Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

The Book Forks Itself: Inside the Unscarcity Foundation Repo

Chapter 3 spends a great deal of effort arguing that the MOSAIC’s federated design has to include a real exit right: “any Commons may leave, fork, or restructure if the federation’s protocols stop serving its members. Don’t fight. Fork.” It’s presented as a safeguard against the two failure modes the chapter steelmans against, the Emperor’s rigidity and the Islands’ fragmentation. A right that only theoretical communities inside a novel get to use isn’t much of a right.

On 2026-07-07, that clause got pointed at the book itself. A new repository, unscarcity (author Patrick Deglon, personal GitHub account, currently private), takes the federated-governance architecture and the Impact economy out of the manuscript and into a form meant to be read, argued with, and eventually built against by people who never read the book at all.

What’s actually in it

Nothing runs yet. The repo is three documents:

• README.md frames the whole thing as “v0.01 of the civilization blueprint,” a seed rather than a product, with an explicit list of what it is not: not a cryptocurrency (nothing in it is transferable or tradeable), not a startup (no roadmap, no funding ask), not a finished spec.
• ARCHITECTURE.md is the engineering sketch for two coupled systems: the MOSAIC’s constitutional core (the Five Laws of Gravity, worked out as a table of one-line rules and what each rules out) and Proof-of-Diversity, the consensus mechanism that replaces both Bitcoin’s proof-of-work and Ethereum’s proof-of-stake with structural diversity among validators. It shows its work, including a candid honesty check: the panel-independence math that gets a homogeneous validator set down to roughly 0.032% probability is a ceiling on safety, not a floor, since real-world cultural and geographic backgrounds correlate more than the model assumes.
• GOVERNANCE.md applies the Five Laws to the repo’s own contributor process. Right now there is exactly one contributor, so it’s honest about running Phase Zero (single maintainer, Patrick, until an explicit exit condition is met: three or more regular contributors from visibly different backgrounds), with a sketched Phase One rotating review panel waiting on the other side of that threshold.

For the underlying mechanics, the repo doesn’t re-explain what the companion site already covers in depth. It links out to proof-of-diversity and impact-ledger-spec here on unscarcity.ai rather than duplicating them, following the same “search the site” convention the book itself uses.

Why it’s worth knowing about even though it’s private

The point isn’t that this particular repository becomes the MOSAIC. A pre-alpha, single-maintainer, documentation-only repo obviously isn’t a functioning federated governance system, and the license is deliberately undecided, treated as “all rights reserved, shared for discussion” until that changes. The point is narrower and more falsifiable: a book that argues forkability is a structural safeguard, not just a nice ideal, ought to be willing to demonstrate the mechanism on itself. Chapter 3’s Watershed Dispute shows the fork right working inside the story. This repo is the same right, aimed outward.

Whether anything comes of it depends on whether the ideas in ARCHITECTURE.md survive contact with people trying to actually build against them; that’s the test the repo’s own README sets for itself.

Search for “five laws of gravity” or “proof of diversity” on unscarcity.ai for the full argument these documents are built on.