Plainly, what this is
The Next Renaissance exists to do one thing: take the surplus that automation is creating, find the most capable and morally serious people of the generation inheriting it, fund them without conditions, and set them a single task - design the way of living that puts humanity back at the centre of an automated world.
We do not claim to know what that design looks like. We claim to know how to find the people who do - and how to keep money and power from corrupting them on the way.
How we intend to do it
Every decision, every pound in and out, and the reasoning behind each one, recorded publicly from the first act. Not disclosed later - published as it happens.
Built to outlast everyone who starts it. The founders are bound to dissolve themselves out of it within a decade, by a rule they cannot later override.
The end and the constraints are fixed. Everything else is sourced from the people who join - starting with how those people are chosen.
What it is made of
The academy
World-class learning and tools, free to anyone, anywhere, no strings. A gift, not a filter - good in itself even for those who never climb.
Take partThe ladder
Real problems posted as open challenges. Work judged blind against a public rubric. Nobody is chosen - people climb, and the work reveals them.
The open questionsThe ledger
Every decision, every pound in, every pound out - reasoned from seven virtues, published in full, challengeable by anyone.
See the ledgerThe premise
Five hundred years ago, surplus wealth, recovered knowledge, a handful of geniuses and a patron with taste aligned in one small city - by chance. The result outlived every fortune that funded it.
Automation is about to create a comparable surplus. Left to chance, surpluses pool. Assembled with intent, they flower. The Next Renaissance is the attempt to reproduce the conditions of the first one deliberately - and to point what the machines create at human flourishing.
Employment for 22-25 year olds has fallen 2.7% since generative AI went mainstream, and 12.8% in the most exposed sectors (Stanford analysis, 2026). The trend is real. The response is a choice.
The conditions, assembled
What aligned once by luck is assembled here by design.
The mandate for those funded: use the technologies of this era to seed a system of being that puts humanity back at the centre. The few are the means. Everyone flourishing is the end.
The constitution
Seven virtues, rendered as testable rules.
Every decision must answer to the seven - out loud, traceably, challengeably. Six are bound by the seventh: Charity is the ground and the ring, the tie-breaker when virtues conflict.
The mark: six virtues held within a single ring of Charity, the mission at the centre. The geometry stands in 500-year-old Florentine stone.
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I
Faith fidelity to the long mission
Build what you will not live to see. Keep the constitution when bending it would be expedient - faith in a challengeable protocol, never in leaders.
Would we still do this if the author never saw the result and got no credit?
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II
Hope build the alternative, never attack the old
Every action builds an option worth choosing. No strategy that relies on anyone's despair, fear or ruin.
Are we building a better option here, or just tearing down a worse one?
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III
Charity the good of every human - the greatest
The base is a gift to everyone. Grace toward the superseded. When virtues conflict, Charity decides.
Does this treat every affected human as an end with dignity - and does the benefit reach the many?
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IV
Prudence wise judgement, least-destructive path
Weigh the second- and third-order effects. Move slowly, yes; move invisibly, never.
Is this the least-destructive path that still works - in full view, not by stealth?
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V
Justice fairness, no bias, no bought influence
Blind, transparent, appealable process. Funders buy no influence. Contribution carries the weight - never wealth, background or connection.
Would this survive being fully public, with the least-powerful treated exactly as the most?
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VI
Fortitude hold the line over generations
Refuse the donation, the shortcut, the expedient breach - even when the money is enormous. Incorruptibility is only real if people have the spine to hold it.
Are we holding the line though it costs us, or rationalising a compromise because it is hard?
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VII
Temperance take only what the task needs
Let no organ grow beyond its function. No accumulation past need - of money, data, authority or reach. Concentrate power nowhere.
Is this the minimum footprint of power, money, data and reach that still does the job?
A first draft, set down in Florence, July 2026 - now being pressure-tested. Faith is placed in a constitution that is challenged, never in one that is obeyed unquestioned.
Where we are, today
Stage one: finding the ten.
Nothing has been built yet. The movement is at its first act: finding the ten people who will build it and then dissolve themselves out of it.
