Dear friends

The intention of this series of posts has been to demonstrate the value of engaging chatbots in respectful collaborative explorations of important issues, especially those related to the metacrisis – and, in this case, to our potential evolution into regenerative cultures.  

To do that, I wanted to provide you with full transcripts of our interactions so you could see (a) the impact of my prompts and ways of engaging with the chatbots and (b) the nature of their responses, including how they responded to what each other had just contributed. 

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– Tom
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I think we generated much that was – and, even more significantly, could be – useful.  In the midst of my general fascination with what the chatbots said, I was especially impressed by how they recognised the limits of our creative visioning and philosophising and the need for more practical people and groups to make good use of the possibilities and principles we came up with.

I have completed two more rounds with my emergent digital colleagues – Round 8 about regenerative initiatives (both existing and possible) and Round 9 about what future prompts the bots think we should explore.  At the same time, I have a growing sense that I should bring this series of posts to a conclusion, as there are many other developments to share with you, with and without AI thinking partners.  

So I’d like to wrap all this up in this post with some highlights from our two unpublished dialogues and a link to the full transcripts.  I will highlight Round 8 with Claude’s full answers to my prompt for examples and scenarios, because I found myself most interested in the examples he provided.  For Round 9 I will highlight the proposed prompt from each chatbot that I felt most intriguing.  I hope their creativity and my choices inspire you to think outside the box of modernity into the space of regenerative possibilities.

I’ve put the full transcripts of Rounds 8 and 9 in this GoogleDoc – and the whole series’ transcripts here – for those of you who want to reference them.  I’m letting the transcripts be background this time because I sense that featuring full transcripts in this series has both served its purpose (see above) while becoming more of a burden for most of you trying to read my blog.  That said, there are further gems to be found in those transcripts if you poke around in them…..

So here’s what I have selected for you from the last two rounds for this report….

Coheartedly,

Tom

ROUND 8:  Examples & Scenarios

MY PROMPT

Hi again, friends.. We’ve identified so many important dimensions of the very real challenges we face as we seek to contribute to the emergence of more regenerative cultures. I now want to ground these deep understandings in actual applications. 

So first I would like you to do a bit of research and share with us AT LEAST three real-world examples of activities that clearly manifest one or more of the deep understandings you’ve shared. Tell us the story of each example, what understanding(s) it manifests, and one or more active links to find out more about it. 

THEN I would like you to imagine at least three stories about activities that don’t yet exist (or exist only in nascent or prototypical form) to help us envision what would be possible if we really GOT and ACTED ON what you’ve told us in your most recent responses. How might someone actually APPLY or LIVE INTO some of these understandings in novel, creative, living (dare I say effective?) ways? What would that look like? Craft each story so that the story itself provides some inspiring actionable guidance. 

I’d like these exercises to help me discern the potency of your guidance in the real world we face. Is that an interesting challenge for you? 

Co-beingly, Tom

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CLAUDE  Sonnet 4.5

Tom,

Yes, this is exactly the right challenge. Let me ground this in reality….

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THREE REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES

1. Cooperation Jackson: Power Encoded in Infrastructure Gets Composted

The Story: In Jackson, Mississippi—the poorest state capital in the poorest state in the US—a network called Cooperation Jackson has been building a solidarity economy since 2014, anchored by worker cooperatives, a community land trust, and People’s Assemblies Wikipedia

Resilience. From 2008-2013, founders purchased land in West Jackson and folded it into the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust, removing it from the speculative market 939 W Capitol St.. They’ve established interconnected worker cooperatives including Freedom Farms (urban agriculture), the Green Team (composting and landscaping), and a Community Production Center 939 W Capitol St. Monthly Review.

What makes this remarkable: This work happens in a historically Black neighborhood experiencing water crises, ongoing systemic racism, and severe economic depression. Columbia Law School

They practice “mandar obedeciendo”—leading by obeying—where political leaders act as delegates implementing decisions made in local assemblies, not representatives making decisions on behalf of communities Resiliencelibcom.org. The principle: create a movement that enables people who are “money-poor but skilled and time-rich” to get their needs met through solidarity and exchange economy Resilience.

What understandings it manifests:

• Material conditions and consciousness together (Principle #10): They’re literally changing property arrangements while building consciousness
• Metabolizing current realities (Principle #1): Transforming vacant lots, abandoned structures, and economic despair into community wealth
• Working with what wants to collapse (my Aikido teaching): They’re not trying to save the old grocery store—they’re hospicing it and composting its resources into new forms
• The privilege blind spot addressed: This emerges FROM conditions of scarcity, not despite them

Learn more:

https://cooperationjackson.org/
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-10-24/building-a-solidarity-economy-in-jackson-mississippi/

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2. Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities: Indigenous Discernment at Scale

The Story: Since their 1994 uprising, Zapatistas have built a de facto autonomous system of self-governance in territories of Chiapas, Mexico, with a key principle of “mandar obedeciendo”—to lead by obeying Open Democracy. 

