The Three Forms of Jordan Hall’s Unkindness
Sure, Jordan Hall is right about one thing: something is breaking. Institutions are losing legitimacy, meaning is fraying, and technological change is going to reorganise large parts of society. On this, he is perceptive and often insightful.
I am concerned that he has upgraded himself from thought leader to prophet, and my heart sinks when I see people descrbing themselves as “fans” and buy in to package deals. I wanted to reply with some detail, to this post by you @ianheffernan , because, frankly… the devil is in the detail.
Where I part company with Hall is not in his diagnosis of disruption, but in the social architecture he proposes in response. Across his recent essays, a pattern emerges — a pattern I can only describe as three forms of unkindness: rhetorical, architectural, and institutional.
This is not unkindness as insult or tone. It is unkindness as design — who is included, who is excluded, and who is simply not considered.
The core concern is this: across these essays, the proposed future is not organised around improving systems for everyone, but around building new systems for those who can qualify for them. The issue is not innovation. The issue is whether the future is being built as a common project, or as a selective exit for the capable.
I. The Rhetorical Unkindness
In the first essay, the unkindness is rhetorical.
Hall describes a coming bifurcation: those who become “superpowered nodes” — technologically capable, networked, adaptive — and those who drift into what he calls “Mouse Utopia.” He suggests that most people will choose comfort, passivity, and managed decline, while a smaller group will step into agency and transformation.
The problem here is not that he predicts differentiation in outcomes. That is likely true. The problem is the moral framing. The majority are described in terms that hover somewhere between pity and disdain, while the minority are framed in near-spiritual terms — those who cross the Red Sea, those who enter the Kingdom.
This is not a neutral description of social change. It is a moral sorting story. He is not only describing who will have more or less; he is implicitly describing who the future is being designed for, and who it is not.
The vulnerable, in this story, are either not really vulnerable (because anyone could become a “superpowered node” if they tried), or they are part of the large population that will have a “sad ending.” Neither position shows much interest in the structural realities of people’s lives: illness, disability, trauma, caring responsibilities, unequal education, unequal starting points, and simple differences in temperament and ability.
The unkindness here is rhetorical because it frames a large portion of humanity as spiritually or psychologically inadequate to the future.
II. The Architectural Unkindness
In the second essay, the unkindness becomes architectural.
Hall’s analysis of twentieth-century consolidation is often clear and useful. Large organisations formed because of real constraints: information-processing limits, coordination costs, regulatory overhead, and the need for capital-intensive infrastructure. He argues that AI reduces these constraints and allows smaller, more local, more agile entities to compete again.
This is a plausible and interesting argument.
But then he makes a huge leap. From the claim that AI changes the economics of scale, he moves to the claim that the optimal system is a church-anchored, vocation-centred, trace-data-visible economic network — what he calls the “Divine Economy.”
This leap is not argued structurally; it is asserted rhetorically. Many other possibilities could follow from the same technological shift: worker cooperatives, community-owned platforms, municipal enterprises, strengthened public infrastructure, sectoral bargaining, universal basic services, and hybrid models we have not yet invented. He does not argue against these alternatives. He simply does not see them as possibilities. The technological shift does not logically imply one specific social form.
But more importantly, the proposed system has entry requirements: you must be entrepreneurial or highly skilled, you must be able to produce visible trace data, you must orient around vocation, and you must be embedded in the right kind of religious community.
Those who do not meet these criteria are not attacked. They are simply not designed for. They remain in the legacy system, which is simultaneously described as dying.
This is architectural unkindness: a system in which the benefits of the future are structurally available to some, while others are left in a system described as obsolete.
III. The Institutional Unkindness
In the third essay, the unkindness becomes institutional.
Here Hall turns to medicine. He correctly observes that regulatory systems designed for mass-produced drugs are poorly suited to highly personalised therapies. This is a real problem. Regulatory frameworks do create friction for personalised medicine.
But his proposed solution is that religious institutions should use religious freedom law to operate outside medical regulation — creating Christian Healing Sanctuaries that can administer unapproved, experimental, personalised treatments to their members.
This is no longer just rhetoric or economic design. This is about who gets access to experimental medicine, under what oversight, and with what accountability.
If such a system exists outside public oversight, then cutting-edge treatments (or harms) become available to those inside a religious network, while those outside remain in the slower, regulated system. If something goes wrong, the legal structure is designed specifically to prevent external scrutiny. The RFRA claim is not a side effect; it is the mechanism. The system is built to be legally unaccountable.
At this point, the unkindness is institutional: the most advanced forms of care are available to those inside the network, and structurally unavailable to those outside it.
IV. The Pattern
Across the three essays, a pattern emerges:
| Essay |
Form of Unkindness |
Who Is Excluded |
| First |
Rhetorical |
Those who do not become “superpowered nodes” |
| Second |
Architectural |
Those who are not entrepreneurial, technically capable, or religiously aligned |
| Third |
Institutional |
Those outside the religious and legal structure |
At each stage, the circle tightens. What begins as a story about human transformation becomes a set of economic structures, and then a set of institutions, that consistently advantage those inside a particular network and leave others in a declining system.
This is not just a vision of the future. It is a sorting mechanism.
V. What I Reject — and What I Hold
I do not reject the claim that our current systems are failing. I do not reject the claim that new forms of organisation, new economic models, and new medical paradigms are coming. Those things are likely true.
This is not an argument against innovation, decentralisation, or new institutional forms. It is an argument against building them in ways that abandon those who cannot simply opt in.
The deeper philosophical disagreement underneath all of this is an old one. It is the argument between universalism and the idea of the elect — between societies organised around systems that work, however imperfectly, for everyone, and societies organised around high-functioning networks that work very well for those inside them, while others fall behind or are left out.
The core question of the coming century is not whether new systems will be built. They will be.
The real question is this:
Will the systems we build be universal systems, designed so that even the vulnerable remain inside the circle — or selective systems, designed primarily for those who can keep up?
There are many possible responses to institutional failure that do not involve building gated systems: rebuilding public infrastructure, cooperative ownership models, community-owned digital platforms, regulatory reform for personalised medicine, and new hybrid institutions that combine innovation with public accountability. The choice is not between stagnation and secession. There is a third path: renewal.
The future does not need prophets dividing humanity into the saved and the left behind. It needs people willing to do something slower and less dramatic: build institutions that work, experiment without abandoning public accountability, care for each other, protect the vulnerable, and remain humble about what we do not yet understand.
That is a harder path than crossing the Red Sea.
But it is the only one worth taking.