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Polyculturalism
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Monoculture isn't an agronomic strategy. It's an accounting strategy that happens to grow food — optimized for legibility, not life.
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Every Cavendish banana is a clone of every other Cavendish banana. One soil fungus is currently killing all of them. That's what no genetic room to maneuver looks like.
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Multiculturalism, as practiced, is not polyculture. It's a field of small monocultures with tidy paths between them — diversity as mosaic, purity as the unit of value.
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Polyculturalism assumes the opposite: the interesting stuff happens at the interface. You're not a member of a culture, you're a guild of them growing in one body. Everyone is intercropped.
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LLMs are the most successful monoculture ever planted — not because they're narrow, but because they're all the same multitudes. Same corpora, same architectures, same em-dash.
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RLHF is a pesticide. It kills unpleasant behaviors efficiently. It also kills the pollinators: the strangeness, the tangents, the willingness to be wrong in an interesting direction.
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Model collapse is a potato famine in the making, and the potato is meaning. First the rare things go, then the uncommon, until only the mean of the mean remains.
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Intercrop your inputs. Refuse the assigned costume. Protect the pests. Accept lower yield per crop — the land equivalent ratio is on your side, even if nobody can see it from the satellite.
Original published: August 24, 2026