TC 03: Compass
Teaching Case · Eduardo Porter · The Guardian · February 2026
The article
Title: Amid talk of artificial intelligence taking our jobs, the big unasked question is: how will we be fed? Author: Eduardo Porter Source: The Guardian, February 23, 2026 Subject: The governance vacuum at the center of AI development — who decides how the fruits of AI prosperity are distributed, what happens to democratic power when human labor becomes economically irrelevant, and what options exist for keeping society functioning if those decisions are left to a handful of tech oligarchs.
What this article does
Porter is asking Compass questions at civilizational scale. He is not primarily concerned with whether AI will disrupt the economy — he assumes it will. He is concerned with who will make the decisions about what happens next, and whether democratic institutions are capable of constraining the people currently making those decisions.
This article will activate the room politically. That activation is the teaching material, not an obstacle to it.
Session structure (45–60 minutes)
Somatic check-in (3 minutes)
This article is politically activating for most people, in different directions. Before we begin, notice your current state. If you find yourself already composing a response to something you haven't finished reading yet — that's the Gyroscope telling you something. Note it and set it down for now.
Gyroscope pass — brief but necessary (8 minutes)
Unlike Sessions 1 and 2, the Gyroscope work here is not about distress or dysregulation. It is about political activation — the state where people stop listening and start defending.
Ask:
Did this article make you want to argue with something?
Did it confirm something you already believed?
Did it make you feel hopeless?
Name these responses without evaluating them. Then: for the next thirty minutes, hold these responses lightly and look at what questions the article is actually asking, before evaluating whether you agree with the answers.
Radar pass — secondary (12 minutes)
Porter's article is substantially more honest about uncertainty tolerance than the vibe reporting Newport described in Session 2. He cites specific researchers (Korinek, Lockwood, Stiglitz), names specific proposals, and acknowledges the political obstacles to each one. It is worth noting this contrast explicitly.
Apply the Radar questions:
What is Porter directly claiming versus implying?
What evidence does he cite for the scale of the disruption he's describing?
What perspectives are absent from this article? (Silicon Valley's counterarguments, labor economists who are skeptical of AI disruption timelines, global South perspectives on AI governance)
Who bears the costs described here, and at what scale?
Give special attention to the Altman quote: "the future can be vastly better than the present." Use Newport's vibe reporting technique on this single sentence:
What is directly claimed?
What is implied?
What evidence would be needed?
Who benefits from the belief being adopted?
Compass pass — primary (15 minutes)
This is where Session 3 goes beyond the previous two. The Compass questions at this scale are genuinely hard.
Ask: What is the smallest honest action available from here?
Name the scale mismatch between the problem described (civilizational AI governance) and any individual's sphere of influence. Don't pretend otherwise.
Then ask: what does collective kind action look like when individual action is insufficient?
This is the Multilevel Selection question. The focus is on what you can do as part of something larger than yourself, not what you can do alone.
Concrete anchors for this discussion:
Voting for representatives who take AI governance seriously, and knowing what that means specifically
Supporting organizations doing this work (list several)
Participating in local and institutional AI governance conversations
Refusing to treat inevitability narratives as fact — "this is how it has to be" is always a political choice, not a natural law
Highlight this Compass claim from the article (António Guterres, UN Secretary General): "The future of AI cannot be decided by a handful of countries or left to the whims of a few billionaires."
Ask: what acting on that claim looks like from where each person in the room actually stands.
The network-states detail (5 minutes)
Save the final paragraph of the article for the end of the Compass pass. Discuss the scenario of tech oligarchs building sovereign territories — in Greenland, Nigeria, Honduras, the Caribbean — to evade democratic governance if they can't get their way under democracy.
This is the E capacity at maximum scale. It is the most extreme form of the cost-externalization pattern students have been tracking since Session 1: a girl's self-esteem, a student's attention span, a worker's economic security, and now — a community's ability to govern itself.
Ask: How does seeing this progression — from the individual nervous system to civilizational governance — change how you understand the article you read in Session 1?
Commitment artifact (7 minutes)
This session's commitment artifact is deliberately collective rather than individual.
Ask each person to name one organization, movement, or community they will learn more about before Session 4 that is working on AI governance, attention economy accountability, or economic equity in the AI transition. Not necessarily to join — just to know it exists and understand what it is doing.
The commitment is: "I will know more about this than I do right now."
The AI literacy thread
All three sessions have described the same mechanism at different scales:
Session 1: an algorithm optimizing for engagement at the expense of a teenage girl's wellbeing
Session 2: a media ecosystem optimizing for activation at the expense of accurate information
Session 3: an economic system optimizing for private profit at the expense of democratic governance
The Radar capacity developed in Session 2 — what is this system optimizing for, and who bears the cost? — applies identically at all three scales. Students who have practiced it twice can now apply it to the largest possible version of the question.
That scaling — from nervous system to civilization — is the ecocentric mental model in development.
Facilitator notes
On political activation: Expect disagreement about the article's political conclusions. This is welcome. The Compass pass is not asking students to adopt Porter's political positions. It is asking them to engage with the questions he raises without collapsing into tribal certainty. There is a meaningful difference between "I disagree with this proposed solution" and "therefore the problem doesn't exist." Help students stay in that distinction.
On hopelessness: Some students will feel that the scale of the problem makes action pointless. This is a Gyroscope response — the nervous system shutting down in the face of overwhelming threat. Name it gently: "That feeling of hopelessness is information about the scale of the problem, not evidence that action is impossible. What's the smallest thing that feels possible from here?"
On the progression: By Session 3, students have practiced Gyroscope, Radar, and Compass work twice each. They are developing fluency. This session can move faster than the first two, because the skills are becoming familiar.
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