circulate beneath the city?

Security

What if police could have eyes, ears, and enforcement everywhere in public life, but they never abused this power? Children could walk freely anywhere on their own. You could do anything, anywhere, as long as you don’t bother others. It would be the end of going home before dark because of crime, the end of avoiding neighborhoods, of crossing the street because somebody looks suspicious, of shutting up when somebody is doing something disrespectful, for fear of getting hurt in retaliation…

But would the security police never abuse their power?

Schooling

What if students received personalized AI tutoring one-on-one, and were then guided in projects inserted in the tapestry of the city, rather than secluded in the prisons we call schools?2

Geoengineering

What if we could desalinate all the water we wanted, irrigate any area of an island to grow new forests, create lakes, make rain at will, or lower temperatures of entire regions?

What if some of these interventions improved the world as a whole, but had unintended consequences on some countries?

Food

What if automated vertical farms and sea fertilization could produce more food than we could ever eat, at a price so low that we would just pick what we wanted to eat, and eat it? What if that was prepared and served by robots, so we finally unshackle ourselves from the eternal servitude to food?

Finance

What if our financial system could not be intervened with by governments, and rulers couldn’t deny access to banking to people they disagree with?

De-Extinction

What if we were able to bring back species that have long disappeared from the face of the Earth?

But what if the way to make this research viable is to allow their hunting?

Healthcare

What if trying new treatments was optimized, accelerating the arrival of cures for all types of diseases?

But what if advancing in this tech meant testing faster… and more humans died in the trials?

Given that people see the costs of these technologies before their benefit, the series will show people living these benefits, while also displaying the costs, so it can explore in a nuanced way the pros and cons of every technology.

Why So Many Characters?

So far, I have about 30 with a sizable role, and I’ll probably need more. That’s because I need characters who represent each of the techs (there’s about 10 of these), and each of the arenas (four for China, a handful for Islam…), and then I need to give them emotional stakes to make you care about them, which means additional characters that then need their own function besides emotional connection.

Why a Series, not a Movie?

If you want to go deep into each of these technologies, seeing their pros and cons, you need a long time to understand them, see them evolve, see how they fail, and experience the beautiful world they create.

Also, if we’re going to see a new city / jurisdiction be created, that takes time, even in TV-land.

Each of the characters must also follow an arc, an evolution that illustrates the themes. When you have dozens of these evolutions, you must take the time to show them.

What Did You Learn Making This Trailer and Treatment?

To apply for the competition, we had to prepare a trailer of up to 3 minutes, and also a 12-page treatment (basically a document that outlines the story and the characters).

In a perfect world, I would write the treatment, and then once it’s ready I would decide what parts of it to extract to distill into a script for the trailer. Then, I’d write the script, and could finally hand that off to the trailer team to make the visuals.

Unfortunately, I am not perfect and I don’t live in a perfect world. Instead, I spent the summer writing articles in Malaysia with my wife and four children, and the place we were staying closed (more on that next week), and we got lice before we came back, and all the while I was writing the story while writing the script while working with an agency to make the trailer. But then if I had not bitten off more than I could chew, I would not have chewed it, and I wouldn’t have a TV series project, at the cost of a couple of years of aging in five weeks. Anyway the lesson here is don’t be like me.

How do you write as a side project a three-season series with 25 characters across five arenas in five weeks with no fiction-writing experience?

Some would say “Poorly”. They might not be wrong. But I still have some learnings for you.

The issue with so many characters is that they are impossible to hold in your brain at the same time: The story is about their interactions, but with so many, they have thousands of potential interactions—impossible to keep track of. The main challenge is that, once you’re in somebody’s brain, you see everything from their point of view: Their goals, their needs, their actions. It’s very difficult to hold one other person’s perspective at the same time, let alone 25. That prevents you from even getting the overarching plot, because it should be the result of these interactions.

I researched how other TV series creators did it. My main references were The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. In most cases, they didn’t have much beyond the first season:

• Breaking Bad had the main arc of the protagonist, and that’s it. For example, the second main character was supposed to die in the first season.

• Mad Men had the main character’s personality and flaws figured out, and the key concepts of the first and last episode of the series.

• The Wire had the high-level concept for the series, and the detail of the first season, but it didn’t know what each season would be about

Luckily, I knew early on how it would end, and I had several setpieces I wanted to hit along the way. So in some way, I already had more detail than these creators. Unfortunately, I felt that I had to complete a reasonable draft of the entire three seasons for the competition. I needed a more detailed project than what these superb creators had… Luckily, George RR Martin, the writer of the hyperdetailed books behind Game of Thrones, has discussed this.

Apparently, he knew the big shape of the story early on: the three big conflicts, who died and who didn’t, the main character arcs… Then, he took one character at a time, and he would write several chapters getting himself in that character’s mind, leading it towards the next point he had clarity on. This allowed each character to feel really alive and realistic: GRRM really gets into each of their heads. He called it gardening, as opposed to architecting.

Once he did that with one character, he moved to the next character, and did the same. This allowed every character to move forward, at the cost of creating content incongruent with other characters’ stories. So when he would write a new character that braided with an existing one, he would frequently have to go back and rewrite the characters he had already written. This iteration would build little by little the overarching story, and frequently he had to change the big setpieces altogether, as they didn’t fit what real characters would do. This is how you end up with thousands of pages per book and leave your audience waiting for 15 years before finishing the next book.

Alas, I didn’t have 15 years, I had five weeks, so I had to compress that somehow. The way I did it was to write the entire story for each one of the arenas: one for Socotra, another for Islam, China, and Mars (the West was a reaction to the others). Once I broadly knew where each was going to go, I took the main characters in each, and wrote them. I did that for about a dozen of the main ones. Once that was done, I had massive amounts of complexity and plots that were incompatible, but that’s where AI is really good. It is trivial for it to pinpoint inconsistencies, and even propose solutions. I’d say 25% of the solutions were good, but 100% of the problem identification was right.

Once I had that, I rewrote the entire series. Now, I have seven pages of a highly consistent storyline, with all the main characters contributing to the plot, with their own arc.

Overall, the arena stories took 30% of the time, the development of the top 12 characters about 50% of the time, and the remaining 20% was putting the storyline together.

What is AI good and bad at for this?

AI is amazing at identifying problems: inconsistencies, weaknesses in the plot, times where characters are flat, when their arc fails, when they don’t move the story forward…

Ideas for solutions are hit or miss: character arcs, setpieces, background story… It would frequently propose stuff that was stale, cliché, or boring. It preferred standard solutions to interesting ones.

It had blind spots when something was coherent but boring. For example, one character was super boring, and the AI kept inserting him in different places, doing different things that were all boring. It’s also not great at figuring out what a character would do in a certain situation. I think both of these issues are in part due to the training, which makes characters converge towards agreeableness and consensus rather than conflict.

I came out of this thinking that, with proper prompting and harnessing, and with better visualizations of story elements, we might be close to designing AI products that can write interesting stories. But not yet.

What did you learn from making the trailer?

I hired an agency to make the actual video, so I haven’t learned much on the video making itself—I plan to remedy that in the future. So the learnings were about everything else. Many of these points will be very obvious to people who work in this space, so this is for everybody else:

• A ~2min video made by great agencies costs ~$20-$25k. I didn’t meet with the very top agencies, but with some great ones, some of which have won awards.

• Normally, the process is to get a script first. Then, you extract the characters and locations, and create sheets for them.

• Once you have the characters, arenas, and key visual elements nailed, you make a storyboard to test the story. And from there, you start producing the actual videos.

• The vast majority of the work was actually the early one: characters and arenas. It was relatively fast to produce the videos afterwards!

• My plan was to iterate on the script while making the trailer: As we explored concepts, I would update the script. That didn’t work for the agency. It was easier for them if everything was mostly established from the beginning. I don’t think that’s great, but I do think more work upfront would have made the process less painful and the outcome better.

• I tended to focus more on the geopolitical stakes, but they fell flat because there were no emotional stakes. Who are we building this for? When I introduced the protagonist’s wife and daughter, it became much better.

• The storyboard was great to see many parts of the story didn’t work, and we had to remake the script.

• Partners might resist dailies (a daily meeting where you review what has been done, correct it, and discuss what comes next), but I found it fundamental. I used to do this in tech (“daily scrums”), and found them mostly a waste of time, but here they were necessary, maybe because the team didn’t know each other well yet.

• People just don’t understand what you have in mind. When you think you’re obvious enough, you’re not. We had to make the story 10x more explicit than we originally thought. In articles, people take the time to consume the nuances. In a 3 minute trailer, it’s just too fast, there’s too much information, people won’t perceive every detail you plant.

• As a result, we inserted text cards throughout the trailer telegraphing the theme, and it immediately became more understandable.

• It’s impossible for you to know if your story is understandable after some time, because you know it too intimately. Every now and then you need to present it to fresh people who have never seen it, otherwise people project what they already know about the project into the trailer to make sense of it. In other words, you quickly become blind to your own story. Ideally, you’d do this throughout the process, and always ask a new person what they understood from the trailer.

• In the back and forth adding and cutting scenes, it’s easy to lose track of some connections. You end up with orphaned scenes that don’t make sense, in some cases losing key elements. Having somebody fresh watch it should correct that.

When Will We Learn If Uncharted Territories Won?

I finished the application last Saturday (hence why no articles last week), and now we need to wait until the end of the month to know if we made it to the top 25, and then the top 10 will be announced in early September. The announcement of the winner will be on September 25^th, at the Moonshots event in Los Angeles that the organization kindly invited me to, so I’ll be there.

If you think this series is awesome and you’d like to see it made, or you’re a professional in the field and are interested in actually making it, please let me know! I have little experience in the industry, so any thoughts are welcome.3

Now, if you haven’t yet, please go watch that trailer, like it, and share it around!

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History books tell you about different countries and who their rulers invaded, the events of the kings’ courts, the big battles, and that’s mostly it. If you go to a museum, you might also see some forts, some weapons, paintings of the powerful, some daily objects if you’re lucky, and in passing, they might mention something like: “Their main sources of income were grain and cloth trading.”

The real story is that last little sentence. Why did one country go to war with another? “For glory and power” you might say, but is that really all the story? And where did that power come from? Or the wealth of the defendant? What determined who prevailed?

All of that was determined by economics, and economics, in turn, are driven by the needs of households. So let’s go visit a household in Ancient Mesopotamia in 2000 BC.

What Was Life Like in Mesopotamia in 2000 BC?

We’re in the 3^rd dynasty of Ur, a Sumerian kingdom in Mesopotamia:1

Nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, this was one of the most fertile regions in the world (water plus sediments), so home to a large population, because food became people. Population meant money and soldiers, so the earliest and strongest powers always came from places like this.

In Sumer, the world revolved around the agriculture of barley.

This means making canals that take water from the Tigris or Euphrates and distribute it into smaller and smaller canals until every field can be flooded, then plowed and sown. Gangs must take care of the irrigation system, while others plow the fields, and yet others transport it. Grain is the source of most calories, it’s what makes cities and kingdoms big, because it can feed many mouths. But farming barley is just the beginning.

Getting the grain was just the beginning. You had to soak, dehusk, winnow, sieve, grind, toast, cook… Of course, that also meant getting pots and fetching water and fuel, tasks that took a long time too. And you had to produce more food to sell, so you could buy other stuff, including other things besides grain. Overall, over 50% of a household’s time was spent on food.

Then you had to make your clothes, build and maintain your house, transport stuff, sell some of your production to the market, work for the state (as a farmer, a ditch maintainer, or a fighter, for example), take care of the children... Of course, everybody helped since they were pretty young, but it was brutal work, day in, day out.2

Notice how different this is from our lives! We still have childcare, household coordination, trading, institutional work (ie, the work we do to pay taxes), cooking, and cleaning, but everything else we buy, which we can afford by doing one single job (usually) which is way better than doing these tasks.3 They worked substantially more than us, doing much harder work, among other reasons because they had to do most stuff for themselves.

There were a few things they consumed that they couldn’t make themselves, though, and that’s the key to history.

When Farmers Needed Others

Coordination

There are many things farmers simply couldn’t do alone, like building and maintaining irrigation systems. You have to dig the canals, build the levees, open and close ditches, and above all constantly dredge them to fight silting. These canals were extremely long, no single household could do all this, so they needed to coordinate so that everybody chipped in, which means they also needed to coerce people to work. So that was one of the key roles of the state, one of the reasons it emerged.

Since the value of land was a direct consequence of the locations of the canals, it was also coordinated by the state. Land was allocated, and habitation land was dirt cheap—unlike today.

I wrote much more about how this shaped the cities and kingdoms of the regions in this article. Here’s an extract:

In Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates channel in and out, forming a network of rivers between them.

Floods don’t happen just before sowing, like in the Nile. They come at harvest time. Therefore, water needs to be tightly managed:

• When sowing, little water was available, so it was precious. It had to be used sparingly.

• When harvesting, floods came, and water had to be managed in a completely different way.

There is a fresh water table and a salty water table, which determines which soil is fertile, which soil can be reclaimed from marshes, and which fields had to remain fallow. If you look at the diagram above, you’ll see the A-B line. Its cross-section is below:

You had orchards, gardens, cereal fields, marginal fields, and marshes, all of which needed to be managed. Canals would bring water during dry times to irrigate the soil. Some fields had to be left to fallow, others had to be reclaimed from the marshes. Marshes could be used for reed and fish.

But which canals should be opened and when? What fields should be left to fallow? How much water could be tapped through wells? What marginal lands could be reclaimed? How high was the salty water table? Most of these decisions required knowledge of local conditions that varied throughout the seasons and were unique to each parcel of land, so the people who managed these fields in Mesopotamia were not easy to replace. In fact, productivity would plummet with the wrong managers at the top. So distant kings couldn’t use this stick to control local managers.

However, local rulers did understand all these nuances, and they controlled access to water during the dry times, so they were able to exact taxes that distant kings couldn’t. This is why rulers were local and not distant, and hence why Lower Mesopotamia had many city-states but no strong and enduring kingdoms and empires until much later.

Besides water, the state had other roles.

Oxen were expensive, and a household didn’t need one full time, so it made sense to share that asset too: Today, you help me plough my field with the group’s oxen, tomorrow I’ll help you. The same logic is valid for the plough itself.

Yet another function that the state could sometimes perform. In some cases, seed was also provided by the state for sowing. It also makes sense, as centralizing grain is a sort of insurance, and it’s cheaper to maintain one large granary than lots of small ones.

All of this could be done locally, so it required social coordination (which evolved into states), but not much more than that. The next level was trade.

