I’ve had “Ice Ice Baby” stuck in my head for days and I think it’s trying to tell me something. Just the opening line on repeat.
Stop. Collaborate. And listen.
Three-ish words from a ‘90s throwaway bop might actually be the most radical sequence of instructions available to us right now.
I also keep thinking about The Maharishi Effect.
For the uninitiated: the Maharishi Effect is the idea that when roughly 1% of a population engages in coherent, focused attention, it shifts the behavior of the whole system.
It’s been debated, dismissed, and revisited.
But the principle underneath it is harder to shake: that collective focus is more than symbolic. It’s structural. It’s evolutionary.
And I’ve been thinking about how order forms. How order can form. The variables necessary for order to become.
Clearly order doesn’t come from order if either is to look noticeably different.
Chaos is the mother, chaos is the fertile soil… unfortunately.
But collective attention is the salve. That’s why we were atomized long ago.
Recall the story of the tower of babel. Ancient, intentional forces chose the collective scrambling of communication, shrouding of intent.
We became lost to each other. By design.
Derived from order.
Resulting in order.
Just not a great order. In my humble opinion…
And the most effective tool of that atomization has always been pressurized speed. Speed of decree, speed of capital, speed of narrative, speed of needs stacking up into an individualized daily static.
The people who controlled the pace controlled the outcome. That’s not new. What’s new is that the monopoly on speed is cracking.
Now we live in chaos, but a strange kind of chaos. Accelerated, orchestrated, but poorly done so.
We see the seams, we know the players, the motives are all laid bare. The incentives seemingly paltry when norms slip away.
Sure money is fancy paper, well printed, strong stock, woven, some say.
But that’s all it is, a collective hallucination that paper imbued with the visage of past great men means something across the world.
That’s the driver here. Money, trinkets, shiny things, things that make loud booms. We’re simple folk at the moment. We line up behind those demonstrating orchestration of assets. Even when those assets hurt others intentionally. Cruelly.
Our leaders persist as the gasping throes of this bygone generation wanting to play with their toys in the sand one last time.
It pains me so much to see the suffering, but it might be even more painful to know how much of my life was enjoyed while sheltered from that feeling. As I now know full well that this shit has been happening since before I was born. Actively, intentionally, constantly, writ large.
And I realize that this admission costs something. But it’s the only honest ground to stand on before stepping into what comes next.
So speed, in this instance, might be the mercy we need.
With the acceleration of conflict and the proliferation of suffering, comes the advent of AI and its ability to effortlessly communicate across language barriers.
AI is the Tower of Babel rebuilt.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
A person in Osaka and a person in Omaha can now have a nuanced conversation without either learning the other’s language. The scrambling that was engineered millennia ago is being unscrambled in real time.
Speed built the walls. Speed is now decimating them with a potential for a new monolith to form. Not one of brick, but one of intention. Shared belief.
It’s time. We’re focused, the chaos has presented us with a moment of shared attention. We can elevate from here. And I’m quite certain that there’s absolutely more than 1% of the human population focused on this quagmire.
We’ll inevitably hopscotch over that Maharishi threshold. And it won’t just be monks in a room or some retreat in Thailand. It will be converged upon by millions of people staring at the same broken systems and deciding, independently but simultaneously, that this isn’t it.
And I humbly propose a new direction. Let’s turn this world into a joy driven exploration machine.
Author’s Note: On the making of this piece
This week’s musing started as a loose pile of thoughts — speed, mercy, the Maharishi Effect, a vague sense that something was connecting them — and I brought that pile to Claude. Not to write the piece, but to do what I’d describe as intellectual patty cake. I batted my draft at it, it batted back a structural spine, I took that into Google Docs and carved it into something that sounded like me, then brought it back for another round. The Vanilla Ice onramp? That came from a collaborative riff on how to give the piece a door that wasn’t immediately abstract. The bones were built together. The voice, the edits, the final choices — those are mine.
The header image and closing mark were generated in Leonardo AI using prompts we developed together. We started with the concept — a ground-level view of a rebuilt Tower of Babel made from woven glyphs, something that embodied the mystery of inference in a tangible structure — and iterated on prompt language until it landed. The CW mark was designed to feel like a carved stone pulled from the base of that same tower, my initials sitting alongside indecipherable script as if they’d always been there.
I share this because I think the process matters as much as the output. AI didn’t write this piece. But it also wasn’t absent from it. It functioned the way a good collaborator does — it helped me find the shape of what I was already thinking, challenged the places where my optimism outpaced my argument, and got out of the way when the work was done. That last part is underrated. The best tools know when to stop talking.