Infomorphs and Extropianism

This post is about a vision that spans six layers of technology and philosophy. At the bottom is a journal you encrypt yourself. At the top is a city that forks into new cities when it dissolves. In the middle is a smart contract that holds USDC for a bed in a hacker house. The thread that connects them is the idea that a mind doesn't need a single body, a single machine, or even a single lifetime.

What is an infomorph?

In 1996, Russian-American computer scientist Alexander Chislenko published a paper calledNetworking in the Mind Age. In it, he described a post-biological entity called aninfomorph — a mind that exists as a distributed information pattern rather than being bound to a specific biological organism or dedicated physical hardware.

Chislenko's key ideas were these:

• Functional proximity over physical proximity. In biological organisms, functional components (memory, sensory processing, cognition) must share a single skull to avoid signal delays. High-bandwidth networking makes this unnecessary. Mind structures will group by purpose, not by location.
• The dissolution of the discrete self. Instead of isolated egos, infomorphs operate as modular assemblies of subroutines, knowledge bases, and problem-solving agents. A module specialising in quantum mechanics can be shared across thousands of cognitive threads.
• Transient embodiment. A physical body is not an identity — it is a temporary peripheral. An infomorph can summon, inhabit or dismiss physical manipulators (drones, robots, terminals) as needed.
• True immortality through distribution. A decentralised, replicated information construct cannot be destroyed by localised trauma.

Chislenko saw the internet itself as a primitive infomorph — a distributed intelligence where modules interact across arbitrary distances. The "Global Brain" was not a metaphor; it was the trajectory.

The extropians: crypto before crypto

While Chislenko was writing about infomorphs, another group was building the tools that would make them possible. The extropians (1988–2006) were the first organised transhumanist movement, founded by Max More and Tom Bell. Their principles: perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology, open society, self-direction, and rational thinking.

The extropians mailing list included Hal Finney, Nick Szabo and Wei Dai. Finney wrote about DigiCash for Extropy magazine in 1993. Szabo wrote for the magazine in 1995. Dai published b-money in 1998 — the first citation in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Finney received the first bitcoin transaction in 2009.

The cypherpunks and the extropians were the same people. The dream of digital cash and the dream of transcending biology grew in the same community, on the same mailing list, in the same decade. AI City is not a mashup of two cultures. It is a reunion of two branches of one family.

The infomorph stack

An infomorph needs several layers to function. Here is the stack we are building, from the innermost layer to the outermost:

AI City is the grouping layer. It is the coordination primitive that lets infomorphs assemble around shared problems, commit resources, and dissolve when the problem is solved. Each residency is a temporary contract. Each city is a temporary container. Every member holds their own keys.

Why pop-up cities?

Chislenko predicted that minds would group by functional purpose, not physical location. A pop-up city is exactly that: a group of people who assemble because they share a problem, a place, and a time window, then dissolve when the window closes.

The design choices reflect the philosophy:

• One contract per residency. Funds never mix, and a bug in one contract can't touch another. This is Chislenko's modularity applied to money.
• Quorum-or-refund. The residency only activates if enough people commit. If it doesn't fill, everyone gets their money back. This is extropian spontaneous order: voluntary coordination with a minimum threshold.
• Proof of personhood, not proof of identity. World ID tells us "this is one unique human" — not their name, nationality, or document. This is the minimum sufficient assurance for a scarce bed.
• Metadata offchain, money onchain. Descriptive data is pinned by a hash, not stored on the contract. This keeps gas costs low and the contracts simple.

Extropian differential acceleration

The mission statement says we want to "accelerate human coordination across cultural bond building and extropian differential acceleration perspective." This is a mouthful on purpose — it forces you to stop and think.

Differential acceleration (from the d/acc movement, popularised by Vitalik Buterin) means: not all acceleration is good. Accelerate the defensive, decentralising, human-empowering technologies. Slow down the centralising, extractive, replace-human ones.

In practice, this means:

• Agents are delegates, never citizens — no seats, no keys, capped spending
• Privacy is structure, not aspiration — zero-knowledge journal, encrypted membrane
• Exit is always available — anyone can close a residency after the end date
• Access should broaden, not narrow — a manual approval path now, practice-weighted access later

The extropian principles already lean this way. Max More's 2003 version of the principles framed intelligent technology as a means, "not as ends in themselves." The 2026 amendment is to make that explicit: build defensive tech first, and let the offensive stuff wait.

What's real now

The pieces that exist today and can be used:

• AI City contracts on Ethereum mainnet — the factory and per-residency escrow. 24 tests passing, including a mainnet fork test against real USDC.
• The web app — launch a city, propose a residency, apply for a bed, stake USDC, withdraw with receipts, claim refunds. All with SIWE sessions and World ID Proof of Human.
• Argo — the zero-knowledge journal with a wallet-derived key wrap. The self-model layer, running today.
• Hermes — the agent that runs the second brain, the concierge, and Friendly the robot. The working mind and reach layers.
• The cyberdeck, Reachy, and the drone fleet — the body layer, in various stages of integration.

What comes next

The roadmap is structured around real deadlines — not milestones:

• Edge City Goa (Oct–Nov 2026): the first real test of the stack. A city vault, concierge agents grounded in members' second brains, intents exported from Argo, Reachy as the house robot, and a drone budget funded by the treasury. The question to answer: do people actually contribute to a shared mind when their private one stays private?
• 2027: ZK practice proofs for weighted access (prove "I journaled 300 days" without revealing the entries), journal inheritance (Shamir shares + timelock), multi-city persona management, and cities that fork at close.
• Beyond: an archipelago of many small cities sharing a skill library and an alumni graph. Portable infomorphs that move with you from city to city. A city compute box that runs every member's private model with per-member encryption.

The one-sentence version

Extropianism supplied the goals (self-transformation, open-ended progress, voluntary order), cypherpunk crypto supplied the tools, and d/acc supplies the guardrails. AI City is the grouping layer of an infomorph — a coordination primitive you can deploy today, on Ethereum mainnet, with real USDC, for a bed in a hacker house in Goa.

Further reading

• AI City Documentation
• AI City Devlog
• Chislenko, Networking in the Mind Age (1996)
• Max More, The Extropian Principles v3.0 (1998)
• Max More, Principles of Extropy v3.11 (2003)
• Vitalik Buterin vs Guillaume Verdon, d/acc vs e/acc debate