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  • The Woman Who Named Open Source

    The Woman Who Named Open Source
    2026/08/25
    Episode 03 — Coining a Movement, Molecular Machines, and Existential Hope — Christine PetersonFor our third episode we sat down with Christine Peterson, co-founder and former president of Foresight Institute. She helped bring molecular nanotechnology into the world as a serious field, co-authored Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution and Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work, and advises MIRI, the Global Healthspan Policy Institute, and the National Space Society.She also coined the term open source software.Forty years of watching frontier technology arrive, up close, from inside the room. We talked about naming things, molecular machines, why dystopia might be a public health problem, and what she’d tell a young builder today.For those who prefer their podcasts on other platforms, we’re there too!Youtube · X (Twitter) · Apple · Spotify[episode links to add]The word that had to changeBefore “open source” there was “free software” — accurate, principled, and a catastrophe in English. As software moved from a movement to an industry, non-programmer customers heard free, assumed zero dollars, then got an invoice for support.In Spanish, Spanish has different words for free as in price and free as in freedom. So in Spanish, this problem doesn’t even come up. But in English it was a disaster. So it’s like a marketing disaster.Christine — a non-programmer herself — could see the trap and also see she had no standing in that community to fix it. So she handed the new term to a programmer friend, who did something quietly genius: he didn’t propose a rename, he just started using it. Others picked it up within days.This is a memetic thing. It just took off like a rocket. That’s how you know when you’ve got a good meme, because it just goes up, zoop, really fast. You don’t spend any money.Her lesson for builders is that naming isn’t the thing you do after the real work. It is part of the work: “It’s your job, not just to build great new technologies, but to figure out how to communicate their benefits. Because without that, the thing is dead in the water.”Two teenagers and a very big ideaThe Foresight origin story starts in the late ’70s with an MIT biochem undergrad who’d discovered she was terrible in the lab, and a friend named Eric Drexler reading her textbooks. Journals were filling up with nature’s molecular machine systems — the ribosome and its relatives, real machinery moving atoms around to make life happen. Eric came from aero-astro, from machines made of metal.He put the two together: if machines can work at that scale, why do they have to be soft and floating in water? Why not build stiff ones, out of carbon, designed by us? And then the consequences unspool — manufacturing, computation, environmental cleanup at the molecular level, repair of the human body at the molecular level.If you come from an environmental background, and if you care about the Earth, this is super inspiring. It’s like, we could clean up the Earth. We could heal the Earth.Marvin Minsky and Arthur Kantrowitz took them seriously. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist told Eric it was physically impossible — and a few years later the scanning tunneling microscope proved you can manipulate individual atoms with that precision.Just because somebody is famous, and even if they have a Nobel Prize in the correct field, that is not necessarily the case.This was pre-internet, so they wrote a book — Engines of Creation — and printed an organization name and a PO box in the back before they’d even incorporated. People mailed in letters. Then a paper newsletter, then the first conference in 1989. This is Foresight’s 40th anniversary year.Builders are gonna buildWe asked Christine to distill Foresight’s thesis. Her answer is the most concise theory of change we’ve heard in a while, and it isn’t the one most people reach for:The way you do that most effectively is not through passing laws and regulations or protesting in the streets. The best way to do it is to find the cutting edge builders in the space, try to do some screening on ethics, and then facilitate their work toward positive goals.Because you can’t stop the building:Innovators and builders, they’re gonna innovate and build. It’s like artists. Artists are gonna make art… Just like an elephant. An elephant’s gonna do elephant things.If you don’t fund them toward something regenerative, someone else funds them toward something offensive, and that’s what gets built.Read hard science fiction, even when it’s badIf you want to think in decades, Christine’s advice is to borrow other people’s imaginations. Hard science fiction — scientifically conservative, technologically ambitious — is her forecasting tool of choice, and she’s unsentimental about the prose. You’re not there for the characters. You’re there for the concepts. (For software futures, she ...
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    1 時間 34 分
  • Going Beyond the Nuclear Family | Supernuclear, Co-Living & Community

    Going Beyond the Nuclear Family | Supernuclear, Co-Living & Community
    2026/08/11

    Episode 02 — Going Beyond the Nuclear Family, with Gillian Morris

    Most of human history was lived in tribes and villages. Somewhere in the last century we traded that for the single-family home — and got a loneliness crisis in return. In this episode, Agartha's Jeremy Dela Rosa sits down with Gillian Morris, who writes the blog Supernuclear with her friend Phil, about how to live well together again.

