About The ReThink
What if its job is to help you think again?
The ReThink is an essay series with one job: take the assumptions the age of scarcity handed us — about work, worth, ownership, winners and losers — and examine each one honestly, now that the ground underneath them is moving.
Why re-examine these now?
Because the premise is shifting under our feet, quietly, without a vote.
Every economic argument of the last two centuries — every one — took a single fact for granted: there is not enough, so we must fight about how to divide it. That fact was true for all of human history. It was so true nobody thought to say it out loud. The systems, the ideologies, the moral instincts we inherited are all, underneath, machines for managing scarcity.
AI and automation are now pushing the cost of copying more and more essential things — knowledge, expertise, teaching, guidance — toward almost nothing. Not everything: land, trust, attention, time, a seat at tonight's table will stay scarce, and the transition itself is genuinely dangerous for real families living on the scarcity road today. We don't wave at that; several essays live there.
But when the founding premise of every inherited rule starts to loosen, the honest response isn't to cheer and it isn't to panic. It's to go back through the rulebook, page by page, and ask of each rule: was this wisdom, or was this just scarcity talking? That's the whole project.
Firstfruits — the most vulnerable at the center
The ReThink is part of the firstfruits mission, and the name is doing real work. Firstfruits is an old covenant word: the first and best portion goes forward first — not the leftovers, not what's left after the strong have eaten.
Applied here, it means one design commitment: as more of what people need becomes nearly free to copy, getting it to the most vulnerable is the spec, not the charity footnote. Abundance that reaches the comfortable first and the fragile eventually isn't the abundance we mean. An economy's character is revealed at the far end of the table — by what reaches the kid in the last chair, and when.
That's the destination we steer by. We hold it with open hands: we're writing essays, not running the world, and we'd rather demonstrate the posture than declare it.
Not left versus right
Our first essay is about capitalism and communism, and it commits to a posture we intend to keep: take the strongest, most honest version of each side seriously — including the parts each side would rather not discuss about itself.
Markets really did carry most of the greatest material rescue in human history. The collectivist experiments of the twentieth century really did end in famines and gulags that killed tens of millions of the people they promised to lift. Both sentences are true. A jersey lets you say only one of them. We wear no jersey, so we say both — the first with genuine admiration, the second with grief, neither with a smirk.
The both-and isn't fence-sitting. It's the recognition that most inherited fights were fights about ratio, not religion — and that the honest question was always harder and more interesting than the chant.
Pull up a chair
The ReThink is a long table, and it's early — most of the chairs are still empty, and we're fine saying so. If turning old assumptions over in the light sounds like your kind of evening, read the first essay, and let us send you the next one when it's ready.
Get each ReThink as it's written
When a new essay is ready, we'd like to send it to you — the whole essay, in your inbox, free. That's the entire arrangement: we write the letters, you read the ones that earn it. No funnels dressed up as friendship, no "act now." Unsubscribe anytime and we'll assume you had good reasons.
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