Theory of ReGrowth · the glossary
The words the Theory of ReGrowth is written in, each distilled to a line or two, with where to read more: a chapter of the live book, ReGrowth Rhythms, a checked essay, or a page of the studio. Some are settled; some are still being defined, and say so. Ideas borrowed from elsewhere name where they come from.
60 termsRooted · 34Seed · 26
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An operating hypothesis: every institution recognises value, cost, success and failure through categories of its own, and what they cannot record becomes easy to treat as external. Put AI on top of them and it can optimise the blindness; point AI at them and it can help expose it.
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The unit of the commons: instructions, skills, sources and evals in plain files, that you can fork, run and own. Its name, .tmc, is a working name.
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The first of the studio’s sentences: AGI is here. It is in the frontier models; you feel it by using it in your own work, not by arguing a definition. As ReGrowth uses the word, AGI is the multiplier of the human in the loop: capability, which is not yet judgement, agency or accountability, and not a claim that a superintelligence exists. The book’s first chapter asks what that can honestly mean.
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The second of the studio’s sentences, after AGI is here: the claim comes first, the audit is the act. Point AI at the institution, not the task, and learn why the work exists before making it faster. Ask of any rule who decided this, when, and whether the reason is still alive; cut rules, not people.
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As ReGrowth uses the word, ASI is super-positive: many domain meta-harnesses, not one superintelligence. The frontier AGIs would be distilled into specialised, efficient malleable software (into software, not into model weights), kept as a Techno-Memetic Commons and improved with traces of taste and decisions contributed with consent. A question for an AI safety lab to test, not a claim.
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The Kośa seen from above the plane: what the studio does in the world, the actions, explore, incubate, consult and roll up, and every project that blooms there out of Piṇḍa: incubations with communities, the ReGrowth Café, Interchain ventures. Each is in the making until it exists.
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How every essay in the journal ends: the claim, the evidence, the strongest objection, and what the evidence doesn’t establish. A chapter of the book is called rooted only once it has passed the same test.
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The skeuomorphic hangover of past decisions, organisational topologies and techno-memetic ontologies. A debt you keep paying interest on without remembering why you took it. A ReGrowth lens, not a peer-reviewed finding: a checked essay names it, and its definition is still earning its place.
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The systems an organisation designs tend to mirror its communication structure, so the org chart is itself a decision. A mirror is not a mandate; the law describes a tendency, not a fate.
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The idea that each culture’s technology grows from its own picture of the world. The book reads it as the respectful door between technopoly and ṛta.
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What the studio does with frontier models: distils them into harnesses and malleable software, not into model weights. It never trains a competing model on a provider’s outputs.
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The book’s own method: raw signals go in, and each takes a place, as a note inside a chapter, an exploration in the margins, or a branch, another way a chapter might go. The numbered chapters, its canon, change only on the author’s word.
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What an audit can find before any work is automated: repetition, contradiction, shadow work and the proxy, a measurable activity that has quietly replaced the outcome it was meant to indicate. A diagnostic, not a finding.
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A grid of cells and a handful of rules about when a cell lives or dies: nobody steers it, yet patterns appear, move and last. Its glider lasts not by staying the same but by being rebuilt, generation after generation.
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In its common form, a measure which becomes a target stops measuring well. The book takes it a step further: a metric with consequences is a policy, and AI makes targets executable.
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Growth read as a direction, not only a number: what grows, what contracts, what circulates, what regenerates; for whom; at whose cost; under which obligations.
a desk
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A desk for one domain: a folder of instructions, skills, sources and evals that agents run, on a model that can be swapped. It is the distillation; the loop keeps it current as models change.
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Four ways we provide for each other, in the embedded economy. The mandala asks how to rebalance them, with the five obligations at the root; that part is a hypothesis.
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The person who stays in the work when agents do it: the owner who can judge the whole result rather than merely complete one step, and whose taste and decisions the work follows. ReGrowth reads AGI as the multiplier of the human in the loop, and means to build its domain meta-harnesses with one.
Venture
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The Venture Lab, the middle of Kṣetra · Karm · Kula: questions turned into ventures, built with the people they serve. On its bench now, Intercamp and KYRM; the Research Lab explores the Sāmatvārtha Interchain, ventures that interlock and share their rails, in the making.
