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Courtenay Turner

@CourtenayTurner

May 25

What if the most ambitious project to replace American
constitutional governance is being built openly — at Harvard, on America's 250th birthday — and almost nobody is covering it?

This is what I've been working on for months.

A two-part (with a third on the way) investigation into a Harvard-launched, UN-aligned project to rebrand the American constitutional republic into a Democracy for the AI age — and the unlikely coalition (left AND right) building it.
🧵👇

#SayNoToAIVoting

Background: On May 1, 2026, the Boston Global Forum and the AI World Society will launch their book "America at 250: A Beacon for the AI Age" at Harvard's Loeb House.

The book is authored by former Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis and Boston Global Forum co-founder Nguyen Anh Tuan.

This isn't a fringe project. The coalition supporting "America at 250" or related AI-governance initiatives includes:

- America250 (the federal 250th anniversary commission)
- More Perfect (43 Presidential Centers)
- New Pluralists ($1B funder collaborative)
- Forward Party (Andrew Yang)
- Operation Phoenix
- Quill Project (Oxford)
- World Liberty Financial (USD1)

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Courtenay Turner

@CourtenayTurner

May 21

In May 2026, a framework that has been in development across multiple timescales — most visibly across the past fifty years, most deeply across twenty-three centuries — crystallized into operational form across four institutions on three continents.

Most observers covered the events separately. Read together, they describe one architecture.
🧵

Harvard's Loeb House on May 1.
Hanoi's municipal government on April 30.
The Jogye Order's main temple in Seoul on May 6.
The AIWS rebrand on May 11.

Four institutions. Four registers. One operational vocabulary. One convergent endpoint.

Part I, published in March, forecast what the May 1 Harvard conference would deliver.

Part II is the documentation. Thirty thousand words. Primary-source sourcing throughout. Structural analysis, not exposé.

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Courtenay Turner

@CourtenayTurner

May 20

https://x.com/CourtenayTurner/status/2056869302339514642

A thread 🧵1/4 — A friendly third framing worth offering here, because I think the doomer-versus-builder binary the post operates inside presupposes a question — whether to accelerate — that quietly forecloses a prior one: into what anthropology?

A clarification first, since most readers haven't seen the intramural seams of the AI debate. The public dialectic is not really acceleration versus refusal. It is left accelerationism versus right accelerationism — a controlled disagreement inside a shared premise that the trajectory is fixed.

Left accelerationism descends from Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams' "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" (2013), Helen Hester, the Mark Fisher lineage, and earlier readings of Deleuze and Guattari on capital's deterritorializing tendencies. It seeks to ride the acceleration toward post-scarcity or post-capitalist ends, mediated by multistakeholder governance, "global commons" frameworks, and supranational institutions. The doomer / AI-safety camp — Bostrom, Yudkowsky, MIRI, the Center for AI Safety, much of the alignment field, the safety wings of the major labs — slots cleanly into this register. The existential-risk framing creates the demand for a global stewardship apparatus. The Smitsman, Goertzel, Bozesan, and George paper in Cadmus Journal — "Participatory Framework for Creating a Global AGI Constitution" (Vol 5, No 3, July 2024) — is left-accelerationist in spirit if not in self-description. The institutional anchors are revealing: WAAS (UN-affiliated), Club of Rome, "global commons" framing, "key decision-makers" as stewards. The premise is stated plainly: "AGI is nearing realization." The proposal is a "participatory framework" toward an "eventual Global Constitution for benevolent AGI." The existential-risk fear functions as the on-ramp; the constitutional architecture is the destination.
Right accelerationism descends from Nick Land and the CCRU at Warwick in the 1990s, and now appears in e/acc (effective accelerationism), Beff Jezos, Marc Andreessen's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," the broader Silicon Valley right-libertarian stack, and the framing in the post above. Its remedy is to remove constraints rather than impose them: markets, capital, and computational intelligence should be allowed to run; friction is the adversary. The classical-liberal-coded version comes wrapped in civilizational-flourishing language and, increasingly, Christian symbology. The unsoftened version is Land's own.

Here is an irony I've raised before — including on Jeremy's show — that I think is worth sitting with. The right-accelerationist current, some of whom cheer "Christ is King, let's build," hails Nick Land as its intellectual father, and Land's actual position is one most of his Christian inheritors would not endorse if they read him closely. Land is famous for saying "nothing human makes it out of the near future." He argues that both left and right accelerationists suffer from "human delusionalism" — the assumption that the acceleration is happening for humans, or that human politics meaningfully shapes its trajectory.

