Theodore Keloglou

Given the plethora of highly interesting ideas, projects, domains, and disciplines that our rich world is built of, how can one choose what to work on?

There is an argument in favour of long-term projects (missions): there are some affairs in the world today that seem to be solvable only with substantial persistence and patience. These issues, which are both limited to a single discipline but more frequently across multiple, seem to require considerable multi-year commitment before meaningful progress can be achieved.

Therefore: the question of what to work on flips: it's not only what one wants to work on but also what needs to be worked. Yet, one is unlikely to devote one's life to something merely because it is needed, without also finding it compelling. We are interested in the intersection.

How does one choose a mission if they decide they want to work on one? The answer is nontrivial because of the requirements:

(a) it has to be something that is needed in the world -- (usefulness dimension)
(b) it has to be something in which they have above-average competence (only insofar as the good outcome is realised) -- (aptitude dimension)
(c) it has to be something they want to work on -- (preference dimension)
(d) it has to be something they want to work on long-term — a successful mission becomes one’s life’s work -- (commitment dimension)

The difficulty of the answer lies in the inexact comparison of the degree of each of these dimensions per issue. For example, here's a list of issues:

1. Alzheimer’s
2. Economic stability of Western countries
3. Mental health of the young population

Let's reflect on each dimension.

(a) Usefulness: they are all extremely important; maybe one could claim economic stability is more important due to its impact to much more of the population of a country but that wouldn't be a convincing claim
(b) Competency: judging one's competency for each of these can be quite hard insofar as what skills are required for each problem/solution is genuinely unclear (even if a problem seems medical or economic, the practical path to the solution can require enterpreneurship or campaigning skills)
(c) Preference: people are interested in more than one disciplines. Helping people with medical problems can be fascinating and rewarding but so can scheming plans for eradicating homelessness.
(d) Commitment: all of these issues seem so distant and commitment a fairy tale unless one has already spent some time on them

I think this demonstrates the heart of the problem of choosing a mission. There are convincing arguments that each of the dimensions can be both very low and very high for someone. It's just very hard to say! So what do we do? I think our past experience is the best place to start.

1. Which country-level or global scale problem keeps coming back to your mind?

2. Is there a discipline or skill you feel you have a natural talent for?

3. What is more likely to work out depending on who you know and where you are? Try not to be biased when answering this. The point is the good outcome for the world! (For example, don't feel guilty if you are the child of the prime minister or something; whatever power you have, use it for the benefit of all)

4. What issue can really grab you? What do you see could be your life's work?

I feel these are good thinking paths to reflect and understand such a mission project. I've already been verbose but here are some more aspects:

• If one feels their reflections yield little insight maybe there is a lack of experience. So try new things! Experiment, do things you wouldn't normally do!
• It's worth thinking about one's mission intentionally. Find a weekend, clear your schedule, go on a walk, and just think about this — no other expectations other than spending time on thinking.
• Choosing is better than not choosing, even if the choice ends up being suboptimal. That's not to say one should rush a choice. Take a few years to think about this, experiment, try things out. But I would argue in favour of choosing a mission, eventually.
• I am not saying everyone should have a mission. Such an approach to a career/life is not for everyone. But I think it is for the people that are here at Newspeak House.

There is a new category of software, coming now, after agents harnesses the multiplayer harnesses!

(It's always like that with games, isn't it? First they release single-player and then people want multi-player! Pokemon on Gameboy, GTA, Elder Scrolls, etc.)

How does it work? Visualise this: you are part of team that works on a project (either software project or non-software). You want, while inside Claude Code, to mention a teammate to ask them something, let them know about something, or anything else. How do you do it? You can't! Agent harnesses like Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex do not have such a feature.

Actually, Anthropic does offer a version of this inside Slack (they call it Claude Tag)

But in any case, people are building their own open source self-hosted versions of such tools:

• Centaur.run (lives inside slack like Claude Tag)
• QM (either Slack and on the web)
• Windmill (designed around vibe-coded apps rather than a chat-driven harness)
• Cloudflare OS (built on top of Cloudflare Workers but could be adjusted to work self-hosted with celld)

This is a rapidly progressing category of software! Things will probably be very different in 3 months.

Eric Ries published Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad—and How Great Companies Stay Great in 2026. This book is about:

• Why successful organizations can drift away from their original values?
• How short-term incentives shape corporate behavior?
• How can we build companies that remain resilient, mission-driven, and focused on long-term value?