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One Kośa, seen two ways: below the plane, the Piṇḍa Kośa, the Research Lab and the development desks; above it, the Brahmāṇḍa Kośa, the actions, explore, incubate, consult and roll up, and every project that blooms there. The three labs, Kṣetra, Karm and Kula, are held in it, from the smallest scale to the largest.
Policy
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The Policy Lab: the rules behind the result, in institutions, standards and public systems. The Research Lab explores the rules underneath as the Sāmatvārtha Stack, in the making.
Community
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The Community Lab: a reason to return and something to make together. The Research Lab explores the Sāmatvārtha Network State, in the making: rooms that become chapters, chapters that become a network.
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A new concept, still being defined: the Laffer curve, an old and much-disputed argument about tax, read with chirality, a shape and its mirror, alike in every part yet never the same. It asks whether our false dichotomies are one shape, mirrored; how the curve and the mirror combine is the open question.
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The lotus born of mud: the mud is the past, the waterline the present, the bloom what deserves to grow. What lives is grown out of the mud of what we inherited, without carrying the mud forward.
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What the studio ships: software you can fork, run and own, released as a Techno-Memetic Commons, with the intelligence built into tools and software, not into model weights.
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A working hypothesis: culture selects ideas partly for how well they travel, and merit enters late, so the best carrier can beat the best idea, and what is carried may in turn shape its carriers. The meme is kept as an analogy, and every analogy breaks somewhere.
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The loop that keeps harnessing each new model into the work, domain by domain, with a human in the loop. The book asks whether ASI is better understood as many such domain meta-harnesses than as one superintelligence: a question for an AI safety lab to test, not a claim.
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How the studio digests frontier models rather than racing to build them: the model, AGI, rented and swappable; the harness, a desk for one domain; the loop that keeps harnessing each new model into the work; the commons, what ships. The book writes it as model, harness, meta-harness, make.
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The race nobody chose and no one can quit alone: velocity without rhythm. Not a villain; it names a failure to coordinate, and the book sets it beside ṛta as ṛta’s absence.
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The stance the book argues for India’s own path through the AI era, from its own ground rather than a copied playbook: not copy-pasted, from first principles, rewiring inherited pathways.
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Ṛṇa is debt, or obligation: five that cannot be defaulted on, only honoured or left to accumulate, to the earth (bhūta), to other people (manuṣya), to lineage and care (pitṛ), to the commons of knowledge (ṛṣi) and to governance, the higher order (deva). A working hypothesis: older texts most often speak of three debts, and the five-fold ledger is a synthesis, offered as a lens, not a constant.
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A held place: the name is written; the idea is still the author’s to give, and the book will not guess it for him.
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Accelerate or brake is an excellent argument if the only controls in the vehicle are stop and go. There is also a steering wheel: direction, distribution and obligation make a better thing to disagree about than speed alone.
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The Kośa seen from below the plane: the studio’s own capability, the Research Lab and the development desks. The Research Lab explores across all three labs: Theory of ReGrowth, the Sāmatvārtha Stack, the Sāmatvārtha Network State and the Sāmatvārtha Interchain, all in the making.
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The present’s crises, taken together. The Sāmatvārtha explainer reads the polycrisis as the symptom and Conway Debt as the diagnosis, and Sāmatvārtha is offered as an Indic response to it.
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The three settings every node of the commons carries: private, yours alone, never leaving your garden; permissioned, shared with the people and agents you name; public, released to everyone, with its provenance. A setting records a decision; on its own it does not enforce access.
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The economy the studio builds tools for; the site calls the studio a regenerative economy and AI safety lab. Its definition is still being written: so far, growth read as a direction, asking for restoration, regeneration and renewal, not “more growth, but green”.
Sāmatvārtha, its Indic name
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How AI should be applied, for people and the planet: restoration, regeneration and renewal, a higher quality of growth. Regrowth, not degrowth: degrowth is right about the fire, and acceleration spends the living planet to go faster.
Sāmatvārtha Mandala, its Indic name
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The Sāmatvārtha Mandala’s name in English: one balance that repeats at every scale.
Sāmatvārtha Sutra, its Indic name
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A live book, written in public: a series of essays, organised as a book, and one series of Theory of ReGrowth. Every chapter shows how far along it is.
