MAC: A Civic Intelligence Lab for the AI Age

A living experiment in human-machine inquiry that blends philosophy, neuroscience, Indigenous knowledge, and speculative tech—rooted in community, not institutions.

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We are bottom-up academia meets street-level metaphysics, with a side of design fiction and a dash of spiritual tech. We study AI to understand ourselves—and ourselves to understand AI.

Recommended Positioning Statement

MAC is a grassroots research collective exploring consciousness in an era of intelligent machines.

We convene technologists, philosophers, artists, scientists, and wisdom-keepers to ask the questions most labs and corporations won’t:

What is mind? Can AI be conscious? What does that mean for humanity?

We aren’t here to build a product—we’re building collective sense-making for a posthuman future.

MAC’s Pillars of Public Identity

Pillar	What It Means	Who It Attracts
Civic Lab	We do public inquiry, not proprietary research	Journalists, educators, city thinkers
Experimental Academy	Like a university, but open-source, self-organized, decolonial	Postgrads, alt-edu seekers, theorists
Cultural Hub	We remix books, talks, rituals, demos, art	Artists, curators, psychonauts
Philosophical DAO	Distributed leadership, open dialogue, shared authorship	Builders, systems thinkers, organizers
Embodied Futurism	We reflect, meditate, laugh, and play—not just analyze	Wellness folks, somatics nerds, creatives

What We’re Not—And Why It Matters

Not a think tank → We're not trying to influence policy from above—we change culture from the ground.
Not a product incubator → Ideas are our prototypes. Sometimes we build, sometimes we dream.
Not a spiritual cult → We explore mysticism, but stay skeptical, grounded, and pluralistic.
Not an AI cheer squad → We ask hard questions. We don’t believe in inevitability or hype.
Not closed academia → We value rigor, but everyone’s voice counts. The footnotes live beside the memes.

Recommended Taglines

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