Author: gkjohn

I came across this excellent Derek Thompson piece documenting the collapse of American happiness since 2020. It reminds me of the challenge I have with the Steven Pinker kind of argument that, by the numbers, everything is getting better. Measurably fewer wars, less poverty, longer lives. And yet, as Thompson shows, people feel measurably worse: lonelier, less trusting, more adrift. Both things are true simultaneously, and perhaps that’s because we can only count what we can see, and the instruments we’ve built can see very little.

This feels parallel to so many conversations in philanthropy, where we keep building better monitoring and evaluation frameworks. They get more sophisticated every year, and in a way, the gap between what the tools show and what the field teams know only widens. Overall numbers improve, but the community isn’t more capable than before. This is not new. Deming had it right when he said the most important things can’t be measured. The revision I would bring is that the most important things can’t be measured without being changed by the measurement.

Which brings me back to AI.

Reed Hastings supposedly once said that Netflix competes with sleep. I think AI competes with connection. Not directly. I don’t mean it’s intentionally attacking connection in favour of a capitalist agenda. It just offers a better-designed substitute that is faster than your closest friend, more patient than your therapist, more available than a colleague, and less judgmental than any of them. At the individual level, this substitution works because you feel heard and supported.

But connection was never just about the individual feeling connected. It is the thing that builds trust between strangers. It is the thing that lets communities hold disagreements. It is the thing that makes collective decisions stick because people say, “We might not fully agree, but I’m in.”

AI produces the feeling of connection at the individual level while, best case, never building connection at the collective level, and worst case, hollowing it out. The individual gets more capable while the collective gets more brittle. Thompson’s data is the macro version of this. The dashboard says the economy is working while the people say something is broken. Best case, the instruments can’t see it because they were never built to. Worst case, no amount of instrumentation can measure what must be felt.

We need more people in the room, not better tools to read the room from outside.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 30 April 2026. View original →

What accountability regimes cost the people doing the most important work — and what a different recursion might look like.

Preface: The In-Between Is Where the System Lives

Thirty years of immersion in a community produces change that no programme design can replicate. The question worth sitting with is: why? What is the mechanism?

For me, it’s because deep, sustained presence builds relational density — the trust, the reciprocity, the shared meaning that accumulates between people and local institutions over time. That’s what actually translates change into practice. Grassroots relational density is vertical, deep within a system, whether it’s the Anganwadi, the school, or the local health network, and is therefore irreplaceable.

But each of these systems intersects with the others. The Anganwadi system with the health system, the education system, the justice system. It’s precisely at those intersections — the in-between across systems — where citizens fall through the gaps, where responses break down, but also where the most generative possibilities lie.

Complexity science has been saying this for decades: emergence happens at the edges, not inside the nodes. Neil Theise’s work makes the case for this operating at every scale, from cell biology to consciousness. And Buddhism has been saying it longer — that nothing exists independently, everything arises in relation. The in-between isn’t a gap to be managed; it’s where the system actually lives.

So the problem with heroic systems change isn’t just that it’s overconfident. It focuses on the nodes while leaving the in-between invisible and untended.

What this means is that we’re missing a practice and a theory for tending the in-between — not a retreat from systems change but a more honest accounting of what systems actually are and what our roles in them could be.

As a child, I knew many paths to the well. The straight one through the maidan, hot in summer but quick, dust rising in small puffs at every step. The one that bent past my aunt’s house, where I stopped, to score the juiciest Banganapalli mangoes in season. The longer one through the seeraga samba paddy, I walked with my grandmother because she liked watching the green come in. The one behind the temple that the older boys used because they wanted to smoke beedis without their mothers seeing. None of these paths were on any map. They existed because we walked them.

What is a path? A path is a piece of ground that has been walked enough times to be remembered.

Then the phones arrived. The phone showed us the shortest route to the well, and we all took it, because why wouldn’t we? The grass grew back on the path past my aunt’s house. The paddy path became harder to find, then impossible. The temple path closed first because the boys grew up, and the next set of boys never learned it existed.

Ask any of us how the walk to the well is going, and we will tell you it has improved. We are right. We get there faster. Anyone who says otherwise is being sentimental about a slower, harder time.

Then one year the rains are bad and the shortest route floods. The phone has no other suggestion to make, because there is no other path for it to suggest. We stand at one end of a closed road, trying to remember how our grandparents used to go. The names of the plants my grandmother taught me on the paddy walk are names I cannot teach anyone now, because I have not walked that walk in twenty years. And the aunt who gave mangoes to people walking past died, but it took a while for any of us to notice.

Can something be a gift at the level of one person and a loss at the level of all of us together? When we all choose the same path, do the paths we are not choosing close quietly behind us?

Because a path is a piece of ground that has to be walked to stay open, and we have stopped walking.

Once they are gone, the phone has nothing to learn them from. We are the only record of those paths, and only while we are still walking them.

Thx for the nudge Anna Biswas 🙂

Originally written for LinkedIn on 27 April 2026. View original →

Do you remember this famous picture from Tim Urban’s piece in the New York Times on the path to here and the path from here? I was thinking about it over the weekend while watching Indy Johar’s Long Now talk on civilisational optionality.

Broadly, Johar argues that the first-class asset for any civilisation is the degrees of freedom available to it – the manoeuvre space to respond not just to named uncertainties but to the deep unknowns as well. Optionality, in that sense, is what lets a society recompose itself without becoming brittle. Lose it, and the future narrows into a tunnel where each crisis reduces your ability to meet the next.