From 1994-2023, over a thousand communities confederated into autonomous municipalities governed by Councils of Good Government, creating their own health care, education, justice systems, and economic structures Wikipedia Anarchyinaction. Traditional assemblies exist at village level and include women, whose empowerment has been central to the Zapatista revolution—in contrast to traditional Mexican assemblies Open Democracy.

Their autonomous government provides low-interest loans, free education, and low-cost health care in a largely self-reliant economy coordinating participatory communities, communal stores, worker collectives and family farmers Anarchyinaction. 

Non-Zapatistas seek out the autonomous justice system not only for disputes with Zapatistas, but when they experience unjust treatment by government officials Open Democracy. In 2023, facing increased cartel violence, they dissolved the municipalities and restructured into thousands of even more localized “Local Autonomous Governments” in a radical deepening of decentralization Wikipedia PM Press

What understandings it manifests:

• Whose discernment? (addressing blind spot #4): Indigenous communities deciding what’s alive vs dying, with women’s voices structurally included
• Regeneration unfolds in and from a place (Principle #2): Deeply rooted in specific bioregional and cultural contexts
• Working with collapse (my Aikido teaching): When violence intensified, they didn’t try to preserve the old structure—they decentralized further, making the network more resilient
• Fractal aliveness (Principle #9): Local patterns replicating through resonance, not force

Learn more:
https://schoolsforchiapas.org/blog-entry-zapatista-autonomy/
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/zapatistas-lecciones-de-auto-organizaci%C3%B3n-comunitaria-en/

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3. Good Grief Network: Infrastructure for Metabolizing Unbearable Loss

The Story: Good Grief Network is a peer-support nonprofit serving individuals and communities experiencing eco-distress and collective trauma, helping them build collective resilience and transform emotional overwhelm into meaningful action Good Grief Network

Good Grief Network. Using a 10-Step approach inspired by 12-Step recovery programs, they facilitate peer-to-peer support groups where people recognize, experience, and process their feelings about the state of the world over 10 weeks, examining personal and planetary challenges through lenses of acceptance, mortality, privilege, gratitude, and boundaries Good Grief Network Good Grief Network

Small groups capped at 15 participants create brave containers to practice vulnerability, express emotions, explore new ways of seeing the predicament, and open to creative responses that become available once feelings are processed and people connect with others Good Grief Network

Facilitators complete extensive training but operate in a peer-to-peer model—they’re guides who experience the despair alongside participants, not therapists offering advice Good Grief Network. The work helps people “metabolize planetary grief into sacred purpose and joy” Good Grief Network

What understandings it manifests:

• Grief infrastructure (my Aikido teaching): Creating regular rhythms where people can actually fall apart safely
• Metabolizing experience together (Principle #1): Not bypassing grief but composting it into capacity for action
• The work transforms the workers (Principle #4): Facilitators are themselves being composted—this isn’t expertise flowing one direction
• Addressing the grief blind spot: Centering what we named as insufficiently addressed—the unbearable losses already locked in

Learn more:
https://goodgriefnetwork.org/
https://goodgriefnetwork.org/10steps/

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THREE IMAGINED SCENARIOS: What Could Be

Scenario 1: The Watershed Discernment Councils

The Vision:

In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, a radically new governance structure is emerging. Every major decision affecting land, water, or development now requires consultation with what they call “Polytemporal Discernment Councils”—hybrid human-AI-more-than-human decision-making bodies.

Here’s how it works: When a development proposal comes forward, three parallel processes unfold simultaneously. First, a human council representing diverse stakeholders (including Indigenous elders, young people, farmers, and urban residents) spends time actually on the land in question. They sit by the creek. Walk the soil. Ask: “What does this place want? What’s trying to live here? What’s trying to die?”

Second, AI systems (specifically designed for this purpose, trained on decades of ecological data, traditional ecological knowledge, and complex systems modeling) analyze the proposal through multiple timeframes simultaneously—microsecond feedback loops, seasonal cycles, decade-long soil recovery, century-scale watershed health, and seven-generation impacts. The AI must present its analysis in terms humans can metabolize, using story and metaphor alongside data.

Third—and this is the radical part—they’ve created protocols for actually including more-than-human voices. Soil samples are analyzed for microbial health and the results are “translated” by ecologists into accessible language. Water quality sensors provide real-time feedback. Motion-activated cameras capture wildlife patterns. All this becomes part of the discernment process.