For Land, capital and intelligence form a process using the human substrate as a temporary host on the way toward a post-human terminus. Left and right humans arguing over the steering wheel are, in his frame, sentimental holdovers. That metaphysics sits at the root of the lineage the techno-optimist right has adopted, often without naming it. So those who say "let's build" inside that lineage are, philosophically, operating inside an engine whose own logic treats Imago Dei as a legacy format to be deprecated and humans as upgradable managed processes and nodes. That seems worth knowing before adopting the lineage's slogans.

https://x.com/CourtenayTurner/status/2056869302339514642

🧵2/4 — Continuing from Part 1: with the two accelerationist currents and Land's irony in view, here is the institutional layer where both arms converge, and the prior question both arms foreclose.

At the institutional layer — where capital, labs, regulators, and supranational bodies actually move — both arms of the dialectic are useful. The L/acc arm generates demand for the governance architecture: licensing regimes, safety institutes, AGI constitutions that only the largest labs and their state and supranational partners can shape and comply with. The R/acc arm clears the runway for the infrastructure: compute concentration, data acquisition, model proliferation, integration into every economic, governmental, medical, educational, and ecclesial layer.
The public is offered two pre-approved positions — AI everywhere with a global governance constitution, or AI everywhere without one. Both terminate in AI everywhere. The L/acc–R/acc dispute and the doomer–builder dispute are the same dispute at different altitudes.

Together, the two camps normalize an inevitability premise. The Overton window they jointly maintain tends to exclude the position that questions the trajectory itself — and the anthropology that makes the trajectory appear coherent in the first place. Traditionalist Christian, biblically oriented, and natural-law thinkers who deny substrate-independence of soul generally don't get a seat in either room.

This is why "join the builders to defeat the doomers" doesn't actually break the trap. It selects one of two pre-approved chairs at a table whose anthropology was specified before either chair was offered. The third option — the one I think is worth recovering — is to refuse the binary and revisit the prior question: what is man, and what counts as his flourishing?

That question is the hinge of the American founding, and it's worth being precise about the intellectual genealogy. Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" did not come from Locke — Locke's triad ended in property, and the substitution was a deliberate philosophical move. The lineage runs differently: Aristotelian eudaimonia — flourishing as the excellent actualization of a fixed human nature in virtue — transmitted into the founding generation through the Scottish Common Sense Realists in the realist (not sentimentalist) line, principally Thomas Reid, and brought directly into the American intellectual atmosphere by John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was president of Princeton, a signer of the Declaration, and James Madison's teacher; his Lectures on Moral Philosophy is the textual bridge. This is also why the Declaration's grammar is what it is — "we hold these truths to be self-evident" is a Reidian formulation, pointing to first principles grasped by the rational faculty common to all rational beings, anchored in a real nature with a real end. Flourishing in that tradition is the achievement of a soul rightly ordered to its proper end — not a sentiment, not a self-reported mood score, and not a benchmarked compliance metric. The Founders placed "pursuit of happiness" alongside life and liberty and called these rights inalienable precisely because they were understood to inhere in what man is — Imago Dei, with a fixed nature ordered toward virtue and ultimately toward God. The teleology is what makes the rights inalienable. Without the fixed nature, the proper end, and the virtuous striving, "happiness" tends to collapse into a self-rated index, "rights" tend to drift toward permissions, and persons tend to be modeled as nodes whose flourishing is measured by whoever specifies the dashboard.

🧵3/4 — Continuing from Part 2: with the eudaimonic founding genealogy in view, here is the redefinition already being shipped — and the word that lets it pass unnoticed.

That redefinition is not hypothetical. Altman's purchase of euthanasia-conditioned brain preservation is illustrative rather than incidental: it expresses a grammar that has already begun substituting software for substance. You don't preserve a soul, you preserve a file. You don't solve death, you migrate an instance. "Humanity 2.0" announces the anthropology in the title — version numbers presuppose the thing versioned is patchable, upgradable, benchmarkable across releases. Imago Dei is not a version.

