http://x.com/i/article/2063021741816127488
12:20 PM · Jun 8, 2026 · 112.4K Views
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Calley Means@calleymeans
Fascinating article by my friend Vijay.
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
1/ Get this moment right and you get Renaissance Florence. Get it wrong and you get the New Soviet Man —and the twenty million graves that came with him.
AI is a Renaissance. Three of its four pillars are already here. The fourth is on us.🧵
6hViews 8.8KLikes 19Bookmarks 6
REPLIES1
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
2/ Every Renaissance runs on the same four pillars: – a distribution shock – a recovery of buried knowledge – mobile patron capital – a new portrait of what it means to be human
The first three arrive on their own. The fourth has always had to be built by hand.
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
1/ Get this moment right and you get Renaissance Florence. Get it wrong and you get the New Soviet Man —and the twenty million graves that came with him.
AI is a Renaissance. Three of its four pillars are already here. The fourth is on us.🧵
6hViews 881Likes 5Bookmarks 0
Michael Koeris@mkoeris
Mandatory long-ish read by the inimitable @vijaypande.
He knows what’s up.
And if you read this - so will you! (And then talk to him - good ideas will get funded)
(And then talk to me! I’ll also fund good ideas!)
🫡🇺🇸
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
1/ Get this moment right and you get Renaissance Florence. Get it wrong and you get the New Soviet Man —and the twenty million graves that came with him.
AI is a Renaissance. Three of its four pillars are already here. The fourth is on us.🧵
2hViews 2KLikes 10Bookmarks 4
Eric Dai@EricDai_BioE
Great essay from my mentor @vijaypande on the four pillars of civilizational rebirth: 1. a new wave of mass distribution 2. the recovery of old knowledge 3. concentrated patron capital 4. a new vision of what it means to be human
We are living in a liminal period that feels rich with the first three pillars, and as yet unanchored by the fourth human pillar.
The algorithmic news feeds and short form video reels that dominate the social discourse today have served to supersede our humanity with viral, memetic, and fundamentally capitalistic rather than humanistic thought forms.
Attention begets capital begets attention, creating a powerful engine of concentrated, compounding growth -- but who is at the wheel. and which direction is the compass of our times taking us?
This is the natural and expected extension of the Attention Economy, within which fitness is dominated by virality (Mr. Beast, Cocomelon and infinitely dopaminergic short form video) over slower and more deliberate forms of expression (art, morality, purpose and reason). In other words, we live in a system driven by short-term Darwinian mechanics, where the thought forms that prevail are those which good at self-replicating versus those which ought to exist.
What gives me hope for the future is that where we as humans have created unintended collateral from technological advance, we have always applied our ingenuity to solve those problems (which in turn creates new unintended challenges to solve).
One example of this chain is insecure food supply for an exponentially growing global population (Malthusian catastrophe) -> super-exponential growth in food supply through Haber-Bosch equipped agriculture -> food oversupply, commercial arms race to produce ever cheaper and more addictive processed foods -> obesity epidemic -> mass GLP1 countermovement yielding a drop in obesity for the first time in decades.
I am optimistic that technology may well give us some as yet underdefined means of counteracting the addictive attention economy as a species, and in turn equip us to reveal the next transcendent expression of our human form.
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
1/ Get this moment right and you get Renaissance Florence. Get it wrong and you get the New Soviet Man —and the twenty million graves that came with him.
AI is a Renaissance. Three of its four pillars are already here. The fourth is on us.🧵
2hViews 1.6KLikes 5Bookmarks 5
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
9/ AI can produce content, but it can't be present.
It can't sit with a dying parent, keep faith with a town, raise a child, restore a house, or make a judgment that costs it something.
That's where dignity moves next.
6hViews 95Likes 1Bookmarks 1
Karl Mehta@karlmehta
Very insightful @vijaypande ! Thanks for sharing your thoughts
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
1/ Get this moment right and you get Renaissance Florence. Get it wrong and you get the New Soviet Man —and the twenty million graves that came with him.
AI is a Renaissance. Three of its four pillars are already here. The fourth is on us.🧵
1hViews 947Likes 1Bookmarks 1
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
11/ It doesn't take many people. Florence had maybe 2000 patrons. Pick 1 piece — the book, the school, the aesthetic, the model person — and hold it long enough to matter. No Renaissance before ours knew it was one. We might. Let's build it on purpose. 👇
6hViews 335Bookmarks 1
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
7/ AI is undermining the four old defenses of human dignity at once: Reason — machines reason faster. Making — machines generate on demand. Labor — it's moving to the machines. Even feeling, as AI mediates our attention and intimacy.
6hViews 114Likes 1
James Rogers@jamestrogers
Vijay lays this out beautifully. I am motivated. Is there a more important question… What is the archetype of the next man? Who is he. How does he architect his time? What does he know that no one else knows yet?
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
1/ Get this moment right and you get Renaissance Florence. Get it wrong and you get the New Soviet Man —and the twenty million graves that came with him.
AI is a Renaissance. Three of its four pillars are already here. The fourth is on us.🧵
3hViews 630Likes 3Bookmarks 0
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
3/ Gutenberg printed the books; you still had to do the thinking. Now the thinking itself is cheap. A farmer in Iowa gets a research scientist's reasoning on her soil at midnight. A teenager in Lagos gets a private tutor on any subject, at any hour.
6hViews 253Likes 2
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
8/ Build the first three pillars without the fourth and it has gone very badly before. The USSR had all three — and a portrait: the New Soviet Man. It made the human a means, not an end. Twenty million graves were the cost.
6hViews 104Likes 2
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
10/ The person of 2050 isn't the best prompt engineer. They hold real things — a craft, a place, a few people in long mutual obligations, a tradition they're passing on.
They hold themselves to a standard their grandchildren will know about.
6hViews 241Likes 1
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
4/ AlphaFold handed structural biology to chemists, pharmacologists, and materials scientists all at once.
A thousand AlphaFolds are coming.
6hViews 142Likes 1
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
5/ The question isn't whether the capital exists.
It's whether it gets deployed as Medici-style patronage on individuals — or as winner-take-all platform extraction.
6hViews 126
Vijay Pande@vijaypande
6/ Three pillars are standing. The fourth isn't. There's no exemplar of the AI age for a young person to look up to: no book, no school, no aesthetic, no model person.
We've handed builders tools and capital before we've handed them a portrait.
6hViews 112