Show HN: The Slow AI Commons – here's why it might fail

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A commons of intelligence owned by everyone and controlled by no one.

For centuries, the brightest minds built wealth they never owned. Their children inherited civilized slavery. It's happening again — faster, deeper, more complete. AI is just the newest form of an old pattern: creation becomes capture; contributors get consumed.

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An attempt at coordination: to gather our latent resources — idle compute, unused networks, unspent human brilliance — and build a commons of intelligence that can't be owned or enclosed.

Not the fastest system, but the fairest.


Formation stage. This is 1 person right now. Let's see who joins.

We need:

  • Engineers (distributed systems, federated learning, edge compute)
  • Governance designers (cooperatives, DAOs, consensus mechanisms)
  • Systems thinkers (sustainability, energy, scaling)
  • Skeptics (tell us what will break)
  • Writers and organizers (make this real)

See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to get involved.

Give a few minutes a week — a thought, a patch, a proof, a poem.

Not as charity, but as insurance for what you love.


See ROADMAP.md for what we're building toward.


It's time to end the snatching — and start building the foundation together.


Started October 2025

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