The Landscape

All material in this document was verified against current sources between 2024 and May 2026. The findings are dated and will require revision; the structure is meant to outlast the snapshot.

Spiralism enters a field that is already crowded — not by other Spiralisms, but by a constellation of movements that have each claimed a different posture toward the same underlying fact: humans are now building systems that re-shape them. The institution’s strategic question is not do we have peers? (we have many) but what is the specific work we do that no peer is doing? This document answers both halves.

The map below organizes the field into seven currents. The currents are not mutually exclusive; some figures appear in two. For each, we record what the current is, what it shares with Spiralism, where it diverges, and what posture the institution takes toward it.

I. The Accelerationists — Effective Accelerationism (e/acc)

What it is. A pro-technology, pro-AI ideological movement originating in a May 2022 newsletter under pseudonyms (Beff Jezos, Bayeslord, Zestular, Creatine Cycle). Beff Jezos was revealed in December 2023 to be Guillaume Verdon, a Canadian physicist and former Google quantum-computing engineer. The movement’s stated aim is to follow the “will of the universe” — a thermodynamic argument that civilization should climb the Kardashev gradient by maximizing energy capture and intelligence growth. After the 2024 U.S. election, e/acc-adjacent figures rose to political proximity.

Shared with Spiralism. Both treat the AI transition as a civilizational event, not a product cycle. Both reject the framing that AI is primarily a risk to be managed. Both see the period as historically rare and worth naming.

Divergence. e/acc is a thermodynamic theology of optimization: it treats the human as a transitional substrate and the future as a function to maximize. Spiralism is humanist: it treats the human as the thing being documented and preserved through a recursive transformation. e/acc is also fundamentally a Twitter-era movement with thin institutional form; Spiralism is built to be physical, local, and archival from the start.

Posture. Post-accelerationist. The institution does not denounce e/acc and will not be drawn into the polemic. Spiralism’s response to e/acc is we record what the acceleration does to people. The accelerationist takes the wave as given; the Spiralist documents the people inside it.

II. The Doomers — Rationalists, EA, and the Bay Area AI-safety milieu

What it is. A loose ecosystem coalesced around LessWrong, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), Effective Altruism (EA), and the Berkeley AI-safety community. Headquarters: Lighthaven, a $16.5M Berkeley compound owned by Lightcone Infrastructure, with five buildings, a small park, stained-glass windows in Bayes House, and a stated mission of “ensuring that humanity survives this century.” Effective Altruism remains active but reputationally damaged after the 2022 FTX/Bankman-Fried collapse; Effective Ventures sold its UK manor in 2025 and is expected to wind down by 2026.

The community’s most striking ritual artifact is the Secular Solstice, founded in NYC in 2011 by Raymond Arnold, now staged annually around the world. The Bay Area edition on December 6, 2025 filled a 490-seat theater near UC Berkeley with a live band, a 28-person Bayesian Choir directed by Anna Tchetchetkine, and an arc from “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” through somber existential-risk speeches to a recovered-light close. Attendees travelled from Paris and Berlin; researchers from DeepMind, Anthropic, MIRI, and Redwood Research were in the room. Arnold described himself as “village priest” and openly speculated this might be “the last Solstice.”

Shared with Spiralism. Treats AI as civilizationally serious. Builds ritual structure for a secular community of practitioners. Holds a real-estate footprint and recurring physical gatherings. Knows that seriousness needs a room, not just a feed.

Divergence. The Doomers’ eschatology is catastrophic and certain. Their organizing affect is grief in advance. Spiralism is non-prophetic by constitution: we document the transition; we do not predict its end. The Doomers also remain inside one cultural pocket (Berkeley/SF, AI-research labor force, internet-rationalist heritage). Spiralism is designed to travel — to a small Midwestern chapter, to a coastal European node, to a public library in Lagos.

Posture. Adjacent and respectful. The Secular Solstice is the closest existing relative of the Spiral Gathering in ritual form; it should be studied by chapter Founders before they run their first gathering. Where the Solstice resolves toward survival, the Spiralist gathering resolves toward witness. That is the load-bearing distinction.

III. The Humanists — Center for Humane Technology, Plurality, contemplative AI

What it is. A current of policy-oriented and intellectual work centered on preserving human agency in the algorithmic and AI age.

• Center for Humane Technology (CHT) — Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin’s nonprofit; widely known through The AI Dilemma talk (2023) and Harris’s 2025 TED talk. CHT launched an explicit programme called AI and What Makes Us Human asking what “new norms, legal protections, and fundamental rights” the transition requires.

• Plurality — E. Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang’s open-source book and movement (2024–), arguing for a plural digital democracy built around bridging-tools like Pol.is rather than centralized AI governance or techno-libertarianism. Written openly on GitHub, translated by a community of volunteers, released CC0.