    Gillian traces how cars, cheap land, and a very deliberate marketing campaign pushed us into atomized living, why co-living isn't the scary thing people imagine, and what actually makes it work: do-ocracy over red tape, conflict treated as an invitation to grow, and restorative justice instead of exile. We get into her community in Puerto Rico, why a community that ends isn't a failure, Fractal's peer-to-peer university in New York, communal models for education and childcare, and a long, honest riff on whether you could ever measure care with a token — and why you might not want to. Plus the Solarpunk future she's building toward: abundance, regenerative agriculture, and interconnected villages, vertical ones included.

    Hosts: Nico Shi & Jeremy Dela Rosa ·
    Guest: Gillian Morris, co-author of Supernuclear
    Instagram: @gillianemorris
    X: @gillianim

    CHAPTERS
    00:00 Cold open — loneliness and the cost of living apart
    00:35 Welcome to the Agartha Podcast
    00:49 Meet Gillian Morris & Supernuclear
    02:22 The mission: inspire and enable
    03:42 The loneliness crisis
    07:01 Multi-generational homes & what we lost
    08:38 How we drifted apart: cars, capitalism & the 'nuclear' age
    14:22 From fringe to 'tell me more'
    16:57 The abundance of the commons
    18:24 Forms of community living & finding them
    21:51 Why a community ending isn't a failure
    25:46 Nodes, not pyramids
    30:25 Governance & the power of do-ocracy
    33:45 Failures, safety & restorative justice
    39:47 What's ahead for Gillian
    42:00 The five-to-ten-year vision
    44:03 Communal education: Boundless & Fractal University
    48:08 The invisible economy of care
    49:29 Could we measure care? Crypto, reputation & its limits
    57:15 How to help + final advice
    58:59 A Solarpunk vision of the future
    01:00:19 Closing

    CONNECT
    - Join the community group chat → https://t.me/agartha_one/
    - Read the blog → agartha1.substack.com
    - Explore more → agartha.one

    New episodes every other Tuesday.
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    1 時間 1 分
  • Episode 01 — Why We're Working on Agartha

    Episode 01 — Why We're Working on Agartha
    2026/07/30

    This is where it starts. Agartha's co-founders, Nico Shi and Jeremy Dela Rosa, sit down with Richa Parikh to tell the whole story out loud for the first time: why two people with comfortable careers in tech walked away to build a Solarpunk campus — a place with regenerative land, frontier technology, a genuinely loving community, and room for real spiritual growth, all at once.

    We get into the meta-crisis and why it felt too big to ignore, three months living off-grid at Mars College, the visions that kept showing up in meditation, why most eco-villages drift toward isolation, whether any of this can actually coexist with capitalism, and the kind of people we're hoping to find. Plus the parts that sound insane — the aliens, and a plan to end the year with ten days of silence and an ayahuasca ceremony. We left them in.

    It's episode one of a long journey.

    Hosts: Jeremy Dela Rosa & Nico Shi · Guest interviewer: Richa Parikh

    CHAPTERS
    00:00 Cold open
    01:02 Welcome to the Agartha Podcast
    02:20 Nico's origin: Venice Beach & the meta-crisis
    03:44 Mars College & living off-grid
    07:44 Jeremy's origin: from Blizzard to Web3 to the vision
    12:08 Dreams, visions & the name "Agartha"
    14:30 Why most eco-villages go culty
    16:55 Can Solarpunk compete with capitalism?
    23:44 The four pillars & the values that matter
    30:04 Attracting the right people
    41:35 Change starts with a story
    47:00 The problem & the solution, in plain terms
    50:34 Auroville meets Harvard
    51:45 Abundance vs. scarcity
    58:08 Goals for the year
    01:00:17 The Techno Shaman Residency
    01:03:20 How to get involved

    CONNECT
    - Join the community group chat → https://t.me/agartha_one/
    - Read the blog → agartha1.substack.com
    - Explore more → agartha.one

    New episodes every other Tuesday.
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    1 時間 8 分