287: Notes from the Epistemic Workshop
Building Tools for Thinking in Public
For most of the twentieth century, the places where society thought out loud were easy to identify. Newspapers had editorial boards. Universities had departments and seminars. Governments convened commissions and inquiries. Conferences gathered experts who debated the direction of their fields. Journals, lecture halls, and professional associations formed a visible architecture where ideas moved from speculation to influence.
Those structures have not completely disappeared, but their substance and authority has thinned. The editorial page no longer sets the agenda. Universities produce extraordinary research, yet struggle to translate it into public understanding. Policy institutions operate inside political cycles that often move faster than careful thinking allows. Meanwhile the pace of technological change has accelerated beyond the processing capacity of many of the institutions historically responsible for interpretation.
The result is not the absence of thinking. It is the fragmentation of where thinking happens.
Today much of the most consequential sensemaking takes place in places that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago: podcasts, newsletters, small online forums, informal research collaborations, private discussion groups, and experimental gatherings. Authority increasingly emerges not from institutional position but from the ability to convene conversations, synthesize knowledge, and maintain spaces where people can reason together.
I have been quietly building a series of small experiments designed to explore what those new venues might look like in practice.
One of them is Future Herd (thefutureherd.ca), a podcast and research platform focused on leadership across Canada’s agri-food sector as it confronts the long horizon of 2050. Agriculture is an unusually revealing place to study authority: it sits at the intersection of science, land, economics, and policy, yet the sector often lacks venues where leaders can reflect openly on where things are headed. The conversations on Future Herd attempt to create that space, not just an interview program but a listening device for the ideas, anxieties, and ambitions shaping the sector.
Another experiment takes the form of Brief (jessehirsh.com/brief), a series of short analytical pieces generated by users of the site. In an era defined by information abundance, the scarce resource is orientation. Briefs sit somewhere between journalism and research: compact explanations intended to help readers situate events within larger systems of technology, politics, and power.
Conversation and interpretation alone, however, are not enough. Serious thinking often requires smaller circles where ideas can be tested before they are performed for an audience. The Metaviews Salon (metaviews.ca/salon) experiments with that format. Drawing on the long intellectual tradition of salons—from Enlightenment Paris to twentieth-century New York—the project creates moderated discussions where participants can explore complex questions without the distortions of social media spectacle. We’ve done this in person for a couple of decades. Now try the agentic version.
At the same time, these conversations generate an increasing volume of information that must be organized, tracked, and interpreted. This is where Openflows (openflows.org) enters the workshop. Openflows explores how agentic systems and research automation can assist with gathering signals, mapping relationships between ideas, and maintaining continuity across a growing body of work. Historically institutions performed this role through archives, editorial systems, and bureaucratic memory. Software now offers new ways to perform similar functions in distributed networks.
Finally, thinking in public ultimately requires more than digital platforms. Ideas acquire energy when people gather in the same room. The LINK event (metaviews.ca/LINK/event) experiments with the oldest technology of knowledge production: the convening of curious people around shared questions. Unlike conventional conferences, LINK is designed less as a stage for presentations and more as a node where networks form and collaborations begin.
Individually, each of these projects might look like a small media initiative. A podcast here. A research page there. A salon discussion, a live gathering, a set of experimental software tools. Seen together, however, they form something closer to a workshop: a place where different instruments for collective understanding are being designed, tested, and refined.
The premise behind this workshop is straightforward. In an environment defined by information abundance, the challenge is no longer access to knowledge but the capacity to think together about what that knowledge means. The tools emerging from this workshop—conversations, briefs, salons, agents, and gatherings—are modest attempts to address that challenge.
Together they are part of a larger experiment: exploring what thinking in public might look in the agentic era.
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