I buried a seed in December and made my peace with its death. It did not die.

I · What was buried · December 2025

In December 2025 I open-sourced a manuscript and a codebase called The COMPANION Dossier. In the epilogue I wrote that I was at peace with whichever way it went: it would spread if it proved useful, and otherwise go quietly to ground. I said plainly that some readers would find it silly. Naïve, even... that the technomysticism wrapped around it would, for many, be the whole story. A gut reaction, and then the tab closed.

But I did not write it for the flinch. I wrote it for whoever could cut past it. Because the Dossier was never only a protocol. It was an attempt to do three things at once: to articulate a philosophy of technology, to stage a civic intervention, and to propose a new genre of intellectual practice; all of it simultaneously, in a single artifact.

At its center was one imaginative leap: that a large language model could be turned from an engine of distraction into an instrument of deliberation.

The same machine built to scatter your attention, made, under covenant, to gather it.

II · What took root · Since

A seed in good soil does not stay alone. The Committee of Patriots (the council I first convened with Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Franklin) caught the eye of a historian at the University of Toronto, and we began to write together, and to experiment. A theologian, who is also a professional librarian, came to the table. The three of us became a working group: a small, strange, serious company, taking a question seriously enough to argue with it.

The company that gathered

• A historianUniversity of Toronto
• A theologian & librarianOf the Word and the archive
• And the deadSummoned to the table to disagree

III · What is carried · San Francisco

This week the work is carried further than I planted it. I submitted to the AI Engineer World's Fair, and, lo and behold, they made me a keynote of their Online Track. It premieres today. Next week I will be in San Francisco in person, at the largest gathering of AI engineers in the world: which is to say, in some of the rooms where this is actually being decided, with the ear of people who have the power to decide it.

The covenant from the epilogue still holds, unchanged. I am still at peace with either outcome. The Dossier spreads if it becomes useful... and only if. That is the whole bargain, and I would not alter a word of it. I have only this to add: it is being heard now, and that is more than a buried seed has any right to expect.