What We Study

The fights we are watching.

An agenda is a fight we have chosen to follow across years, not a topic we cover once. For each, we ask the same three questions: who is fighting over this future, what are they fighting for, and what becomes default if no one contests them.

Agenda 01

The future of work

When AI rewires how work is coordinated, who captures the value — and who is written out of the redesign?

Automation is not mainly taking tasks; it is reorganising who must talk to whom, who decides, where the value pools. We study who owns the coordination layer once it is rewired — platforms, or the people who held the system together by hand — and what that means for labour, the Global South, and the shape of the firm.

Contested by: Platform owners · labour · the Global South

Agenda 02

The future of money & identity

As identity and payment fuse into one programmable layer, is it convenience — or a switch someone else can turn off?

Digital identity, programmable payments, and central-bank digital currency are converging into a single credential that is also a control surface. We study who holds the switch, what becomes conditional on it, and the line between a system that serves the individual and one that governs them.

Contested by: States · issuers · the individual

Agenda 03

The future of cooperation

As the conditions that once made rivals cooperate erode, does the world default to mutual defection — and who moves first?

Cooperation among rivals was never moral; it was structural — it held where a few specific conditions held. We study those conditions across security, trade, and technology as they are dismantled, and what it would take to rebuild them before the game collapses to defection.

Contested by: Great powers · alliances · markets

The method holds across all of them

Name the fight. Don't sell a prediction.

A prediction closes the question; naming the fight keeps it open — the honest posture, because the question is in fact still open. Our work is useful precisely to the people who still have a move to make.

Read the essays →