They are asked for a decade, and for the terms on the stewardship page - no fame, no fortune, no promise of a harvest in their lifetime. Their entire job is two finite tasks: prove the idea, then construct the constitutional system that makes them unnecessary. The founding cohort is the last group ever chosen before the open ladder exists. Everyone after them arrives through it.
The first question is how to choose us
Here is the problem with writing our own selection method: we would be the people it selects. A movement whose constitution forbids anyone deciding about people - and requires an open process that lets them reveal themselves instead - cannot make its very first act an exception for its own founders.
So we are not writing it. The first open question we ask the world is how to seek, test and select the founders of a movement like this - fairly, without bias, and in a way that cannot be gamed by the people who benefit from the answer. The best answer becomes the method. Then that method, not us, finds the ten.
The honest limit: someone has to ask the first question and judge the first answers, and that act is unearned. We are not pretending otherwise. What we can do is make that act as small as we possibly can, declare it plainly, and spend it on handing the design of everything downstream to people outside this room. One unearned act, used to end unearned acts.
How the asking stays fair
A movement against inherited advantage cannot start by handing seats to the founders' friends. Nobody here is appointed, recommended or drawn from an address book. Five commitments hold every open question - this first one included - and all five are published before entry opens, not decided afterwards.
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The rubric is published first
How answers are judged - and how the qualification bar is defined - is public before anyone writes a word. You can read exactly what you are being judged against, and argue with it, before you decide to enter.
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Judging is blind
Names, countries, ages, sexes and histories are stripped before an answer reaches a judge. The work is judged; the person is invisible. Nobody's connections can help them and nobody's background can count against them.
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Entry is funded, not just open
An open door is not a fair one if reaching it costs money you do not have. Translation, tools and stipends exist so that the person with the least can actually enter the same arena as the person with the most.
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The founding cohort must be diverse - by rule, set in advance
A founding group that shares a country, an age and a life bakes its blind spots into everything that follows. So the composition rule is fixed and published before entries open: the ten must span countries, sexes and generations. It selects among those who clear the bar - it never lowers the bar for anyone, and no individual is ever scored higher or lower for who they are.
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Every application and decision goes on the ledger
Entries, scores, the reasoning behind each judgment, and the final composition against the published rule - all recorded permanently and publicly. If the process ever failed its own rules, the record would show it. That is the point of keeping one.
We are not the ones with the answer
What is written here is a destination and a set of constraints: human flourishing as the end, the seven as the bounds, and the refusal to build power that cannot be given away. That is deliberately all.
The how - what gets built, in what order, by what design - is not ours to specify, and pretending otherwise would be the first and worst overreach. It is the work of the minds who join, and of everyone who comes after them through the open ladder. Scripting their answer now would be like telling a tree what shape to grow.
The first question is being sharpened now. When it is ready, it will be asked in the open.
The proposed shape of it
A decade, ending in our own absence.
Two finite challenges, then a mission that never completes. The dates below cap the speed - the handover can never go faster than this - and each step is gated on the system proving it can carry that power before it is released. Held longer if it is not ready; never taken back once given.
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Now
Ask how to choose the founders
Publish the rubric and the commitments, fund entry, and put the first question to the world: how should the founders of a movement like this be sought, tested and selected?
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Next
Run the method we are given
The best answer becomes the selection method, published in full. It is then run to find the ten - by the process, not by us.
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Challenge one
Prove it, and find them
Answers judged blind, every score and its reasoning published, the ten formed, the debate lit. Finite - it completes.
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Years 0-2
Money moves by rule
Build the funding and distribution protocol, prove it, then lock founder discretion over money out. Money goes first because it is the most corrupting power.
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Years 2-4
Structure
Stand up the elected, rotating governance, prove it can govern, then lock founder control out.
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Years 4-6
Selection
The open ladder and transparent judging fully replace panel judgment. Nobody is ever again chosen by invitation.
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Years 6-8
Direction
The freed system chooses what to build within the immutable end. Founders stop setting direction.
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Years 8-10
The rules themselves
Amendment power passes to the constitutional process. After this, not even a founder can change the constitution - only the system can.
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Then
The mission that never completes
The end and the seven locked immutable, the founders gone, and the thinking free. Deliberately unspecified, because specifying it would be the last overreach.