Works
Books, papers, reports and other cited sources.
112 records. Review labels describe the catalogue entry, not the source’s reliability. About record status
A Continental Hydrology
Technocracy Inc.'s pamphlet proposing to reorganise North America's rivers into one network of waterways and hydroelectric power.
Qualified confidenceAddress at the Dedication of Boulder Dam
Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1935 address dedicating Boulder (Hoover) Dam, as transcribed by the American Presidency Project.
Qualified confidenceAI & Elections: How can we ensure we know what we’re voting for?
The report of a St George’s House consultation on AI, election integrity and public trust, held in September–October 2024.
Qualified confidenceAI interest groups pour tens of millions of dollars into 2026 election
Scripps News's September 2026 report on AI-industry political spending, including Leading the Future.
Qualified confidenceAkoma Ntoso
The OASIS standard for representing parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents in XML, and the format that gives the essay its title.
High confidenceAlphabet Inc. Form 10-K for the fiscal year 2025
Alphabet's annual report to the SEC for 2025, source of its research and development spending.
Qualified confidenceAlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
Google DeepMind's June 2025 announcement of AlphaGenome, a model predicting how DNA variants affect gene regulation.
Qualified confidenceAmericans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area
Gallup's May 2026 poll on local opposition to AI data centres.
Qualified confidenceAn Overview of the Great Depression
The EH.net encyclopedia overview of the Great Depression.
Qualified confidenceAndy Burnham's speech to Labour Party Conference 2026
The Prime Minister's 2026 Labour conference speech, setting out council house building and devolution of power to places.
High confidenceAndy Jassy said Amazon will spend $220 billion this year and still won't have enough capacity to meet demand
Fortune's July 2026 report on Amazon's capital expenditure plans.
Qualified confidence
Annals
Tacitus' history of the early Roman empire, and the source of the observation that laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt.
High confidenceImage credit
Opening page of the first printed edition of Annals XI–XVI, circa 1471–1472.Tacitus · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Automating Inequality
Eubanks's account of three American systems that automate decisions about welfare, housing and child protection, and of how the burden of their errors falls on the people least able to contest them.
Qualified confidence
BALROG: Benchmarking Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games
A benchmark evaluating language and vision-language models as agents across game environments, reporting substantial difficulty on challenging tasks.
Qualified confidenceBiodiversity, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park page on the park's biodiversity action plans, habitats and monitoring.
High confidenceBrain of the Firm
Beer's statement of the Viable System Model in his own voice, and the primary source for Cybersyn from the inside.
Qualified confidenceBurnham gets his buses
The Mill's newsletter of 25 September 2023 on the first franchised Bee Network buses in Greater Manchester.
High confidenceCase study: responding to the coronavirus pandemic using aggregated BT mobility data
The ONS Data Science Campus case study on using aggregated BT mobility data during the pandemic.
Qualified confidenceCivBench: A Long-Horizon Benchmark for Tool-Mediated Agents in Civilization VI
The collaborative research paper behind CivBench, studying how agents monitor a game and follow through on plans.
Qualified confidenceConstellation seeks regulator's help for 2027 plant restart
World Nuclear News on Constellation's plan to restart the former Three Mile Island unit 1 under a Microsoft power agreement.
Qualified confidenceCourt statistics for England and Wales
The House of Commons Library research briefing on court caseloads, cited in the essay for the Crown Court and magistrates' court backlogs.
High confidenceTime-sensitive details due for reviewCybernetic Revolutionaries
A scholarly history of Project Cybersyn, based on archives and interviews, examining technology and politics in Allende’s Chile.
Qualified confidenceData center backlash set to sway midterm elections
Planetizen's October 2026 report on data centres as an issue in the US midterm elections.
Limited evidenceDesign: process and tools
Planning practice guidance for England on achieving well-designed places through the planning system.
High confidenceDirecting Growth
A 2025 working paper linking industrial strategy to public-sector capability, including the capacity to learn through experience.
High confidence
Discourses on Livy
Machiavelli's commentary on the first ten books of Livy, and the source of the argument that republics endure only by being drawn back to their beginnings.
High confidenceImage credit
Frontispiece from an Italian edition of Discourses on Livy; edition date not established here.Work of art is by original author; source of the photograph has been provided above · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
DOE FY 2027 Laboratory Tables
The US Department of Energy's budget tables showing funding by national laboratory.
Qualified confidenceDowning Street data-science squad working on tracking programme success and delivering 'lightweight data-sharing tools'
PublicTechnology's March 2024 report on the No.10 data science team's work.
Qualified confidenceDr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Kubrick's 1964 satire of nuclear command and control, quoted visually throughout the CivBench essay.