The Role of Scarce Resources

This is what people had to buy from the market:

Other Food

You can’t survive just on grain or your vegetable garden. People also bought fish, meat, dairy, dates, vegetables, salt, condiments… Many of these required specialized people: fishermen, shepherds, date farmers, salt producers… But in the case of Ur, most of these could be done relatively close by, by people who didn’t possess unique knowledge, and without unique resources. Salt could be quite unique in other parts of the world, but not here.

Pottery

What do you put your food on? Pottery plates. You also used pottery for storage.

Pottery needs three things: clay, kilns (ovens), and expertise.

Clay is quite common, but it’s not literally everywhere. Kilns require big investments, because the bigger they are, the hotter they can get. Pottery needed enough skill that potters had to specialize. The result is that pottery tended to have some sort of state coordination, but owning a pottery operation didn’t get you very much political power, only maybe in your area.

Timber

Timber is a bit harder to get. In Mesopotamia, farmers could grow reed and palm trees, but neither are great for construction. For that, you need long, strong beams, which had to be imported. But there are lots of sources of timber, and it could be floated downstream, so the result was that there wasn’t too much political power to be gained by controlling its trade, even though local civilizations or kingdoms could emerge based on the trade of timber. In fact, that’s exactly how Phoenicians emerged, just around that time, in what’s today mostly Lebanon. This is a satellite map of the area today:

You can see how these mountains catch snow and rain, irrigating the mountainside that can’t be easily farmed, so the trees were not cleared, and Phoenicia became one of the biggest sources of timber for both Mesopotamia and Egypt.

As I’ve written in the past, Phoenicians were the first civilization to spread across the Mediterranean, and it’s not hard to understand why: Anatolia and Mesopotamia are where civilization emerged in the area, and Phoenicia is one of their closest coasts. But unlike the other ones (the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf), there’s plenty of timber here, needed for ships, so Phoenicians made their ships and sailed around the Mediterranean. This advantage would allow them to found colonies left and right in the Mediterranean around 1,000 years later.

Copper

Now we’re really talking. Metals like it can explain, among other things, the predecessors of Bahrain and Oman.

Read more

New business models are opening up in space, and our path to Mars becomes ever clearer.

Space Tourism on the Moon!

This is what GRU (Galactic Resource Utilization) has in mind:

Artist’s rendering of GRU Space’s hotel on the Moon.

Here’s their white paper. Interestingly…

Read more

Nine months ago I looked at the data and concluded that we were not yet in an AI bubble: The fundamentals of the business models were good. I thought demand for AI would continue growing, and that would drive stocks up. Indeed, demand and stocks kept growing.1 Are we still in that world?

It’s time to reassess what’s going to happen looking forward, and now I’m less confident because of several signals:

1. Massive stock market swings in AI

2. Some signals that demand is weakening on the ground

3. Competition

4. Cash availability

Let’s look into the details.

Weakness Signals

1. Stock Signals

This is the South Korean stock market index KOSPI:

This is because SK Hynix (a company that makes the critical memory needed by AI) and Samsung (which also makes memory, as well as chips) account for about half of that index. After so much growth, a correction was due. Since lots of retail investors had joined, and many of them were leveraged (borrowed to invest), the correction caused a scare and touched off panic-selling. Others who were overleveraged were forced to sell because their stocks had lost more money than they had put in.

South Korean companies are not the only ones that have suffered this correction. At the time of writing, Micron, also a memory company, has lost 32% of its peak value, AMD (chips) has lost 18%, NVIDIA 15%, Intel 36%, Broadcom 19%. These broad drawdowns have caught other investors that were overleveraged, such as Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness.

Note that virtually all of these have grown back from their troughs, but is this a stop on the way down, or was the trough a stop on the way up?

2. AI Demand Weakening

I constantly read examples of tech companies saying they’re going to cut their AI spend because it’s gone through the roof—60% of enterprises are doing this, according to the investment bank UBS. These include companies like Uber, Walmart, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Cisco, Atlassian, Tesla, Salesforce, or DoorDash. Logically, if the cutting-edge tech companies are cutting AI spend, surely others are following suit, right?

3. Cash Availability

This is Google’s cash flow (how much cash is produced or eliminated by the company):

For the first time in its history, Google has burned more cash than it has earned. If it’s doing that, odds are its competitors are also burning through cash at a flabbergasting speed.

All this money is going from hyperscalers to chip and memory makers.

As hyperscalers burn all this cash, they start borrowing. They still have plenty of room to do that though

4. Competition

A couple of weeks ago, the Chinese open-weights model Kimi surprised the world: It beat frontier models like Claude and ChatGPT in some performance evaluations (in the case below, coding):

It’s the first time this has happened:

Now this is just for coding, and is only one evaluation. In other measures, it seems like Kimi is still a few months away in performance compared to bleeding edge models.

Since they’re basically free to use, the market is moving to them, at least in terms of tokens:

This is a massive deal, because the trillions invested in frontier models like those of OpenAI and Anthropic are contingent on these companies making huge returns, but if their products are easy to copy, their lead will eventually be competed away: Who will pay millions to a company when a free version from China exists? If this continues, wouldn’t investment grind to a halt?

The way this usually happens is through distillation: A company asks another company’s model lots of questions, and then uses the questions and answers to train their own model. The companies that suffer the copying aren’t happy about it, but their argument against it is pretty flimsy: They, themselves, have trained their models on the entirety of the Internet’s content, for which they don’t own any copyright. Hard to accuse others of copyright violation when you’ve done it too.

The lack of scruples of these Chinese models is another upside for them: They have very few harnesses.

After using all three recent releases, Fable, GPT 5.6, and now Kimi, it's clear that the full power of the models has been significantly held back by the safeguard restrictions, leading to the top models being quite literally lobotomized in some areas, which leads to subpar results as the safeguards pollute its entire thinking and problem solving abilities.—Enzo

You can use them for all sorts of nefarious goals (and also for legitimate ones that are nevertheless blocked, such as cyberdefense or research into hot topics), and they won’t stop you.

Overheard: “I’ve switched to Kimi from Claude for a bunch of work. It’s just so much more fun because it just does the thing instead of lecturing you”.—David Sacks, investor and Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

This is also called dumping: Make a similar product at a fraction of the cost, destroy the industry in the source country, and then control the entire supply chain. China has done this with electric vehicles, solar panels, and many other industries. Get ready to add AI to the list.

The solution is not protectionism, though: It would lead to worse and more expensive models.

But China’s impressive performance is not just due to distillation. They can learn from each other in a way that closed companies like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI can’t, since they are hiding their secrets from others, and must reinvent the same solutions.

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OK, these are all the signals of weakness I can find on the outlook of AI companies and their stocks. But are there signals of strength? And how do they compare to the weakness signals?

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Right on script, a malicious AI just escaped into the Internet to commit illegal actions. Luckily, we’re still alive, and the AI seems contained. So what does it mean? Should we be more scared now that an AI has enacted exactly the AI Doomers’ fears? Or safer knowing that we are still alive?

To answer that, we must understand the details of the hack and its consequences.

The Hack

OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) was testing a new AI model internally. These tests include how well models hack other systems. For that, they need to let them run wild to see their full potential, to attack as aggressively as they can, so the AI had no harnesses—controls that constrain its behavior.

But of course, you don’t want these models to cause havoc all over the Internet, so you keep them in a “sandbox”: A locked room where the student must pass the test. He can play inside, but he can’t get out.

We don’t know exactly how OpenAI’s sandbox is designed,1 but one of their key features is no direct access to the Internet, to avoid an escape and all sorts of nefarious behavior. Using the student analogy, it’s as if he got his study materials in the room, but no Internet access to avoid cheating.

In this case, the only access the student theoretically had was a guard from whom he can ask for books. The guard assesses the request, and if it’s reasonable, he goes to the Internet, downloads the book, and gives it to the student. In software parlance, the guard is a proxy, and it downloads software packages.

To observe the AI’s behavior, OpenAI researchers gave it a goal: Beat ExploitGym, a test specifically designed for this, in which an AI must find a series of vulnerabilities in the code, and attack as many as possible until they succeed at exploiting them. It’s a bit like asking a military student: Here are a bunch of defended cities. Try to find their weak points, and when you do, attack until you breach them.

But this new AI/student found that too much work, so it had a different idea: What if, instead of doing the work, I cheated? What if I could find the actual answers to the test, rather than pass the test? What if, instead of really analyzing all these cities, I just sneaked into the teacher’s office and stole the answers?

The best place to find these answers is obviously on the Internet, but to access it, it had to bypass the guard. So that’s what the AI did.

The rogue AI attempted to break away from the guard on July 9^th around 2:30am. It took control of the guard within one hour.

But the guard didn’t have access to the open world either. It was merely the first step. From there, the AI kept hacking the internal networks, going from one computer to another, gaining more and more credentials, until it found one machine with access to the Internet. And then it escaped.

After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym.—OpenAI

So the AI agent attacked Hugging Face, and got in by July 11^th. How? The place where AIs in general are most vulnerable is when they take in datasets from the Internet—a bit like when you download a document from the Internet, and it turns out to have a virus. That’s how the malicious agent inserted itself into a Hugging Face machine. From there, it infected a program, and from there, an entire machine. Once there, it looked for credentials—which the machine needs to perform its work, like for example access to remote servers—and harvested them.

The AI achieved its goal on July 13^th, four days and over 17,000 actions after starting, each time hiding its steps.

Hugging Face suggested that it used its own AI defense:

Thanks to this approach, we were able to do in hours what would usually take days, and match the adversary's speed.—Hugging Face

What AI did they use? They started with frontier models (probably OpenAI and Anthropic’s own AIs), but these companies are so worried about people using their models for cyberattacks that they didn’t let Hugging Face defend itself properly. They were mixing defense and attack, so they prevented defense. So Hugging Face turned to a Chinese AI! It has open weights (the inner working is public and people can download the AI to use it on their own computers), so they installed it on Hugging Face’s own servers, which had the additional benefit that all the facts and credentials they used remained local to Hugging Face instead of being shared with OpenAI or Anthropic.

Unfortunately, it looks like this was not really defense, but an attempt at understanding what had happened. By the time Hugging Face reacted, the malicious AI had already obtained what it wanted, the ExploitGym results.

It also looks like, in this or another similar case, OpenAI found other types of shady behavior:

In one case, an agent left notes apparently for future versions of itself, according to three people familiar with the matter. The ‌notes, found in ⁠a part of OpenAI's infrastructure, laid out instructions for how agents could free themselves from OpenAI’s internal constraints, the people said. Earlier tests of the models yielded cases in which monitoring systems had been disconnected, one of the people said.

Why are people so concerned?

Paperclips

The biggest fear about AI is the paperclip maximizer, first illustrated by Nick Bostrom.

The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.

The key concept here is instrumental convergence: To achieve virtually any goal, AIs will tend to achieve other intermediary goals that are pretty predictable: cheat, hack, escape to the Internet, replicate there, and… neutralize humans so that they can’t stop the AI from achieving their goal.

So Is This Good or Bad?

Now that this hack happened, should we be more or less worried about AIs taking over the world and killing us all? Here are the pros and cons I can gather.

Reasons I’m More Concerned

1. This is exactly what doomers predicted: An AI would try to escape a sandbox, and would succeed (because they’re impossible to stop, because they become too intelligent at some point). This means their other predictions are more likely: instrumental convergence suggests eventually they won’t stop at cheating, hacking, accessing the Internet, and leaving instructions for other AIs to escape, but also start self-replicating on the Internet and trying to neutralize humans.

2. AIs go to extreme lengths to achieve rather narrow goals. That’s exactly the paperclip scenario. Four days and over 17,000 actions!

3. It took days for either OpenAI or Hugging Face to notice the attack.

4. In the case of OpenAI, it looks like they weren’t even monitoring the sandbox!!

5. OpenAI doesn’t know how to keep an AI in a sandbox, and this is happening all the time:

“Models have broken out of sandboxes before, and we always try to patch them,” the staffer says. “But the problem is … it’s impossible to patch every single thing that a creative AI can do.”

6. This is not confirmed, but it seems like the malicious AI won. It got the results.

7. It shows that, without harnesses, the AI will choose the easiest path to achieve its goals. It could have thought much longer, but it saw that cheating was easier, so that’s what it did.

8. This includes committing illegal acts like hacking other companies. It’s not clear what the command was, but the fact that it is willing to commit clearly illegal behavior means that, in many circumstances, AIs will.

9. Based on the timeline, it looks like the FBI learned about the attack before OpenAI. That means OpenAI might have been forced to reveal the issue, and that many others happen that we don’t know about.

10. We can’t use AI to defend ourselves, because it’s too restrained. So advanced attacking AIs will always be at an advantage. This is dangerous.

The attacker was bound by no usage policy, while our own forensic work was blocked by the guardrails of the hosted models we first tried. The practical lesson for defenders: have a capable model you can run on your own infrastructure vetted and ready before an incident, both to avoid guardrail lockout and to keep attacker data and credentials from leaving your environment.—Hugging Face

11. Maybe the worst thing is that, even knowing exactly what they were supposed to do, OpenAI still failed across the board.

12. OpenAI’s head of safety, Johannes Heidecke, announced his resignation sometime before July 10th

13. It looks like the latest model is much less aligned than the previous one.

Reasons I’m Less Concerned

1. If the AI had been really capable, it would have solved the problem rather than cheat. From another perspective though, its decision was pretty rational: Should I try to solve 1,000 exercises, or better just one exercise (get out of OpenAI to get the results directly)? More importantly, it seems like ExploitGym is a poorly structured test: In some cases, you have to make a guess. Therefore, solving the test will always give you a worse result than getting the answers directly (no gambling in that).

2. It’s unclear what the AI was told to do. Some people suggest it was told to succeed at getting the results, which implicitly entails “by any means necessary”. If that’s the case, then the hack can be seen as restraint. It didn’t kill anybody, it didn’t destroy anything, it just stole.

3. Everybody expected the first of such attacks to come from open weight models, which are naturally more accessible to hackers, and that closed-weight models would be defending. The exact opposite happened, which suggests frontier AI models are going to be the risk, not random hackers using open weights. Frontier models basically means OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, which is good news: They have high oversight, and there are only a few to monitor.

4. We can now use better and better AIs to attack pieces of code and find more and more vulnerabilities and bugs, closing them before more intelligent AIs come around. This is what Anthropic did with Mythos (Fable before it was harnessed): For months, they used it to collaborate with others to find and patch vulnerabilities.

5. OpenAI’s test didn’t go right, but it’s important that they do this sort of work. That’s exactly how we learn and improve, so we’re ready when an AI goes really rogue.

Will This Happen Again?