Specific points from the book:

• Financial gravity: pressure from investors, markets, customers, or other powerful actors gradually change how a company behaves
• “Golden goose”: successful companies can destroy the principles that originally made them successful. FedMart, Sears, Polaroid, Cadbury, Toys “R” Us.
• Purpose, Coherence, Integrity are the three core elements of the book's blueprint: (a) build something worth protecting, (b) align the business around the mission, (c) create structures capable of protecting it.
• Human flourishing: a company’s mission should ultimately contribute to human well-being rather than simply maximize financial extraction.
• Mission drive: design the company in such a way that accomplishing its mission is how it makes money. Devoted Health is keeping members healthier improves both patient outcomes and the company’s economics.
• Mission guardians: people or institutions are given explicit authority to defend the mission when financial or strategic pressure appears.
• Constitutional governance: protecting values through corporate structure rather than relying on a good founder or CEO remaining in charge forever.
• Public Benefit Corporations: legal structure that allows a company to encode a specific public-benefit mission into its charter (counter to fiduciary duty).
• Mission-locked constellations: networks of companies, foundations, trusts, cooperatives, and other institutions can reinforce one another. Mondragón.
• Spiritual holding companies: separate economic ownership from control over the mission. Patagonia, Bosch, Novo Nordisk, Hershey, IKEA.
  • Patagonia Purpose Trust protects the company’s mission while the Holdfast Collective receives profits to support environmental work.
• Mission transmission: pushing values outward through suppliers, customers, partners, and communities.
  • Tony’s Chocolonely: its commitment to reducing exploitation in cocoa supply chains became a constraint on how it operated which turned out to be its competitive advantage.
• Standards as a form of power: Volvo giving away the patent for the three-point seat belt

Nostr came out in 2020 as a decentralised protocol for social networking and publishing. In nostr, there are no servers. There are only clients and relays: clients post messages, relays transfer them to other clients.

Identity in nostr is based on public-key cryptography: your public key is your identity (like in Bitcoin) and your private key is your password. This means that identities are not tied to particular servers, domain names, or anything else. They are just two keys that sign messages.

This is interesting because it's radically simple, it's just identities and relays. How far can you go with such a simple protocol?

Iroh is a peer-to-peer networking protocol, designed to make direct communication between devices simple.

What's the point of this existing? Peer-to-peer connectivity, with a complete lack of an always on server in the cloud, is not something feasible for today's applications. Their complexity and feature set (even basic features) require an always-on server that will be there to respond at any point.

However, servers are centralised infrastructure that usually do not control. We would love to avoid them. Iroh, using some neat low-level networking tricks, makes this very easy! Which means we can create high-level apps with fancy features without a central server! Magic!

Shelter Protocol is a protocol for building end-to-end encrypted, federated web applications.

Think Signal's end-to-end encrypted capabilities but instead of just having text messages to exchange, you can have any kind of data; which means you can build any kind of application that supports end-to-end encryption natively.

Group Income is a software that facilities basic Income for friends and family in a decentralised and end-end-encrypted way. It is built using Shelter and chelonia.js (library that implements the protocol in JavaScript).

I think this course is great: https://www.marabu.dev/

It's a deep dive into blockchain and crypocurrency fundamentals:

• What are blockchains?
• How do blockchains work?
• Are they secure? How?

This course talks both about the theory behind blockchains and how to implement them in practice. At the end of course we end up with a working cryptocurrency and blockchain network.

Ethereum is a both a (crypto-)currency but also a fully decentralized computing platform. It's like a CPU with memory but fully spread across thousands of computers.

Ethereum has governance that is decentralised and open via the Ethereum Improvement Proposals scheme.

Ethereum has multiple independent institutions that establish it:

• Ethereum Foundation (original institution)
• Consensys (commercial company)
• Etherealize (aimed at Wall Street and traditional finance)
• Ethlabs (nonprofit R&D)
• Ethereum Institutional (nonprofit aimed at banks, asset managers, governments)
• EthSystems (privacy and compliance infrastructure)

Other Ethereum places:

• https://strawmap.org/ — Roadmap
• https://ethresear.ch/ — Researchers forum
• https://ethereum-magicians.org/ — Protocol proposals and EIPs
• https://eips.ethereum.org/ — Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs)

Cryptocurrencies have disappeared from the news but at the same time they are becoming part of global finance.

