Principles

Principles

The short version of the manifesto. These are commitments, not aspirations.

1. 1. Route, don't capture

   We move people, capital, and intent toward the right counterparts. We do not lock them in.

   A coordination layer that captures becomes an institution. Institutions optimize for their own preservation. Memetwork has to keep choosing the opposite — routing past itself when that serves the goal better.

   This rules out: building a platform that owns its users, running a fellowship that’s optimized for repeat applicants, becoming a brokerage that takes a cut.

2. 2. Small in name, large in function

   Brand kept light on purpose. The work shows up under whichever banner serves the moment.

   The temptation in any movement is to brand-build until the brand replaces the work. We resist that by keeping the public surface narrow and the underlying coordination surface as wide as it needs to be.

   In practice: layered architecture. Organizations and communities sit on different layers. Council, hub, movement, project office, dev lab — each specialized, none asked to be everything.

3. 3. Operators, not just researchers

   AI-safety ecosystems route technical researchers well and route everyone else poorly. We work on the rest of the graph.

   The talent infrastructure that exists today serves technical AI-safety researchers reasonably well. It serves operators, founders, program leads, strategic communicators, and cross-functional generalists poorly. Those are the people who turn alignment into shipped systems and shipped systems into civilizational outcomes. Fixing their absorption into the ecosystem is the tractable opening move — not the whole project, but the obvious wedge.