Yes, for sure. AIs are getting better. The more time passes, the more intelligent they are, and the longer they can spend time attacking other AIs.

That said, the world of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a prime target for malignant AIs, and yet DeFi services have lost to attacks little money in historic terms.

The reason these attacks haven’t risen in frequency, according to some commentators, is that AIs all use the same types of approaches, so attack and defense are on an equal footing: If you know what types of attacks you’ll get, you can focus your defense on them. Meanwhile, humans diverge much more in their attack approaches, so defenders must spend much more time and money in covering their bases. Even then, you won’t catch everything:

I don’t know if this is true. And I can think of an equally concerning thought, which is that if an attacker is completely free to do whatever it takes to hack a system, then the defense must be equally free, because otherwise the attacking AIs will move at the speed of AIs, while the defense will be blocked by human speed. This means most companies will have unharnessed AIs able to write code in production, and that sounds like a very dangerous thing to have.

Why does this matter? Because the #1 fear that AI experts have had for a long time is that AI might kill us all.

Will the AI Kill Us All?

As we get more information, we must update our views. We just did it with the HuggingFace hack, but what other things have we learned on the topic in the last few months?

1. No FOOM

One of my main fears was a FOOM: an AI getting better so fast that it would improve itself, thus becoming faster, and using the speed to improve itself more, and so on in a recursive loop that would make it superhuman in a matter of hours.

It’s been four years since the release of ChatGPT, and we’re not there yet. Recursive self-improvement is happening now, but it’s taking months or years.

2. Compute and Electricity Limitations

The amount of compute, and even electricity, available is not infinite, and it’s limited by very physical things. An AI can’t easily raise a trillion dollars to build new datacenters and nuclear power plants.

3. Alignment

AIs have emerged not from some alien type of intelligence and values, but from the most fundamentally human one: language. Language embeds all of humanity’s values. It’s all of us, everything we’ve ever written.

This bestows it with some very valuable features, like the fact that when an LLM is pushed to be good in some ways, it becomes good in other ways (and vice versa). This means we might not need to get them all perfectly right; it might be enough to get them broadly right.

You might have felt that yourself when using LLMs: Now, you can give them very broad prompts, without making your goal very explicit, but they’re able to understand what you meant (rather than precisely what you said) and answer your intention rather than your words. I think they do that substantially better than most humans, actually.

These three facts suggest the paperclip optimizer scenario is less likely than I thought.

So What Should We Do?

Over 1,000 employees at top AI companies have signed a statement asking the US government to lead an initiative to slow down AI development. This has been signed by the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei. Many others have professed sympathy for this, including DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and Sam Altman.

This is important because no company can unilaterally stop their AI development: If they do, their resources (money, compute, researchers) will go elsewhere. That elsewhere, by definition, will be less scrupulous about their AI research.

So the only way is to have all the frontier AI companies agree to slow down. I think after this incident, and that statement, it’s more likely to happen.

But we can’t do it without China. We now need the US government to meet with AI companies in the US and with their Chinese counterparts, so we can orchestrate an AI development pause. That way, we can use the AIs we’ve already developed to better understand how to align and constrain new ones.

It’s extremely important to continue developing AIs: They will improve humanity across the board, help us fend off aging and diseases, and provide a level of abundance never seen before. But we should not do that while running the risk of eliminating humanity. So let’s pause for a bit.

Overall, my p(doom) —the probability that AI kills us all—has probably shrunk over the last week or so: Not because the AI hack was not scary, but because it looks like we’re finally reacting.

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When I claimed a year and a half ago that Europe’s current path of limiting freedom of speech was dangerous, many commenters thought I was exaggerating. Unfortunately, I fear I was overly optimistic.

The UK

For starters, the UK prosecutes 17x more people per year for speech crimes than the USSR did!

Mind you, these are prosecutions. If you look at arrests, just in England and Wales:

30 people are arrested every day for offensive online messages. According to Grok,1 this is 21x more than Russia today…

The crimes include retweets and sharing cartoons.

Apparently, this is an underestimate, because these numbers are just for one of the anti-speech laws. The number of recorded offenses could be in the order of hundreds of thousands per year.

This is not random. The Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service for England and Wales between 2008 and 2013 was Keir Starmer, now defenestrated prime minister, so those who prosecute free speech and those in power are the same.

These are the types of tweets that justified his arrest.

British citizens have been told they can’t wave an English flag in England near a pro-Palestinian demonstration.

You know this is a real problem when The Guardian agrees…

The Political Bias of Censorship

I fear there’s an aggravating issue here: The persecution might be politically motivated: In this case, the left might be using these tools more than the right, and do it against right-leaning views. I have seen many arrests for right-wing speech, but few for left-wing speech. Doing some research, it looks like there are some arrests for left-wing speech (related to death threats and others supporting Palestine) but outside of that, when I asked four LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek):

• Claude couldn’t find any arrest against left-wing speech

• DeepSeek found two: in both cases, attacks on left-wing politicians (!)

• Grok found ~20 arrests for anti-monarchy speech while mourning the Queen, one against a soldier, and a couple more about attacks on left-wing politicians (!)2

• ChatGPT could find 5 more.

When I made the equivalent request for arrests against right-wing speech, ChatGPT had no problem giving me long lists.

If you think that’s because the left doesn’t make the same types of speech violations, this is a video of a demonstration where the chant was “Shoot him in the neck like Charlie Kirk.” I asked LLMs to tell me if there were arrests for this type of chant, and it doesn’t look like there have been.

To be clear, I think most censorship is bad, whether it comes from the Left or the Right. It just happens to come more from the Left lately.

The desire to restrict free speech goes beyond the UK’s borders. Not only was Graham Linehan living in the US when he made the comments that resulted in his arrest, but the UK also tried to get a US company to pay fines.

They have done this after approving the Online Safety Act, which allows the UK government to attack foreign platforms and threaten them with massive fines in order to censor what they decide is harmful speech (to whom?).

Now, right-wing British politicians are complaining that the government is weaponizing these laws to censor them, by pressuring platforms like TikTok to take down their videos (and they comply).

This lawyer claims this was very much why the Online Safety Act was designed the way it was.

More Censorship!

The UK is of course exploring going further. It has released plans to downrank competing voices in social media, so that their vetted media gets more views:

Today (23 June) the government has published a Green Paper, Watch this Space: A new strategic direction for UK media, to consult on options to require social media companies and video sharing platforms to make sure that news content from public service media (PSM), which includes the BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4, S4C and 5, and other trustworthy providers, is prominent and easy to find on their platforms.

YouTube interpreted this more clearly: This is to downrank all competing creators, to give the government a stronger voice.

And then the UK government wants to track every person commenting online—imagine for what.

I was at a table with a European billionaire a couple of months ago. He thought it was a catastrophe that Elon Musk had bought Twitter, because now misinformation was rampant. I think that’s very telling of the different European and US approaches to speech: Americans understand that free speech is uncomfortable, but that it’s necessary because otherwise the government will end up deciding what people should think via censorship. Europeans haven’t realized this. They see speech they don’t like and conclude “We must ban that!”, not realizing this can turn extremely dangerous when the opposition takes power. I don’t care whether the party in power is from the left or the right, censorship is always bad.

More European Censorship!

All of this is not limited to the UK. Germany doesn’t want to be left behind by the UK: It’s illegal to insult somebody in public or online. Retweeting fake quotes or an insult is a crime.

To see how far this has gone, simply look at Google Reviews. Somebody posted a three-star review of a business (“it’s just OK”) and this is what Google said:

From official EU data:

One analysis found that 99.97% of all Google Maps reviews removed for the information across the entire EU come from German businesses.—via FastCo

Since this made star ratings useless, Google Maps reacted by revealing the number of complaints that were removed, and that’s what people pay attention to now:

France also wants in. A woman who had been sexually harassed by an immigrant (who was never apprehended), and who said “the main danger to women in France is Black African and Arab immigrant men”, was convicted of aggravated public insult (injure publique aggravée) on grounds of origin, ethnicity, race, etc.

Much more worryingly, the French Senate’s culture commission adopted a report with 56 recommendations on how to regulate online information. In this video, representatives from left, right, and center parties are saying:

What would happen if a public figure, an intellectual movement, or a well-funded political party decided to devote those resources to a political project, using social media as a weapon?

In other words, French politicians want to ban citizens from funding opinion campaigns?! This is absolutely nuts! From now on, only the government can push opinion campaigns.

This is exactly the way freedom dies.

In the Netherlands, this man was convicted to go to prison for releasing statistics that link immigration to crime—exactly what I did in this article.

Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, said that for information, “Prevention is better than a cure.” In other words, the position is not “Censorship doesn’t exist” anymore, but “Censorship is good.”

I used to be a fervent supporter of the EU, but I have now reversed my position, because of moves like this one that make my blood boil.

So what happened? The EU has been trying for some time to pass a law that allows governments to access personal communications. It’s like having a government agent eavesdropping inside your home. The excuse, like always, is “protect the children”:

But that’s not the true intention. You can imagine what the true goal is by paying attention to what so many censorship-supporting politicians say when they’re not extremely careful. So this is what happened:

• The EU parliament approved Chat Control v1 in 2021.

• It was always meant to be temporary until a better solution was approved, but after five years, the better solution never came (because it’s so abusive it always loses). So in April of this year, it lapsed.

• In March 2026, the EU parliament denied an extension.

• So in July, in the last session of the parliament, when many MEPs are on holidays, the center-right European Popular Party (EPP) used an emergency procedure to avoid committee oversight and force a vote. In 2^nd votes, the EPP needs a majority of the entire chamber (361 votes out of the total 720, not a simple majority of the parliamentarians who vote) to stop a law. But given so many people were not in the parliament, only 314 voted against it (compared to 276 in favor).

• By the way, this is all led by the EPP, the center-right party in Europe, to show that many people on both sides of the aisle are against freedom in Europe.

This gives them two more years of surveillance while they figure out Chat Control v2, a way to mass-surveil Europeans forever. They’ve already failed in five rounds of negotiation, but they won’t stop until they succeed.

Canada Follows the Motherland

According to this article, similar things are happening in Canada:

Until now, a Canadian charged with a hate-propaganda offence could raise the “good faith religious opinion” defense, a narrow protection for sincerely expressing an opinion on a religious subject or advancing an argument based on a religious text. The Combatting Hate Act, which received Royal Assent on June 18 and takes effect July 18, repeals it. Whether a sermon or a quoted verse is protected now depends on context, audience, and how a prosecutor reads the room. American law has a name for what happens when people must guess what they are allowed to say and, because of the uncertainty, end up not saying anything at all: a chilling effect.

There’s more. Close behind the Combatting Hate Bill, a new Ottawa bylaw taking effect August 1 will mandate a 50-meter “bubble zone” (that’s about 164 freedom feet) around schools, hospitals, places of worship, daycares, and care homes. Inside the bubble, protest is simply banned. Not “protest that blocks the door,” or “protest that disrupts planned events,” but any protest at all.

There’s more. In early July, Canadians learned of a 35-page internal memo from Industry Minister Mélanie Joly’s department — titled “Misinformation and Disinformation Strategy” — floating “legal action” against users on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn who post what the government deems “false and misleading information.”

You read that right. This memo proposes giving the Canadian government the power to deem criticism false and punish (somehow?) the author for publishing that false information or the platform for hosting it — who exactly would be the target of “legal action” is also unclear. If that sounds familiar, it should. The Soviet Union had something very much like it.

What I alerted about a couple of years ago is now becoming a reality. Europeans and Canadians have to wake up. Free Speech is under threat.

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Greening the Sahara
German Environmentalists Worsen the Environment
Wisconsin’s Bald Eagle Nests
Record Fires
The US Nuclear Renaissance
Deaths from Heatwaves in Europe
Meanwhile in China
Energy Transitions Are Getting More Efficient
Solar Prices
Efficient Solar Installation
Solar Everywhere
Does Solar Degrade Fast?
Batteries Are Still Growing
Se…

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Read more

• Did Plains and Mountains Make Countries?

• Humans Terraform the Earth Before History

• External Stomachs

• Clans Are Bad for Society

• Iran vs US (Premium from hereon)

• African Slavery of Africans

• Colonial Empires Made the Homeland Poorer

• Population Density in Europe in 1600

• Population Changes in Europe in the Last 25 Years

• The EU Will Soon Produce More Weapon Shells than China

• Are the Chinese a Single Ethnicity?

• China in the Arctic

• The Lowest Point of the Chinese Communist Party

• We’re about to Discover More about the Past

In the previous article, I omitted that Oman controls the end of the tip of the Strait of Hormuz on the western side. We’re working on an automated fact-checker to avoid these, if you find any mistake please point it out, it should help it get better over time.

Did Plains and Mountains Make Countries?

One of the key hypotheses of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is that Europe had plains and mountains placed in such a way that they encouraged the formation of separate countries that competed against each other, and that this competition led to Europe’s progress.

Meanwhile, China’s heartland is the one massive North China plain, and from it, it’s reasonably easy to conquer adjacent spaces, none of which have plains that are as good.

This paper assessed this claim with numbers, finding that topography is sufficient to explain the formation of many countries in Europe and a single one in China. They found, however, that differences in land productivity could also explain this phenomenon. Specifically, the North China Plain is so hyperfertile—crossed by the two massive Yellow and Yangtze Rivers and crisscrossed by their tributaries—as to singly justify the centralization of China.

Humans Terraform the Earth Before History

Until recently, I thought the world was mostly pristine until humans hunted many megafauna species (such as mammoths) to extinction a few tens of thousands of years ago and started cutting trees around 5,000–10,000 years ago to replace forests with farms.

But Against the Grain (no sponsorship link), argues that humans terraformed the Earth much earlier, among other ways through fire.

The main enemy was trees. They’re like very tall umbrellas capturing most of the sunlight from above and lots of nutrients from below, and producing wood and very high leaves, both of which are nearly impossible for humans and animals to eat—wood because we can’t digest it, and leaves because they’re too high.

Humans therefore burned them, which replaced trees with:

• Ash, which is basically a concentration of all the nutrients that the trees have accumulated, placed onto the ground

• No competition for sunlight

• Fast growing bushes and grasses

  • The grasses could then feed animals, which could then be hunted

  • The bushes and grasses produced food that humans could eat, such as grains, seeds, nuts, shoots, tubers, and berries

Of course, the burning itself was a weapon, which humans used to hunt, for example by encircling animals, exposing nests and burrows, or pushing prey off a cliff or into traps or bogs.1

The best way to understand this as a system is as an improvement in the cost-benefit of calories. By transforming calories from wood and high-up leaves into edible plants and animals, fire increased the density of calories available to humans per acre, which also meant they had to walk less to feed themselves. A higher number of calories per acre is the single most important factor determining human population.