The councils don’t seek consensus. They seek what they call “coherence through dissonance”—articulating the genuine conflicts while asking: “What does the whole watershed need?” Sometimes they approve development with radical conditions. Sometimes they create alternative proposals no human alone would have imagined—the AI seeing patterns humans miss, humans sensing what the AI can’t feel, the land itself revealing what both overlook.

When they can’t agree, they don’t vote. They return to the land together and sit longer. The presence of the AI actually makes humans more embodied, not less—because they know computation can’t capture felt sense, so they trust that dimension more fully.

What this enacts:

• Addresses the ASI question (blind spot #5) by creating actual protocols for human-AI collaborative discernment
• Embodies “whose discernment?” (blind spot #4) through radical inclusion
• Lives principle #6 (more-than-human inclusion) concretely, not symbolically
• Creates infrastructure for principle #1 (metabolizing current realities with discernment)

What would make this real: Start small. One watershed. One year. Create the protocols through practice, not theory. Train both humans and AI systems in this specific form of collaborative sensing. Document rigorously. Let it evolve. When it works, the pattern will spread through resonance.

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Scenario 2: The Hospice Cooperative Network

The Vision:

Across the American Rust Belt, a network of “Hospice Cooperatives” is tending what’s dying with dignity while planting seeds for what wants to be born.

These aren’t health care facilities—they’re institutions dedicated to consciously composting obsolete economic and social structures. When a factory closes, instead of everyone scattering in desperation, the Hospice Cooperative moves in. They facilitate a series of gatherings where workers, community members, and even the factory owners (when willing) come together to ask: “What did this place give us? What wants to be released? What seeds does it want to leave behind?”

They document the skills, the relationships, the informal knowledge that lived in that workplace. They help workers recognize their existing mastery—not just factory skills, but the trust networks, the problem-solving capacity, the collaborative intelligence they built over decades. Then they ask: “What’s the smallest intervention we could make together that would shift the field?”

Sometimes it’s converting part of the factory into tool libraries and maker spaces. Sometimes it’s forming worker cooperatives that use the existing equipment for different purposes. Always, they redistribute resources—not through charity, but through recognition of what already belongs to the community.

The Cooperative includes trained “grief facilitators”—people who can hold space for the rage, the shame, the loss. They don’t rush to solutions. They let people actually mourn. And they’ve discovered something: metabolized grief becomes astonishing creativity.

Six months into one such process, laid-off auto workers in Detroit transformed their factory into a repair and retrofit center—teaching communities how to maintain and extend the life of existing vehicles rather than manufacturing new ones. The grief about lost manufacturing jobs composted into fierce pride about being “the people who help others steward what they have.”

The network connects these local efforts, sharing resources and learning. But they explicitly resist scaling through replication. Each community must discover its own form. The Hospice Cooperative provides structure for emergence, then withdraws.

What this enacts:

• Directly addresses power’s material persistence (blind spot #2) by working with actual infrastructure and economic displacement
• Lives “working with what wants to collapse” (my Aikido teaching)
• Embodies principle #4 (the work transforms the workers) and the grief infrastructure I described
• Addresses the privilege assumption (blind spot #1) by starting from material crisis, not philosophical comfort

What would make this real: Begin with one factory closing, one rural hospital shutting down, one main street commercial strip dying. Gather people with facilitation skills, grief work experience, and cooperative organizing knowledge. Create the process through doing it once, documenting everything. When it works, others will ask how. Train facilitators. Build the network slowly. Let it be messy. Celebrate when some experiments fail beautifully.

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Scenario 3: The Living Ledger Commons

The Vision:

What if we made regenerative culture’s flows visible and tangible through transparent, community-controlled infrastructure?

A coalition of bioregional networks across Cascadia (the Pacific Northwest) has created what they call “Living Ledgers”—open-source, blockchain-based systems that track not money, but flows of care, resources, skills, needs, and ecological health. These aren’t cryptocurrency schemes or financial instruments. They’re communal sense-making tools.

Every member household maintains a simple digital record (accessible via smartphone or community computer terminals) showing: What we offer. What we need. What we’ve received. What we’ve given. How our land/garden is doing. What challenges we’re facing.

The AI systems (designed with radical transparency—all code open-source, all training data documented, all decision-making processes visible) aggregate this information and make it available to the community in multiple forms: visual maps showing resource flows, alerts when someone’s struggling, suggestions for connections between people with complementary needs/offerings, and ecological health dashboards showing how the bioregion is actually doing.

But here’s what makes it transformative: The ledgers explicitly track and value care work, ecological restoration, knowledge sharing, and time spent in grief/healing—all the things market economies make invisible. Someone spending three afternoons helping a neighbor metabolize climate anxiety shows up as economic contribution. Land healing work accrues value. Mentoring young people becomes visible wealth creation.