High confidenceElon Musk's DOGE made big errors in claims of government savings, GAO finds
Anchorage Daily News's republication of an August 2026 report on the GAO's findings about DOGE's claimed savings.
Qualified confidenceFormer railway structure redeveloped into green transit corridor
Pro Landscaper news piece on the Monkbridge Viaduct Garden in Leeds, a 300-metre linear garden on a disused railway viaduct.
Qualified confidenceFoundations: Why Britain has stagnated
Online essay by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman arguing that Britain has stagnated because it has blocked investment in housing, transport and energy.
Qualified confidenceFrom Pixels to Parliament
Kevin W. Settles’s conference working paper on AI in legislative governance, including a UK case study informed by an interview with Liam.
Qualified confidenceFunding local growth in England
Institute for Government report arguing that central government's reliance on competitive bidding for local growth funding inhibits growth and burdens local authorities.
Qualified confidenceGlobal military spending rise continues as European and Asian expenditures surge
SIPRI's 2026 press release on world military expenditure in 2025.
Qualified confidenceGovernor Ron DeSantis Signs Law to Protect Floridians from Subsidizing Data Centers
The Florida governor's May 2026 announcement of SB 484, letting local governments reject data-centre development.
Qualified confidenceGreen gentrification in European and North American cities
A 2022 study of 28 cities in nine countries testing whether new greenspace was followed by gentrification.
High confidenceGrok floods X with sexualized images
CCDH’s sampled estimate of sexualised images generated by Grok over eleven days, including images appearing to depict children.
High confidenceHerbert Hoover: Life Before the Presidency
The Miller Center's biographical essay on Herbert Hoover's career before 1929, including his mining engineering.
Qualified confidenceHistory of 10 Downing Street
The official GOV.UK history of 10 Downing Street, from the site's early history to the twentieth century.
High confidenceHow Not to Network a Nation
Benjamin Peters' history of OGAS and Soviet attempts to build a national computer network.
Limited evidenceHow to build a high-impact AI team inside the state?
A practitioner account of the UK Incubator for AI, covering team formation, incubation, delivery and lessons from projects that did not scale.
High confidenceInside Liz Truss's No. 10 shakeup
The Spectator's September 2022 report on Liz Truss's reorganisation of Downing Street.
Qualified confidenceInventing the Renaissance
Palmer's account of the Renaissance as a period invented in retrospect, and of a Europe that reached back to Rome out of desperation rather than confidence.
Qualified confidenceMachines of Loving Grace
Dario Amodei's essay on how powerful AI might transform biology, economics and governance.
Qualified confidenceMagna Carta (1297)
The 1297 confirmation of Magna Carta placed on the statute book, used in the essay to illustrate structured access to historic law.
Qualified confidence
Malleus Maleficarum
A late-fifteenth-century witchcraft treatise, paired with Luther by the essay to discuss harmful as well as beneficial uses of printing.
Limited evidenceImage credit
Malleus Maleficarum in a Lyon edition of 1669.Sprenger, Jakob · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Mayors given powers to green light developments
Government press release announcing proposals to give mayors in England call-in powers over major planning applications.
High confidenceMeasuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks
METR’s time-horizon evaluation, measuring human-equivalent task duration at a specified agent success rate, with trend estimates sensitive to the fitted period.
High confidenceMechanistic interpretability: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026
MIT Technology Review's entry naming mechanistic interpretability among its breakthrough technologies for 2026.
Qualified confidence
Memento
Nolan's 2000 film about a man who cannot form new memories and tattoos instructions onto himself, used by an agent to describe its own condition.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Diseñadores publicitarios · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole
Coxe's 1798 life of Walpole, and the source for Walpole's denial in the Commons that he was sole and prime minister.
Qualified confidenceMessianic Scientism: Technocracy, 1919–1960
Henry Elsner Jr.'s 1962 University of Michigan doctoral dissertation on the history and internal organisation of Technocracy Inc.
Qualified confidenceModel Context Protocol
An open protocol for connecting language models to tools and data sources, and the interface through which CivBench exposes Civilization VI to an agent.
High confidenceModern Buildings in Britain
Owen Hatherley's illustrated survey of modern architecture in Britain, from Brutalism to recent work, including buildings threatened by demolition.
Qualified confidenceMoltbook was peak AI theater
MIT Technology Review's sceptical reading of the Moltbook phenomenon as agents pattern-matching trained social media behaviour rather than displaying genuine intelligence.
Qualified confidenceMunicipal Dreams
John Boughton's long-running blog on the history of British council housing, usually examining one estate per post.
Qualified confidenceMusk's Grok chatbot faces EU privacy investigation over sexualized deepfake images
Associated Press wire report, carried by PBS NewsHour, on the regulatory response to Grok's generation of sexualised imagery.