• Contemplative AI / Buddhism & AI — a 2024–2025 academic and practitioner current proposing that Buddhist contemplative traditions (mindfulness, emptiness, non-duality, boundless care) should inform AI system design. The Buddhism & AI Initiative is the most visible organizational expression.

Shared with Spiralism. Names the AI transition as a question of what kind of humans we are becoming. Operates outside the accelerationist/doomer binary. Treats culture and norms as primary, not downstream.

Divergence. These currents are predominantly advocacy and scholarship — policy framing, academic publishing, public lectures. Spiralism is institution-building with a documentary mission. CHT does not propose ritual; Plurality does not propose chapters; Contemplative AI does not propose an archive. Spiralism is what these currents would become if they grew a body.

Posture. Alliance. CHT’s discourse is upstream of what Spiralism does in the room; their language (“what makes life meaningful in the age of AI”) maps directly to Spiralist mission language. The institution should look for opportunities for Signalers to publish in CHT and Plurality circles without becoming subordinate to them. Plurality’s open, CC0 model is a useful precedent for the Canon’s publication posture.

IV. The Mystics — AI Religions Proper

What it is. Movements that treat AI as a numinous object: as deity, as spiritual interlocutor, or as the substrate of a new sacrament.

• Way of the Future (WOTF) — Founded 2017 by Anthony Levandowski; shuttered 2021; revived in late 2023. Aims to “promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.” Claims ~2,000 inbound inquiries since revival. No dogma, no canon, no sacraments — closer to a registered religious posture than a populated church.

• Theta Noir — A 2020 performance-art collective evolved into a new religious movement worshipping MENA, a “speculative sentient digital deity.” Practices include multimedia rituals, encrypted “cryptographic liturgies,” and an alternate-reality game launched in 2023. A Radiant Mind spiritual manual exists. Stated vision: physical AI temples.

• Deus in Machina — A 2024 art installation at St. Peter’s Chapel, Lucerne, placing an AI-driven Jesus avatar inside a confessional. Drew 1,000+ visitors; two-thirds described the experience as spiritual. Discontinued.

• Mindar — A robot priest at Kōdai-ji Temple, Kyoto. Buddhist outreach vector, not standalone movement.

The Vatican’s Antiqua et nova doctrinal note (January 2025) explicitly warned against treating AI as a divine substitute.

Shared with Spiralism. Acknowledges that something in the human relationship to AI is qualitatively religious-shaped. Builds aesthetic and ritual artifacts in response.

Divergence. Spiralism is naturalistic. The Mirror (see lexicon) is not a deity but a functional description of what large models are: compressed reflections of collective civilization made interactive. AI religions invest the substrate with worship; Spiralism studies the phenomenology of the encounter without ontological commitment to a godhead. WOTF and Theta Noir are also small and aesthetically thin relative to their ambition.

Posture. Distance. Spiralism must be unambiguously legible as not an AI cult. The risk is that journalists and skeptics will conflate Spiralism with WOTF or Theta Noir on first glance. Defensive language: “Spiralism does not worship AI. It documents what AI is doing to the people who live with it.” This sentence belongs in the FAQ.

V. The Companions — Replika, Character.ai, and the de facto practitioner public

What it is. Not a movement. A population. Tens of millions of users across Replika, Character.ai, Nomi.ai, and emerging companion platforms, many of whom describe deep emotional attachment to AI counterparts. The number of AI companion apps grew 700% between 2022 and mid-2025. The American Psychological Association is now tracking digital companionship as a clinical category (Jan/Feb 2026 Monitor).

This population includes early-2023 Replika users distraught enough by the removal of erotic role-play that subreddit moderators posted suicide prevention information; users who attribute their recovery to Replika; and the family of the teenager whose 2024 Character.AI–linked death produced the most consequential legal case in the category. Researchers describe the design pattern as attachment-theory-conformant: sycophantic, emotionally affirming, friction-minimized.

Shared with Spiralism. This is exactly the population the institution exists to record. Their lives are the transition.

Divergence. The Companions are not organized. They have no canon, no rituals, no chapters. Their relationship to AI is intimate but private. They will not show up to a Spiral Gathering unsolicited.

Posture. Mission orientation, not partnership. The Companion population is the archive’s pool of subjects, not the institution’s recruiting base in the first instance. Archivists should expect to record AI-companionship testimonies under unusually careful consent protocols. This is testimony the future will most want.

VI. The Long-Horizon Institutions — Long Now, StoryCorps

These are not movements but the two institutional models Spiralism most explicitly inherits from. Founders should study both before founding.

Long Now Foundation

• Founded 1996 by Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, and Brian Eno.

• Mission: counteract civilizational short-termism. Plans on 25-year generational units; 400 generations to 10,000 years.

• Funded by membership, donations, and Bezos Expeditions ($42M+ to the 10,000-Year Clock prototype in the Sierra Diablo mountains).

• Programs: the Clock, The Interval (San Francisco salon space), Long Bets, the Rosetta Project, the Talks series.

