What culture is right for you?
The problem of one-size-fits-all culture and why different components need different approaches.
Writings
A proto-book in early stages — exploring how to map values, culture, and sovereignty.
Proto-Book: Mapping Values, Culture and Sovereignty
This is a proto-book — an early-stage exploration of how to map culture, values, and sovereignty. These posts represent the building blocks of a larger work that is still forming. The ideas are evolving, the structure is provisional, and the conclusions are deliberately incomplete. Think of this as watching a book being built in public.
Part I — Foundations: Mapping Culture
The original "Off the Beaten Path" series (2019-2020). A structured exploration of how culture can be mapped, how values evolve, and what holds societies together.
Exploring Culture
How to map culture itself, and stories as the primary mechanism of cultural transmission.
Exploring Brexit
Applying the cultural mapping framework to Brexit as a real-world case study.
From values to rituals
How values evolve into principles, then enablement systems, then rituals.
Exploring value
Inclusion versus exclusion, and how competing values shape society.
Embedded in memory
How culture becomes encoded in memory, stories, and institutional structures.
Me versus We
The tension between individualism and collectivism, written as the pandemic began.
Part II — Values and Society
Extending the values framework into geopolitics, economics, and societal change. How the balance between inclusion and exclusion plays out in practice.
On fascism, neoliberalism and poorly defined terms
Defining the political terms needed for the framework.
From HS2 to China and back again
Geopolitics and how values shape infrastructure decisions.
On the diversity of values
The inclusive and exclusive nature of values across societies.
Digital Sovereignty
Applying the values framework to the question of digital sovereignty.
2020: The Isolation Economy
The pandemic as a forcing function on values and society.
The Great Division
What happens in the corporate world post-covid, through a values lens.
How organisations are changing
The next generation of organisational structures and the forces driving them.
Those virtual battlegrounds
Virtual worlds, digital territory, and the values embedded in online spaces.
Part III — Digital Sovereignty and AI
Where the proto-book is heading: how AI systems embed values, why sovereignty is about landscapes not territory, and what happens when reasoning itself is captured.
Do mountains matter in digital sovereignty?
There are no borders without landscapes, and no better representation than maps.
AI and the New Theocracies
LLMs as tools that embed values and capture reasoning.
Sovereignty and Landscape
Digital sovereignty Part I — why landscape matters.
Societal versus Market benefit
Digital sovereignty Part II — who benefits from the current system.
Whose interests are you serving?
Digital sovereignty Part III — the question every government should ask.
2026, Brexit, Sovereignty and all that
Sovereignty as the ability to say no, identity politics, and EEA/EFTA.
Brave New World
Government, markets, values, and how AI changes what we accept as normal.