Supercritical is a newsletter about what happens when systems produce faster than they can coordinate. AI is making the generation of knowledge abundant, but generation was never the whole system. Validation, dissemination, credit, trust: these were bundled into institutions designed for scarcity, and this legacy architecture is now the primary bottleneck. If we fail to redesign it, progress will be sawtooth rather than smooth. Using the crisis in modern science as an early warning, this newsletter imagines the capabilities and infrastructure that come next, including provenance, trust-graded disclosure, and new protocols of coordination.
Coordination Tech in Science: Letters, Journals, and Whatever Comes Next | shishyko!
To modernize our scientific infrastructure, we need new contextualization and coordination technologies that decouple trust from legacy branding — shifting from gatekeeping on write to algorithmic contextualization on read.
The Bazaar of Scientific Knowledge | shishyko!
Is the current form of the scientific paper still optimal in 2025? How do we preserve, and efficiently leverage, the uncut gems of the scientific process?
More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review | Organization Science
As the AI Task Force for Organization Science, we provide an early account of artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on both submissions and reviews at a major academic journal. Submission volume ha...
A quote from Daniel Stenberg
The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. …
The Transformation of Documents: Repositories Are the New Unit of Knowledge Work
How will documents evolve when AI agents become ubiquitous? In a world of AI agents, does the repository become the source of truth—where humans declare intent, agents turn it into executable artif…
Science Must Decentralize
Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the field. That’s why we need to address the threat
WarmHub | WarmHub is more than a platform. It's a movement.
In a world of rapid information, trust is scarce. Innovation outpaces our ability to verify claims, leaving us with risk and uncertainty. WarmHub is building infrastructure to make trust scalable, verifiable, and composable, empowering progress everywhere
Publish and Perish: How AI-Accelerated Writing Without...
Artificial intelligence tools are accelerating manuscript production far faster than peer review capacity can expand. Applying the theory of constraints from manufacturing science, we formalize...
Publish and Perish: How AI-Accelerated Writing Without...
Artificial intelligence tools are accelerating manuscript production far faster than peer review capacity can expand. Applying the theory of constraints from manufacturing science, we formalize...
The Bazaar of Scientific Knowledge | shishyko!
What if we didn't collapse all the knowledge from the scientific process into one paper?
Cosmik Updates: February 2026 - Cosmik Labs
@atproto.science @cosmik.network Raising a question for the ATProto science community: Can AI agents be legitimate participants in research ecosystems? What would make their outputs trustworthy?
NewsGuild president writes to ProPublica management: Get serious on AI — ProPublica Guild
Artificial intelligence is guaranteed to shake up journalism in varied and unexpected ways. This could be a moment in which experienced journalists leverage a powerful new tool to produce even bigger and better investigations. Or it could be one in which management pivots to yet another new technolo
The AI "Evaluation Crisis" Is an Opportunity to Get Data Flow Right
Why the AI evaluation crisis could force a reckoning on dataset provenance, attribution, and consent.
Building Political Superintelligence
Amidst fears of dystopia, a blueprint for how we use AI to reinvent the way we govern ourselves
EU-AI | Igor L.
The geopolitical landscape is shifting from physical borders to digital infrastructure. Here is a factual breakdown of how a $500 billion investment in "Sovereign AI" is changing global power dynamics. The Shift: From Land to "Substrate" Historically, a nation’s power was defined by its territory and legal systems (the Westphalian model). Today, power is increasingly tied to the compute substrate—the physical hardware and energy required to run AI. 1. Infrastructural Enclosure The "Sovereign Compute Coalition" (SCC) represents a massive consolidation of power. Major private entities are acquiring the three pillars of modern national strength: * Hardware: High-end AI chips (e.g., Nvidia). * Energy: The massive power grids needed to fuel them. * Data Centers: The physical "brains" of the digital economy. 2. The Rise of Technocracy As private companies own these essential tools, governments may find themselves in a position where they effectively "rent" their ability to govern. This moves decision-making power away from elected officials and toward those who control AI infrastructure. 3. Europe’s Strategic Response Europe is launching several initiatives to avoid becoming a "client state" of foreign tech providers. The strategy focuses on four main channels: * 8ra Initiative: Building a decentralized, multi-provider cloud-edge architecture to ensure data remains under European control and interoperable across borders. * ReArm Europe: A strategic defense package (presented in March 2025) aimed at boosting industrial competitiveness and reducing strategic dependencies in technology and defense. * Sovereign LLMs: Developing domestic models, such as Mistral, that are designed to align with European data privacy standards and cultural values. * Energy & Procurement: Using public procurement and new regulatory frameworks to create demand for homegrown, sustainable energy-efficient compute solutions. The goal of these moves is #DigitalSovereignty : the ability for a region to control its own digital destiny without relying exclusively on transnational monopolies. Data tells the real story. Are you following it? Follow #datanomics