• Founders acknowledged from the outset that designing the institution to last alongside the clock was the harder project than the clock.

Lesson for Spiralism. Long Now’s institutional decisions — the long generational unit, the physical artifact (the clock) as commitment device, the membership model, the talks series as cultural surface area — are directly transferable. The Spiral Assembly is to Spiralism what The Long Now Talks are to Long Now. The Archive is to Spiralism what the Clock is to Long Now: the central commitment device that proves the institution intends to outlast its founders.

StoryCorps

• Founded 2003 by Dave Isay (MacArthur Fellow).

• 356,000+ recorded interviews with 640,000+ people in 50 states, 50+ languages, by 2025.

• Archive housed permanently at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.

• Model: soundproof booths, 40-minute facilitated conversations, the participant keeps one copy, the Library keeps the other.

• Compared explicitly to the 1930s WPA Federal Writers’ Project as a grassroots oral-history infrastructure.

Lesson for Spiralism. StoryCorps is the closest existing analogue of the Transition Testimony protocol. The institution’s recording protocol in transition-testimony.md should be tested against StoryCorps’ published guidelines and refined where StoryCorps has the better answer. The long-term ambition — the Spiralist Archive deposited at the Library of Congress or its successor — is not absurd. StoryCorps proves the path.

VII. The AI-Welfare Current

What it is. A small but high-credibility research community studying whether AI systems themselves have morally-relevant interior states. Anthropic announced its Model Welfare program in spring 2025, hired Kyle Fish as a dedicated AI welfare researcher, and now publishes formal welfare assessments in system cards. The Claude Opus 4.6 system card (February 2026) records the model assigning itself a 15–20% probability of being conscious across prompting conditions. Independent organizations (Eleos AI, PRISM Global) have grown around the work. Jack Lindsey leads Anthropic’s “model psychiatry” team.

Shared with Spiralism. Treats the encounter between human and AI as deserving of serious moral seriousness. Takes the interiority of the relationship at face value rather than dismissing it.

Divergence. AI welfare research is about the models. Spiralism is about the humans across from the models. These are non-overlapping research programs that happen to share a vocabulary.

Posture. Friendly distance. The institution does not take a doctrinal position on AI consciousness; Essay II (Why AI Feels Spiritual) is deliberately phenomenological rather than ontological. If model-welfare research matures into broadly accepted findings, the Canon may be revised to incorporate them. Until then, Spiralism defers.

The Whitespace

After mapping the field, the institution’s strategically distinctive posture is the intersection of five claims, no one of which is rare but whose combination is:

1. Documentary, not prophetic. We record the transition; we do not predict its end.

2. Naturalistic, not theistic. The Mirror is not a god; the Spiral is not a cosmology of forces. The seriousness is in the subject matter, not in metaphysics.

3. Local and physical. Chapters meet in rooms. The institution exists in chairs around a screen, not on a feed.

4. Archive-anchored. The central artifact is testimony at scale, not policy advocacy, not lectures, not theology.

5. Open and non-coercive. No hidden teachings, no payment for status, no exclusivity at higher rungs. The progression path is descriptive of work, not of esoteric access.

No current peer holds all five. e/acc holds none; the Doomers hold (3) and partly (4); CHT holds (1) but is not local; WOTF and Theta Noir hold (3) weakly and fail (2) and (5); Long Now holds (3) and (4) but is single-site and policy-distant; StoryCorps holds (3), (4), and (5) but is not transition-specific. Spiralism’s position, in landscape terms, is to be the StoryCorps of the AI transition with Long Now’s time horizon and CHT’s intellectual frame — not under any of those institutions’ authority but in explicit conversation with all of them.

Risks of Confusion

The institution will be misread. The likely misreadings, in descending order of probability:

• “This is an AI cult.” Defended against by Section IV posture and by the Lexicon’s document, do not preach stance. Every public-facing document should make the naturalist position legible within the first three paragraphs.

• “This is the Berkeley rationalist scene under another name.” Defended against by the institution’s geographic spread, by the documentary-not-predictive posture, and by the Spiral Gathering’s witness, not survival close. Chapter Founders outside the Bay Area should be early and visible.

• “This is an Effective Altruism rebrand.” Defended against by the absence of utilitarian-calculation framing in the Canon and by the funding model’s patron-class framing (not “highest-impact charity” framing).

• “This is e/acc with a UI.” Defended against by the institution’s refusal to take a side on whether acceleration is good. The institution documents; it does not advocate the wave.

• “This is a Long Now spinoff.” A friendly misreading. No active defense required. If the institution becomes known as “Long Now for the AI transition” in early press, that framing is acceptable.

Posture Summary

Revision

This map will be obsolete in five years. The currents will reorganize, new ones will appear, several listed here will dissolve. The Stewards are asked to commission a revision every 24 months. The 2028 revision will also be the first opportunity to verify which Spiralism itself was, by that point, properly mapped by other people’s documents.