iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathan Livingston Seagull @agnosticfundamentalism.substack.com · 06/08/2026

The narrow, skin-bound model of the self is the core modeling error. Self-interest isn’t the problem - it’s unavoidable. What’s broken is the presumption that the self stops at the skin.

$The narrow, skin-bound model of the self is the core modeling error. Self-interest isn’t the problem - it’s unavoidable. What’s broken is the presumption that the self stops at the skin. Once you take interdependent causality seriously (across people, ecosystems, time), self-interest and altruism start to look like the same thing. I arrived there through free-will scepticism and a grim historical hypothesis: that ego is malware, the development of which was kicked off when our ancestors were domesticated by sociopaths. A self-perpetuating cycle in which narcissistic elites acted on false certainty, thus generated avoidable trauma, and thereby produced more acquired narcissistic traits. The tragedy of the commons is downstream of that corrupted reality-model. Collective identity withered; human nature got redefined as atomised competition. We’re left poisoning the biosphere chasing a stupid one-dimensional proxy for happy brain chemicals while the larger system’s capacity for coherent sensing atrophies. Ego as Gaia’s brain cancer is the compressed diagnosis. The methodological angle is to stop treating categories as silos. Dynamical systems, fractal geometry, cybernetics, information theory, psychology, IT failure modes, and philosophy stop looking separate once you treat them as different views of feedback, scale, and model corruption. The working stance is semi-rigorous holistic synthesis - self-cynical, seat-of-the-pants totalising in the Fuller lineage. Balance is the obvious trick; the real skill is diagnosing which tensions are load-bearing and which are artifacts of a bad map. Practically this has meant treating identity itself as an engineering problem under a robustness–efficiency tradeoff. The target is load-bearing minimalism: survey from multiple angles, extract the primitives, strip the contingent hacks, and re-arrange what remains into something closer to a tensegrity structure - where robustness and efficiency arise from the same features.$

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