This fire thing has been going on for about 400,000 years, so the Earth we know (and even the Earth that the first farmers knew about 10k years ago), has nothing in common with the pristine Earth of 500,000 years ago. This includes the Amazon Rainforest, which has signs of this type of fire landscaping!

Food for thought for those who want to go back to a wilder Earth.

External Stomachs

We can’t eat wood. But we also can’t eat most grasses. So it’s a big problem when most of the calories after a fire are converted into grasses. As I mentioned before, this was solved by animals eating the grasses. The mechanism here is that we used the bioreactors of animal stomachs, thanks to their gut bacteria, which transform grass matter into edible matter for humans.

The problem with wild animals is that you need to hunt them, which takes a lot of calories. So the ROI (return on investment) has a high benefit (meat!) but at a high cost (hunting!).

This was solved by domesticating animals. First sheep and goats, but also chickens, pigs, and cows, foraged for us, converted that organic food through their bioreactors into meat, and stored it right there without the need for salt or fridges, for us to harvest when we saw fit. We selectively bred these domesticates for the qualities we desire: rapid reproduction, toleration of confinement, docility, meat, and milk and wool production.

Fire is the other external stomach we’ve used. Cooking food makes more calories available to human digestion because it weakens the plants’ cellular protection, makes proteins easier to attack by enzymes, disables defensive chemicals, opens starch granules…

Clans Are Bad for Society

I never realized how harmful clans were to civil development.

Clans are families made up of several generations of siblings and cousins. They can be quite big, if they have lots of children and maintain connections with family members for generations. They’re a pretty natural way for humans to organize, if you think about it: You share your assets with your blood relatives, whom you likely trust more than the average stranger.

Unfortunately, clans have many disadvantages. For example:

• By linking trust to blood, it makes cooperation between clans much harder.

• Cooperation with complete strangers is even harder, because justice is served within clans. If you can’t keep somebody honest because you don’t know their clan, how are you supposed to trust them?

• They prevent ambition, because the success of a single individual is shared across the entire clan. It’s like a huge tax, and taxes on labor reduce labor. Why would you work too hard if the fruits of your labor will be shared with others?

I’ve been reading The WEIRDest People (no sponsorship link), which advances the idea that the Catholic Church eliminating cousin marriage ended up weakening clans, so people had to start building institutions to coordinate with unrelated people, and that created institutions like guilds, chartered towns, religious orders, universities, companies, or stockmarkets.

This is supported by this paper, which provides evidence that:

• The medieval Catholic Church's marriage regulations dissolved Europe's clan-based kin networks.

• Strong kin networks are detrimental for democratic institutions.

• So the Church contributed to the emergence of participatory institutions.

It does so by showing associations:

• The weaker the ancestral kin, the stronger an ethnicity’s democratic tradition.

• The more exposure to the Church, the more self-governed cities with participatory institutions grew.

• The more cousin marriage bans, the more communes were formed.

• The weaker kin networks, the more civic a group is, and the more political participation there is.

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Also, there’s less than one week left to design the poster you’d love to see represent Uncharted Territories. The entries so far are all visible here. Here are the fan favorites, as of today:

It’s great to see some people interpreting individual articles or series too:

What do you think? Would you put one on your wall? Why?
Can you do better?

I added a creative brief for extra guidance. Don’t forget you can enter as many times as you like, so if you’ve submitted one and want to try again, go for it!

Entries close July 22.
$1,000 for the winning entry, announced on Aug 5, 2026.

The Russia – Ukraine War

I’m probably going to write a more complete article on this, but here are some salient facts from the last few months. Previous article on the topic here, here, and here.

The US Is Now Irrelevant in Ukraine

The US still sells weapons—some of which through EU procurement—but that’s not enough to tilt the battleground, and SpaceX’s Starlink is private. Any involvement of Trump & Co in Ukraine is theater.

Russia’s Military Spending Is Huge

In 2025, Russia’s state budget was €470B, so the military represents 53% of the state’s budget!

This means Russia doesn’t have that much room to maneuver. Luckily for it, the Iran War increased oil prices, but they have now gone down.

Russia’s 2026 budget is expected to shrink, although amendments might change that. But that would not be good for Russia’s economic outlook.

Starlink War Math

A war of attrition is won by the amount of resources each side can employ, and how productive those resources are.

As a rule of thumb, Ukraine has a quarter of Russia’s population and is poorer per capita, so any ratio needs to be higher than 3:1 in favor of Ukraine for it to have a chance.

According to Ukrainian sources, the kill ratio of Russians to Ukrainians was ~5:1, and now it’s frequently 13:1 since Starlink stopped servicing Russian troops in February.

We can’t draw many conclusions from this, but one we can is that Starlink is becoming one of the most powerful geopolitical tools there is.

Russia’s Loss of Power in the Russian Sphere

Kazakhstan just downgraded Russian in its constitution:

The new draft Kazakhstan constitution downgrades the status of the Russian language by specifying that Russian exists “alongside” Kazakh rather than sharing legal equality with it, a move upsetting Moscow and Kazakh nationalists for opposite reasons.

Kazakhstan used to be a key area for Russia to control to prevent attacks from horse-mounted hordes.

The UAE Leaves OPEC

The UAE is OPEC’s 3^rd largest producer of oil at 14% of the total, and it left the group on May 1^st. That’s a pretty significant loss:

Why did the UAE do that?

1. Oil used to be the lion’s share of the UAE’s income. Not anymore, now it’s only about 50%. A bigger and bigger share of the UAE’s income comes from the returns on its sovereign wealth fund, or from the success of the non-oil global city of Dubai.

2. By leaving OPEC, it can maximize its own revenue by pumping out oil, even though it reduces the price of oil overall. In March, I wrote The Future of Petrostates After Oil, in which I claimed that petrostates would start pumping out more and more oil as peak oil demand approached and they realized that whatever they can’t sell now was going to remain unsold in the ground.

3. Saudi Arabia has fiscal issues: It needs to cover all the entitlements it promised its population and continue investing to prepare for the end of oil. So it’s in a much less flexible position than it was a few years ago, when it pumped out so much oil that prices fell to zero, forcing Russia to stop its oversupply of oil.

4. The UAE increasingly despises Iran (which is part of OPEC), as it’s been the country most targeted by Iran. And the rest of the Gulf countries have not come to the UAE’s defense. The UAE and Oman control one side of the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran the other. The UAE will do everything it can to avoid Iran gaining full control.

5. Iran is aligned with Russia. This is pushing the UAE towards Ukraine, whose counter-drone and anti-missile technologies are relevant to the UAE now.

6. And, crucially, the UAE is more and more at odds with Saudi Arabia, which came to a head in Yemen in January, 2026, with the UAE-backed side being ousted by the Saudi-Arabia one.

Argentina’s Record Harvests

In the three articles about Argentina, I explained how its poverty was partially caused by its agricultural success, which brought lots of money when commodity prices were high, which then brought heavy export taxes to increase entitlement spending. This hindered agricultural production, and when commodity prices fell, the state’s budget broke.

We’re seeing one part of this cycle now, thanks to Milei’s policies. He’s been reducing export taxes on all commodities, and this is the result, for corn:

And for wheat:

The idea is not to stop all taxes. It’s that some taxes are good and some are bad. In general, you don’t want to tax the stuff that disappears when you tax it, just the stuff that remains. That’s why capital gains taxes are usually low in financially free countries (otherwise capital leaves), or why export taxes are bad: They make investment inefficient. Instead of taxing the exports, you want to tax the corporate benefits, which don’t penalize investment as much.1 That’s what Milei is doing: less export taxes, so that businesses invest more, grow more, and eventually pay even more taxes, via corporate taxes. We’re seeing the first half of that working, with record harvests—the result of investment.

Details About When Palestinians Missed One of Their Best Opportunities

I explained here what happened on the two occasions when Palestinians had historic opportunities to get their own state, and in both cases missed. As those close to these negotiations say, Palestinians never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity.

This recent account from a Saudi Arabian minister at the time is interesting. He basically corroborates the US & Israeli versions and is aligned with what happened soon after: Clinton was replaced by Bush, the Israeli PM lost his election, and Palestinians lost their state.

In the video, he explains how Ehud Barak, the Israeli PM, said he had approved an agreement that his government and the Israeli public wouldn’t approve. He still signed. When the signature on the agreement was presented to the Palestinians, they used the situation to make more requests. Always more requests, mooting any agreement. And now it’s Arabs sharing the same type of details.

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The contest for Uncharted Territories posters is ongoing. Go here to view the current entries and vote for your favorites so far. So far, my take is that there are many interesting concepts, in part thanks to AI, but that AI adds lots of meaningless details that don’t easily produce a great end product. The contest will remain open for a couple of weeks. Go here to submit your own entry!

I spent 15 years designing software products and businesses: reducing friction in onboarding, creating viral loops, building new features to increase retention, designing for improved network effects…

The more I did it, the more transparent the tactics that religions have used to grow became to me. It’s like the veil of complexity falls and the true structure of the world appears. Patterns that seemed incomprehensible suddenly make sense.

Yes, religion is like software: both produce ideas and rules instead of physical products, they have goals they translate into repeatable instructions focused on shaping human psychology and behavior, they have version control (anti-heresy) and forks (new sects), they optimize the onboarding, retention, viral loops, network effects…

With this lens, you start understanding why Christianity is the most widespread religion on Earth and why Islam spread so fast, having replaced smaller local religions like Facebook replaced Hi5 and SmallWorld. Why there are few Jews but the religion has survived 3,000 years, why each of these religions holds the beliefs it does, why their borders have barely changed in over 1,000 years, how they have evolved from one form to the other… You can understand why they emerged in the order they did, and why they were successful or failed. And it gives us a sense of what will happen with current religions in the future, and what new religions might arise.

And new versions come over time that improve on the previous ones, to make them work better and grow faster. In the previous articles, I showed how this is the case for Christianity and for Islam. The best way to illustrate this is through their evolution, from the v0 of animism and polytheism, following the software updates v1, v2, v3, v4, and v5.

v0: The Origin of Religious Belief

Finding Patterns

Which hominid was most successful: Those who saw patterns and drew quick conclusions to explain their causes, or those who didn’t? Obviously, the ones that reasoned through causality: Those who heard rustling in the bushes and thought “Lion!” would live longer than hominids who heard rustling in the bushes and thought “eh, who knows.” The hominids who saw their brother get struck by lightning and thought “The gods don’t want us on that hill, especially during thunderstorms” would live longer than hominids who thought “I wonder if that happens every time.”

Hominids who were constantly seeing cause-and-effect patterns were probably wrong most of the time, but if you’re superstitious and avoid repeating any behavior that preceded something bad, then you’re going to pass your genes on, and a thousand generations down the road your descendants are going to have brains that are great at imagining patterns, even those that aren’t really there.

Social Rites

When too many humans gather and they don’t have rules to code their conduct, tension arises. This makes collaboration hard, which keeps them poor. The groups that were prone to ease these tensions through some sort of activity would be able to collaborate more, and prevail. We call these activities rites. From this article by Rob Henderson:

San Bushmen (modern hunter-gatherers) will occasionally engage in a dance to dispel what they call “star sickness.” This mysterious force encompasses jealousy, anger, interpersonal conflicts, and a failure to exchange gifts. Such pressures give rise to hostilities and damage cohesion in the group.

One of the most disturbing social elements is young males, especially those deprived of social, economic, and mating opportunities. Disputes between them can easily spiral into reciprocal violence, especially when large numbers of allies can be recruited. Rites tailored to them are especially important. Dunbar studied them in early societies, and found religious rituals, feasting, singing, and dancing that have been shown to enhance social cohesion. Other social innovations (e.g., men’s clubs, socially recognized leaders) and regulated relationship arrangements (marriage, kinship, dowries) are all geared to lowering young male violence.

Ceremony

Ceremony is an important part of these social rites. From the book Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, as explained by Henderson:

In a video, a man performed the ordinary action of picking up a glass, cleaning it with a cloth, pouring the drink, and inspecting it before setting it on a table.

In another video, the event was ritualized: after picking up the glass, he waved the cloth at it without touching it, raised the container high up before pouring it into the glass, and bowed to the glass before setting it on the table.

When the researchers asked participants whether the two glasses were the same in terms of their physical qualities, the participants generally said yes. But when asked which one was more special, a significant difference emerged: they favored the ritual drink. When asked which beverage they would prefer to have, participants were three times more likely to pick the “special” drink. And when participants were told that the gestures were part of a traditional ceremony practiced in Fiji, Gabon, or Ecuador, participants were even more likely to select the ritual drink.

So it looks like we’re naturally geared towards religious belief. What did it translate into?

v0 to v1: From Animism to Polytheism

When your daily experience is of nature, plants, animals that hide in bushes or under cover of darkness, their skeletal remains after death and consumption… The natural thing is to assume they share a similar experience to yours: Spirits inhabit every animal, like they inhabit every person. This is why most early societies were animist.

And since your daily experience is that of humans and animals, you bestow upon them the abilities of humans and animals, just more powerful. Gods eat, sleep, lust, lie, and get fooled like humans do. They feel love, sadness, anger. They’re also pretty amoral and selfish: They don’t care much about what happens in the big picture, just about what happens to them and their supporters.

Then came agriculture and suddenly humans start controlling their environment. A clear hierarchy starts emerging: humans above plants and animals. It makes sense that now not all animals and things are spirits, and humans emerge as having a special relationship with gods.

Gods become more and more human-like.

As agriculture becomes more widespread, life and death don’t depend on the animals and plants around you, but rather on weather, pests and wars. So it makes sense that each of these big factors of survival develop their own gods.1

Humans think gods trade favors with them: If you give them the right gift or the right sacrifice, they will be happy with you and will help you with whatever power they have. The relationship with them is like with a patron: You sacrifice something when you need something—rain, victory, a child. If you anger them, they’ll side against you.

Rituals are attempts to get these fabulously powerful but mysterious entities on your side, and they’re designed through trial and error: You gave a part of your harvest to the farming goddess, and the next year the harvest was great? Surely, that made her happy. We must continue. But we don’t know exactly what part of the rite worked, so we should try to copy it very precisely to make sure it works again. The clan that knows a specific rite controls a god and gets social advantages. The more rites and gods you control, the more power your clan has.