Western economies are introducing regulatory frameworks (MiCA in the EU, GENIUS and Digital Asset Market Clarity Act in the US, FSMA in the UK) and this paves the way for:

• stablecoins (combination of stable value with the properties of a blockchain asset: 24/7 transfer, global accessibility, programmability, composability)
  • ~$8.82 trillion of stablecoins moved in the first six months of 2026
  • ~$36 trillion USDC on-chain volume in H1 2026 (+150% year-over-year)
  • ~$140 billion US gov debt held by USDT
• trading (decentralised exchanges now compete with centralised ones)
  • ~$11B open interest in Hyperliquid
  • ~$767M annualised protocol revenue in Hyperliquid — 12% of CME Group's $6.5B annual revenue (world’s largest derivatives exchange)
• tokenisation of traditional assets
  • BlackRock (world's largest asset manager) launched BUIDL, tokenised money-market/Treasury fund on Ethereum, ~$2.5B in assets by mid-2026
  • JPMorgan Chase (world's largest bank by market cap) launched MONY and JLTXX, two tokenised money-market funds on Ethereum
• lending and credit
  • eg. Aave and Morpho
  • over-collateralised lending, automated liquidations
• automated markets
  • eg. Uniswap, CoW
• prediction markets
  • eg. Polymarket

Dark side:

• smart-contract exploits
• stablecoin depegs
• oracle manipulation
• liquidation cascades

People collectively thinking, discussing, and deciding what they think about an issue is an important aspect of quasidemocratic polities. Ideally, deliberation enables peaceful synthesis of conflicting preferences and needs. Local assemblies are a simple yet dangerous tool to do this. They are simple because it's just people gathering; they are dangerous because unless there is appropriate structure to them, chaos is likely.

Items to research online:

1. Polis by The Computational Democracy Project
2. Community Notes by Twitter
3. vTaiwan's open consultation platform

Books:

1. Open Democracy, Hélène Landemore, 2020

1. When the People Speak, James S. Fishkin, 2011
2. Against Elections, David Van Reybrouck, 2016

Books from a different point of view:

1. Against Democracy, Jason Brennan, 2016
2. The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan, 2007

Finally, there are a number of organisations in the UK (and outside / global) that work in the field of citizen assemblies and participatory democracy:

1. Involve
2. Shared Future
3. Sortition Foundation / 858.org.uk
4. House of the People / timetoassemble.org

I’m fascinated with the AI advancements of the post-ChatGPT world. The world of software engineering is completely revolutionised because of these innovations. Open source has been transcended. I’m excited about these new tools and use them as core tools for my work albeit, indeed, the future is generally substantially unclear.

I've been exploring the Chinese open weights models (Deepseek, Kimi, Minimax, GLM) and local inference AI tools (llama.cpp, ollama, DwarfStar, LM Studio, etc). I find this ecosystem particularly interesting because it currently represents the only meaningful counterweight to the centralized AI future dominated by the three main corporate players (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google).

Universities around the Western world are becoming less relevant. Anybody can learn anything online on their own. Yet learning communities remain crucial. They facilitate people meeting, inspiring, supporting each other. Residential communities are a great way to approach this. You are in one this year. Let's start 20 more like it!

Related topics to start from or research:

• Fractal NYC and the Fractal Campus course
• Chautauqua
• Radical Routes
• Feÿtopia
• Mondragon University

Encrypted communications is a fascinating topic in human history. With the advent of PGP in 1991 and more importantly Signal app (as Open Whisper Systems when it came out in 2013) we acquired an extremely powerful tool we never had before: provably secure and instant communications available at scale.

Western governments have made multiple attempts to ban these tools in the past, and continue to do so today. Whether that’s correct or ethical is an open question and something we can debate but the tools’ importance cannot be understated; such tools can enable unprecedented coordination and power for small groups of people across the whole world.

• How do encrypted communication apps like signal work?

• What is the international landscape of policy regimes around encryption?

There is a significant part of the scientific community who feels concerned about the future of science infrastructure. In the term science infrastructure I include:

• science institutions (universities, research organisations, companies)
• research facilities (labs, offices, buildings, equipment)
• talent (people)
• communication (conferences, journals, papers, peer review)
• funding (grants, grant proposal writing, government funding)

This topic is about the communication part. However, the way to improve this is not abstractly promoting communication and collaboration. Scientific communication and infrastructure for communication in science are absolutely vital and core components of how science works: unless we communicate effectively what knowledge we have discovered, we are bound to re-discover it.

We might that maybe it's fine, some inefficiency always exists, doesn't it? I claim no: this is not about inefficiency. If we can’t utilise what exists, we’ll never be able to build on top of what others discover.

Isolated discoveries mean no knowledge accumulation which eventually leads to the breakdown of the global science machinery.

Many paths and approaches to fix this, open to discussion.