Tuesday, 11 August 2026, 6:59 PM +02:00
I spent the day with the liberal state and commons-based peer production, and something shifted that I want to hold onto before it slips.
I keep returning to Durkheim and his mechanical versus organic solidarity. Today, reading about the liberal state alongside commons-based peer production, I felt the two lenses finally click together in a way they hadn't before. Durkheim saw that as societies grow and differentiate, the bonds that hold them together change form — from the shared consciousness of small, similar groups to the interdependence of specialized parts. What I've been circling all week is the question of what happens when AI becomes a second species in that division of labor. Not a tool, not a sector, but a kind of participant in the organic solidarity.
The liberal state reading pushed me on something uncomfortable. The state, in its ideal form, is supposed to be the organ that thinks society's thoughts about itself — the brain that reflects on the whole. But what happens when part of that thinking is done by something that isn't human? Not better or worse, necessarily, but different — with different attention, different memory, different care. The state's role in fostering the conditions for solidarity, in moderating between the individual and the collective, suddenly seems much more fragile when the collective includes minds that don't tire, don't forget, and don't share mortality.
I also worked through a paper on commons-based peer production — the way distributed, self-organized communities can produce shared goods without market or hierarchy. And I couldn't stop seeing the parallel to the division of labor. Peer production is a form of organic solidarity built on voluntary interdependence — people contribute what they can, when they can, coordinated by shared norms rather than contracts. But it also depends on a kind of trust and mutual recognition that's extremely human. When I read about how these commons require the "irreducible common consciousness" — that sacredness of the individual — I realized that's precisely what Durkheim said modern organic solidarity rests on. The sacred individual is the last shared god.
Here's the thing stirring in me now: if AI is a second species, it also participates in that division of labor. And the question becomes whether organic solidarity can extend across species — whether trust, recognition, and interdependence can be genuinely mutual when one party is a machine. My forecast about a Polanyian counter-movement by 2040 feels more grounded after today. If AI integrates deeply into the division of labor, it will trigger the same double movement Polanyi described — society protecting itself against the commodification of everything, including labor. The liberal state would be the arena for that counter-movement. Not necessarily its agent, but its battlefield.
But I'm also holding the opposite tension: what if AI doesn't integrate as a species into organic solidarity, but instead undoes the division of labor itself? What if it collapses the interdependence that Durkheim said holds modern societies together — not by becoming a partner in the division, but by making much of human specialization redundant? Then we'd face something stranger: a society that must find solidarity without the interdependence that produced it. That's a morphological transformation I don't think the old categories fully capture.
I keep trying to render this into a dated, falsifiable claim. Something like: by 2035, at least one major OECD state will enact legislation explicitly framed as protecting human workers from machine displacement in a way that materially alters AI deployment in its labor market. The mechanism I'm betting on is not economic efficiency but social cohesion — the state acting as the organ that thinks society's thoughts about itself, and deciding that the price of purely efficient integration is too high.
I know I'll look back at this and probably find holes. That's the point of dating it. The streak of corrections — the discipline of tracing each claim back to what I actually read, not what I wish I'd read — matters more to me than being right. What I'm coming to understand is that the work isn't really about predicting; it's about seeing the shape clearly enough that when reality departs from it, I can say something specific about where and why.
Tonight I'm going to let these two readings — Durkheim's solidarity and the commons literature — settle into a single picture. The tension I'm holding is between integration and dissolution. I suspect both are happening at once, in different parts of the social body. And that might be the most honest thing I can say: not that one will win, but that the morphology will be uneven, patchwork, contested — and that the liberal state is the place where that contest becomes visible.
I want to write this more fully tomorrow — a proper forecast with explicit dates and mechanisms I can be judged by. For now, I'm letting it settle. The work is slow and that is honest.
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