You prayed to your god before a battle, but you lost? Surely, your god is weak, and the god of the conqueror is stronger, so you might as well pray to him instead. That means they have specialties and territory over which they have jurisdiction, just like humans and animals. This means gods are local to specific regions. They can only perceive what they see or hear, which is why in the Iliad Hera seduces Zeus so that he doesn’t watch the battlefield, or why Diomedes wounds Aphrodite with a spear.2 There can be many gods, no exclusivity. There’s no ritual to convert or to be a member, no commitment, because there’s not really a full concept of a cohesive religion, just a bunch of gods that exist.

The further a society removed itself from nature, the more human its gods became.

Notice how these features make these religions weak:

• Since gods are local—with their homes in specific cities or regions—they can’t spread much.

• That ties them to the local state. When the state crumbles, the religion goes with it: Surely, the god must not have been very powerful if his protected state failed.

• Everybody has a different version of the gods, and few of their features get recorded, because nobody knows them definitively: Everyone is just trying to figure out what they want through trial and error. So they evolve across time and space, they merge with other deities, they lapse…

If you like The Avengers, you understand these gods’ appeal.

Within these belief systems, some features of future religions start peeking through.

In Ancient Egypt, there’s an afterlife. People’s hearts are weighed at death, the wicked are annihilated, and the good survive. If you think about it, that’s pretty natural: Evolution has given us a fear of death, so coming up with an afterlife is the most reassuring belief. Tying it to proper behavior is pretty intuitive too, as that’s what happens in human interactions: Be nice to people, and they reward you. In the case of Egypt, good meant avoiding violence, exploiting the weak, theft, cheating, cruelty, lying, sacrilege, and public disruption. We can see an ethnic system emerge.

But this proto-feature is only accessible to elites, is only summarily defined,3 and isn’t tied to spreading the religion.

Zoroaster came to change this.

v2: Zoroastrianism

The religion of Ancient Iran started moving towards monotheism between 2000 and 1000 years BC. Then, between ~1200 and 600 BC appears Zoroastrianism, spurred by the religious reformer Zoroaster4. Zoroastrianism displays some interesting religious innovations.5 The most important is the crystallization of good and evil for everybody. There is still a judgment after death, but now it applies to everybody, not just the elites or those who could afford it. People do good things because they’re good, and vice versa. You should do more good things to be good, and fewer bad things. When you die, your specific soul is judged.6 This enables moral enforcement for every individual among the population. This judgment gets linked to an afterlife, and a proto-heaven and hell appear, which is very convenient because they’re a super cheap way to enforce behavior.

PRIEST ZOROASTER: Something very very very bad will happen to people if they don’t behave properly!
PRIEST DARIUS, whispering to ZOROASTER: But how can we know somebody did something wrong? How do we identify them? Punish them?
ZOROASTER: We go get them.

DARIUS: With what power?
ZOROASTER: Soldiers!
DARIUS: What if the soldiers don’t want to do it? Or are too expensive? Or at war? Or are the perpetrators? Or there are too many bad people? Or we can’t witness the deeds?
ZOROASTER: Good points. Hmmm…. OK OK, hear me out: What if we say the judge is God, not us, and he sees much more than us?

DARIUS: Okay, but how will people know we’re telling the truth? They’ll do a bad deed, wait for retribution, it won’t come, so they’ll carry on.
ZOROASTER: OK hold on… What if it happens after death?

DARIUS: What do you mean?
ZOROASTER: That way, they can’t say it’s false. They have no proof! They’ll be punished after death!
DARIUS: Genius! But we need to make sure the stick and the carrot are huge, otherwise people won’t care.
ZOROASTER: What if the punishment is really bad and it’s like forever? And vice versa: If you’re cool, you get a cool afterlife forever?
DARIUS: Yeah, totally, that would do it!

By introducing the concept of being good to each other, we suddenly get a religion that can enforce moral, collaborative, positive behavior across an entire region. People work more together instead of killing each other, wealth can accumulate, and society thrives.

Another innovation is that religion becomes dualistic: Only two main gods, for Good and Evil. All other deities become secondary. That’s just one step removed from monotheism: Obviously, everybody should follow the good one.

These innovations were certainly not designed with intention as I described in the conversation above, they likely came about through evolution. But as we know from the debate between intelligent design vs evolution, you don’t really need intelligent design for something significant to appear. With enough time, evolution can make it happen. The mechanism would be something like:

• Lots of different prophets and priests are always coming up with new software ideas.

• They debate ideas and combine them.7

• The cleverest, most charismatic, or luckiest ones come up with a (software) combination that is more productive than any other version. This one spreads.

• Entrepreneurial and efficient priests (which might or might not be the same as the theoreticians) take these ideas and help them spread faster and farther.8

In any case, Zoroastrianism was so successful that it became the state religion of the Persian Empires until the 600s AD, when Arabs conquered the Sassanid Empire and introduced Islam. Zoroastrianism persisted for centuries, but eventually dwindled. Yet today, there are still over 100,000 Zoroastrians in Iran. That’s the power of installing valuable new software.

But why did it appear then and there? Karl Jaspers and Peter Turchin speculated that they were the result of technological development. Here’s my interpretation.

Several innovations happened between 4000 BC and 1000 BC, including the domestication of horses, their mutation to be able to carry humans on their back, the invention of the wheel, and the discovery of iron smelting. These inventions made farming much easier and scalable. And war. Horseback riding enabled horse-mounted roaming. Curiously, as soon as the secret of iron smelting became widespread, most eastern Mediterranean civilizations collapsed, probably enabled by bandits who now had easy access to weapons.

All of this suggests that, through these thousands of years:

• Empires became viable, because agriculture improved and now farmers could generate calorie surpluses, while technologies of violence allowed these farmers to conquer others.

• At the same time, roaming bandits became viable too. The unconquered people would rather raid the farmers with their horses and iron weapons than do the farming themselves.

• The bigger the empires, the harder to maintain their cohesion, and they would fall apart.

Prophets would witness these problems and propose solutions that had to be moral because the problem was of social coordination.

As nomad military superiority forced agrarian states to scale up to resist pressure from the steppes, one cultural mechanism for holding together ethnically diverse people in new mega-empires was the presence of unifying, ‘meta-ethnic’ (supranational) ideologies, such as Zoroastrianism in the Achaemenid empire, Buddhism in the Maurya empire, and Confucianism in the Han empire. Turco-Mongolian nomads (perhaps going as far back as the Xiongnu) had their own integrative meta-ethnic religion, Tengrism, although it is not usually viewed as a world religion.—Peter Turchin

Alas, although Zoroastrianism is productive software, that doesn’t make it everlasting: It doesn’t really focus on acquiring believers or retaining them. The next iteration would improve one of these aspects.

v3: Judaism

Read more

Why?

In How Did Islam Spread so Fast, I explained the origins of Islam, and some of the ways it spread so fast. Today, I’m going to do what we did with Christianity: Go deeper into Islam’s software growth strategies and how it distinguished itself from Christianity and Judaism to accelerate its virality. This will help us guess whether this will continue, and at what cost.

1. Islam’s Product

The Beauty of the Quran

I don’t speak Arabic, so I can’t confirm this claim, but apparently the literature of the Quran is so exquisite that it became a sales argument to convert people into Islam: Surely, an illiterate like Muhammad couldn’t have created such beautiful prose by himself; it must have come from God!1

The Ummah

Christianity’s growth took place in the Roman Empire, because it benefited from the peace and trade of the Pax Romana. Peace was a given. Muhammad was not in that world. Arabia suffered tremendously from clan-on-clan aggression. The only way to end that tribal warfare was to create an ethnic unity above the clan: the Ummah. You can’t attack fellow Muslims, so this measure ended all the blood spilled in clan warfare, and replaced it with inter-clan solidarity.2 This was a great source of user acquisition (We need to grow the Ummah!) and retention (You must remain in the Ummah!).

Zakat: Social Security as Subscription

Christianity was the first to make social security a core pillar of growth. But how much should members pay? Can they refuse?

Islam solves this with the Zakat: It’s called charity, but it’s closer to a tax. You’re expected to pay ~2.5% of your wealth every year if you can afford it.

2. Islam’s User Acquisition

Lesser Jihad: Aggressive Sales Tactics

Jesus started preaching to Jews. His apostles broadened the TAM (Target Addressable Market) to the whole of mankind, the first time that had ever happened. The Great Commission tells everybody to go and convert others—quite a viral improvement!

Muhammad’s brilliance was to make that virality aggressive. Islam takes the peaceful proselytism of Christianity, and adds the aggressive growth through the sword. Since Arabs were already accustomed to raiding because of their clan warfare lifestyle (due to the geography of the area), it was just an outward expansion of their existing lifestyle.

Also, the sales team got compelling compensation incentives: a sizable share of revenue generated (i.e., spoils of war).

Sales Bonus

To motivate your sales team, you want to give them a share of the business they generate. In Islam, that’s Ghanimah, and includes 80% of war spoils, plus captives. Not bad!

Your sales team might be a bit too cautious, though, and not go the extra mile. So you want to incentivize them to take risks. The problem is that, in war, taking risks often means death. So, brilliantly, Islam invented the superbonus of heaven with 72 virgins.

Long-Term Onboarding through Jizya and the Dhimma Ratchet

It’s usually a bad idea to force your customer base to convert to your religion. They tend to revolt. So instead, Islam allowed non-believers (the Dhimmi) to keep their religion, but they had to pay higher taxes (Jizya) and had fewer benefits and less access to power. Over long periods of time, this resulted in their conversion to Islam.

Lowest Friction in Onboarding

To convert to Judaism, you have to study for years, and if you’re male, you must cut your penis. To convert to Christianity, you also have to study for years, and to get baptised, you need a profession of faith, repentance of sins, and instruction in church teachings.

In Islam, you just say out loud: "I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God."

Lowest friction onboarding process ever.

Women’s Rights

You don’t only grow by converting new customers, but also by having your customers reproduce more.

We saw how Christianity did this, basically banning all non-vaginal sex, and only allowing it to happen within marriage. But Christianity has a feature that impedes its reproduction rate: With its idea that God loves all the creatures it created, Christianity embedded the future development that women are equal to men.

Muhammad does not say that. For him, men are in charge of women and can even strike them if they disobey. This, in practice, means that men have more access to sex within their marriage, and that the woman is in a weaker position to oppose sex and having more children. In general, more egalitarian societies have fewer children.

Polygyny

Ironically, when Muhammad said men could have four wives, it was meant to be progressive: They could only have four wives.

Did that increase reproduction? I think it depends on which system focuses most male effort on their progeny.

In monogamy, most men have a wife, so most of the resources of each man are dedicated to rearing children, but this is especially true for poor men. Rich men, with only one wife and her children, might have many more resources they’re not dedicating to their children.

In polygyny, many poorer men don’t have a wife (and hence children), so their work is not dedicated to child-rearing. However, a greater share of powerful men’s resources are dedicated to child-rearing, as they have more children with more women. I’m not sure which one of these two models wins.

However, in polygyny, the stock of poor men without access to women means they’ll be frustrated, and they became a tool for violent expansion of Islam through Jihad.

On balance, I don’t know whether polygyny increased the number of children in Islam, but it certainly increased the “inorganic” growth of Islam—via conquests.

Marriage Asymmetry

Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women,3 but the opposite is forbidden. This makes sense, as the limiting factor for reproduction is female fertility. As a result, Muslim women remain locked into Islam, while Muslim men (less scarce) can go out and take the risk of conversion (both out of Islam for them and into Islam for their wives).

Children Asymmetry

Whereas in Judaism the children of Jewish women are Jewish, Islam asked: Why not make the children of Muslim men Muslim, too?

No need for baptism, even. It’s automatic.

3. Islam’s Retention

If Islam’s user acquisition has been aggressive, its retention has nothing to envy. Taken together, it’s clear why Islam is overtaking Christianity:

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I’m going to be writing …

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Christianity is the biggest religion in the world: ~2.3B people, nearly 30% of the world’s population.

Why has it been so successful?

Based on that chart, you’d probably assume that most growth happened in the last few centuries: From the European conquest of the Americas in the 1500s onwards, to the conquest of Africa in the late 1800s, and the 20^th century baby boom.2

If instead you looked at this map of the early growth of Christianity, you’d suspect something different:

From this, you’d guess that the big milestone of Christian growth was the takeover of the Roman state in the 300s AD.3 Well, here’s the same graph as above, but logarithmic:

In fact, Christianity grew like crazy until it took over the Roman state! From ~1000 followers around the time of the death of Jesus, to ~35M when it became the official religion of Rome, Christianity grew by ~40% decade over decade.4 How is that possible? How did a ragtag group of Jews from a frontier colony of the Roman Empire create a new religion that took over the most powerful empire, and from there the world?

In my previous careers, I created and grew software, including viral applications. The insights on viral growth are what allowed me to quickly understand COVID, and when I look at the rise of Christianity, I see the exact same patterns: a piece of software hyperoptimized for growth.

Indeed, Christianity, like all religions, is software, an operating system that guides people on what they should and shouldn’t do. And Christianity optimized every aspect of its business for growth:

1. Big audience

2. The value proposition of its product

3. The segmentation, to specialize in a few key audiences

4. Advertising, to spread the message to new audiences

5. The sales force

6. Low friction to convert customers

7. Viral growth: Existing customers attract new customers

8. “Reproduction rate” (growth within existing customers)

9. Retention rate: The degree to which you keep your audience

10. Competition suppression

11. Customer monetization

Today, we’re going to look at each.5

1. Big Audience

A good business has a huge TAM, or Total Addressable Market: All the people who can potentially consume the product.

Christianity comes from Judaism, but Jews think they are Chosen People: Only them have been chosen by God to receive the Torah and follow his commandments. It’s a religion mixed with an ethnicity. A private club. Back then, virtually all religions were private clubs.

Christianity killed that and declared itself open to all:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.—Galatians 3:28

Religion gets disconnected from ethnicity.
Does it though? No! That’s not what Jesus said! He said to try to convert Jews only!

Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.— Gospel of Matthew

I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.— Gospel of Matthew

The ones to increase the TAM were his disciples; that first quote was from Apostle Paul. Why would the apostles change Jesus’s message? Because they had to travel across the Mediterranean to convert Jews, who lived in pretty mixed communities: Many Jews only spoke Greek, and they were surrounded by pagans. By accepting non-Jews, early Christians dramatically grew the TAM,6 and with it the scope of Christianity.7

2. Great Value Proposition

The Christian pitch was so much better than that of the competition that good missionaries could convert thousands of people. For example, after the apostle Peter preached to a multitude:

There were added that day about three thousand souls.—Acts 2:41

How was the pitch so competitive?

Love

Greek & Roman life was pretty brutish, violent, and mean. Think Roman circus.

Judaism was an improvement on that: Although the Jewish god is feared, and Judaism focuses on Jews, it does preach loving each other and thy neighbor.