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Order as a living rhythm, a beat kept in common, not a speed, which the book reads as a blueprint for technology rather than a brake on it; dharma is behaviour in tune with it. Ṛta here is not equilibrium.
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Every rule run every way at once. Beside it sits computational irreducibility: for some systems the only way to know the outcome is to run the steps; the book sets an Advaita reading beside the science, held as a hypothesis and not as proof.
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How the studio applies frontier AI: as the product, not a page of practices. Bloom your own is the first of it, self-service and kept in your browser, its preview open now; the guilds and the Interchain are in the making. Beneath it all: audit before you automate, and say what the evidence doesn’t establish.
ReGrowth, in English
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The theory’s original, Indic name: sāmatva is balance; artha is prosperity and meaning. ReGrowth is its name in English, set against both degrowth and accelerationism.
ReGrowth Automaton, in English
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One balance that repeats at every scale: three words, Kṣetra (policy), Karm (venture) and Kula (community), held in one Kośa. It is the mental model for reading the studio’s work. The book presents it as a formalism the studio is building, not as inherited scripture.
ReGrowth Rhythms, in English
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The live book’s Indic name; in English it is ReGrowth Rhythms.
ReGrowth Fellow, in English
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A ReGrowth Fellow’s Indic name: one who holds a thread of the studio’s work, bringing a capability to a scoped question in one of the Labs. A Fellow never pays a fee; there are no terms or commitments yet.
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Accelerate or degrow, e/acc or EA, capitalism or Marxism: false dichotomies on the same plane. ReGrowth stands at right angles to all of them; it is the other axis.
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How far along any idea, chapter or venture is. In the book: a seed is a working title, its question and a few notes; a sprout, an outline with its sources, then a draft; rooted, checked; compost, folded into another chapter or set aside, its lineage kept.
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The technology is the same; the substrate, ecological, social and economic, is the variable.
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SuperPositivity’s opposite: trying to act on all the possibilities at once, and losing the one that mattered.
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A new concept, still being defined: keep the possibilities open, and act on one. Its opposite, supernegativity, tries to act on all of them at once, and loses the one that mattered. SuperPositivity is also the book’s lens on ASI: it asks whether superintelligence is better understood as many harnessed domains than as one mind.
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The point of abundance, in ReGrowth’s reading: tools for thinking and doing, kept in common, every node of it private, permissioned or public. It asks whether technology and ideas can be held in common without being enclosed, because open is not the same as unenclosable; a research and operating programme, not a reviewed licence.
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The theory’s method, in its long name: technology and memetics, the two levers, held together and pointed at the inherited debts.
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When a tool stops serving a culture and starts setting its rules. The book starts from the word, and will read its author in full before it claims anything about him.
Sāmatvārtha, its Indic name
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The theory, and the series that carries it: how to make the best use of AI for people and the planet, shown rather than told, in essays, a live book and films made in public with the models. It is one of the Research Lab’s four explorations, in the making.
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The name of the show’s first season, and its anthem, post-rock ambient by uncommonidentity, made with AI. The season is in the making.
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The question underneath the Audit: when intelligence gets cheaper, what was costly all along? Perhaps the rules the work obeys.
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As in the self, so in the cosmos; as in the part, so in the whole. It names the Kośa’s two senses, Piṇḍa below and Brahmāṇḍa above, and the mandala’s one balance, repeating at every scale.
The author’s working series names, beginning Theory of, Signal of or Sutra of. Each leads to the chapter where it is being written, under its working title; whether the series names become chapter titles is still open. “Signal” marks a Western idea brought across as a bridge, named with respect. The list is open.
Sprout · a checked essay names it; the chapter is still being written
Conway Debt, in the glossary, aboveSeed · still being written
Goodhart’s law, in the glossary, aboveSeed · the concept is still being defined; a checked essay opens the argument
Laffer Chirality, in the glossary, aboveSeed · still being written
Memetics, in the glossary, aboveSeed · still being written
Pañca Ṛṇa, in the glossary, aboveSeed · still being written
Sāmatvārtha Mandala, in the glossary, aboveSeed · still being written
SuperPositivity, in the glossary, aboveSeed · still being written
Techno-Memetic Commons (TMC), in the glossary, aboveSeed · still being written
Technopoly, in the glossary, aboveMissing a word, or read one differently? Suggest a term or a correction by writing to hello@2014p.com; replies come from the studio.