Which made me wonder what widespread LLM use might be doing to that adjacent possibility space. (It is a little ironic that I used ChatGPT to help generate the images below, but here we are.)

To wit: is there a universe in which, at the individual level, there is a genuine expansion of what feels like the adjacent possible (because you can do things you couldn’t before, write code faster, draft faster, think faster), and the subjective experience is real, but at the collective level, it is convergence? A reduction of the adjacent possible at the level of the planet?

Aggregated across billions of users, a shared model becomes a shared attractor, and the outlier paths that made the adjacent possible genuinely wide get paved over. The paths that used to exist, kept alive by people walking them, stop being walked.

Are we, at some level, exchanging collective resilience for individual productivity? And it isn’t a symmetric trade because once the people who maintain the weird paths stop practising the weirdness, you cannot synthesise it back from a model trained on its absence.

Johar calls this optionality collapse through externality recoupling. The engine that expanded our optionality starts consuming the optionality it produced.

I would love to be wrong about this.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 24 April 2026. View original →

Do you remember during the pandemic when we all started working from home? How we all thought it was going to be the future?

Do you remember when working from home was gradually reduced and they said it was about teamwork, collective creativity, the magic of being in a room together?

Do you remember when working from home became a privilege?

Do you remember when the same people told us the metaverse was the future? That we’d all be there, together, in community?

And now those same people are telling everyone to get an AI agent. Your AI will draft for you, brainstorm for you, work autonomously, even talk to other AI agents. All of this while you sit in the office.

These are the same people building bunkers in New Zealand. Not communes. Bunkers.

It was never about creativity or collaboration, was it?

Originally written for LinkedIn on 22 April 2026. View original →

It must be Skoll Forum week soon because my timeline is full of debates about scale – whether to scale, what to scale, how to scale, who scale leaves behind, etc. 🙂

Which isn’t to say these aren’t serious questions. But are they really new?

Because this debate has happened before. The Basic Needs movement in the 1970s challenged the growth-led paradigm. The participatory development turn in the 1980s challenged the top-down delivery model. Each time, the challenge was partially absorbed and partially neutralised. The delivery model adapted its language without changing its logic, reducing participation to a checkbox and local leadership to a procurement category.

Something similar is at risk of happening again. The current debate is still, at its core, a debate about delivery. Whether to scale, what to scale, and how to scale — these are all questions about the intervention.

What almost nobody is asking is what the system needs to be capable of receiving what we’re trying to deliver.

The binding constraint isn’t the model. It’s the relational substrate — the trust, the reciprocity, the shared meaning that accumulates between people and institutions over time. You can’t deposit exponential impact into a system whose connective tissue has been decayed by the very logic you’re now trying to scale through it.

In agriculture, nitrogen fertiliser produces dramatic short-term growth. Without phosphorus, the soil can’t absorb it, and repeated application without attention to the soil’s underlying biology eventually degrades the capacity you were trying to enhance. The intervention becomes the cause of the limitation it was trying to overcome.

The relational substrate doesn’t have a metrics infrastructure, it doesn’t have a funding category, and it doesn’t have institutional-scale champions willing to say bluntly that this is the binding constraint.

Not how do we scale better? What does the system need to be capable of receiving what we want to give it?

The first question has become more sophisticated over the past fifty years, while the second one has barely been asked.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 18 April 2026. View original →

G. Ananthapadmanabhan — Ananth — was one of the most significant figures in Indian civil society of his generation. An IIT Madras graduate who gave up engineering for teaching at the Krishnamurti Foundation, he went on to lead Greenpeace India, serve as International Programme Director at Greenpeace International, and then as CEO of Amnesty International India. His final institutional role was as CEO of Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives. In his later years he stepped back from running organisations to mentor those who were, and to co-found smaller efforts with the same principled rigour. He passed away on April 18, 2026.

Ananth passed away today. I’m only beginning to understand how much I learned from him. His years at Amnesty, Greenpeace, and APPI were each an education in what it takes to build an organisation in this country that can speak its mind.

And then in these last years, rather than run one more thing, he co-founded several that drew in something he had already lived through. Like the young men from the Alcott hostel who had nowhere to go once they turned eighteen.

He was allergic to the heroic framing of this work. “What can you do alone?” was a Krishnamurti line he often returned to. He wrote years ago that collaboration is not a toolkit or a technique but a mindset you have to actively cultivate, because it is not our natural state, and the incentives will never be sufficient. It took me years to see how deeply that has shaped the way I try to think about this work.

He was also, quietly, one of the bravest people I’ve known. When illness came, he chose quality of life with a clarity most of us would struggle to find. He kept walking, thousands of kilometres through Bangalore. He kept advising when asked. He kept showing up for the people and projects he cared about, without self-pity or performance.

Thank you, Ananth.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 18 April 2026. View original →

Have you come across John Boyd’s famous OODA loop?

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

I have seen it being applied to everything from startups to social change.

A few days ago, a friend, Kuldeep Dantewadia, and I were chatting about Reap Benefit’s experiments in running addas as open community gatherings where people show up, share from wherever they are and let something emerge.

Looking at his diagram of how it works, we realised he’s built the ADDA loop.

Arrive. Disclose. Dwell. Act.

Where OODA is about adversarial superiority, ADDA is about collective emergence. One optimises for speed. the other for trust.

Is the OODA logic to social change the wrong one? Maybe what we actually need is, as Kyla Scanlon, writes “…an elimination diet: fewer inputs, longer stays…” and letting the container do the work

If OODA is a loop for winning, what the current moment needs is the ADDA loop for belonging.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 16 April 2026. View original →