Cleave to Chaos

At a time when artificial intelligence evolves by the hour and societal systems are strained, it’s easy to fall into the trap of binary thinking—progress vs. peril, order vs. chaos, human vs. machine. It’s also tempting to spin out in thinking that we’re just fodder for overwhelming bedlam. But what if the truth—and the path forward—lies in accepting and engaging disorder itself?

Few thinkers captured the spiritual and philosophical tension of technology better than John Perry Barlow, who stood at the demiurgic intersection of counterculture idealism and digital frontierism. He reminds us that the internet is not just a tool; it’s a movement, an idea, a space for radical freedom. As AI begins to occupy a similar space in our cultural consciousness, it’s worth revisiting Barlow’s vision to help us make sense of this new frontier. Barlow believed that chaos was not to be feared, but rather to be invited. Decentralized systems and self-organizing networks are not bugs of the digital age, but features—manifestations of a more organic, democratic, and ultimately human order.

Curiosity of intent over correctness of outcome is an algorithm for which fascinating, bizarre, and unpredictable are inherent. Where the patterns, hunches, and ordering dynamics that emerge may seed the systems of our future’s future. These are the traits of chaos, in theory and in demonstrable practice. The venomous saliva of the North American Gila monster was passing factoid from David Attenborough in Desert episodes of nature programs until the GLP-1 hormone in that saliva delivered one of the most significant breakthroughs in biochemistry and human healthcare in decades.

The progress of AI today echoes that same unpredictability. We now build models we can’t fully explain. We deploy them in open systems where outcomes can’t be forecasted. While this raises real ethical and safety concerns, it also challenges our assumptions about control, authorship, and intelligence itself. Such challenges aren’t signs of doom—they are marks of evolution.

To embrace AI through this lens is to reject rigid hierarchies in favor of permissionless experimentation. It is to question centralized power, whether in the form of massive language models trained behind closed doors or governments scrambling to write the rules of a game they barely understand. It is to ask: Who gets to decide what intelligence means? And who owns the outputs of a machine that has learned from all of us?

Barlow’s optimism wasn’t naive —it stemmed first from a deep belief in human agency and collective intelligence And it endured despite deep skepticism of surrendering organization and control to any entrenched 3rd party actors, especially in the form of governmental regulatory protection. That same suspicion could be leveled at today’s tech monopolies who promise to keep us safe from the very tools they are racing to build. There is a comforting delusion of existing structures which obscures the opportunity to begin relying on that which will emerge.

Of course, chaos can also be dangerous. There is a fine line between open exploration and reckless annihilation. We don’t cede our responsibilities — as an individual, a collective, a firm, or a corporation — of participation and enabled involvement with artificial intelligence or any other technologies. But if we view AI as a force of entropy alone, we miss the deeper opportunity: to build new institutions, norms, and narratives that reflect the complexity of the world we actually live in.

Crucially, chaos isn’t a formless void. It is rich with nascent principles and ordering elements. Such points and patterns — odd vessels and thickets of magnetic draw — come to the fore in that space of possibility, potential, and fervent activity. Think: fibonacci sequence. Now more than ever, artificial intelligence and machine learning enhance and advance the power of distributed information networks and bottoms up structure, access and involvement. Individuals and firms, as smaller actors loosely meshed, engage with fluidity through which they can come together for one instance, spin off, and then reform for another.

Maybe the goal isn’t to tame AI into perfect alignment, but to co-evolve with it—curious, alert, and a little off-balance. That posture of humility and openness may be precisely and absolutely essential to the purposes of AI and our access to and involvement with these technologies. It creates a zone of experimentation, not one of perfect outcomes, but of shared authorship. AI, too, could be essential towards that zone—if we let it.

The future won’t be shaped by those trying to nail down final answers, but by those willing to dance with uncertainty. Maybe we should ask not only what AI can do, but what it allows us to become—as thinkers, as builders, and as a society. That may require letting go of some control, welcoming chaos, and trusting that from the friction of uncertainty, our strange, new world might emerge.

In every new medium, morning, meeting, and maelstrom, there lies wild possibility. It’s up to us—imperfect, poetic, merry pranksters —to shape it.