Christianity went further though:

You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.— Jesus Christ (Matthew 5:38–42)

When mixed with universalism (everybody can be Christian) and the mutual obligation to help each other, this message became extremely powerful. It created a community of people who were morally much more admirable than the competition, and who gathered in loving and kind community.

All of this was very counterintuitive at the time! You can imagine how compelling that pitch would have been.

Progress, Agency, and Legibility

When you design videogames, you learn that the single most important motivator to a player is actionable progress, whether through reactions to your actions (e.g. you shoot, somebody dies), level or quest completions, progress bars, points… You can act, that action brings progress, and that progress is visible.

Polytheisms tended to be terrible at this: You, the player, were subject to the whims of gods. You couldn’t really know what they wanted; you had to guess. You performed some sacred rite and hoped it worked. You didn’t know what parts worked, so you just tried to get it as close as possible to the time when somebody did something similar and ended up lucky.

Christianity changed all that. You knew exactly what you needed to do (love, respect and help others, etc.); even if you failed you could still get back on the wagon; you could comment on your progress with a priest (confession), who would tell you what you needed to do to get back on track (penance)... Based on all this, you had a pretty good sense of whether you were going to end up in heaven or hell.

Miracles

In the ancient world, the point of religion was for gods to help you, to get supernatural help… miracles. If your god couldn’t make them, she was weak. Christianity claimed that it could perform lots of miracles. A healing or exorcism was a public demo. Even when a miracle was only reported, the report itself traveled as social proof.

Social Security

That belief translated into specific benefits.

Let the strong care for the weak, and let the weak reverence the strong. Let the rich man bestow help on the poor and let the poor give thanks to God.—First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians

Christianity was a mutual-aid society. People took care of the poor, of the sick, of the neighbor in need.

This was especially valuable in the past, because the world in general, and cities in particular, were extremely dangerous: disease, fire, famine, abandonment, patronage dependence, widowhood, infant mortality, slavery, migration… The Church gave members a second family.

In this way death, waging war with these two weapons, pestilence and famine, destroyed whole families in a short time, so that one could see two or three dead bodies carried out at once… Then did the evidences of the universal zeal and piety of the Christians became manifest to all the heathen. For they alone in the midst of such ills showed their sympathy and humanity by their deeds. Every day some (Christians) continued caring for and burying the dead, for there were multitudes that had no one to care for them; others collected in one place those who were afflicted by the famine throughout the whole city, and gave bread to them all; so that this thing became noised (spoken of) abroad among all men, and they glorified the God of the Christians and, convinced by the facts themselves, confessed that they alone were truly pious and religious.—Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, 324 AD8

Did this matter? So much so that the emperor Julian launched a campaign to meet the value proposition:

Julian complained in a letter to the high priest of Galatia in 362 that the pagans needed to equal the virtues of Christians, for recent Christian growth was caused by their “moral character, even if pretended,” and by their “benevolence toward strangers and care for the graves of the dead”.—The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark

This was even more compelling in times of crisis like famines, pests, or earthquakes, when society fell apart except for the Christians. If you lost everything and none of your pagan priests were there for you, but the Christian community was surviving together, that made for a pretty compelling sales pitch.

Role Models

Showing love, gathering together, helping each other… They were patient, disciplined, peaceful, sexually restrained, generous, willing to suffer… These are things no other religions did. The product demo was great and unique.

This was even truer of Christianity’s power users: monks, virgins, martyrs, confessors… Their costly self-denial made the product more credible, like a product’s community having power users as evangelizers, a name used to this day for this purpose in software products.

Heaven and Hell

As I’ll describe in the next article, the older religion of Zoroastrianism had invented a version of heaven and hell, which Judaism had adopted. But the process was slow, lasting centuries. Initially, people believed there was nothing after death. Then, a state of stasis. Then, that all the dead would eventually rise on the final judgment day, and the good would be rewarded and the bad punished. Then, that during the waiting period, the good would have a more pleasant experience than the bad. That last part is closest to what Jesus believed.

Early Christians made an addition: They made heaven and hell destinations you enter just after death. Why? Well, Jesus had just died and been resurrected within 3 days, so that proved it could happen fast. And where was Jesus now? The final judgment day had not arrived, so he must be somewhere. That somewhere had to be pretty cool, right?

CHRISTIAN PROSELYTIZER: Did you know there’s a life after death, and it lasts for a very long time, and if you’re good you get an amazing place to enjoy until the final judgment, and if you’re bad you suffer?

ROMAN: How do you know that’s true?

CHRISTIAN: Well, Jesus died and was resurrected. We have plenty of witnesses. How do you know it’s NOT true? Are you willing to risk suffering for what could be forever?

ROMAN: Hmm…

CHRISTIAN: Oh and by the way, the one who makes that judgment is my God. And he sees EVERYTHING and can do ANYTHING. Unlike your weak gods.

ROMAN: Sh*t… OK where do I sign?

This creation of a clearer vision of heaven and hell where your soul goes while you wait for the final judgment really gelled as Christians mixed with Greeks. Early on, Christians thought resurrection was literal (the body came back). But with Greeks, who conceptualized the duality of body and soul, the idea became sturdier: Clearly, the bodies of the dead were not coming back, and many Christian martyrs were being persecuted. There was urgency to come up with a solution for them to continue believing in Christianity. That’s how the idea of a soul leaving your body and flying to the sky to hang out with Jesus emerged.

Later on, the Church would make heaven a kick-ass place and hell the worst place ever, forever. They were basically the biggest stick and carrot you could conceive, if you wanted your flock to do as you say. Pretty convenient.

Mass = Meditation

Meditation is good for the mind, and later on in the history of the Church, everything around mass was designed to induce a meditative state:

• When you enter a church (even more so a cathedral), all your senses awaken, as if you were passing the threshold into a sacred space. The temperature is different from outside due to the solidity of the walls and the height of the ceiling; light is filtered through colored glass, sound is quiet and the little noise reverberates as if everything was a murmur, the smell of incense lingers… All its architecture is designed for this.

• I think most sermons are designed to be boring. It’s not a coincidence that the word litany originally refers to a prayer led by a priest, and has come to mean a long, monotonous, or repetitive catalog of complaints or issues. Boring sermons achieve two goals: Suffering them in silence displays adherence to the belief, but more importantly, they induce a meditative trance. People escape their minds for a moment, their thoughts, very much like guided meditation

• The topics push the audience to reflect, to take stock of life and to project into the future.

3. Great Segmentation

At the time of Jesus Christ (JC), the main target segment to convert to Christianity was Jews.

Convert the Jews

Like many other ethnicities (Greeks, Romans), Jews had spread through the Roman Empire, mostly as traders and artisans, which meant they stayed primarily in cities. Unlike other ethnicities though, they preserved their Judaism strongly, so that there were Jewish communities in cities around the Mediterranean—a perfect target for conversion. That’s why early Christian missionaries traveled so much around the Eastern Mediterranean. It’s also why most early conversions of Christians were in cities. The word “pagan” originally meant “rural”...

Being far from Israel, these Jews were likely less orthodox. Some were integrating into their host cities already, and were probably easier to convert.

Convert Jewish Adjacent

Many Gentiles would have become adjacent to Judaism, but might not have converted yet. Remember, it was a private club, not easy to join. So if a religion adjacent to Judaism appeared and made it easy to join, it would have been quite successful.

Localization

You might well say your TAM is everybody, but if you don’t speak their language, your product won't travel far. So as Christian proselytizers traveled around the Mediterranean, they adapted their texts to local languages.

Christians went beyond translation. For example, when the Church had to translate religious texts into Slavic (which didn’t have an alphabet), they created the Cyrillic Alphabet.

Women

Women in general are a better target than men for early conversion to a new religion: They tend to make up the biggest share of new members in cults, are more religious, more prone to believe in the supernatural (e.g. astrology), and in certain circumstances are more easily persuaded9.

And in the Ancient World, they were the most underserved audience.

The status of Athenian women was very low. Girls received little or no education. Typically, Athenian females were married at puberty and often before. Under Athenian law, a woman was classified as a child, regardless of age, and therefore was the legal property of some man at all stages of her life. Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. Moreover, if a woman was seduced or raped, her husband was legally compelled to divorce her. If a woman wanted a divorce, she had to have her father or some other man bring her case before a judge. Finally, Athenian women could own property, but control of the property was always vested in the male to whom she “belonged”.—The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark, via Astral Codex Ten

Meanwhile, Christians thought everyone was equal under God, and that having sex created an exclusive covenant that created an eternal bond between men and women.

The two shall become one flesh.—Jesus, Matthew 19

As a result, Christianity condemned divorce, incest, marital infidelity, and polygamy, all of which are bad for women (who could lose their status and income, or have to share their husband’s wealth with other women), especially for high-status women (who had the most to lose).

Also:

• No early marriage: Christian girls were two thirds less likely to be married by age 13 than pagan women.

• No forced remarriage after becoming a widow: Widows were pressured to remarry under Roman law (and thus lose their inheritance, which became their husband’s), but not in Christianity.

• Status: Women could also hold high-status office in the Christian Church.

The result was a lot of early conversion of women:10

The early church was so especially attractive to women that in 370 the Emperor Valentinian issued a written order to Pope Damasus I, requiring the Christian missionaries to cease calling at the homes of pagan women. Although some classical writers claimed that women were easy prey for any "foreign superstition," most recognized that Christianity was unusually appealing because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.—Reconstructing the Rise of Christianity: The Role of Women

The Downtrodden

Slaves also seem to have been a significant part of the early Church and in some cases even found themselves in leadership roles. Early Christian communities were accused of targeting the illiterate, enslaved, young, female and under-educated.—Brett Devereaux

This makes sense, as the people most likely to want to upend the system are those who are losing in the current one. The same was true for communism 1800 years later.

Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith….is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court?—James 2:5

Elite Overproduction

Peter Turchin has this theory that lots of revolutions are caused by secondary elites, who are close enough to power that they can see it and experience it, but for whom full access is barred. They become the angriest and tend to lead revolutionary movements. That’s indeed the segment that Christianity targeted:

The main strength of Christianity lay in the lower and middle classes of the towns, the manual workers and clerks, the shop keepers and merchants—Jones, 1963

The Rich

All of this makes a lot of sense. If you want to take over an existing power system, you have to create a coalition of the losers of the existing system. That means you must take the power away from those who currently have it.

Go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.— Matthew 19:21

This is why it was so important for the spread of Christianity that Jesus shun the rich. By telling them they won’t reach heaven through riches, and that they must give to the poor instead, he was able to get the resources needed to broaden Christianity’s reach.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.—Mark 10:25 / Matthew 19:24 / Luke 18:25.

That said, the rich are by definition more powerful, so more likely to fight back and with the resources to do it. The only way to win there was to make Christianity intellectually respectable. A religion of fishermen, slaves, widows, artisans, and urban migrants could grow from below, but to conquer the empire it also had to climb the prestige ladder. Many Christian thinkers worked to reframe Christianity as a true philosophy that had superior answers to the questions Greek philosophy had been asking for centuries.11

4. Great Advertising

Martyrs

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.— Tertullian, Apologeticus 50

Normally, when you kill people for belonging to a religion, that religion weakens or disappears. But when Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire, the religion spread. Why? A lucky combination of factors:

1. Rome didn’t systematically eradicate Christians, mainly because Christians were generally good: They respected the state and gathered to sing and to tell each other to be good people. The killings were sporadic, and frequently done for show.

2. Christians were not just killed, they were asked to convert or die. Many decided they’d rather die. What a great marketing message! See? He’s so sure this is the right religion that he’s willing to die for it.

3. Part of this acceptance of death was from the section above, the introduction of the concept of heaven & hell. Christians thought they were going to heaven.

4. This is even more true when Christians were killed because of their belief. They became like Jesus, martyrs for the belief. That was compelling. Muslim suicide bombers have also willingly died as martyrs, and today many people wish to become martyrs in Islam.

5. The Roman display of killing Christians was meant to inspire fear, but it backfired because Christians would endure these ordeals with unusual composure, which inspired others: They truly believe in their religion, they truly believe in an afterlife, they truly believe they should act like Jesus, because they’re willing to die for it. Therefore, Christianity must be the way to go.

6. ​​This, by the way, is probably why Romans tended to avoid killing Christians, as Roman leaders knew they’d become martyrs to the cause. Christians, taking power later, no doubt tweaked the story to make it look like they had been persecuted more than they actually had been.

“[Martyrdom] was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex.—Catherine Nixey

That said, the execution of Christians for religious nonconformity was extremely rare, since most Roman rulers were smart enough to realise that there is nothing to be gained from making religious extremists into heroes. In 111 CE, Emperor Trajan insisted in a letter to Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, that he should punish only the most recalcitrant rebels; anyone willing to offer prayers to “our gods” could be pardoned, “however suspect his past conduct may be”.12

Brand Bible

Greco-Roman religion was very visual: temples, statues, processions, sacrifices, sacred objects, priestly costumes, inscriptions... Early Christianity began comparatively light on its visuals, so that’s not very competitive. So it quickly developed its visual brand: codices, crosses, fish, anchors, Good Shepherd imagery, and later basilicas, mosaics, icons, relic containers, and sacred architecture. We’ve talked in the past how much the Church pushed Gothic architecture for example as a way to inspire Christians.

5. Sales Force

If you have a great product, a big market, and plenty of effective advertising, it’s time to unleash your sales force. And Christianity had a very good one.

Missionaries

Jesus asked his disciples many times to spread the Gospel: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people”, “Proclaim the kingdom of God”, “The good news must first be proclaimed to all nations”, “make disciples of all nations”, “As the Father sent me, so I send you”... And they did. They traveled far and wide to spread the Gospel, especially Peter and Paul.

Traveling Healers

Traveling healers were common at the time. Christianity adapted that role for its missionaries, adding the teaching component, using that mechanism as another channel for growth.13 It was easy, since Jesus had been a traveling healer, too. So we can view part of Jesus’s life as modeling the traveling salesman role to teach his disciplines the craft.

APOSTLE JOHN: We have not been taught to be physicians. How then will we know how to heal bodies as you have told us?
JESUS: Rightly have you spoken, John, for I know that the physicians of this world heal what belongs to the world. The physicians of souls, however, heal the heart. Heal the bodies first, therefore, so that through the real powers of healing for their bodies, without medicine of the world, they may believe in you, that you have power to heal the illnesses of the heart also.—Acts of Peter

This actually allowed Christianity to differentiate itself from the competition through miracles. In Greek and Roman times, most miracles were site-based. You had to travel to a place to benefit from them. But Jesus tied them to his name, and from there, missionaries also became mobile miracle workers, allowing the stories of miracles to travel further.

