Questions of progress
Earth is 4.5 billion years old, roughly ⅓ the age of the universe. Human civilization appeared 12,000 years ago. The industrial revolution happened 250 years ago. In a 4,500-page book, human civilization would be the last word on the last line of the last page. We’re playing games built in the last 300 years of progress, standing on 4.5 billion years of history. What humanity has achieved is miraculous, especially given how destructive we are, to ourselves and to others. But yet the number of unanswered questions remains as big as the universe. Trying to make sense of cosmic timescales and phenomena can feel futile. But we ponder them anyway, especially as AI forces us to rethink fundamental ideas such as consciousness and progress.
Hyperlocal questions
“The idea of progress isn’t natural. To make progress we need to believe that it is possible and desirable. Progress is not even monotonic: it can be slowed, stopped, reversed or lost.”
- Jason Crawford
Progress is intentional, it happens when people commit to specific problems they care about. Some work on fundamental questions like consciousness and AGI (like lossfunk). Some create startups, industries to build new solutions or markets. Others take completely different approaches. There’s no shortage of problems worth solving or questions worth exploring. A sidequest always awaits.
But most of this work towards progress happens at scale, global research, national markets, broad abstractions, government schemes, university labs etc. When we go hyperlocal, the local questions often go un-asked/un-answered/ignored. These aren’t trivia questions, they’re gaps in practical knowledge that affect daily decisions and long-term resilience.
These answers exist, scattered across thousands of heads, learned through trial and error, held by elders who remember how things were. But they’re not written down, not searchable. They disappear when people move, when buildings fall, when the person who knew dies without being asked. These questions matter because generic solutions don’t account for local context, culture, or ecology. Answering these questions would not result in scientific breakthroughs but we’ll know ourselves and our surroundings better, be more aware, be more connected with other humans, with other beings and nature. Traditional knowledge dies when nobody documents it. Usually the local people are best positioned to understand and improve it, if they have the tools, space and skills to do so. These are questions governments and NGOs, Media should answer - but resources are stretched thin, data is usually outdated, manipulated or missing, and local nuance gets lost in district-level aggregation. Smaller, locally-committed spaces(labs, workshops, studios, community hubs, citizen science centers) can fill these gaps and collaborate: collecting hyperlocal data, understanding community needs directly, and building & engineering solutions that actually fit the context.
Hyperlocal infra
Some of these questions don’t just need answers, they need infrastructure. We want to build tools that make hyperlocal knowledge accessible. These aren’t just databases, they’re social infrastructure. They turn scattered knowledge into shared intelligence, and they generate new questions: building a flood map reveals drainage patterns nobody had documented; mapping repair skills shows which trades are dying. Living tools, maintained by the people who use them.
At alwaysbecooking, we’re trying to answer, build around such ideas for a certain kind of progress that we desire. Along with it learn, interact, experiment, have fun with various projects.
🎱 problems
Honestly we just want to create silly things and have fun. But more often than not, we try to look at problems that are often the bad side-effects of larger systems and are usually swept under the carpet. When knowledge is enclosed, people can’t create. When everything optimizes for scale, local knowledge dies. When power is centralized, communities lose agency. When we’re disconnected from embodied experience, we can’t learn through making. When infrastructure for a community & documentation disappears, knowledge doesn’t flow.
We living in abstraction of reality
Most solutions and data are scale first, not well structured and don't consider depth of things
There are knowledge access barriers & lack of local information
Creation requires more friction than consumption
Infrastructure for connection and creation
High barriers to experimentation
Low Neighborhood Investment
Solutions Already Exist Elsewhere
Our roll/bet 🎲
At alwaysbecookin’, we’re trying to understand something fundamental: what happens when people have direct access to tools, knowledge, space, and each other? and bet that hyperlocal knowledge has genuine economic and social value.
We’re not trying to solve all the problems we’ve identified. Instead, our approach is:
- Acknowledge the problems - Document and understand issues affecting our neighborhood, even if we can’t solve them all.
- If organizations are already working on it → We try to catalyze their efforts through local knowledge, community connections, or pilot testing.
- If something needs attention → We bring attention to it through documentation, advocacy, or connecting it with appropriate resources.
- If no one else is addressing it → We try doing something about it directly, but only where we have unique advantage or capability.
Current systems seem to optimize for abstraction over embodiment, scale over depth, consumption over creation, individualization over community, centralization over distribution, and knowledge hoarding over commons. We’re curious about what the alternatives look like - not only theoretically, but practically.
alwaysbecookin’ is our attempt to explore this. It’s infrastructure for a different set of trade-offs: embodied over abstract, local over scaled, creative over consumptive, communal over isolated, distributed over centralized, open over enclosed. We don’t know if this will work. That’s why we’re building it - to find out. This is an experiment in what becomes possible when you create certain conditions and see what emerges.
Hyperlocal knowledge and tools create value through:
- Personal skill-building and practical knowledge (understanding local growing conditions, traditional techniques, neighborhood systems)
- Better understanding of local ecosystem and culture (monsoon patterns, soil conditions, native plants, microclimate knowledge, local history, community networks, place-based identity)
- Social capital and network effects (knowing neighbors, informal support systems, local business connections)
Values
- Localism & Embodiment: Touch grass, know your neighborhood, understand your body
- Curiosity Without Agenda: "Fuck around and find out" as a legitimate methodology
- Intergenerational Learning: Always keep learning, learn from everyone
- Making as Thinking: Understanding through building, /never stop building/
- Stewardship: Of knowledge, of ecology, of community
- Porousness: Between disciplines, between work and play, between serious and silly
Areas of Interest
These are the domains we care about, the questions we're exploring, and the work we're pursuing across the space
Nature, Ecology & Climate
Mapping, Geography & Place
Social & Local Data
Digital Etymology & Algospeak
Human-Computer Interaction, Information Theory, Learning & Communication Techniques
Archiving & Curation
Tools for Wellbeing
Making, Building & Craft
Play & Fun