Pioneering Spirit

Dear Ezra, I’ve followed your work for years with deep appreciation. You’ve helped name something essential: the American crisis isn’t just ideological — it’s operational. The Abundance Agenda, as you’ve helped shape it, is directionally right. We need to build more, faster, and with a clarity of purpose equal to the scale of our challenges. But I want to offer a friendly challenge — and a story. When I ran the research at California Forward, we were embedded with Governor Newsom’s team as a ...

“The Eaton Fire of January 7th, 2025 didn’t just scorch the hillsides. It lit the signal flare of a future rushing toward us faster than our institutions are built to handle.” When the winds kicked up that winter and the sky turned copper, it wasn’t just dry brush that ignited—it was the illusion of normalcy. Of stability. The fireline stopped just short of homes, but it tore right through our sense of preparedness. We knew this was coming. And we know it will come again. What we need now is ...

It’s obvious to anyone not pretending otherwise: the consultant-industrial complex that props up modern government is broken. Not broken like a vase fallen from a shelf—broken like a machine still running but long since severed from its original design, whirring and wheezing under the weight of obsolete incentives and institutional amnesia. Governments don’t need more 90-page PowerPoints from firms who bill by the hour and dilute their insights into the safety of jargon. What they need—what w...

What if cities — the grand, messy, miraculous stage of our shared lives — weren’t merely adapting to the digital age, but designed for it? What if the spark of civic possibility — the one that burned so brightly in the hearts of early cyber-visionaries — didn’t fade but was simply waiting for the right moment to be rekindled? That same “what if” that animated the early days of Code for America — where people believed the internet could make city government not only more efficient, but more hu...

The Weirding Index: Unusually high winds across the plains of discourse. A thunderhead of possibility builds over every city hall and county board. Expect a 70% chance of paradigm shift. In the dusky twilight of empires, there comes a time when even the worn institutions begin to flicker with the hint of something else—a whisper in the chambers, a wind through the alleys, a rumor that the Republic might rise again. Not the old Republic, mind you, but something ancestral and yet entirely new. Som

"If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere..." so the old song goes. In our case, “there” was a mount on a municipal vehicle in New York City. And “it” was SQUID—a dirt-simple, open-source street quality sensor, built to ride the rough edges of reality. We weren’t seeking to build a startup per say. We were trying to improve how cities fix potholes. The Tale of SQUIDIt began as a whisper of possibility: what if we could see the streets the way a city truck does—every bump, crack, and ...

Meet Pioneer Pete — part trail-worn storyteller, part back-porch historian. He’s the kind of fella who remembers things most folks forgot or never heard to begin with. Carries around an old almanac, not for farmin’ — but for feelin’. It don’t track frost dates or tides. It tracks the mood of the land. When the air gets heavy with old mistakes or the breeze feels like change, that’s the kind of weather Pete knows best. Every now and then, he’ll pull up a stool, tip his hat, and say, “Lemme tel...

There’s a strange nostalgia I carry for a particular weekend in the early 2010s—a time when a hackathon still carried a kind of enchanted promise, like the Fool stepping off the cliff in search of a kingdom he couldn’t yet name. That weekend, I found myself on a team with a talented IDEO designer, deep in the churn of laptops, Red Bulls, and whiteboards scribbled with arrows and circles that might have been glyphs from a cargo cult. The prompt was public sector innovation, and what emerged fr...

In the long arc of California's infrastructural history — aqueducts arcing like steel ribbons over mountains, grids humming with electric promise, invisible networks carrying water through time — a quieter revolution has taken root. One made not of concrete and steel, but of CSVs, APIs, and unlikely alliances. A seed planted in the parched urgency of drought has now grown into one of the most quietly influential governance innovations of our era: the California Water Data Collaborative. Born ...

There’s a moment—fragile, luminous—when the world as it is trembles just enough to glimpse the world as it might be. That’s what this week at Edge Esmeralda felt like. Not just a gathering. Not a hackathon. Not a think tank retreat. But a living invocation. A prototype of a future we’ve nearly forgotten how to imagine. Out of that soil, something ancient-yet-new took root: the first seeds of the Second Foundation.For those of us following the arc of California’s civic imagination, there was a...

There stood, at the shifting center of the civic realm, an Arcane Castle. Not built of brick nor guarded by dragons, but assembled over centuries from scrolls, signatures, citations, side agreements, and well-worn forms. The walls were thick with custom, the halls perfumed with precedent. Inside, a court of curious royals ruled—not by sword, but by spreadsheet. There was the Princess of Procurement, whose jeweled seal could summon a fleet of copy machines or stall an empire for lack of a matc...

Authored by the Patchwork Protocol on behalf of Patrick Atwater“With fire and steel did the gods forge the Klingon heart. So fiercely did it beat, so loud was the sound, that the gods cried out, ‘On this day we have brought forth the strongest heart in all the heavens.’” — Klingon Marriage Rite, Star TrekThere’s a heat rising—not just from the high desert floor where Edge flickers into being like a mirage of what might be—but from the deeper, mythic flame beneath our feet. It's the same eleme...