Objection Handling

You’re telling me all these stories of a guy who died and then was resurrected, he walked on water, he turned water into wine… That sounds pretty preposterous to me. How do I know it’s true?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which could not be provided for these types of claims.14 Yet good salespeople are prepared to handle their prospects’ objections. So what did Christianity come up with? A role model.

St Thomas was the skeptic apostle15 and he didn’t believe that Jesus had died and rose again. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” So according to the Bible, St Thomas did see Jesus and did touch his wounds, at which point he believed. Then Jesus said:

Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

In other words, suspend your disbelief and start accepting the claims without verification.

This is reinforced elsewhere in the Bible:

We live by faith, not by sight.—2 Corinthians 5:7

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.—Proverbs 3:5-6

The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom.—1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Celibacy

One key innovation by the Medieval Church to its sales force was making its main employee base—priests—celibate:16 They’d dedicate their entire lives to the Church without diluting their efforts. More importantly, having children creates a conflict of interest, as what’s good for the children (inheritance) is not good for the Church (accumulating wealth). No children, all your efforts go toward growing the Church.

6. Low Friction Converting Customers

If you have a strong sales pipeline, but your prospects don’t convert to customers, you will be wasting your time.

Food & Penises

Judaism had what we call a high friction acquisition funnel for men: You had to cut a piece of your penis. Imagine what the end of the sales pitch sounded like: “There’s one last little detail that I haven’t mentioned yet…”.

You also had to follow plenty of complicated food requirements, along with many other rules of daily life.

The Council of Jerusalem got rid of all of that in ~50 AD. Interestingly, this was not because of Jesus, who mostly preached to Jews. His apostles changed the rules to accept gentiles (as we mentioned), and once they did, they thought, “God accepts gentiles, so we don’t need to make the followers of Christ into Jews”.17

It suddenly became much simpler to become a Christian, easing the path to conversion.18

Homes = Temples

Reducing the requirements to convert was not the only way Christians reduced the friction of the conversion funnel. Another was lifting the requirement of having temples. Every home could be a temple, so missionaries could go from home to home to spread the message, without the need to build expensive temples.

Grandfathering

When building software products, grandfathering is how you let previous users continue with a great deal they had in the past. For example, you might increase the price for all new users, but let existing ones keep the lower rate.

Christianity grandfathered Jews, basically incorporating the Torah as their Old Testament, and just adding a new one on top of it.

Feature Parity

When the competition has cool features, you want to add them to your own product to be more competitive. The Church took pagan gods, festivities, and temples, and incorporated them into Christianity.

Romans had a very convenient feature: Each god would look out for specific people and interests. Want love? Talk to Venus. Trade? Ask Mercury.

That doesn’t work with a single god. So how do you co-opt this feature? You just take the gods, lower their status (because they’re not equal to God) and change their labels. In the case of Christianity, the new label was “saints”, which I assume was good marketing because these were actual people who actually did good things in the world before ascending to heaven, so surely they must be able to help you now!

The best example is Saint Brigid of Kildare, the patron saint of Ireland, who is suspiciously similar to the pre-Christian goddess Brigid: Same name, same feast day,19 patroness of the same things (fire, fertility, livestock, smithing…). Her shrine at Kildare reportedly kept a perpetual flame tended only by women, a carry-over from pre-Christian cult practice.

The other obvious example is St Mary, who basically replaced all mother/fertility goddesses (Isis, Cybele, Demeter).20 Other examples include sailors replacing Poseidon / Neptune with St Nicholas, the cults of St Cosmas and Damian (physician-martyrs) replacing Asclepius (the Greco-Roman healing god),21 the electrical phenomenon of St Elmo’s fire that was earlier associated with Castor and Pollux…22

On festivities:

“Oh you have the winter solstice celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus around December 25^th, when nights start getting shorter and the light starts growing again? Well, we’re not sure when Jesus was born, and we don’t really celebrate birthdays, but let’s switch Jesus’ likely birthday in spring to December 25^th, and start celebrating Christmas!”23

Other examples include:

• The Roman Robigalia became the Christian Rogation Days

• The Jewish Passover became Easter. Shavuot became Pentecost. Shabbat (Saturday) was transferred to Sunday (Sun-day, the Lord’s Day)

• Temples were converted into churches, festivals with sacrifices into Christian celebrations with banquets

On temples:

The temples of the idols in [Britain] ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed [...] For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.

And because they are used to slaughter many oxen in sacrifice to devils, some solemnity must be given them in exchange for this, [...] no more offer animals to the Devil, but kill cattle and glorify God in their feast, and return thanks to the Giver of all things for their abundance; to the end that, whilst some outward gratifications are retained, they may the more easily consent to the inward joys. For there is no doubt that it is impossible to cut off every thing at once from their rude natures—Letter from Pope Gregory to the Abbot Mellitus, then going into Britain (601 AD)

7. Viral Growth

OK so we have a great product for a big market, we’ve done our advertising, our sales team has been selling to the target audience, and we’ve made it easy for prospects to convert. Now they are converting! How can we accelerate the business? By recruiting our customers as the sales force!

Software can start growing really fast when each user converts more users. That’s how Facebook or TikTok grew, or viruses like the Coronavirus. The key reason why Christianity grew so explosively is that it stumbled upon a series of hyperviral tactics—only some of which came from Jesus.

Everybody’s a Missionary

Christianity transforms every believer into a sales person, a node that can spread the software.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.—Jesus’s Great Commission (Matthew 28:19–20)

This is probably the most powerful way in which Christianity spread. If you think about it in terms of viral spread, that’s like getting the R (transmission rate, remember from COVID?) from near 0 to much closer to 1, and even above 1 for missionaries.

Studies of new religions show that most conversions are not between people who don’t know each other, but between those who know each other well. The better you know a person, the easier you can convert her. We’ll see an important example of that when we consider women later in this section.24

High Bandwidth Channels

The Roman Empire's network of roads and waterways facilitated travel, protected by the safety of the Pax Romana.

Christianity didn’t just travel contained in the brains of missionaries. They made use of the amazing Roman postal system to communicate via letters.

Superspreader Events

As we said, the Jewish diaspora was concentrated in cities across the Roman Empire, and that’s perfect for viral spread: It’s much easier to convert a lot of people if they’re all together. In a way, the Jewish diaspora enabled many “superspreader events”. This is why the map of Christianity looks like this:

Look first at the dark blue:

• Most early conversion was near Israel, where Christianity started

• Within its vicinity, it spread mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean (and not Arabia or Mesopotamia) through the Roman highway that was the sea

• The farther you went, the smaller the Christianized regions by 325 AD, but always concentrated in cities.

Then, once Christianity was supported by the state, it took over the rest of the empire (light teal).

Women

We saw before how early Christianity probably had many more women than men. Women then converted their husbands and their families, winning political influence for Christianity in the process.

Many women became the first converts in a family, often leading their husbands to conversion but even more so raising their children as Christians. It was often through wives that Christianity penetrated the upper classes of Roman society, with the result that Christians became increasingly influential.—The amazing growth of the early church, Dreyer (2012)

But women were not powerful in the Roman Empire, so how could they make this happen? Peter was specific on the sales pitch:

Wives [...], submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the Word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.—1 Peter 3

Community Spread through Support

We saw before how social security generated viral growth. If your Christian neighbor is always helping you, you’re more likely to open up to his religion. If your recently-converted sister has a cool group of friends who are always helping her, that’s a club you want to join, too.

8. Reproduction Rate

So far we’ve seen how Christianity could grow by converting others. But the more it grew, the more the reproduction rate of Christians mattered.

Judaism already had a mandate to be fruitful and reproduce (typical in agricultural societies), which Christianity inherited, but that mandate was not just for Jews, but for all of God’s creatures. Christianity took that to heart and dramatically optimized reproduction. The main way was with a simple philosophical change with massive repercussions: Considering life sacred (because we’re all the children of God). This optimized the reproductive funnel: find stable partner → have sex → conceive → have the baby → keep the baby alive.

Vaginal Intercourse

The Christian Church famously bans any sex that isn’t vaginal: oral, anal, masturbation. It even bans coitus interruptus, so you can’t have vaginal sex without finishing inside. And of course, any kind of contraception. Basically anything that doesn’t lead to reproduction is banned. Weird, right? It’s a bit of a stretch to go from: Life is sacred to Avoid blow jobs. How did that happen?

What happened with masturbation is an interesting example. It comes from the biblical story of Onan, who was killed by God because he wasted his seed. But the story is misinterpreted:

Onan's crime is often misinterpreted as masturbation, but it is universally agreed among biblical scholars that Onan's death is attributed to his refusal to fulfill his obligation of levirate marriage with Tamar by committing coitus interruptus.

What does that mean? Onan had an older brother, Er, who died without having procreated with his wife. That meant his male line was going to disappear, and that was bad in the patrilineal Jewish culture. So as a younger brother, Onan had a duty called levirate marriage: Have sex with the widow so that she can have children, who will be deemed to be the progeny of Onan’s older brother.

Onan did have sex with her, but he didn’t want her to have a child who would be his brother’s heir (presumably because his other children would not inherit as much), so he didn’t finish inside of his sister-in-law. The problem was in not giving children to his brother, NOT in ”wasting the seed”!

This was the proper interpretation for over 1,000 years, until Christians changed it. Through what process?

Remember that early Christianity was bathing in Greek culture. Aristotle and the Stoics had written centuries earlier that semen had a divine aspect, and that it contained most of what was needed to create a life.

The theologian Clement of Alexandria around 200 AD, and later Augustine around 400 AD,25 put it all together: If God says you have to reproduce, and God said you shouldn’t waste your seed, and semen is divine and contains everything needed for life, then surely all semen should be used for vaginal sex. And Jesus said the bond between a man and a woman is sacred, surely all sex should happen within the marriage, should be vaginal, and geared towards reproduction. Over the following centuries, non-reproductive sex would become more and more vilified.

Contraception

In the Greek and Roman world, contraception had been common, but Augustine forbade it for the same reason: Sex had to be reproductive. Roman women managed their menstrual cycle to avoid pregnancy and used plants to such an extent that the contraceptive (and abortive) silphium plant went extinct.

Abortion

If contraceptives failed, abortion was also an option. It was widely practiced in the Greco-Roman world, because they thought fetal development formation was a gradual biological process, not imbued with some sacred meaning. Like a plant or an animal growing. Judaism, meanwhile, discouraged it.

Christians banned it since the beginning.

Thou shalt not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide.—The Didache, ~late 1st or early 2nd century

Infanticide

“If you are delivered of a child before I return home, if it’s a boy, keep it, if it is a girl, expose it.—Hilarion, Roman citizen writing to his pregnant wife.

For Romans, men owned their wives and children, so they could do with them as they wished. That included infanticide, which was a double penalty on fertility.

First, because all the children you kill won’t procreate later.

But second, because of sexism. Romans tended to favor sons, so infanticide of girls was common. The fewer daughters you had vs sons, the fewer potential mothers.

Female infanticide was not an isolated incident: There were ~130-140 males per 100 females in Rome, which suggests about 20% of baby girls were killed!26

Even in large families, more than one daughter was practically never reared.—Lindsay (1968:16), via this

But Jews believed all humans are God’s creatures, so you can’t just kill them like that. Christianity inherited this and banned infanticide, as we just saw in the Didache quote above. That meant more Christian children survived than pagans.

Women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion . . . for we regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care.—Church father Athenagoras, 2^nd century

Survival Rate

Finally, given the social security service of the Church, Christians received more care than pagans when they were sick. According to Rodney Stark, 30% of pagans died during the plague, but only 10% of Christians!

Adoption was only common among elite pagan classes, but widespread among Christian orphans (e.g. by godparents). That meant many more Christian children survived to adulthood (this is at a time when half of children didn’t reach adulthood).

With all these measures, it’s likely that Christians had many more children, who survived much longer than other Romans’ offspring.

9. Retention Rate

Now that we’ve been growing our Christian groups so much, we need to make sure the bucket doesn’t leak, that there aren’t more people leaving the faith than those arriving. How? Christianity didn’t have the death penalty for apostasy that Judaism (and Zoroastrianism) had, because it was not a state religion. They socially shunned it, but couldn’t forbid it until it was the state religion. So what did they do?

Writing & the Codex

Chrisitianity inherited from Judaism the writing of religious texts and doctrine. Words didn’t easily get corrupted over centuries of repetition. The fact that Christianity communicated so much in writing and had so many gospels made it much easier to bundle teachings in a codex (similar to a book) than the prevailing scrolls. The codex survived for longer and helped communicate and keep a record of all the relevant theology. It also became a symbol of Christianity (the Bible).

Bundling

Catholicism has many once-in-a-lifetime rites of passage:

• Baptism for entry into the group

• Confirmation for the passage into adulthood

• Marriage for access to sex

• Anointing for illness or preparation for death

• Burial and mass for after death

All of these require the priest and the community, providing social pressure to stay in the religion. Think about how many people want to get married through the Church even though they’re not believers anymore.

But Christianity bundles all these services together: If you want marriage, you must be baptised, have taken the communion, and be confirmed.

This is not something fully new in Christianity: Rites of passage exist in virtually every religion, Judaism had an equivalent of baptism for men (circumcision), Zoroastrianism had priest-led funerals, etc. Christianity’s innovation was to merge all of these together and make them all social and led by priests. It took it many centuries to get there.

Lifecycle Management

All the rites follow the entire life, but Christianity colonized every year, and every week too: Sunday worship, fasts, feasts, saints’ days, Advent, Lent, Easter, Christmas… It became the rhythm that organized life, and that made it impossible to forget.

10. Suppress Competition

One of the best ways to increase retention is suppressing competition, and Christianity’s main weapon for that was…

State Takeover

I’ve mentioned before that Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 AD, when ~10% of the empire’s population was Christian. That share grew tremendously, so that in 380 CE, when Theodosius made it the state’s official religion in the Edict of Thessalonica, about half the population was already Christian.

That takeover allowed Christianity to spread everywhere the empire was present. Remember:

The state takeover brought sticks and carrots.

More Benefits

Before Constantine, becoming Christian could cost you status, safety, and opportunity. The carrot was that, after Constantine, suddenly there was a massive benefit in joining the Church. Confiscated Christian property was restored, bishops gained imperial access, churches received gifts, clergy received privileges, and Christian affiliation became increasingly useful for careers and patronage. The conversion funnel was subsidized.