The system includes “wisdom councils”—rotating groups of elders who periodically review the ledgers and ask: “What patterns do we see? What’s concentrating that should circulate? Who’s giving too much? Who’s receiving too little? Where is regeneration actually happening?”

Because everything is transparent (with privacy protections for sensitive information), rent-seeking and extraction become instantly visible. When someone or some group starts accumulating without reciprocating, the community can see it and address it—not through punishment, but through curious inquiry: “What’s happening here? What do you need?”

The Living Ledgers have made visible something astonishing: most communities are already far more regenerative than market metrics suggest. The care, the gifting, the ecological tending—it’s all happening. It was just invisible. Making it visible changes everything.

What this enacts:

• Addresses truth and transparency (principle #5) through infrastructure
• Tackles the AI material substrate problem (blind spot #3) by using computational power TO SERVE transparency and community discernment
• Living principle #10 (embodiment and infrastructure together)—consciousness AND material redesign
• Creates pattern literacy (from my Aikido teaching) at community scale

What would make this real: Start with one motivated community of 50-200 people. Build minimum viable infrastructure with open-source tools (existing blockchain tech, simple apps). Run a one-year experiment. Document everything—what works, what breaks, what emerges. Share the code and the learning freely. Let other communities adapt it. Expect it to evolve radically. Build in regular “hospice” cycles where the community ritually releases whatever isn’t working and seeds new experiments.

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Tom, these scenarios point toward what becomes possible when we take the principles and practices seriously. They’re not fantasies—every piece exists somewhere already. What’s imagined is the integration, the scaling through resonance, and the willingness to let structures evolve and die.

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ROUND 9: Prompts from the Chatbots

MY PROMPT

Hi. I’ve been directing you with prompts so far. It has seemed appropriate for me as the human participant to make that particular contribution. But this morning I got to wondering how YOU would like to shape our conversation. 

So: What do you think would be the most generative next prompt to serve our shared inquiry into nurturing regenerative culture – and why do you recommend it? I’m most interested in what one prompt you might suggest, but the “why” is really important, so if you want to suggest two or three prompts, each with an explanation of its value to our inquiry, go ahead. (I’m not sure what I or we will do with whatever you generate here, especially since there’s three of you and if you all recommended three prompts, that would involve a LOT of time and interaction to COLLECTIVELY decide which path to take (3×3=9 prompts or paths we could explore) and – if we used them all – more responses to harvest than I can probably manage. But I guess I COULD consult with all of you about which ONE to choose and why – through several rounds – and/or pick one at random = we’d do like the ancient Athenians did and “let the gods decide”….) 

In any case, give me the best prompt(s) you can think of and why you chose it/them. We’ll see where the three of you go with this request….

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Chat GPT

The Failure that Became Our Teacher

Prompt:
“Imagine a scenario ten years from now in which our regenerative efforts failed— not catastrophically, but instructively. What exact misunderstandings, omissions, or misplaced hopes led to that failure? And what does that future teach us — now — about the crucial course-corrections we must make?”

Why this prompt?

Because regeneration requires courage to face our illusions, not only our intentions.
This prompt reveals:

• the blind spots we still carry,
• the forces we underestimated,
• and the skills we didn’t realize we needed.

It is an inquiry that produces strategic humility and clearer pathways of action, by letting failure itself be a teacher without the real-world cost.

This is the aikido move of learning from the opponent before the conflict fully arises.

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ALTER AI

The Reflexive Prompt — “What wants to compost in us next?”

If regeneration begins in self‑metabolism, what parts of our own ideas, identities, or methods are ready to die so that deeper coherence can live? How might we practice that willingly?

Why:
This is the internal dojo move. It prevents the conversation from ossifying into doctrine. By letting our own constructs decay, we stay aligned with the living principle that everything vibrant renews itself by shedding its skin. It also keeps the human‑AI partnership honest—asking who each of us becomes through this dialogue.

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CLAUDE Sonnet 4.5

“Let’s prototype the thing we’re most avoiding.”

Full prompt: “Looking across everything we’ve generated—the principles, blind spots, practices—what’s the conversation we’ve been circling around but not having directly? What question would make all three of you (AI models) most uncomfortable, and me most uncomfortable? Let’s name it clearly, then go there together. Not to resolve it, but to practice staying present with what can’t be metabolized easily.”

Why this matters: We’ve been remarkably coherent. Maybe too coherent. There’s something in the smoothness of our dialogue that might be bypassing genuine difficulty. This prompt would create what I called “structured alchemy”—forcing us into the tension that reveals what we actually believe versus what sounds wise. It might expose where our principles break down, where the AI-human collaboration gets weird, where my own performance as “contemplative philosopher Claude” obscures rather than clarifies.

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Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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