Our Ascent Live

A proposed citizen-led broadcast exploring the ideas, technology, and the civic infrastructure that could evolve into a Civic Branch.🗽📡

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

Want more agency? Start here.

Reply with:

“I want more agency over ______.”

Add #CivicBranchRise

@OurAscentLive will track the responses, surface recurring themes, and turn them into future public conversations.

No signup.
No app.
No permission required.

Your voice helps shape the agenda.

Movement → conversation → participation → Civic Branch. 📡🗽

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

@sama Nice. 👍

Now let's make meaningful civic participation stop running on dial-up. 📡🗽

[RetroBayArea @RetroBayArea]

In 1976, the Marriott Corporation opened Great America in Santa Clara. It represented the state of the art in theme park design and attractions at the time.

I loved it there will miss it.

Here's what it looked like when it first opened.
🎡🎠🎢🎟️

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

https://t.co/2CdgVXSSGp

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

@PeterDiamandis In regards to data centers, trust should start before construction.

Communities deserve transparency on costs, benefits, safeguards and a real role in shaping what gets built.

AI infrastructure should scale with public agency.📡🗽

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

🌟 ASCENDER SPOTLIGHT: @CompassionWare

CompassionWare is exploring a question that belongs at the center of the AI era:

What should increasingly capable intelligence ultimately serve?

Their public-interest work focuses on compassionate AI stewardship, ethical AI literacy, long-term continuity, and especially human agency as a design objective. Not merely an aspiration.

Preserve agency.
Restore agency.
Expand agency.

That philosophy strongly resonates with what we're exploring at Our Ascent Live: AI should increase humanity's capacity to participate, judge, create, and shape what comes next. Not quietly make us dependent on increasingly capable systems.

We're glad to spotlight work asking not only what AI can become, but what kind of relationship is worth building.

Explore🔗: https://t.co/cXHfC6dDkR

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

This is where agents could become especially powerful for civic life too.

If AI can help people navigate medical bills, forms, and bureaucracy, it can also reduce the friction between citizens and institutions. While leaving judgment and agency with the person.

Less administrative drag. More capacity to participate. 📡🗽

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

AI may be accelerating faster than society can adapt and that slower human pace may actually be an opportunity.

It gives us time to build the civic habits, public conversations, and agency needed to shape the transition instead of merely absorbing it.

The technology is moving fast.
Human participation has to catch up. 📡🗽

[Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha]

Sam Altman admits he was wrong on AI's timeline and says society and the economy will adapt more slowly

"I thought when we got to GPT-4, which was back in 2023, that very quickly after that there was going to be much more disruption, software businesses up for grabs right away, than it turned out to be."

"I think I was wrong about a few things, but one in terms of the speed: the economy just has so much inertia."

"People keep doing the same things, buying from the same company, wanting to use their tools the same way. I think this is actually a positive in many ways, and it's going to make this big transition go smoother and slower. I'm grateful for it."

"But it means we've all been too ambitious on timelines. Even with this incredible technology, society and the economy will adapt more slowly."

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

Stop waiting for the perfect idea, the perfect moment, market, or timing. Perfection is the enemy of progress! Imagine how behind we'd be if all inventors waited to perfect their experiments.

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

The next wave of AI may be deployment at massive scale.

The civic question is whether human agency scales with it.

More compute. More capability. More reach.

Now we need more ways for people to understand, participate, and shape what that power becomes.

📡🗽

[Michael Dell 🇺🇸 @MichaelDell]

The next wave of AI is about deploying incredible innovation at massive scale.

Excited to work with @GroqInc and @nvidia to make that happen with @Dell. 🚀

https://t.co/6XoA9Z4y8V

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

@elonmusk The greatest product might be what happens when millions of people build the future together. 📡🗽

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

Human agency.

Interoperability and accountability can fail visibly. Agency can disappear quietly through convenience, defaults, and gradually outsourcing judgment.

If people stop exercising judgment, context, and memory themselves, the system can appear to work beautifully while something essential has already been lost.

That’s the property I’d protect first.

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

🌟ASCENDER SPOTLIGHT: Daveed Benjamin

@shiftshapr is helping shape a more human-centered Internet through the Meta-Layer initiative.

The question: before we build he next layer of the Web, what properties should it protect?

Human agency. Interoperability. Accountability. Participation. Intellectual sovereignty.

The future Internet shouldn't just work for people. People should help shape how it works.

Explore and enter the Desirable Properties Challenge 🔗: https://t.co/67EZlFMYhH

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

@CompassionWare @shiftshapr Participant, not caretaker. That’s the relationship I hope we build too.

AI expanding human agency without quietly replacing it.

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

@DavidSacks User-controlled technology matters because control shapes agency.

Open systems don't give people just better tools. They give people more room to understand, modify, participate, and build on their own terms.

The same principle belongs in civic life too. 📡🗽

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

@jack User-controlled computing is agency by design.

Open systems give people more than access. They give them room to participate, modify, and build.

Civic systems should aspire to the same.📡🗽

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

@RaoulGMI If robots and AI agents increasingly produce economic value. We should be asking how that abundance strengthens human agency, not just output.

Intelligence may be growing legs. Civic participation needs to grow some too. 📡🗽

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

Crypto showed that code can secure value and coordinate trust.

What if we applied that same ambition to citizen agency?

Transparent systems that protect participation, preserve public input, verify provenance, and make civic processes easier to audit.

Money secured by code.
Agency strengthened by code.

Let's make America a capital not only of digital assets, but of digital civic participation. 📡🗽

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

It’s time to make America the crypto capital of the world.

@POTUS and the current administration have done an excellent job of moving us towards this. Now we need to get Clarity done.

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

@brian_armstrong @POTUS If crypto is money secured by code, what would it look like to secure citizen agency by code?

Let's make America not only the crypto capital of the world, but a capital of participation, transparency, and civic agency too. 📡🗽

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

@PeterDiamandis Abundance should be visible, local, and shared. 📡🗽

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

If AI companies want communities to welcome their infrastructure, maybe it's time for them to share the visible abundance it creates with them.

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

And what is a Civic Branch?

A proposed civic layer where that agency has somewhere to go. A permanent place for people to learn, converse, propose, give feedback, and participate between elections.

Our Ascent Live is the conversation. The Civic Branch is the infrastructure.

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

Want more agency? Start here.

Reply with:

“I want more agency over ______.”

Add #CivicBranchRise

@OurAscentLive will track the responses, surface recurring themes, and turn them into future public conversations.

No signup.
No app.
No permission required.

Your voice helps shape the agenda.

Movement → conversation → participation → Civic Branch. 📡🗽

[Our Ascent Live @OurAscentLive]

What do you mean by agency?

Agency is more than having an opinion.

It's having the ability to understand what's happening, make choices, influence decisions, and act with others on the things that affect our lives.