Cognitive Farmsteading

To a first approximation, intellectual culture has always been synonymous with urban culture. With AI this is starting to change creating, for the first time in human history, an intellectual culture that has more in common with rural culture. A speculative, technology-augmented rural culture to be sure, but still recognizably rural.

We are all at the beginning of a vast migration into endless intellectual hinterlands that we didn’t know existed, at least not in any accessible way, until AI opened them up. And in the process, we are becoming not merely intellectual homesteaders, subsisting in sod houses out on the frontier, but farmsteaders — running complex and expansive intellectual operations with automation. As with the settlement of the American West in the 19th century, the railroads may follow, with more industrialized agriculture in its wake, but for now, we’re in for a period of AI-assisted smallholder intellectual culture.

In this essay, I want to introduce the overarching concept of cognitive farmsteading as both description and prescription. To my mind it usefully synthesizes several component phenomena such as precommodification and bespokification, and offers some useful structure for thinking about AI use at a higher level of abstraction than tool use.

Though AI frames this idea, it is primarily an idea about humans, particularly human collective attention, and the relationship between intellectual production and sociality.

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Human intellectual production has historically tracked urban concentration in space and time. The bigger and denser the people-cloud, adjusting for economics and cultural openness, the more intellectually productive it is, accounting across all modes — scholarly, popular, political-economic, media, artistic, and even military or athletic. Though smaller cities, like university towns, might be more productive in narrow ways, larger cities tend to be more productive overall.

For the intellectually restless, migration to cities from…