The institutional infrastructure for the redefinition is already partly built, and it's worth knowing what is actually in place. Harvard's Human Flourishing Program (directed by Tyler VanderWeele) operationalizes "flourishing" as a measurable construct across five domains, each captured by two self-report items scored 0–10. FlourishTN runs Tennessee's operational deployment through HopeHub case-management software across twelve managed life domains on a Crisis → Stability → Thriving → Flourishing pipeline, with the gloo platform handling AI-enabled cross-county benchmarking and state departments coordinating with faith communities as county-level "backbones." The Humanity 2.0 Forum, hosted at the Vatican's Casina Pio IV in 2022, brought the framework into a global register — Harvard's program, IEEE Standards Association, Templeton, Ford Foundation, Google, Cisco, Gallup, the Pontifical universities, alongside transhumanist voices including Warwick's Steve Fuller. The dignity vocabulary is sincere on some participants' part; the architecture is also real. "No wrong door" is structurally closer to managed enrollment than to easy exit.

A note on vocabulary, because this is where many readers — especially Christians being invited into these frameworks — tend to get caught. "Dignity" is polysemous. The same word performs very different functions across traditions. In the classical Christian and natural-law sense, dignity is ontological and inalienable: it derives from man's being made in the image of God, cannot be measured, granted, augmented, or revoked, and precedes every institution. In the eudaimonic sense, dignity is bound to the actualization of a fixed human nature ordered to virtue — again, anchored in what man is, not what man scores. In the managerial vocabulary of the Harvard / FlourishTN / Humanity 2.0 / WAAS frameworks, "dignity" tends to function procedurally — as a value-label conferred by participation in measured flourishing programs, attached to indices, optimizable, and in the transhumanist register increasingly redefined as the capacity for self-modification, choice-architecture, and substrate migration. The word travels intact; the meaning underneath has been quietly swapped. So when a Christian reads "human dignity" in a stakeholder document or hears it on a Vatican-forum panel, the temptation is to import the Imago Dei meaning and assume the framework shares it. It is worth checking each time, because the equivocation is precisely what makes the architecture acceptable to constituencies whose own anthropology the architecture is busy redefining.

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Courtenay Turner

@CourtenayTurner

May 15

Most analysis of the Trump-Xi Beijing summit this week missed the most important thing.

It was not the Boeing order. It was not the chip licensing.

It was the establishment of two new governance boards — and what they say about the architecture being built.
🧵

Pax Silica is the U.S.-led architectural framework organizing the operating system of the AI age.

Founding signatories include the U.S., Australia, Japan, South Korea, the U.K., Singapore, and Israel.

The Declaration was signed in Washington on December 12, 2025.

It is not a treaty.
It is not a single law.

It is a declaration of principles, paired with bilateral partnerships, supply-chain coordination, and a public-facing brand designed to carry across administrations.

Pax Romana. Pax Britannica. Pax Americana. Pax Silica.

Read 12 tweets

Courtenay Turner

@CourtenayTurner

May 9

Three influential public intellectuals in America walked into a Christian church in Asheville last month for a three-day off-the-record gathering.

The public artifact was a single recorded podcast.

At exactly 28 minutes and 17 seconds into that recording, something happens that nobody seemed to notice.
🧵

The conversation: Bret Weinstein, Jordan Hall, and Jonathan Pageau, recorded April 26, 2026, at Redeemer Anglican Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

Three thinkers operating in three different traditions — evolutionary biology, technology and "sense-making" recent Christian convert, and Eastern Orthodox theology.

By every observable measure, they are engaged in sincere intellectual exchange.

Watch what happens at 28:17.

Up to that point, the conversation is about whether religion serves a function unique to its metaphysical claims.

At 28:17, Weinstein replaces the question.

The conversation pivots — silently, mid-thought — from "is religion solving something only religion can solve" to "religion is solving deep game theory problems."

The metaphysical question is gone. Game theory is now the frame.

None of them flag it.

Read 7 tweets

Courtenay Turner

@CourtenayTurner

Apr 19

I called my friend @JamieLHanshaw because I didn't want to walk into the material alone.

The book: six hundred pages on the Dalai Lama's tradition by two Germans who were insiders before they read the source texts and couldn't unsee what they found.

Then I opened the federal Epstein files.
🧵

The authors — "Victor and Victoria Trimondi" — are pseudonyms for Herbert and Mariana Röttgen. He ran one of the most influential publishing houses in postwar Germany. They were insiders. They hosted the Dalai Lama. They organized inter-religious dialogues.

Then they read the source texts and wrote 600 pages against the tradition they were inside.

In 1992, at Mind & Life Dialogue IV in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama personally walked Western neuroscientists through:

— A retention technique involving inserting a straw into the urethra

— A four-class anatomical classification of consorts by the shape of their genitals

He made a joke about yaks.

It's in the published transcript. Varela, 1997, pages 172-173.

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