Browse a gallery showcasing two long-form submissions as practical applications of the GSC lens to real-world problems
Submission 1: A Premortem on the Future of Knowledge
Challenge: "Better Questions for Brighter Futures"
Instead of simply complying with the challenge's requirement to conduct a "premortem" (analyzing why a project failed), we applied the GSC lens to reframe the entire question. We asked: "Under what environmental and internal conditions would this complex informational structure lose its integrity and decohere?"
The GSC Reframing
We identified two primary decoherence pathways for the Mosaic Web Initiative:
1. Isolation in an Informational "Void": The project could decohere by becoming an informationally isolated system with language that's too esoteric and self-referential, lacking external "sculpting inputs" necessary for evolution.
2. Overwhelmed in an Informational "Filament": The project could be overwhelmed by informational noise without a sufficiently strong internal "coherent void" to anchor its identity.
This analysis served a dual purpose: it answered the challenge while also providing a self-reflective warning about the GSC Model itself. By identifying the risk of becoming a sterile, self-contained system, we justified the need for creating an "easy on-ramp" website to prevent the GSC model from succumbing to its own predicted failure mode.
Challenge: "Digital Confidence: Tools for Safe Online Participation"
For the international challenge, we again reframed the core premise, shifting from "digital safety" (a defensive, problem-solving posture) to the active construction of "informational coherence." Online harms were redefined as "deliberate, low-information decoherence events" designed to degrade social trust and fragment the social substrate.
The Verifiable Honesty Construct (VHC)
Our solution replaces the subjective notion of "trust" with "Verifiable Honesty." The VHC is a standardized, machine-readable declaration that online entities can publish, containing:
• Theory of Value (ToV): The entity's specific purpose and intended outcomes
• Theory of Management (ToM): How the entity is influenced by external factors and managed over time
• Evidence Grid: Where claims are tested against real-world cybercrime data
The VHC operationalizes long-standing work on "verifiable honesty" and integrates pre-GSC frameworks like the LDCF and SDCF with the Objective Observer Initiative (OOI). It transforms a static government report (the Australian Institute of Criminology's "Cybercrime in Australia 2024") into a dynamic substrate for building a coherent online reality.
Perhaps most importantly, our entire process became a live demonstration of the GSC model's predictive power. We conducted an "a priori-mortem" - analyzing our own submission's potential to succeed or fail before the event itself.
Two Possible Outcomes
Decoherence via Misinterpretation: The submission could be seen as a clever but non-compliant philosophical exercise, judged against conventional criteria it seeks to transcend. This would be a low-information outcome.
Coherent Persistence: The submission could be understood as a necessary and powerful reframing of the problem, successfully forcing a paradigm shift in evaluators and creating a new, complex understanding of the challenge's purpose. This would be the path of maximum informational richness.
By making our process the project, we created a self-referential validation of the GSC model itself. The entire eight-step journey can be mapped directly onto the GSC model's evolutionary framework, providing the most direct and compelling evidence for the model's predictive power.