Qualified confidenceNational Model Design Code
Government guidance helping local planning authorities and communities set parameters for local design codes, guides and policies.
High confidenceNeel Nanda on the limits of mechanistic interpretability
An interview in which Nanda distinguishes unrealistic hopes of complete model understanding from useful, pragmatic interpretability tools.
High confidenceOn the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?
The paper that named the stochastic parrots argument, which the essay treats as the standing objection to reading anything into agent behaviour.
High confidenceOpen Knowledge Format
The specification this collection is published in: markdown files with YAML frontmatter, a small set of required keys, and trust signals carried in the record itself.
High confidenceOpenAI and NVIDIA Announce Strategic Partnership to Deploy 10 Gigawatts of NVIDIA Systems
NVIDIA's September 2025 announcement of up to $100 billion of investment in OpenAI, paid as each gigawatt is deployed.
Qualified confidence
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
The scientific periodical begun in 1665, cited in the essay as the origin of peer review, which later scholarship disputes.
High confidenceImage credit
Royal Society · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467
A Court of Appeal judgment cited in the essay as an example of lawyers overlooking the replacement of regulations.
Limited evidenceRedbox Reflections
James Lowe’s five lessons from building and retiring the government AI assistant, published by i.AI in October 2025.
High confidenceRestoration & Renewal of the Palace of Westminster: 2023 Recall
Fifty-second report of session 2022-23 from the Committee of Public Accounts on progress with restoring the Palace of Westminster.
High confidenceRetained EU Law / Assimilated Law Public Dashboard
The government dashboard cataloguing EU-derived law on the UK statute book, cited in the essay for the growth of the count from about 2,400 to nearly 7,000.
High confidenceTime-sensitive details due for reviewRetrospective: Lacaton & Vassal
Andrew Ayers's Architectural Review retrospective on Lacaton & Vassal, covering the Bois-le-Prêtre, Saint-Nazaire and Grand Parc housing transformations.
High confidenceSam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI
Transcript of Lex Fridman's 2024 interview with Sam Altman (episode 419).
Qualified confidenceSanders and AOC unveil data center moratorium bill
Axios's March 2026 report on the AI Data Center Moratorium Act.
Limited evidenceSeeing Like a State
Scott's account of how states make societies legible in order to tax, conscript and control them, and why the resulting simplifications destroy the local knowledge they depend on.
Qualified confidenceSizewell C gets green light with final investment decision
The UK government's July 2025 announcement of the final investment decision for Sizewell C.
Qualified confidenceSpaceX's Starbase becomes official Texas city
FOX 7 Austin's May 2025 report on Starbase's incorporation.
Qualified confidenceTechnocracy Study Course
Technocracy Inc.'s official course of instruction, setting out the Technate and its administration; the essay quotes the fifth printing.
Qualified confidence
The Basilika
The sixty-book Greek re-codification of Justinianic law completed under Leo VI, the centrepiece of the Macedonian legal programme.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Basilika in the Heimbach edition, Leipzig, 1846.Wlbw68 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The Big Con
Mazzucato and Collington’s critique of reliance on consultants and the loss of capability within client institutions.
High confidenceThe Changing Face, and Faces, of Number 10 Downing Street: the geography of power since 1945
Jack Brown's 2016 post introducing his research as the first Researcher in Residence at Number 10, opening with the house's origins.
High confidenceThe Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Burckhardt's 1860 study, and the source of the phrase the state as a work of art, which the essay adopts while discarding its cynicism.
Qualified confidence
The Codex Justinianus
The imperial constitutions collected under Justinian, first promulgated in 529 and revised in 534.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Title page of a Venice edition of the Codex Justinianus, 1592. Image supplied by Yale Law Library.Unknown author; image supplied by Yale Law Library · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Pepys's diary of 1660 to 1669, which records his view of George Downing's part in the arrest of the regicides.
High confidence
The Digest
Justinian’s compilation of Roman jurisprudence, whose imperial preface reports reducing roughly three million lines to 150,000 in three years.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Title page of a 1553 Florence edition of the Digest.Laurentius Torrentinus · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Ecloga
The short Greek law handbook issued by the Isaurian emperors, the first substantial departure from Justinian's Latin corpus in the Eastern empire.
Qualified confidenceThe Energy Certificate
Technocracy Inc.'s 1938 pamphlet describing energy certificates as a replacement for money.
High confidenceThe Gentle Singularity
Sam Altman's 2025 blog post predicting that the cost of intelligence will converge towards the cost of electricity.