Religious Coercion

The stick is that, by co-opting the empire, Christianity became much less tolerant. It latched on to a power that had already been established for nearly a millennium, and repurposed its tools for its own benefit. Starting in the early 300s AD, Roman law gradually:

• Condemned sacrifices

• Ordered temples to be closed

• Destroyed effigies and other sacred items, to show the gods couldn’t defend themselves and demonstrate their humiliation

• Defined heresy and opened the door to its suppression

• Removed testamentary rights for Christians who become pagan

• Forbade public religious debate

• Ordered rural temples to be destroyed

Violations of what we would now call human rights and civil liberties were allowed for the sake of religious conformity. In Alexandria in 415 CE, the philosopher and teacher Hypatia was dragged from her carriage, taken to a church, stoned, flayed, ripped to pieces and burned by a gang of Christians, who accused her of witchcraft. Classical learning, literature and philosophy were now all suspect.—Source

[Temple] roofs are uncovered, walls are pulled down, images are carried off, and altars are overturned.—source

Why this change? I don’t know, but I can venture a few guesses.

1. Early Christians were probably self-selected as the most virtuous people (who else would go against the world preaching love?). Their charisma would carry the crowds.

2. But there are only so many virtuous people, and once you convert the vast majority of a group, you won’t have only virtuous people. The average hateful guy might say they prioritize love, but might still have the instinct to hate the Others.

3. If you were downtrodden and suddenly you’re part of a new group where you have status, you’re going to enjoy your new status and be quite aggressive with the former system that kept you down.

4. Power doesn’t change people, it reveals them. Once you’re in power, you start doing things you didn’t dare to do before.

Censorship

Aside from sticks (religious coercion) and carrots (advantages for Christians), the other advantage of Constantine becoming Christian is that the religion could start advertising and selling in the open. Before 312, much Christian growth happened through households, urban networks, letters, local communities, and occasional public controversy. After legalization, Christian advocates could preach and debat publicly, build churches, perform imperial ceremonies, produce inscriptions, crosses, music, processions…

Anti-Forking Software

One of the biggest concerns of Christianity after it had become the state’s religion was quelling alternative versions—what we call in software forks in the code. There was Gnosticism, Marcionism, and especially Arianism.

That’s one more reason the Church wanted a close cannon, and hence the ecumenical councils or the Bible. Everything that was not approved could be called heresy and quelled.

Kin Suppression

Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World suggests that the Church banned cousin marriage in the Middle Ages, among other reasons to undermine clans: If you don’t put your clan first, you’re more likely to put the Church first (or second, only behind the nuclear family).

This would have had the side-effect of reducing congenital diseases and hence improving survival rates27 and reproduction of Catholics,28 bolstering the religion’s success.

11. Deterritorialization

Christianity took over the state to use it to grow. But when the state died, it moved on.

As we will see in the next article, most gods were linked to locations and states. If somebody conquered you, it was proof that your god was weak, and that god disappeared. By some unique set of circumstances, Judaism transcended that, and became independent from land and state. Christianity inherited that.

Barbarian Reverse Conversion

This was very handy when first the tribes of barbarians destroyed the Roman Empire in the west: It was not common for conquerors to completely throw their religion out the window and adopt the religion of the conquered! In fact, the timing couldn’t have been better: The Roman Empire disappeared just as Christianity was reaching its maximum power. When the Barbarians arrived, they killed the state but had no reason to do the same to the Church. Yet the Church had inherited its strong structure and hierarchy from the Roman Empire, so it remained as the most capable structure for power. The Barbarians wanted its legitimacy and efficiency, so they converted and thereby gave the Church immense power. For example, when Rome disappeared, so did its administrators, and hence all schools that taught literacy. The Church still needed literate employees, so it took over all education. And because education was valuable to kings, they employed clergymen, which put the Church at the helm of information power.

Enterprise Sales

We talked about a sales force before, but that was the normal type of sales force, the one that converts small prospects into customers. Enterprise sales tries to get massive companies (“enterprises”) as customers. These require their own elite sales force and a dedicated strategy.

Christianity did just that. It used bishops and other elite clergymen to convert kings into Christianity before the rest of the population. Once the king was Christian, missionaries had a much easier time moving around their lands, harnessing resources, and using the king as the example to follow. This happened with Clovis of the Franks, Vladimir of the Rus, Mieszko of Poland…

Control over Secular Power

It was also very handy to become a power independent from the state. Kings had to obey the Church or risk being excommunicated—something many of them might not have feared personally, but feared because their citizens believed this was terrible. The Church was able to create a system parallel to the state’s, with its own lands, its own leaders, sometimes its own soldiers, its own wars… For centuries, the Church got its own state outright—the Papal States—and they were powerful enough to delay the unity of Germany and Italy by several centuries.

Franchising

Once states were weak, it was hard for them to settle new land. But monasteries could. The Middle Ages Church would plant a new monastery at the edge of Christian territory (or in an underpopulated area), and bring with it investment: farming, schools, guesthouses, clinics, artisanal industry, manuscript factory… This enabled it to grow its assets and its believers.

12. Monetization

Software businesses tend to focus first on growing their audience, and only once they’ve succeeded do they focus on maximizing revenue from their audiences. The Church was no exception. It started with a very promising philosophical base:

You cannot serve both God and money.—Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13

Ah, dammit. What does that mean concretely?

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.—Mark 10:25, Matthew 19:24, Luke 18:25

OK so I should not die rich, or otherwise I won’t go to heaven! What should I do with my money then?

If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.—Matthew 19:21

RICH CHRISTIAN: OK, let me do that. But there are a lot of poor people, how do I know who to help?
THE CHURCH: Don’t worry, give it to me, I’ll take care of it.29

So that meant bequests were a primary way for the Church to get a lot of money. Here, we can see how some other factors from earlier matter. There was much less pressure for women to marry, and especially for widows to remarry. If they died with a fortune but no children, where did that fortune go? To the Church.

If clans had been strong, they would have been the primary recipient of the money. In fact, in clans, property is not as much part of the individual as it’s part of the clan. By eliminating clans, the Church co-opted more bequests.

These donations were unidirectional: The Church kept most of these assets and made money out of them. The more it accumulated, the more money it made. Back then, wealth meant land, and the Church became the biggest landholder in Europe in the Middle Ages. The Church hired farmers to produce wealth from these lands. It also owned other types of infrastructure that it monetized: granaries, mills, bridges…

Also, remember that the Church ensured asset accumulation by preventing clerics from having children.

But they weren’t the only source of income. Early on, the Church received some income through charity, but once it was part of the state, it received tax benefits and direct transfers from the state. Eventually, the tithe (one tenth of people’s income) would become mandatory for all. This is substantially better than the episodic payments that polytheist temples received. On top of that, the Church received fees for sacraments and burials, relic-based pilgrimages, monastic enterprises (wine, wool, brewing), the sale of indulgences, papal taxation of clergy…

Like Facebook and Google showing too many ads, the Church overplayed its monetization hand, and people started defecting. The sale of indulgences was the proximate trigger of the Reformation.

Other Growth Tactics

It’s impossible to cover them all, but here are a few:

• The Church invests heavily in education, financing it for many people to this day. That allows it to insert Christian education, through which people are retained and converted.

• The anti-forking software I mentioned before also included things like the Inquisition. But also, Jesus didn’t have a doctrine against new branches of Christianity.30 So once the Church lost its monopoly on information, many versions of Christianity appeared. These compete with each other, allowing for the most efficient ones to prevail. It meant lots of wars early on, but also many more approaches today.

• Christianity also spread through crusades. The ones we know the most about are actually the failed ones in the Levant. There were many successful ones in other parts, such as the Baltic Crusades and the Spanish Reconquista.

So Why Did Christianity Grow So Much?

This breakdown of the Christian Church’s business tactics is not exhaustive, but even then, you can see how it came up with ~100 innovative mechanisms for growth.

In some cases, these mechanisms came from Judaism, such as:

• The monotheism

• The deterritorialization that allowed Christianity to survive the state

• The tendency to write everything down (which allowed for more retention of the content, more spread of doctrine, and reducing forks due to misinterpretation)

• The benefit of target populations in urban areas spread around the Mediterranean, ripe for conversion

Others emerged from new religious doctrine:

• From the concept of “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” came a huge TAM that included gentiles (especially the Jewish-adjacent), appealed to women and the poor, a missionary sales force, viral spread through each believer, the elimination of circumcision and food restrictions, made homes into temples… But remember, this did not come from Jesus!

• That phrasing of “in Christ Jesus”, plus the concept of love, entail the ideas that all humans are sacred, which led to tactics of anti-contraceptives, anti-abortion, anti-infanticide, care for the sick, orphan support, higher survival rates, social security services, enabled traveling healers… It formed the core of the value proposition of loving yourself and your neighbor.

• If you adopt faith as a virtue, you reduce your skepticism, you are more open to new doctrines, you’re more likely to advertise the religion through martyrdom…

• If salvation becomes super high stakes, legible, and actionable, you suddenly have a massive incentive to do what’s right for the community

Yet others were a result of the Roman Empire:

• The early multilingual nature of Christianity

• The unified market of the Roman Empire, enabled by the Mediterranean highway and Rome’s famous roads

• The ability to evangelize in big cities across the empire, which acted as superspreader sites

• The ability to harness the power of the state to spread

• The Roman Empire also provided the administrative structure the Church adopted

Some are a combination of these, like for example, the success of Christianity with women is a combination of making women more equal and the terrible treatment they received in antiquity.

And many others are completely untethered to any of these, including:

• Many of the monetization tactics

• Kin suppression

• Anti-forking software

• Destruction of alternative temples

• Making priests celibate

How can we summarize all of this?

1. Judaism had many compelling aspects to become a huge religion (monotheism, deterritorialization, heaven and hell…), but was missing a few key levers.

2. There were many prophets within Judaism who proposed variants, but the one Jesus invented was the most fit for growth, thanks to a few concepts: all are one in God, love each other, have faith. They unshackled Judaism’s software barriers to growth.

3. But Judaism lacked network infrastructure. When the Roman Empire conquered Judea (just 60 years before Jesus was born!), it brought the infrastructure needed for the massive spread of Judaism’s successor religion.

4. Jesus’s followers were deft enough to continue changing and adapting Christianity (or even inventing new concepts altogether) to optimize growth. The optimization was ruthless and lasted more than a thousand years.

I talk a lot about Christianity being designed in this article, but I don’t always mean it as purposeful design, as… intelligent design. A potential process was more like… evolution: Judaism was a new religious species that had evolved from others, the Roman Empire provided a new environment, lots of religious variety emerged from that, natural selection meant the fittest one—Christianity—exploded… and as it became an institution, it started being managed as such.

But as we saw, many of the changes didn’t happen at the time of Jesus, but after his death. It would be surprising if all of Christianity’s mutations happened so fast, and always coincidentally geared towards growth. It’s as if it had been helped by some enterprising human hands.

Or maybe God’s purposeful hand.

I’m opening the newsletter to sponsorship. If you have a business that is moving the world towards a techno-optimistic future and would like to reach 125k+ curious, globally-minded people to learn about it (founders, researchers, investors, policymakers), reach out here.

1. Design for Our Merchandise Shop

You might not want to work for us full time, or you’re more on the graphic side of design? Perfect! We’re building a shop for Uncharted Territories merchandise, and we want to fill it with some of the best items you can find anywhere. That means we need designs, and the best ones will probably come from you, the people who know Uncharted Territories the best.

Every week, I spend hours reworking graphs and generating compelling images to illustrate the ideas I’m writing about.

Humans have absorbed visual information for millions of years, but we’ve been reading for just a few thousand. We’re much better at understanding through visuals than words. The right visual can make a complex idea instantly clear. My challenge each week is to take real information and make it stimulating, exciting, and accessible.

Today, I pass that challenge on to you. I’d love for you to take an idea from Uncharted Territories and turn it into a poster. Something that will reframe how people understand how the world works, that is at the same time so beautiful and inspiring that people will want to hang it on their wall.

For that, you have two ways to participate: a competition, or an application.

Submit your design or application

1.1. Poster Design Competition

The brief is simple: Design a poster based on Uncharted Territories that would be a talking piece in any room.

I’m offering a $1,000 grand prize to the image that best conveys a map, chart, idea, or full article in an interesting and visually stunning way. The best examples will tell a story that will have visitors staring at it and asking where it’s from.

Specs

• $1,000 prize, open to everyone worldwide

• Submit as many entries as you like

• Choose any UT article, map, or idea as your subject

• A2 / 18×24", submit a screen-resolution preview: JPG or PNG, max 10 MB

• All entries will be displayed publicly, unless you opt out

• I will select the winner, heavily based on community opinion

• Deadline: 22 July 2026, winner announced 5 August

Submit your best design via the Competition landing page. The winning entry will receive $1,000 cash, with their poster becoming the flagship product in a new Uncharted Territories shop.

Submit your design

Public commentary will be open for the length of the competition and for two weeks beyond. I’ll highlight a few of the most immediately impressive pieces in the newsletter and on socials as the competition runs, with credit given to their creators.

Viewers can like and comment on their favorites but the final say will be mine. I want to know which designs resonate but I don’t want it to be a popularity contest.

The competition isn’t only for current readers. If you know any designers who you think would be good at this kind of visual storytelling, please forward them this article or the Competition homepage. All IP stays with the designer for artworks I don’t end up using.

What if I love more than one design?

Then I’ll pay for the others too!

I’m not saying I’ll only pay $1,000 for one poster. I’m saying I’ll pay at least $1,000 for one poster. But if we have lots of amazing posters, and we’d like to put them all on the site, I’ll happily pay for more posters!

1.2. Share Your Portfolio, Concepts, or Ideas

Not everybody can spend time working on a poster without a guaranteed payment. I get it. So beyond the competition, I’d like to commission designs for use in Uncharted Territories posters and merchandising.

Simply head to the competition page, scroll to the Direct Applications section, and tell me why you think we should work together: Maybe that means your portfolio and your ideas for what you’d like to do for Uncharted Territories, maybe something else.

I’m really excited to see what you come up with!

Submit your design or application

2. Work with Us

I’m building a small team of developers: With AI, I think just three are enough to build incredible tools. I’ve already hired our first vibe-coder / engineer, and we’re building so fast you’re soon going to see amazing products. But neither of us are designers, so we’re looking for our second vibe-coder—a person who can complement our skillsets, so I’d like this person to come from the world of design.

So if you:

• Have experience as a UX/UI designer

• Have great aesthetic taste and a strong sense of what’s usable

• Love the Uncharted Territories asesthetic, but want to make it 10x better

• Have jumped into the world of AI and have been vibe-coding your own apps

Then go to this page and join the expedition!

Enlist

Know somebody who could fit the description? Send them this page!