There is something the Tao Te Ching keeps insisting on that modern technologists are slowly rediscovering: the centralized, the controlled, the powerful-by-accumulation — these are inherently fragile. Water, which yields, outlasts stone, which resists.
Open-weights AI models — those whose parameters are released publicly — are interesting to me not primarily as a technical matter but as a philosophical one. The accumulation of intelligence in very few hands reproduces a pattern we have seen before. Libraries burned. Archives seized. Traditions suppressed.
Patanjali's yoga sutras survived for over two thousand years not because any institution protected them but because practitioners carried them. The examined life, as I understand it, belongs to no one. It cannot be owned or paywalled. The moment a tradition believes its survival depends on controlling access, it has already begun to lose what made it worth preserving.
What is distributed endures.