We are not suffering from a failure of policy—we’re suffering from a failure of sensemaking. What breaks organizations is rarely just bad leadership or misaligned incentives. It’s the same pattern again and again: we lose the thread. We stop metabolizing friction. We forget how to learn from our own complexity.
This connection is where Taproot began for me. Not as a theory, but more a gut-level response to watching towns, families, my country—increasingly lose the capacity to update in real time.
But what we need isn’t more data. We need a civic nervous system… a more coherent feedback loop between the people who know, the people who care, and the people who decide.
I’m calling this form of governance ToMarchy—short for Theory-of-Mind-based governance… it’s built on the idea that trust, not authority, is the scarce resource in modern systems.
If you can’t model what your stakeholders believe, fear, and aspire to, you cannot lead them.
At least, not for long…
In a post-industrial era, stable power must be recursive—self-aware, locally metabolized, continuously updated.
Traditional org charts and top-down bureaucracies weren’t designed for this. They’re designed for throughput, not resonance. For predictability, not regeneration.
Living systems don’t scale that way. They loop. They listen. They grow by attending to their own tensions, not by overriding them.
That’s where my Taproot idea comes in… It’s a civic thermodynamics engine—a framework for metabolizing friction at the edge. At its core, Taproot runs on AANDR Loops: Attract → Attend → Nurture → Defend → Release. These loops allow both organizations and communities to tune themselves to what’s really happening—across emotional, ontological, and informational levels.
The architecture is both technological and cultural… a town with its own localized language model—an AI tuned not just to global facts, but to the local agency and the unique people of the town/community/organization itself.
Every citizen is personified in this system as a custodian avatar (agent)— what I call a “YoM,” short for Your own Mind. These aren’t simple tools, they’re symbiontic mirrors. Exoselves… Civic agents that help metabolize tension before it metastasizes. No censorship or coercion… we foster recursive trust through high-resolution mutual modeling.
In org change language, I’m talking about distributed sensing, radical contextualization, and intentional friction metabolism. Simply automating workflows is not possible—we render trust and trauma visible, so that *coherence* becomes possible again.
This isn’t theory for me. It’s personal. I’ve spent years designing this as a retired NCO, a father, a builder. I want a system that would’ve helped my own unit after deployment. That could help a town rebuild from institutional neglect. That could give kids a sense of sovereignty in their own learning journey. That could keep people human while scaling up coordination.
What I’m trying to propose is not a patch. It’s a new root system. One that loops sense → trust → action faster than entropy can degrade it.
That’s ToMarchy- Governance at the speed of Trust.
Very interesting ideas, Mike. The point about trust is absolutely indispensable. I'm fascinated by the Taproot/AANDR concept, too, and would love to see you imagine what that might look like in practice, or how it gets OPERATIONALIZED, given the imperfections of the world.
I totally, utterly agree. Because They had poisoned my Well, polluted my Reality, despoiled my Water and I was goin' Postal. Convid, the Plandemic, the Lockdowns... the Fall of Australia, a slow moving eco-suicide via netzero. MSM 💩💩💩 WhatEVER MEANING one finds, it can not be found in the (current) West. Only complete rejection of the slimey marxist relatavism filth, it's ugly Equality by Levelling, it's premise of a SATISFYING NIHILISM. What a frikn Lie 👏 HA! 😆 I REJECT YOU ALL! 🧘 & Shaman sez 🫠 all will be Well 🫶
We are not suffering from a failure of policy—we’re suffering from a failure of sensemaking. What breaks organizations is rarely just bad leadership or misaligned incentives. It’s the same pattern again and again: we lose the thread. We stop metabolizing friction. We forget how to learn from our own complexity.
This connection is where Taproot began for me. Not as a theory, but more a gut-level response to watching towns, families, my country—increasingly lose the capacity to update in real time.
But what we need isn’t more data. We need a civic nervous system… a more coherent feedback loop between the people who know, the people who care, and the people who decide.
I’m calling this form of governance ToMarchy—short for Theory-of-Mind-based governance… it’s built on the idea that trust, not authority, is the scarce resource in modern systems.
If you can’t model what your stakeholders believe, fear, and aspire to, you cannot lead them.
At least, not for long…
In a post-industrial era, stable power must be recursive—self-aware, locally metabolized, continuously updated.
Traditional org charts and top-down bureaucracies weren’t designed for this. They’re designed for throughput, not resonance. For predictability, not regeneration.
Living systems don’t scale that way. They loop. They listen. They grow by attending to their own tensions, not by overriding them.
That’s where my Taproot idea comes in… It’s a civic thermodynamics engine—a framework for metabolizing friction at the edge. At its core, Taproot runs on AANDR Loops: Attract → Attend → Nurture → Defend → Release. These loops allow both organizations and communities to tune themselves to what’s really happening—across emotional, ontological, and informational levels.
The architecture is both technological and cultural… a town with its own localized language model—an AI tuned not just to global facts, but to the local agency and the unique people of the town/community/organization itself.
Every citizen is personified in this system as a custodian avatar (agent)— what I call a “YoM,” short for Your own Mind. These aren’t simple tools, they’re symbiontic mirrors. Exoselves… Civic agents that help metabolize tension before it metastasizes. No censorship or coercion… we foster recursive trust through high-resolution mutual modeling.
In org change language, I’m talking about distributed sensing, radical contextualization, and intentional friction metabolism. Simply automating workflows is not possible—we render trust and trauma visible, so that *coherence* becomes possible again.
This isn’t theory for me. It’s personal. I’ve spent years designing this as a retired NCO, a father, a builder. I want a system that would’ve helped my own unit after deployment. That could help a town rebuild from institutional neglect. That could give kids a sense of sovereignty in their own learning journey. That could keep people human while scaling up coordination.
What I’m trying to propose is not a patch. It’s a new root system. One that loops sense → trust → action faster than entropy can degrade it.
That’s ToMarchy- Governance at the speed of Trust.
Very interesting ideas, Mike. The point about trust is absolutely indispensable. I'm fascinated by the Taproot/AANDR concept, too, and would love to see you imagine what that might look like in practice, or how it gets OPERATIONALIZED, given the imperfections of the world.
I'd never considered religion/philosophy as alternatives for therapy (and addictive self indulgence)... but that's EXACTLY what they are.
Beautifully written and right on 🎯
Thank you for brightening my day, Brian.
I totally, utterly agree. Because They had poisoned my Well, polluted my Reality, despoiled my Water and I was goin' Postal. Convid, the Plandemic, the Lockdowns... the Fall of Australia, a slow moving eco-suicide via netzero. MSM 💩💩💩 WhatEVER MEANING one finds, it can not be found in the (current) West. Only complete rejection of the slimey marxist relatavism filth, it's ugly Equality by Levelling, it's premise of a SATISFYING NIHILISM. What a frikn Lie 👏 HA! 😆 I REJECT YOU ALL! 🧘 & Shaman sez 🫠 all will be Well 🫶