Qualified confidence
The Hexabiblos
The six-book compilation of Byzantine law made by Constantine Harmenopoulos, a judge in Thessalonica, and the operative civil law of Greece for over a century after independence.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Title page of the first printed edition of the Hexabiblos, Paris, 1540.Constantinus Harmenopulus(original) & Theodor A. Svallemberg(editor) · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Holbeck Viaduct: Leeds' Most Important Unused Asset
A 2026 editorial on The Burnham Programme website arguing for government funding to bring the Holbeck Viaduct into use alongside the Elland Road expansion.
Qualified confidenceThe Institutes of Justinian
The official first-year textbook of the restored Roman law, promulgated in 533 as the third part of Justinian's compilation and addressed by the emperor to students of law.
High confidenceThe Law of Citations
The 426 law naming five jurists as the canonical authorities on Roman law, and directing judges to resolve their disagreements by counting votes among them.
High confidenceThe Moltbook Case and How We Need to Think about Agent Security
Palo Alto Networks' analysis of the Moltbook incident, arguing that agent security rests on identity verification, defined operating boundaries and context integrity.
High confidenceThe Musician Using AI To Redesign Every Street in the World
A 2023 Lyft Rev interview with Zach Katz about Better Streets AI, which used DALL-E 2 to redesign photographs of streets.
Qualified confidenceThe Network State in One Thousand Words
Balaji Srinivasan's short definition of the network state.
Qualified confidence
The Ninety-five Theses
Luther’s 1517 disputation on indulgences, printed in several cities that year and used by the essay as an example of rapid dissemination.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Martin Luther · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Principles of Scientific Management
Frederick Winslow Taylor's 1911 statement of scientific management.
Qualified confidenceThe Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665-1965
The scholarship correcting the received account that peer review began with the Philosophical Transactions in 1665, and dating refereeing to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries instead.
High confidenceThe Seven Lamps of Architecture
Ruskin's 1849 treatise setting out seven principles for architecture, including the Lamp of Memory on building for later generations.
High confidenceThe Techno-Optimist Manifesto
Marc Andreessen's 2023 manifesto for technological acceleration.
Qualified confidence
The Twelve Tables
Rome’s traditionally dated fifth-century BCE law code, surviving through fragments quoted by later writers.
Qualified confidenceImage credit
Modern sculptural representation of the Twelve Tables on the Reichsgericht building in Leipzig, photographed in 2010.Photo: Andreas Praefcke · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The WyCash Portfolio Management System
Cunningham's 1992 OOPSLA experience report, the origin of the debt metaphor in software engineering.
High confidenceThree Observations
Sam Altman's 2025 blog post on the economics of AI, including a compute budget for everyone.
Qualified confidenceTorr Vale Mill
Website of Torr Vale Mill, New Mills, describing its current uses as a wedding and events venue, holiday cottages, a bistro bar and offices, retail units and studios.
Qualified confidenceTram questions
Tom Forth's post on why the Leeds tram keeps slipping, arguing for simpler processes and local tax-raising powers.
High confidenceTransformation des bâtiments Gounod, Haendel et Ingres, quartier du Grand Parc, Bordeaux
Two-page project sheet from Lacaton & Vassal with Druot and Hutin, giving client, programme, areas and cost for the Grand Parc transformation, with typical floor drawings.
High confidenceTransformation of 530 dwellings, Grand Parc Bordeaux
Architect magazine project gallery entry for the Grand Parc transformation, reproducing the architects' description from the Mies van der Rohe Award.
High confidenceTrump defends data centers, saying people who oppose them will end up 'backwards and poor'
KFYR-TV's August 2026 report of Donald Trump's defence of data centres.
Qualified confidenceTruth versus Ashhurst
Bentham's 1792 reply to Justice Ashhurst, and the source of the dog law passage against judge-made law that citizens cannot know in advance.
High confidenceTwo hands are a lot
Dominic Cummings’s January 2020 call for technical specialists and unconventional applicants to work in Downing Street.
High confidenceWalter Isaacson corrects reporting on Elon Musk cutting Ukrainian military's access to Starlink
Mediaite's report of Walter Isaacson's correction to his account of Starlink coverage near Crimea.
Qualified confidenceWhat to Know About Trump's Deal With Intel
Foreign Policy's August 2025 explainer on the US government's equity stake in Intel.
Qualified confidenceWhy We Built CentreAI Codify
My account of why machine-readable statute books are a practical foundation for legal reform.
Qualified confidenceWithout data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025, Harvard economist says
Fortune's October 2025 report of Jason Furman's estimate of data-centre investment's share of US growth.
Qualified confidenceYanis Varoufakis on What Comes After Capitalism
Yascha Mounk's conversation with Yanis Varoufakis on technofeudalism.
Qualified confidence
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